AFRICA: 500 Years Later

                      

"500 Years Later" is the title of an independent documentary film directed by Owen 'Alik Shahadah, written by M. K. Asante, Jr. released in 2005. It won five international film festival awards (including UNESCO 'Breaking the Chains Award') in the category of Best Documentary. 500 Years Later has received praise as well as controversy, both for the genre of the film (creative documentary), and the social-political impact of the film as it relates to race study. 

Plot

Crime, drugs, HIV/AIDS, poor education, inferiority complex, low expectation, poverty, corruption, poor health, and underdevelopment plagues people of African descent globally. 500 years later from the onset of slavery and subsequent colonialism, Africans are still struggling for basic freedom. Filmed in five continents, and over twenty countries, 500 Years Later engages the retrospective voice, told from the African vantage-point.

Bringing Light

"The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

John 1: 4-6

Making the Darkness Conscious

Image credit: pikespeakPhoto.

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious"

Carl Jung

The Aceh Story: The Hope of Love and Forgiveness

                       

The true story of how the need for unity in recovering from a devastating tsunami brought Indonesian officials and rebels together in peace talks that ended a 30-year civil battle over economic inequities. The documentary will air on Indonesian TV on Dec. 26, the eighth anniversary of the tsunami. Includes graphic images of flood damage and victims.

Madagascar: Poverty and Caste System Causing Modern Slavery

Gulnara Shahinian, UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré

19 December 2012 – A United Nations independent expert today called on the Government of Madagascar to take “urgent measures” in its fight against poverty, adding that poverty was the driving factor in the island nation’s slavery epidemic.

“Human rights cannot thrive in an environment of extreme poverty,” the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Gulnara Shahinian, stated in a news release at the end of her first-ever visit to the African country.

During her trip – which included stops in the towns of Antsirabe, Ambositra, Fianaransoa, Ihosy, Sakaraha, and the capital, Antananarivo – Ms. Shahinian noted that she was informed that over 70 per cent of the population in Madagascar is poor and over 50 per cent is extremely poor.

Moreover, she detailed the lingering effects of Madagascar’s caste system and the deeply rooted discrimination resulting from it, which continues to marginalize the most vulnerable people in society, particularly those descended from slaves.

“Madagascar’s experience has shown the extent to which men, women, and children suffering from extreme poverty end up living in conditions of contemporary forms of slavery such as domestic servitude, child slavery in mines and quarries, bonded labour, and servile marriages,” Ms. Shahinian said.

Read the whole Article >>

The Organ Traders (Al-Jazeera)

                        

An investigation into the loose but interconnected multi-million dollar international criminal enterprise of human organ trading. People & Power tries to find out how this trade continues to flourish and the challenges law enforcers are faced with.

Making Conscious the Energy of Enslavement

Photo:The Horses at Sunset by Jenny Woodward

"What we do not make conscious, emerges later as fate"

Carl Jung

Beautiful People do not just Happen

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross