October 25, 2021 – Page 2 – Djibouti News Gazette

October 25, 2021

Cameroon Says COVID Scare Drove Breast Cancer Increase

Health care activists in Cameroon are visiting homes, markets and farms this month, encouraging women to get free screenings for breast cancer. The central African state says the number of women diagnosed with breast cancer has risen sharply over the past year because many women delayed screenings for fear of COVID-19 infections. The push to increase screenings is part of this year’s breast cancer awareness month in October.

Civilians, mostly women, visit various neighborhoods in Yaoundé asking people to go to hospitals for free breast cancer screening.

Each group of a dozen people includes medical staff members, representatives of healthy living organizations, cancer patients and their family members.

Among those participating is 24-year-old Amin Ruth Tabi of the Noela Lyonga Foundation, a Cameroon-based NGO. The foundation’s main objective is giving hope to persons who have lost hope either due to frustration, stress or ill health.

Tabi says she wants to stop people from dying from breast cancer.

“Every female seven to ten days after menstruation is supposed to conduct a breast self-examination to look for abnormal nodules, redness, fluid coming from the nipples, orange skin appearance on the breast because breast cancer is treated well and quickly when it is noticed at an early stage,” she said.

Cameron’s Health Ministry said several thousand women came out in at least 11 towns including the capital Yaoundé, the commercial capital Douala and the English-speaking western towns of Kumba, Buea, Limbe, and Bamenda Kumbo.

Claudette Mani, 36, says she was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2020. She says thanks to prompt medical intervention and assistance from NGOs, her life was saved.

“I was so isolated, I was so weak, looked very bad and I felt like it was the end of the world,” she said. “At first just from my looks you will know that I have a problem, but now I am healthy, strong, and looking good. They [humanitarian groups] brought in doctors, educated us on how to feed ourselves, how to do exercises, to stay strong, eliminate the fact from our heads that we have this breast cancer and be focused on our dreams.”

Cameroon’s Association of Cancer Patients says breast cancer patients suffer from prejudices. Family members often think breast cancer is some sort of divine punishment for wrongdoing. The association says because of either illiteracy or lack of financial means, families abandon members diagnosed with breast cancer.

Cameroon’s Health Ministry says screening programs with mammography can lead to earlier diagnosis, and that coupled with effective treatment, will lead to reductions in breast cancer mortality.

Cameroon reports that in 2019, 3,000 of the 5,000 patients diagnosed with breast cancer died. In 2020, the number of breast cancers diagnosed rose to over 7,000 with close to 5,000 deaths.

Professor Paul Ndom is president of Cameroon’s National Committee for Cancer Prevention.

Ndom says many people neglect going to hospitals for consultation because breast cancer is not painful at its early stages. He says people at high risk of developing breast cancer are women who smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol, women who are not physically active and women who refuse to visit hospitals for fear they will be exposed to COVID-19 infections.

Ndom said the government of Cameroon subsidizes treatment for people diagnosed with breast cancer.

The October Breast Cancer Awareness month campaign was launched by the American Cancer Society and Imperial Chemical Industries to encourage women to get regular screening for breast cancer. The month-long activities educate women to reduce their breast cancer risks, be screened and seek medical attention if a suspicious lump is detected.

Source: Voice of America

October 25, 2021

129-Year Journey Nears End as France Returns Benin Treasures

In a decision with potential ramifications across European museums, France is displaying 26 looted colonial-era artifacts for one last time before returning them home to Benin.

The wooden anthropomorphic statues, royal thrones and sacred altars were pilfered by the French army in the 19th century from Western Africa.

President Emmanuel Macron suggested that France now needed to right the wrongs of the past, making a landmark speech in 2017 in which he said he can no longer accept “that a large part of many African countries’ cultural heritage lies in France.” It laid down a roadmap for the controversial return of the royal treasures taken during the era of empire and colony. The French will have a final glimpse of the objects in the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac from 26-31 October.

French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot tried to assuage jitters among European museums, emphasizing that this initiative “will not create a legal precedent.”

A French law was passed last year to allow the restitution of the statues to the Republic of Benin, as well as a storied sword to the Army Museum in Senegal.

But she said that the French government’s law was intentionally specific in applying solely to the 27 artifacts. “[It] does not establish any general right to restitution” and “in no way calls into question” the right of French museums to hold on to their heritage.

Yet critics of such moves — including London’s British Museum that is in a decades-long tug-of-war with the Greek government over a restitution of the Elgin Marbles — argue that it will open the floodgates to emptying Western museums of their collections. Many are made up of objects acquired, or stolen, during colonial times. French museums alone hold at least 90,000 artifacts from sub-Saharan Africa.

