Kiplagat’s body was found with a knife wound to his neck, suggesting he was murdered, according to the local police.
Ugandan athlete Benjamin Kiplagat has been found dead in Kenya, police say, with Uganda’s Daily Monitor and other media outlets in Kenya reporting he had been stabbed to death.
The Kenyan-born Kiplagat, 34, had represented Uganda internationally in the 3,000-metre steeplechase, including at several Olympic Games and World Championships.
His body was discovered in a car on the outskirts of Eldoret, a town situated in the Rift Valley, on Saturday night.
Eldoret is known for being home to numerous athletes who undergo training in the high-altitude region.
“An investigation has been launched and officers are on the ground pursuing leads,” local police commander Stephen Okal told reporters in Eldoret on Sunday.
He said Kiplagat’s body had a deep knife wound to his neck, suggesting he was stabbed.
‘Shocked and saddened’: condolences pour in
“World Athletics is shocked and saddened to hear of the passing of Benjamin Kiplagat,” the global athletics governing body said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter.
“We send our deepest condolences to his friends, family, teammates and fellow athletes. Our thoughts are with them all at this difficult time.”
Peter Ogwang, state minister for sports in Uganda, expressed similar sentiments on X.
I am saddened to hear about the death of our athlete, Benjamin Kiplagat who was reportedly murdered in Kenya. I send my deepest condolences to his family, Ugandans, and the entire East Africa for the loss of such a budding athlete who has on several occasions represented us on… pic.twitter.com/yX29cBnAl3
“I send my deepest condolences to his family, Ugandans, and the entire East Africa for the loss of such a budding athlete who has on several occasions represented us on the international scene,” he said.
Media reports said Kiplagat had been training in the Eldoret area before going to Uganda to participate in athletics competitions.
Still struggling to come to terms with it. Former 3000m steeplechase runner Benjamin Kiplagat was murdered earlier today in western Kenya. His neck was cut with a knife. He represented Uganda at 3 @Olympics & 6 @WorldAthletics Championships. Won 2008 world junior silver in Poland… pic.twitter.com/tclMqs2k0D
Kiplagat, whose running career spanned about 18 years, won the silver medal in the 3,000-metre steeplechase at the 2008 World Junior Championships and bronze at the Africa Championships in 2012.
He made the semi-finals of the event at the 2012 Olympic Games in London and competed in Rio in 2016.
His death follows the killing in October 2021 of Kenyan distance running star Agnes Tirop, who was found stabbed to death at the age of 25 in her home in Iten, a training hub near Eldoret.
Her husband, Ibrahim Rotich, went on trial for her murder last month. The 43-year-old has denied the charge against him and was freed on bail just before the trial opened.
Twenty-five-year-old Naomi Iwelu is now settled, living in a room in the centre of Catania, Sicily. Here she recounts the robberies, betrayals and rape she experienced on her journey from Benin, Nigeria.
It was her mother’s death, four years after her father’s, that prompted Naomi to quit school and leave Benin in 2018. As the eldest of six children, all now orphans, continuing her education beyond secondary school was an impossibility.
“We couldn’t afford the expenses to continue my studies,” Naomi tells Al Jazeera, “so I started working in bars, restaurants and cleaning.”
However, the family’s living conditions deteriorated. Leaving Nigeria to start a new life in Europe became an ever more considered option.
“I got in touch with a friend who was living in Libya at the time,” she says. “We had attended the same school, but we had lost contact with each other. I found her contact on Facebook. She was the one who convinced me to leave Nigeria and said that she would help me to do so.”
Naomi was told the trip would cost about 4,000 euros ($4,370), far more than she could raise.
“I asked my boyfriend at the time for money to help my sister. I lied to him,” she says. “That’s how I sent the money to my friend in Libya, and that’s how the journey started.”
She set out as part of a group organised by the contact her friend had provided. Today, she struggles to remember the number of people, only that there were “a lot”.
“We spent two weeks in the desert,” she recalls. “There was barely any water for us, and many things happened.”
Prompted for details, Naomi becomes silent, speaking volumes.
Eventually, she arrived in Tripoli, Libya’s capital, where she stayed for six months, finding cleaning work in a local man’s house.
One day on returning home, Naomi found two local men waiting for her.
“They were holding a knife. They threatened me and asked for money. But I did not speak Arabic well. I did not understand. Then they ordered me to undress. That’s how they both raped me,” she says.
