Monthly Archives: February 2019

Chad: ‘More than 250 rebels’ captured in convoy raid

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Chad’s military said on Saturday that it had captured more than 250 rebels during an operation against militants crossing from Libya.

A statement said that the large number included “four leaders” who had been detained.

They said 40 of the rebels’ vehicles had been destroyed and hundreds of weapons had been seized.

France, which provides military support to Chad, used warplanes this week to attack the convoy in the Ennedi region.

It announced on Thursday that it had attacked the stream of vehicles several times this week in conjunction with Chad’s armed forces.

The militants had managed to cross hundreds of kilometres into the country before being halted, AFP news agency reports.

Intelligence sources who spoke to Reuters news agency said only 100 militants had been captured.

The incursion is the latest in a series of threats against the rule of President Idriss Déby.

French troops are currently deployed in Chad as part of Operation Barkhane – an ongoing coalition effort in Africa’s Sahel region to fight jihadist insurgents.

France ruled Chad as a colony from 1900 until it gained independence in 1960 and it has supported President Déby before.

Read more on BBC Africa

CFP: Language, Culture and Colonization: the third JIAS conference on the legacies of colonialism and imperialism

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Language, Culture and Colonization: the third JIAS conference on the legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

2-4 September, 2019, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study

1 Tolip Street, Westdene 2092, P O Box 524, Auckland Park 2006, Johannesburg, South Africa

Convenors David Boucher, Cardiff University and  University of Johannesburg and Ayesha Omar, Witwatersrand UniversityColonialism and Imperialism imposed alien cultures and languages on their subject peoples with the consequence that the legacy in each society, or nation, to varying degrees, was a process of ‘Creolization’ giving rise to cultures and languages with mixed origins. Contemporary decolonisation movements confront this tendency by calling for the reassertion of indigenous practices and languages. The aim of this third JIAS conference on colonialism and imperialism is to explore the effects of ‘creolization’ and to investigate the respects in which they have been both negative and positive, particularly in the areas of language and culture.  Two of the most influential theorists and activists in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s, for example, took opposing view on the use of the colonizer’s language. For Frantz Fanon, an endemic aspect of the destructive process of colonisation was the acquisition of the coloniser’s language. He contends: ‘A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language’. Cabral, on the other hand views language in purely instrumental terms. Portuguese, for him, was not a threat to the culture of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, ‘because language isn’t evidence of anything, but an instrument for men to relate with one another, a means for speaking, to express realities of life and of the world.’ Cabral argues that ‘we of the Party, if we want to lead our people forward for a long time to come – to write, to advance in science – our language has to be Portuguese’.

The organisers welcome expressions of interest with abstracts of proposed papers exploring issues of culture and language in relation to decolonization. Deadline 22th April, 2019.

Please send them to:

Boucherde@cardiff.ac.uk and ayesha.omar@wits.ac.za