MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The Mexican government has formally asked Pope Francis for the temporary return of several ancient indigenous manuscripts held in the Vatican library ahead of next year’s 500-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
The request to allow the texts to be exhibited in Mexico was made in a two-page letter addressed to Pope Francis and posted on President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s Twitter page on Saturday but dated Oct. 2.
It was delivered to the pope by Lopez Obrador’s wife, Beatriz Gutierrez Muller, who met with him at the Vatican following a meeting she had on Friday with Italian President Sergio Mattarella.
One of the three codicies, or books, requested is the Codex Borgia, an especially colorful screen-fold book spread across dozens of pages that depicts gods and rituals from ancient central Mexico.
It is one of the best-preserved examples of pre-conquest Aztec-style writing that exists, after Catholic authorities in colonial-era Mexico dismissed such codicies as the work of the devil and ordered hundreds or even thousands of them burned in the decades following the 1521 conquest.
In the letter, Lopez Obrador requests the Vatican return the Codex Borgia, two other ancient codicies as well as its maps of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan for a one-year loan in 2021.
The nationalist president is planning a series of events to commemorate the anniversary next year. He also reiterated his request that the Catholic Church, as well as reigning Spanish King Philip VI, apologize for atrocities that were committed following the conquest of Mexico, which Lopez Obrador said would mark an “act of historic contrition.”
The Vatican has not yet responded to the request, but its museums and archives have in the past lent out various manuscripts and works of art after similar requests from other countries.
Reporting by David Alire Garcia in Mexico City; Additional reporting by Philip Pullella in Rome; Editing by Chris Reese
… books following the Black Lives Matter movement.
“When I delivered the book … pulled (a book) out and posed,” Books for Newborns … 11% of children’s books starred Black characters, … — yielded counteractive results. Publishers will include people of color …
GW425, South Africa, Cape Town, 1990: Nelson Mandela with Winnie Mandela as he is released from Victor Vester prison. ANC – African National Congress African leaders, icons, public figures, famous people, goverment, political. ( Photo: Graeme Williams/South Photographs )
The shattering personal cost of political currents on the tempestuous but enduring love affair between Nelson and Winnie Mandela, two of the world’s most prominent 20th–century revolutionaries, has been further highlighted in two works on the late South African statesman.
First published in Daily Maverick 168
Let’s begin with the first. It is a description of the last hours in the life of Nelson Mandela as set out by Vejay Ramlakan, head of Mandela’s medical team, in his book Mandela’s Last Years, published in 2017 and withdrawn at the threat of legal action.
Ramlakan, who died in August 2020, describes how, apart from his medical team, only Winnie Mandela remained at her former husband’s bedside when the monitors recording Mandela’s fading life source finally fell silent at 21.48 on 5 December 2013.
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It was Winnie who held his hand as her great love exhaled his last breath, and who sobbed “as she nestled her head beside Madiba’s still body”, according to Ramlakan.
The second revelation is more searing. It appears in a surveilled conversation between Mandela, his daughter Zenani and her husband Prince Thumbumuzi Dlamini on 1 September 1989 in the house at Victor Verster Prison, Paarl, to which Mandela had been transferred in 1988. Zenani and Muzi lived in the US and visited Mandela on a trip to South Africa. According to a letter accompanying the transcript of the conversation, Mandela had been keen to remove Zindzi from the “corrupting influence” of her mother, Winnie. The conversation is related in Prisoner 913 – The Release of Nelson Mandela by Riaan De Villiers and historian Jan–Ad Stemmet, based on the “private archive” of former apartheid justice minister Kobie Coetsee, who played a role in the National Party’s bids to talk to the ANC about a negotiated settlement for South Africa.
The excavation of this part of Coetsee’s archive offers significant insights into the behind–the–scenes delicate dance between PW Botha, the Nationalist government, its senior leaders, Mandela, other incarcerated senior leaders and ANC leadership in exile.