Despite the experience, Naomi had no option but to continue her work, eventually raising the money for her passage to Europe.
“The journey was extremely hard. There were many of us in a rubber dinghy,” she says, describing how she had been sick throughout the crossing.
After reaching Lampedusa, the Italian doctors who examined her told her she was pregnant.
“I didn’t know I was pregnant. It was so painful for me,” she says. “I wanted to study, and for that, I had to get [an] abortion. I didn’t want the baby.”
Naomi was eventually able to secure an abortion, and now, having graduated from an Italian school, she works in a restaurant a few steps away from Via Etnea, Catania’s central street.
She remains in regular contact with her family in Nigeria and sends them what money she can. “I miss them a lot, but I don’t want them to make the same journey as me and experience what I experienced,” she says.
This article is the fifth of a five-part series of portraits of refugees from different countries, with diverse backgrounds, bound by shared fears and hopes as they enter 2024. Read the first, second, third and fourth parts here.
Overthrow of leaders in Niger and Gabon has been met by international condemnation but celebrations at home.
Two more coups in Africa during the past year.
That brings to nine, the number of governments deposed on the continent since 2020.
Are there common factors, or are these takeovers isolated?
And what could we see in the coming year?
Presenter: Laura Kyle
Guests:
Alexis Akwagyiram – Managing editor at the news website, Semafor Africa
In Abuja is Kabir Adamu – Managing director at Beacon Consulting, a security risk management and intelligence provider in Nigeria and the Sahel region
And in Bamako, Mali is Moussa Kondo – Executive director of the Sahel Institute and formerly special adviser to the current interim president of Mali, Assimi Goita
South Africa has filed an application instituting proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing it of crimes of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza after nearly three months of relentless Israeli bombardment has killed more than 21,500 people and caused widespread destruction in the besieged enclave.
In an application to the court on Friday, South Africa described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group”.
“The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction,” the application said.
The ICJ, also called the World Court, is a UN civil court that adjudicates disputes between countries. It is distinct from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which prosecutes individuals for war crimes.
As members of the UN, both South Africa and Israel are bound by the court.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has compared Israel’s policies in Gaza and the occupied West Bank with his country’s past apartheid regime of racial segregation imposed by the white-minority rule that ended in 1994.
Several human rights organisations have said that Israeli policies towards Palestinians amount to apartheid.
South Africa said Israel’s conduct, particularly since the war began on October 7, violates the UN’s Genocide Convention, and called for an expedited hearing. The application also requests the court to indicate provisional measures to “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people” under the Convention.
“South Africa is gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants,” a statement from South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) said, adding that the country has “repeatedly stated that it condemns all violence and attacks against all civilians, including Israelis.”
“South Africa has continuously called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and the resumption of talks that will end the violence arising from the continued belligerent occupation of Palestine,” the statement added.
Israel has rejected global calls for a ceasefire saying the war would not stop until the Hamas group, whose October 7 attack triggered the current phase of the conflict, was destroyed. Some 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack in Israel. The Palestinian group has said its attack was against Israel’s 16-year-old blockade of Gaza and expansion of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
In the latest development in Israel’s war on Gaza, tens of thousands of newly displaced Palestinians in the centre of the Palestinian enclave on Friday were forced to flee as Israel expanded its ground and air offensive in the centre of the enclave.
Israel has faced global condemnation for the mounting toll and destruction and accused of meting out collective punishment on Palestinian people.
‘A very important step’
The court application is the latest move by South Africa, a vociferous critic of Israel’s war, to ratchet up pressure after its lawmakers last month voted in favour of closing down the Israeli embassy in Pretoria and suspending all diplomatic relations until a ceasefire was agreed in Israel’s war with Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza.
Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo, reporting from the United Nations headquarters in New York, said the move was “clearly a very important step to try to hold some accountability to Israel.”
“Now that South Africa is pushing this to the ICJ, it will be on [the UN’s] agenda to try to make a ruling on this very important question,” he added.
On November 16, a group of 36 UN experts called on the international community to “prevent genocide against the Palestinian people”, calling Israel’s actions since October 7 a “genocide in the making”.
“We are deeply disturbed by the failure of governments to heed our call and to achieve an immediate ceasefire. We are also profoundly concerned about the support of certain governments for Israel’s strategy of warfare against the besieged population of Gaza, and the failure of the international system to mobilise to prevent genocide,” the experts said in a statement.
