Local Voices Must Shape Global Engagement on LGBT Rights, Speakers Tell ICWA at US Capitol Event Event: The Geopolitics of LGBT Rights Keynote Speaker: Randy W. Berry, Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons Guest Speaker: Ambassador Lars Gert Lose of Denmark ICWA Speaker: Robbie Corey Boulet, ICWA Fellow in West Africa, 2014-2016 Partner Organizations: Johns Hopkins SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations; Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Event Report by Robbie Corey-Boulet, ICWA...
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YAMOUSSOUKRO, Côte d’Ivoire — In 1984, in an essay for The New Yorker, the writer V.S. Naipaul described Yamoussoukro, a town in central Côte d’Ivoire, as a place that “awaited full use.”[i] He meant this in the most fundamental way. The previous year, President Félix Houphouët-Boigny had established the town, his birthplace, as the country’s...
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Nov. 1, 2015 OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — During their brief, failed coup last September, soldiers from Burkina Faso’s elite presidential guard moved swiftly through the capital, Ouagadougou, to assert control and stifle dissent. Driving in convoys, they toured main intersections and other potential rallying points, training automatic weapons on unarmed civilians trying to organize demonstrations....
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October 1, 2015 Three hours before the train to Ouagadougou was scheduled to leave, the station in Treichville, in southern Abidjan, the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, hummed with more activity than it had seen in days. Across from the crowd control barriers, ticket-holders sipped Nescafé on a concrete ledge, shielding their faces from the...
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As campus events go, it is difficult to imagine anything less controversial than the “Peace Fair” held at Côte d’Ivoire’s largest university one Friday morning last July. Part of a U.S. State Department-backed program intended to temper a politically volatile campus climate, the fair featured Ivoirian artists and singers, a blood-donation stand and booths where...
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An aide would later say that the whole exchange happened “very quickly.” On the morning of Feb. 23, 2015, Tulinabo S. Mushingi, the American ambassador to Burkina Faso, met with Chérif Sy, who is heading the country’s interim parliament in the run-up to elections following the toppling of President Blaise Compaoré last year. According to...
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OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso – On Nov. 1, 2014, the day after Blaise Compaoré resigned as Burkina Faso’s president and fled the capital in a convoy, abruptly ending his nearly three-decade hold on power, a 40-year-old man named Prosper looked on as an opposition lawmaker exulted over the autocrat’s hasty departure while giving a radio interview...
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ABIDJAN – Thiossane and Moctar meet in classic West African fashion. Trying to send a text message one day to an old friend from school, Thiossane, an educated but unemployed resident of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, enters the number incorrectly and instead reaches Moctar, an uneducated grave-digger who has recently lost his job. Moctar...
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