In 1903, the United States and one of the world’s oldest nations, Ethiopia, established a relationship. Emperor Menelik II described the day as “… beginnings of a relationship which will have some place in history”, as quoted in a paper presented by Professor Negussay Ayele of Cornell University, to mark the 100th anniversary of that occasion. The historic relationship is, in this week, to witness a rare event with the first visit of a sitting president of the United States paying a visit to Ethiopia. President Barack Hussein Obama’s visit to Ethiopia follows what happens to be his first visit as President, to his father’s homeland, Kenya.
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Twenty years ago, a young Barack Obama, on the verge of his first political campaign for an Illinois state senate race, published his real life bildungsroman, Dreams From My Father. The book chronicled his life up to his entry into Harvard Law School and it provided a thought-provoking description of his trip to Kenya so that he could come to grips with the tenuous but persistent legacy of his father’s Kenyan origins and on his own circumstances as an American, an African American, and a man with a potent but virtually unexamined African heritage.
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Washington, DC — On Thursday the former soldier who seized power in Burkina Faso 27 years ago agreed to negotiate with opponents. The announcement was a response to massive popular demonstrations against President Blaise Compaore’s intention to extend his rule for another term.
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New York — In September, I spent time with an American woman who had recently been in Lofa County, Liberia, an Ebola hot spot bordering the village in Guinea where the first case was identified. We were nowhere near west Africa; we were both attending an international conference with participants from around the world.
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As the Ebola nightmare continues in Liberia and as we battle to contain the epidemic, it is important to look beyond the immediate crisis. Many more lives will be lost before this dreadful outbreak is beaten, but to properly honor the memory of the victims we need to ask how it happened in the first place and, more pressingly, how we can prevent it from happening again, writes Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
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