Israel has rejected South Africa’s move as “baseless”, calling it “blood libel.”
“South Africa’s claim lacks both a factual and a legal basis, and constitutes despicable and contemptuous exploitation of the Court,” Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, Lior Haiat, said in a statement posted on X.
“Israel has made it clear that the residents of the Gaza Strip are not the enemy, and is making every effort to limit harm to the non-involved and to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip,” the statement added.
“It does rally public opinion to the reality of what’s going on in Palestine, not just in Gaza but also in the West Bank,” said Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara.
According to Article 2 of the Genocide Convention, genocide involves acts committed with the “intent to destroy, either in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.”
“Where the disagreement lies is whether there is intent or no intent,” Bishara said.
“The three leading Israeli officials have declared the intent, starting with Israeli President Herzog when he said there are ‘no innocents’ in Gaza, the defence minister who said Israel will impose collective punishment on the people of Gaza because they are ‘human animals’,” Bishara said, adding that prime minister Netanyahu also used a biblical analogy in a statement widely interpreted as a genocidal call.
Lagos, Nigeria – Chinenye Ikechukwu’s Decembers are usually dotted with concerts, parties, and restaurant and beach outings with friends. But this year, the 27-year-old resident of Yaba in Lagos has stayed mostly at home due to the economic downturn plaguing Africa’s largest economy.
The rising cost of living and soaring inflation, which stands at 28 percent, forced her to draw up a preference list. What was most painful to strike out was Detty December, as Nigeria’s end-of-year celebrations are known. They feature a rolling succession of concerts, parties and other festivities.
“The point is that Detty December this year is very tough, and this is the worst recession I have ever seen. These days, you come back to something that you saw just the day before, and it has an increased price,” she told Al Jazeera. “And there is nothing to do about it.”
Lagos, the nerve centre of Nigeria’s entertainment scene, puts on hundreds, if not thousands, of events every December. This extravaganza also goes on in towns and villages far from Lagos but at a much slower pace.
These concerts are a big contributor to the music industry’s more than $2bn in annual revenue.
“What has happened over the last decade and a half is that a lot of brand and artists have created this modern experience that basically builds on the culture of people gathering to have fun and enjoy themselves,” said Ikemesit Effiong, a partner at SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based sociopolitical risk consultancy firm.
This year, the fun has been muted.
Dancers perform at the annual Felabration music festival in Lagos [File:Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP]
Hard times
Since his inauguration in May, President Bola Tinubu has been on a mission to improve the economy, but his policies have hardly done so. Floating the currency and removing fuel subsidies have triggered record inflation in a country where 133 million people live in poverty.
Disposable income has declined for many like Ikechukwu who have now opted to “cook rice at home”, Nigerian speak for staying away from the party circuit.
After realising she’d be unable to join the yuletide frenzy, Ikechukwu decided to host a Christmas party at home for her friends, but the price of basic goods at the market made her cancel that plan.
From April to May, the cost of making a pot of jollof rice increased by almost 30 percent. By December, it had almost doubled as the minimum wage barely changed all year.
“The prices of food stuff and cost of catering … is next to impossible. I haven’t even looked at anything that is happening since,” she said.
Analysts like Effiong said inflation has eroded the incomes of every demographic in the country, especially in December.
“There is always an extra inflationary top-up in December because a lot of service providers tend to go home, so prices generally go up in December even in the best of times,” he told Al Jazeera.
Concerts have been a recurrent fixture in Odunayo Odedoyin’s December plans for the past three years. Last year, she attended several shows, including gigs by CKay and Runtown, but she is unable to continue that streak this year.
“Ticket prices are even scary now,” the 25-year-old said.
The minimum amount for a ticket to a major show goes for about 20,000 nairas ($22). Experts said show organisers are only responding to the rising cost of securing venues and logistics services.
Her plans were not only impeded by ticket prices but also by the rising cost of transportation. Charges on ride-hailing apps like Uber and Bolt have doubled or tripled in some cases. Thirty-minute rides that previously cost about 4,000 naira ($4.42) now go for about 12,000 naira ($13.27) or more.
“I planned to party hard, but Bolt ride prices are now crazy, making it hard to move around like I had planned,” she said.
Reduced show traffic
This year, the number of concerts in Lagos has drastically fallen. Organisers cancelled some before the start of the December festivities. For those that are still being held, the economic downturn has affected their attendance, said Bizzle Osikoya, co-founder of The Plug, a Lagos-based entertainment company.