But for now what is relevant is the conversation between a father and his daughter and her husband about his wife, in the heat of a brutal and, at times, covert, civil war in South Africa in the mid- to late 1980s.
Winnie had risen as a leader in her own right, a thorn in the side of the apartheid state; the “other” Mandela who became one of the global faces of the anti–apartheid movement. That she was targeted by agents of the state using dirty tricks and that her life was violently disrupted in every way is part of the physical, emotional and mental landscape Winnie Mandela needed to navigate.
By the time Zenani visited her father in jail in 1989, Winnie had spent 491 days in solitary confinement. There she was beaten and tortured, as recorded in her harrowing biography, 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69. Later she was “banned” and banished with her two daughters to Brandfort, Free State, before being drawn into the resistance to apartheid in the 1980s.
Nelson Mandela had been a prisoner for 27 years when Zenani visited in 1989. To the Nationalist government he was Prisoner 913.
It is in this recorded conversation that Mandela reveals an apparently long–held belief that it was Winnie who had betrayed him and disclosed his location before his arrest in 1962. It is a shattering charge.
We learn that author, activist and journalist Mary Benson provided information to Mandela in 1962, when he visited her in London, that Winnie had been involved in an extramarital affair while Mandela had been on the run, receiving training in Africa before heading to London.
On his return, he was arrested.
Somewhere between 1962 and 1989, Mandela believed that because of these affairs his whereabouts in South Africa became known and he was arrested at a road block in Howick in August 1962. In the conversation, Mandela is recorded as raising this belief. He knew he was being monitored and his jailers transcribed, keeping records and hand–written notes of each conversation.
De Villiers and Stemmet reveal this conversation was marked “confidential” and sent to Coetsee with a covering letter in which then Commissioner of Prisons, General Willie Willemse, sets out his opinions on what the conversation was about and what it might mean.
“Herewith a significant document which airs in some detail a large piece of bitterness, resentment and frustration which client has harboured towards his wife over many years and he can do little about it.”
Willemse opines that “it appears as if things are now moving to some sort of conclusion. She pays him no heed, for numerous reasons, among which certain physical needs must apparently not be discounted.”
The authors debated the ethics of making personal moments in Mandela’s life public, deciding he had made available an archive of personal material for public scrutiny.
The Mandela–Zenani conversation is retold by Willemse and other prison officials, so we do not hear Mandela in his own words, only how he was overheard.
“913 says he went underground. 913 says he was in London with Mary Benson, and she had told him that Winnie had attended a concert with a married man. 913 says she also had relationships with other men.”
“913 says it was clear to him that the police knew he was in Durban. 913 says Winnie had spoken about where he was. She (W) had told this to someone with whom she had an intimate relationship.”
This person, Mandela is reported as saying, had wanted both Winnie and Nelson arrested. Winnie, writes Willemse, “was arrested and she had said where 913’s comrades were”.
They divorced in 1996, but Winnie remained a presence in his life, visiting him in hospital later in life and after he had married Graça Machel.
It suggests Mandela had come to terms with a sense of deep betrayal.
Did he believe it? Certainly. Was it true? Probably. Winnie led her own life with her husband on the run. Did Mandela cast Winnie as having betrayed him politically? Mandela was silent on this.
In the end it was Winnie alone who was with Mandela when he died and who bade farewell to a life partner with whom she had shared South Africa in all its wretchedness and resilience.
As Sisonke Msimang writes in The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela, Winnie needs to be placed in a wider context to understand her legacy.
“The trick perhaps is not to debate whether Winnie was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (whatever those terms even mean). Removing her from the binaries to which women are often consigned rescues her from cliché, and spares us a tired and unproductive discussion.
“Winnie does not need to be either this or that. Instead, redeeming Winnie – thinking about what she teaches us – is to consider what she meant to our society and, in a particular way, how she embodied popular ideas of strength and resilience.”