The story of the “Abomey Treasures” is as dramatic as their sculpted forms. In November 1892, Colonel Alfred Dodds led a pilfering French expeditionary force into the Kingdom of Danhomè located in the south of present-day Benin. The colonizing troops broke into the Abomey Palace, home of King Behanzin, seizing as they did many royal objects including the 26 artifacts that Dodds donated to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris in the 1890s. Since 2003, the objects have been housed at the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac.

One hundred and twenty-nine years later, their far-flung journey abroad will finally end.

Benin’s Culture Minister Jean-Michel Abimbola called the return of the works, a “historic milestone,” and the beginning of further cooperation between the two countries, during a news conference last week. The country is founding a museum in Abomey to house the treasures that will be partly funded by the French government. The French Development Agency will give some 35 million euros toward the “Museum of the Saga of the Amazonians and the Danhome Kings” under a pledge signed this year.

The official transfer of the 26 pieces is expected to be signed in Paris on Nov. 9 in the presence of Macron and the art is expected to be in Benin a few days later, Abimbola said.

While locals say the decision is overdue, what’s important is that the art will be returned.

“It was a vacuum created among Benin’s historical treasures, which is gradually being reconstituted,” said Fortune Sossa, President of the African Cultural Journalists Network.

Source: Voice of America

October 25, 2021

Coalition: Kenyan Police Involved in Dozens of Killings; Security Forces Deny

The Missing Voices coalition, consisting of 16 civil rights groups whose mission is to end disappearances and killings in Kenya, met Sunday with mothers of victims and other survivors of police abuse in Nairobi. The coalition also launched “They Were Us,” a book on the subject. The coalition said it documented 119 police killings and 23 enforced disappearances between January and September 2021. Police deny the accusations.

Forty-eight-year-old Lilian Njeri’s son and two others were killed in May 2018, allegedly by police in the Kiamaiko area of Nairobi.

“After the killing of my son, I wanted to commit suicide. My other son asked me who would take care of him if I killed myself. I drank a lot. Since I joined the women’s network whose children were killed, it helped me heal and defend others,” she said.

The mother of two said she reported the matter to the Independent Police Oversight Authority, or the IPOA, a body mandated to check on the work of the police. The IPOA advised Njeri to file the case with the other two victims, in hopes of bolstering the investigation and getting convictions. However, Njeri says she is still looking for one of the mothers.

In September, five officers were charged in Nairobi with murder over the death of a man killed in September 2018. The man was arrested for possessing illegal alcohol and IPOA investigators concluded that he died of multiple injuries inflicted with blunt force. The court ordered the officers involved to be held until December 6.

Last month, the chairperson of IPOA, Anne Makori, told Kenyan editors the court is handling 98 cases of police abuses against the public. Since 2010 IPOA said there have been eight police convictions.

The Missing Voices consortium, a group investigating unlawful killings, said 167 people were killed or disappeared in 2020.It says 157 of those deaths were as a result of police killings.

Kenya’s police spokesperson Bruno Shioso says these allegations are unfounded.

“It’s wrong to say police have killed youths because we don’t have that data, that information. These are wild allegations but when you tell them to come forward and bring proof or something tangible about nobody comes. So, it is very hard for us to react to something without any evidence. But we tell people if they are sure the police are complicit in any criminal undertaking let them come forward, let them make a formal report to us and we pick it from there if they can’t come to us, they can go to the oversight authorities,” he said.

Aileen Wanjiku works with Missing Voices, the organizer of Sunday’s book launch, shining a light on the stories of police victims. She told VOA most families have yet to see justice for the deaths of their loved ones.

“There is a challenge and problem even getting investigated, just pushing it in a court is an issue and when we get to court, there is that delayed justice… So, the reason many of these cases haven’t been investigated, pushed or documented it’s because a lot of witnesses don’t want to come forward because the protection of witnesses is lacking significantly. So, you see cases where witnesses are killed for coming forward,” said Wanjiku.

Josephine Akoth, 50, is one of those featured in the 64-page book. Her son, Sylvester Onyango, disappeared in August 2015. The mother of six recalls that on the day he vanished, massive police operations were taking place in the Dandora area, an eastern suburb in Nairobi, and its surroundings where he worked as a public bus driver.

Akoth says she has gone through a lot, and she is requesting the government to help her search for her son and to help her know whether he is alive or dead. She says even if he has died, she would like to know where he was killed. At least she can collect the remains and bury them, she says.

Last month, 16 mutilated bodies were retrieved in Garissa County from the River Tana, the longest river in the country. Hundreds of families went to the area in hopes of identify the remains of missing loved ones.

Source: Voice of America