“A lot of shows are not really packed like they usually are because people can’t really afford it. Some people now prefer to go to free or smaller events,” he told Al Jazeera. “More people are looking to go to end-of-the-year parties of big corporations where they don’t have to buy tickets.”
Osikoya’s company decided to make its Island Block Party affordable with the cheapest ticket set at 2,000 naira ($2.21), so partygoers can still attend the shows despite the cash crunch.
“Our shows have not been affected because our show prices are not high. We make it so that the fans can come and enjoy themselves. … Our production might not be as expensive as the other ones, so that is why our show is not that expensive,” he said.
According to a report in November by SBM Intelligence, Nigerians spend 97 percent of their income on food, leaving a tiny margin for other essentials like transport, healthcare and even shelter. Little or nothing goes to entertainment.
“Detty December is becoming a byword for either being economically secure or being financially irresponsible because it is expensive to [partake in] now. That really sums up where Nigeria is now, which is not a very good place,” Effiong said.
This, he added, shows that structural weaknesses in Nigeria’s economy are manifesting themselves in the services sector.
“The services sector has traditionally been the engine of growth at a time when many service providers need financial support. It is really concerning that the only economic sunshine we have had for a while now is beginining to come under pressure,” Effiong said.
In Lagos, despite having a quiet December, Ikechukwu is still worried about what will come in January, which Nigerians jokingly say extends for 60 days due to the limited spending capacity after the festive expenses of December.
“I worry about this because what it tells me is that our economy is in shambles and there is nothing to be done about it,” Ikechukwu said. “From all indications, 2024 is going to be worse.”
Weeks after a deadly drone attack on November 30 killed five civilians in the town of Wegel Tena in Ethiopia’s Amhara region about 570km (350 miles) north of the capital, Addis Ababa, a witness is still reeling from the trauma.
“It’s extremely difficult to even describe the scene of the aftermath,” said Gebeyehu, who requested use of his first name only for safety reasons. “Bodies were burned so badly they had turned to dust. I saw the finger bones of one of the victims still shaped as though it was still clutching a mobile phone.”
Several witnesses told Al Jazeera that a drone fired on an ambulance as it approached the Delanta Primary Hospital in Wegel Tena and obliterated it. Hospital staff, including a doctor and the ambulance driver, as well as employees from a nearby construction site died instantly.
“In Wegel Tena, there are still surveillance drones hovering over the sky. Everyone is afraid, so we avoid walking in large groups,” Gebeyehu added.
The strike was the latest in a rise in deadly drone activity in the Amhara region, where the Ethiopian army, the only operator of armed drones in the Horn of Africa country, has been engaged in an all-out war against ethnic Amhara rebels.
The rebel militiamen, known as Fano, were formerly allied with the Ethiopian government, but the two sides fell out after the former refused orders to disband in April. Instead, in August, they overran a slew of major towns in the region.
In response, the Ethiopian government declared a state of emergency and deployed the army to “restore order” and crush the rebels. Despite lacking a formal command structure and largely relying on volunteers, the Fano fighters are still actively fighting across the Amhara region, where they are widely popular.
In August, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission detailed widespread killings of civilians in the conflict, including in air strikes and shelling. Within days, hospital officials in the town of Finote Selam said at least 26 people had died in a suspected air strike by federal forces.
Regionwide communications outages have made it difficult to verify the mounting reports. But the United Nations managed to document two other incidents, including the killings of seven people at a primary school in the region’s Wadera district on November 6 and the killing of more than a dozen people at a bus terminal three days later in the town of Wabirr.
The incidents highlight what UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Seif Magango referred to as the “devastating impact of drone strikes and other violence on the population in the Amhara region”. The BBC has also reported that 30 to 40 people were killed in a December 10 strike in the district of Amhara Sayint.
“The drone strikes have increased dramatically in the past few weeks, and almost all the strikes have targeted civilians,” said Tewodrose Tirfe, chairman of the United States-based advocacy group Amhara Association of America. “The uptick in drone strikes is an indication the ground offensive by federal forces has failed and they are losing on the battlefield to the Fano.”
‘Collective punishment’
In 2022, drones were linked to civilian deaths of hundreds of people across the then-rebel stronghold of Tigray, a region that borders Amhara in the north, and Ethiopia’s largest region, Oromia. More than 50 people died in a single attack that struck a camp for displaced people in Tigray in January.