The personal cost was great, the healing might never have come completely, but their love story stands as a testimony to the vulgarity and glory of the times. DM168
The conflict in the border region, located in the South Caucasus, has persisted for more than three decades, with the latest round of hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan erupting over the past two weeks.
“The Secretary-General welcomes the agreement on a humanitarian ceasefire announced yesterday in Moscow by the Foreign Ministers of the Russian Federation, Azerbaijan and Armenia. He commends the Russian Federation for its mediation efforts”, according to a statement issued on Saturday by his Spokesperson.
Mr. Guterres called for the ceasefire to be respected, and for swift agreement on its specific parameters.
The Secretary-General also welcomed the commitment by Armenia and Azerbaijan to begin substantive negotiations under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), through its Minsk Group.
France, Russia and the United States chair the OSCE’s Minsk Process, which promotes peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
The UN chief further appealed to the international community to support the ceasefire agreement. He also urged countries to continue to encourage the sides to resolve their differences through peaceful means.
A European diplomat on Saturday said that the European Union is ready to send a mission to monitor the Palestinian electoral process, as well as support the Central Elections Commission.
During a meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Ishtaye in Ramallah city, Sven Kuhn Von Burgdsroff, the EU representative in Palestine, stressed that the EU supports holding the general elections in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, Ishtaye praised the EU’s support for holding the general elections, calling on it to put pressure on Israel to permit holding the Palestinian elections in East Jerusalem. Enditem
(UN Photo/Tobin Jones)Young girls line up at a feeding center in Mogadishu, Somalia on 9 March 2017.
The World Council of Churches has joined the rest of the plant in welcoming the award of the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to the UN World Food Program, one of the world’s first responders in global crises.
“We express our gratitude and congratulations to the leadership and each staff member of the World Food Program,” said Rev. Ioan Sauca, WCC interim general secretary.
Oxafam released as report soon after say the threat of “COVID famines” and widespread extreme hunger is setting off every alarm bell within the international community, but so far sluggish funding is hampering humanitarian agencies’ efforts to deliver urgent assistance to people in need.
A new Oxfam analysis says that the international community’s response to global food insecurity has been dangerously inadequate.
The report, “Later Will Be Too Late”, is aimed at the Committee for World Food Security’s (CFS) high-level event today which is hoped to “keep food security and nutrition front-and-centere of the global sustainable development agenda.”
In Yemen, DRC, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Somalia – that is, five of the seven countries where severe hunger continues to increase – donors have so far given no money at all for the “COVID-related nutrition assistance” part of the UN’s $10.34 billion humanitarian appeal.
“This vital multilateral organization comprises many dedicated people, working in the remotest and most vulnerable regions of the world, affected by conflict, climate catastrophe and economic crises.”
The WFP’s spokesman Tomson Phiri was briefing journalists at the UN in Geneva when then announcement was made and said he views the Nobel Peace Prize as recognition of those struggling to prevent starvation around the world.
“This is a proud moment. The nomination in itself was enough. But to then go on and be named the Nobel Peace Prize winner is nothing short of a feat,” he said.
“This is an organization I have served for nine years. I have seen the extent to which the people who are dedicated across the globe go the extra mile,” said Phiri from Zimbabwe.
“Just before I moved to Geneva, I was based in South Sudan, where people would walk on foot to serve humanity. And it’s really a proud moment. I really feel honored to be a member of this,” he noted.
WFP WORKERS’ SACRIFICES
The first thing that came to his mind when he heard the announcement was, “I thought of all my colleagues whom I’ve worked with in many countries, all the sacrifices that they do sometimes under conditions of insecurity. I think this is for them.”
Earlier WFP’s U.S. Executive Director David Beasley tweeted on hearing of the award that he as “deeply humbled” by the announcement
“This is an incredible recognition of the dedication of the WFP family, working to end hunger everyday in 80 countries,” he wrote.