Tewodrose said his organisation has accumulated data on about 70 drone strikes that caused civilian casualties in the Amhara region since May. In an extensive interview with an Ethiopian state broadcaster, the head of the army, Field Marshall Birhanu Jula, denied that army drones were targeting civilians.
“Of course, when we find gatherings of the extremist fighters, our drones will hit them, but we take great care to avoid civilian casualties. In fact, we’ve previously located targets and decided against firing when we note that they are embedded with civilians,” he said.
Footage Al Jazeera obtained showing the aftermath of the Wegel Tena drone strike appears to contradict his statement. It shows an ambulance ablaze with its roof caved in, consistent with a direct aerial hit. The footage appears to match photographs of the aftermath circulated days later. Shortly after the photographs surfaced, the town’s internet access was cut off.
“The violence and drone strikes are part of a trend of collective punishment,” said Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, a lecturer at Curtin University’s Centre for Human Rights Education in Australia. “The government refuses to distinguish between Amhara fighters and civilians as it prefers to demonise Amhara society as a whole. It’s a political ploy to weaponise nationalism against a group it characterises as an enemy.”
Yirga said the conflict with Fano could have been averted had the government taken steps to address grievances of the Amhara people with sincerity instead of force.
Meanwhile, civil society organisations in Ethiopia are calling on the warring parties to end hostilities and engage in dialogue.
‘Cruel and pointless’
On the government’s side, the conflict is portrayed as nearing its end, rendering dialogue unnecessary.
“We’ve destroyed their main fighting force,” Birhanu said. “All that’s left are remnants, including bandits and escapees from prison. Some had been detained for murder.”
Meanwhile, Mere Wedajo, a Fano military commander, told Al Jazeera that the biggest roadblock to peace talks was Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
“We aren’t opposed to peace talks in theory as the Amhara are a peace-loving people, but with Abiy, we are talking about someone who can’t honour his own word. He is treasonous. How could the Amhara people trust him?”
As fighting looks to continue into 2024, the Ethiopian government could continue to resort to its drone arsenal, battle-tested in the country’s wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions since 2019.
The wars have exacerbated a humanitarian disaster and drained the economy. Reports of a surge in starvation deaths have coincided with the news that the country is on the brink of a debt default.
But Addis Ababa may still be gearing up to expand its drone investments.
Last week, a joint Ethiopian-Emirati airshow was held to mark the 88th anniversary of the founding of the Ethiopian air force. The event, which was broadcast on state media and held in the city of Bishoftu, where the air force is based, featured foreign dignitaries, including Emirati military officials.
Al Jazeera has previously documented the United Arab Emirates’s extensive deliveries of armaments, including drones, to Ethiopia. Open-source researchers have recently discovered another uptick in Emirati cargo flights to the air force base in Bishoftu.
Among the dignitaries present was Haluk Bayraktar, CEO of the Turkish defence firm Baykar, which manufactures the Bayraktar TB2 drone used in Ethiopia’s wars.
Baykar, whose drones have been implicated in civilian killings in Ethiopia and beyond, was awarded a medal from Birhanu for “significant contributions to capacity building of the Ethiopian air force”. The honour and the civilian deaths have angered observers of the country’s internal crises.
“It is beyond comprehension that a prime minister who was recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize would deploy armed drones to fire live bullets at his own citizens,” said Addisu Lashitew, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.
“It is both pointless and cruel. Pointless because you can’t subdue a people with an idea with bullets. Cruel because most of the victims are innocent civilians.”
The artificial intelligence (AI) industry began 2023 with a bang as schools and universities struggled with students using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help them with homework and essay writing.
Less than a week into the year, New York City Public Schools banned ChatGPT – released weeks earlier to enormous fanfare – a move that would set the stage for much of the discussion around generative AI in 2023.
As the buzz grew around Microsoft-backed ChatGPT and rivals like Google’s Bard AI, Baidu’s Ernie Chatbot and Meta’s LLaMA, so did questions about how to handle a powerful new technology that had become accessible to the public overnight.
While AI-generated images, music, videos and computer code created by platforms such as Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion or OpenAI’s DALL-E opened up exciting new possibilities, they also fuelled concerns about misinformation, targeted harassment and copyright infringement.
In March, a group of more than 1,000 signatories, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, called for a pause in the development of more advanced AI in light of its “profound risks to society and humanity”.
While a pause did not happen, governments and regulatory authorities began rolling out new laws and regulations to set guardrails on the development and use of AI.
While many issues around AI remain unresolved heading into the new year, 2023 is likely to be remembered as a major milestone in the history of the field.
Drama at OpenAI
After ChatGPT amassed more than 100 million users in 2023, developer OpenAI returned to the headlines in November when its board of directors abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman – alleging that he was not “consistently candid in his communications with the board”.
Although the Silicon Valley startup did not elaborate on the reasons for Altman’s firing, his removal was widely attributed to an ideological struggle within the company between safety versus commercial concerns.
Altman’s removal set off five days of very public drama that saw OpenAI staff threaten to quit en masse and Altman briefly hired by Microsoft, until his reinstatement and the replacement of the board.
While OpenAI has tried to move on from the drama, the questions raised during the upheaval remain true for the industry at large – including how to weigh the drive for profit and new product launches against fears that AI could grow too powerful too quickly, or fall into the wrong hands.
Sam Altman was briefly fired from OpenAI [File: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters]
In a survey of 305 developers, policymakers, and academics carried out by the Pew Research Center in July, 79 percent of respondents said they were either more concerned than excited about the future of AI, or equally concerned as excited.
Despite AI’s potential to transform fields from medicine to education and mass communications, respondents expressed concern about risks such as mass surveillance, government and police harassment, job displacement and social isolation.
Sean McGregor, the founder of the Responsible AI Collaborative, said that 2023 showcased the hopes and fears that exist around generative AI, as well as deep philosophical divisions within the sector.
“Most hopeful is the light now shining on societal decisions undertaken by technologists, though it is concerning that many of my peers in the tech sector seem to regard such attention negatively,” McGregor told Al Jazeera, adding that AI should be shaped by the “needs of the people most impacted”.
“I still feel largely positive, but it will be a challenging few decades as we come to realise the discourse about AI safety is a fancy technological version of age-old societal challenges,” he said.
Key concerns include the sources of information used to train AI algorithms, much of which is scraped from the internet without consideration of privacy, bias, accuracy or copyright.
The EU’s draft legislation requires developers to disclose their training data and compliance with the bloc’s laws, with limitations on certain types of use and a pathway for user complaints.
Similar legislative efforts are under way in the US, where President Joe Biden in October issued a sweeping executive order on AI standards, and the UK, which in November hosted the AI Safety Summit involving 27 countries and industry stakeholders.
China has also taken steps to regulate the future of AI, releasing interim rules for developers that require them to submit to a “security assessment” before releasing products to the public.
Guidelines also restrict AI training data and ban content seen to be “advocating for terrorism”, “undermining social stability”, “overthrowing the socialist system”, or “damaging the country’s image”.
Globally, 2023 also saw the first interim international agreement on AI safety, signed by 20 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Poland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Nigeria, Israel and Chile.
AI and the future of work
Questions about the future of AI are also rampant in the private sector, where its use has already led to class-action lawsuits in the US from writers, artists and news outlets alleging copyright infringement.
Fears about AI replacing jobs were a driving factor behind months-long strikes in Hollywood by the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America.
In March, Goldman Sachs predicted that generative AI could replace 300 million jobs through automation and impact two-thirds of current jobs in Europe and the US in at least some way – making work more productive but also more automated.
Others have sought to temper the more catastrophic predictions.
In August, the International Labour Organization, the UN’s labour agency, said that generative AI is more likely to augment most jobs than replace them, with clerical work listed as the occupation most at risk.
Year of the ‘deepfake’?
The year 2024 will be a major test for generative AI, as new apps come to market and new legislation takes effect against a backdrop of global political upheaval.
Over the next 12 months, more than two billion people are due to vote in elections across a record 40 countries, including geopolitical hotspots like the US, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Venezuela, South Sudan and Taiwan.
While online misinformation campaigns are already a regular part of many election cycles, AI-generated content is expected to make matters worse as false information becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the real thing and easier to replicate at scale.
AI-generated content, including “deepfake” images, has already been used to stir up anger and confusion in conflict zones such as Ukraine and Gaza, and has been featured in hotly contested electoral races like the US presidential election.
Meta last month told advertisers that it will bar political ads on Facebook and Instagram that are made with generative AI, while YouTube announced that it will require creators to label realistic-looking AI-generated content.
South Africa has displayed robust support for Palestinians over Israel’s war on Gaza. As Nabila Bana explains, this solidarity has a long history with roots in South Africa’s apartheid past.
Some locals flocked to the scene and took the leaking gas from the tanker when it exploded.
At least 40 people have died after a gas tanker exploded in northcentral Liberia, the country’s Chief Medical Officer Francis Kateh said on Wednesday.
Late Tuesday, a fuel truck crashed in Totota, Lower Bong Country, about 130km (80 miles) from the capital, Monrovia – after exploding, the blast killed and injured many who had flocked to the scene.
Kateh told local news on Wednesday that it was difficult to determine the number of victims because some had been reduced to ashes, but he estimates that 40 people were killed in the incident.
“We have our team going from home to home to check those that are missing,” he told the French news agency AFP.
Police had earlier put the death toll at 15 and said that at least 30 others were injured as locals gathered at the scene.
“There were lots of people that got burned,” said Prince B Mulbah, deputy inspector-general for the Liberia National Police.
According to United Nations figures, poor road safety and weak infrastructure have made sub-Saharan Africa the world’s deadliest region for crashes, with the fatality rate three times higher than the European average.
After Tuesday’s crash, some locals took the leaking gas when the tanker exploded, another police officer, Malvin Sackor, said. He added that police were still gathering the total number of injured and killed.
An eyewitness from Totota, Aaron Massaquoi, told AFP that “people climbed all on top of the truck taking the gas, while some of them had irons hitting the tanker for it to burst for them to get gas.
“People were all around the truck and the driver of the truck told them that the gas that was spilling they could take that … but some people were even using screwdrivers to pit holes on the tank”.
Harare, Zimbabwe – In 2006, a small but supportive publisher helped Zimbabwean author Valerie Tagwira make the transition from doctor to published author, picking up her first novel, The Uncertainty of Hope.
Then based in the United Kingdom, Tagwira had sent out her manuscript to UK and Australian publishers and received 13 rejections. Two years after it was published by Weaver Press, it won one of Zimbabwe’s National Arts Merit Awards, the country’s highest recognition in arts and culture.
Today, she remains grateful to that publisher, Weaver Press.
“When nobody else would, Weaver Press gave a voice to the stories that I felt compelled to tell as a novice writer,” Tagwira told Al Jazeera, paying tribute to Irene Staunton, the publishing house’s publisher and editor. “Irene’s patience and expertise as an editor inspired me and brought to fruition my long-held dream of becoming a published writer.”
But now, after a quarter of a century of operation, the Harare-based independent publisher will close its doors at the end of this year, signalling a bleaker literary landscape for the southern African nation.
Weaver Press is based in Emerald Hill in northern Harare, a previously whites-only suburb in the colonial era, hardly an obvious setting for the country’s most vibrant and diverse publishing house.
But since 1998 when it was co-founded by Staunton and her husband Murray McCartney who has served as its director, it has hoisted the voices of up to 80 fiction and over 100 nonfiction writers from Zimbabwe. The house has had interns over the years and, for a short while, a fully-fledged employee, but has been mostly run by the duo.
On December 7, a 25th-anniversary gathering brought together some of its authors and the country’s literary luminaries – authors Shimmer Chinodya, Petina Gappah, and Chiedza Musengezi; the poet and retired university lecturer Musaemura Zimunya; former education minister and memoirist Fay Chung; and retired priest and writer David Harold-Barry.
The birthday bash was also a funeral even if that was left unsaid at the gathering.
“Weaver Press will go dormant at the end of the year,” Staunton said in an interview at their home-cum-office, using a euphemism for the imminent shutdown.
Of the anomaly of a death notice at a birthday party, her husband added: “It seems a little strange but it’s true. Much has changed over the years. We aren’t able to survive just from book sales…we get more revenue from freelance editing work. And that doesn’t need to be Weaver Press.”
Zimbabwean writers Musaemura Zimunya (left) and Petina Gappah (right) read the Shona version of Gappah’s short story, The Mupandawana Dancing Champion, at the 25th-anniversary celebration of Weaver Press at the Zimbabwean German Society in Harare [Cynthia Matonhodze/Al Jazeera]
Surviving Zimbabwe
When the husband-and-wife team founded Weaver Press, the country was about to go into a sociopolitical, and economic, meltdown triggered in part by former ruler Robert Mugabe’s decision to seize white-owned farms.
A hyperinflationary environment ensued, making it impossible for most businesses, let alone a publishing house, to survive. They made do by working on a project-by-project basis. “For the first few years we were more like an NGO than a publisher in that we tried to find funding for projects to get us off the ground because we ourselves didn’t have any capital except our time,” explained Staunton, whose own publishing career goes back some four decades.
Staunton, perhaps Zimbabwe’s foremost editor, was editor and co-founder of Baobab Books, the now-defunct publisher of prizewinning works by the late novelists Yvonne Vera and Chenjerai Hove, and the posthumous works of legendary writer Dambudzo Marechera.
“In the last twenty years,” said Staunton, “the publishing scene has changed dramatically. Nowadays a great many people are self-publishing, and our best writers are being published outside the country for obvious reasons. They get much better advances, royalties, promotion, [and] they achieve an international reputation. If I was them, I would just do the same.”
In the last decade, a new crop of Zimbabwean writers has emerged, more popular abroad than at home. Among that cohort is Noviolet Bulawayo whose two novels Glory and We Need New Names, were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Weaver Press first published Bulawayo’s Caine Prize-winning story that morphed into We Need New Names.
The publishing and reading culture of the 1980s, which partly helped Zimbabwe earn the bragging rights to being one of Africa’s most educated nations, has long since ended: Most schools don’t have libraries, less and less students are taking literature as a subject in schools, while government subsidies that made it possible for most schools to buy textbooks and novels have long vanished. Added to that, illegal photocopying of books has hit pandemic proportions in the country, making it impossible to have a viable publishing industry.
Staunton recalled that when she was at Baobab Books, in the 1990s, if one of their titles was a set book on the school curriculum, they could sell as many as 250,000 books. By way of comparison, when Weaver Press author Shimmer Chinodya’s novel Tale of Tamari was once on the school syllabus between 2018 and 2022, it took them four years to sell just 2000 copies.
Zimbabwean dramatic arts practitioner Zaza Muchemwa reads an excerpt from writer Valerie Tagwira’s Trapped [Cynthia Matonhodze/Al Jazeera]
Weaver’s weaknesses
Yet it’s not only the challenging political climate and economic situation – whose nadir was inflation rates of 80 billion percent – made it impossible for them to continue. And that is a point McCartney conceded: “Weaver Press has never been particularly good at marketing and publicity. I will concede that. That’s not our strength.”
It was a point echoed by South Africa-based Zimbabwean writer Farai Mudzingwa, whose short fiction was first published by Weaver Press in 2014 and who told Al Jazeera that he remains grateful for the part the publishing house has played in his writing career.
“Weaver Press appeared resolute on moribund local print publishing within Zimbabwe, with no financial incentive for the writers, but my focus was set on international sales, beyond Zimbabwe and the continent, and with an eye on foreign language translation, film, audio and other extended rights and formats,” he said.
Mudzingwa’s debut novel Avenues by Train has just come out through the Nigerian publisher Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s company, Cassava Republic Press.
Whatever the publishing couple’s faults, Weaver Press’s exemplary role in shaping Zimbabwe’s 21st-century publishing landscape has been undeniable.
Some of their notable publications include teacher-politician Fay Chung’s important war memoir Re-Living the Second Chimurenga, the late war veteran Dzinashe Machingura’s authoritative autobiography Memories of a Freedom Fighter and numerous short story collections.
Zimbabwean author Shimmer Chinodya gestures while talking to former Zimbabwe education minister Fay Chung at the 25th-anniversary celebrations of Weaver Press held at the Zimbabwe German Society in Harare [Cynthia Matonhodze/Al Jazeera]
Yvonne Vera’s novel, The Stone Virgins, won the 2002 Macmillan Writers’ Prize for Africa. Brian Chikwava’s short story, Seventh Street Alchemy, winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2004, first came out in a Weaver short story collection. Two of the stories in Petina Gappah’s 2009 Guardian First Book Award-winning collection, An Elegy for Easterly, were also first published in Weaver short story anthologies.
Meanwhile, Tagwira has since relocated to neighbouring Namibia, where she works as an obstetrician-gynecologist.
With Weaver Press now dormant, chances are that the next novel by Tagwira who published two under them, will be published in South Africa. It is a win for that country and will probably bring financial reward to Tagwira, but is surely a loss for Zimbabwe’s publishing culture.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