The United Nations estimates that the world recession caused by the COVID-19 crisis pushed an additional 83 to 132 million people into hunger with women and children usually those most at risk.
World Food Program received the award “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas. And for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict,” said Nobel committee chairman Berit Reiss-Andersen in speaking about the award.
The award announced in Oslo each year comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor or U.S.$1.1 million. It is courtesy of a bequest left 124 years ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
“We expect the Nobel Peace Prize to also help us going forward in not only shining the light on ourselves, but shining the light on the work that we do,” said Phiri.
The WFP’s contribution has become even more important in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the number of people facing acute food insecurity has nearly doubled to 265 million in 2020, from 135 million in 2019 said the WCC.
“People of faith, who are deeply rooted in their communities, are witness to the WFP’s heroic, sacrificial, and consistent responses to hunger, and have been privileged to serve as partners in many such contexts,” said Sauca.
He commented as faith communities were celebrating Churches’ Week of Action on Food, and many are emphasizing the moral imperative of addressing hunger and food insecurity.
However, in many places, funding allocated to support millions of vulnerable people needing lifesaving assistance is being reduced, due to the lack of resources or changed priorities.
“People of faith are committed to stand and act with the World Food Program, to protect people’s livelihoods, wellbeing and daily sustenance for all, especially for those experiencing the harsh reality of hunger, during these difficult times,” said Sauca. ”
We pray for solidarity among the world’s nations that such support is extended to the most marginalized communities within each society.”
During the Churches’ Week of Action on Food, being observed this year from Oct. 11-17, the WCC, Christian Conference of Asia, and Pacific Conference of Churches are inviting all people of goodwill to attend an online prayer service on October 16, World Food Day, in the different regions.
EU commissioner Mariya Gabriel has tested positive for Covid-19, she said yesterday, the first top Brussels official known to have caught the coronavirus.
Gabriel, the EU commissioner for research and innovation, had already announced on Monday that she would self-isolate after a member of her team tested positive for the virus.
“After a first negative #COVID19 test on Monday, my second one is positive,” said Gabriel, who is Bulgaria’s representative to the 27-member EU executive.
“I have been in self-isolation since Monday and continue staying at home, following the established regulations. Keep yourself healthy and stay safe!” she said.
The EU commission is headquartered in the Belgian capital of Brussels, which is currently one of the worst hit cities in Europe by the virus, along with Madrid and Paris.
The commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen on Monday briefly went into self-isolation after a close contact with a positive case, but her two tests came back negative.
Last month the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, was forced to postpone a European leaders’ summit for a week after a security guard in his team tested positive.
“My mum thought it was something spiritual from her side of the family. So they took me for prayers with the hope that I’d be cured of whatever was wrong,” he told CNN.
“My aunt advised my dad that they should take me to camp for prayers against evil spirits. I remember I was laying down on the ground and people were all over me praying. I didn’t want to react but the prayer wasn’t working,” Godwin said.
He added that when they realized on the way back home from camp that the expected healing didn’t happen, they brought in another pastor to pray for him at home.
In parts of Nigeria, it is common to attribute mental illness to supernatural factors such as witchcraft or repercussion for sins against God, according to a report in the Integrative Journal of Global Health.
At the time Godwin was 18 and he recalls being overwhelmed with fear, hearing voices and crying in distress.
“I felt irritation all over my body. The sound of the fan in the room made me paranoid, I felt like it was rolling too fast and it would cut off and kill me. There were so many confusing voices talking to me in my head,” he said.
Godwin’s family doctor eventually referred him to a specialist after hearing about his symptoms, “that’s when we went to the psychiatric hospital,” he said.
In his case, he was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and placed on drugs. “I was so relieved to know what was going on with me. My parents too were relieved knowing it was nothing spiritual,” he said.
Mental health illness is so poorly understood that in some cases, people with these conditions are chained and locked up in unorthodox facilities across the country including traditional healing and religious centers.
According to a 2019 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), people in these facilities are subjected to different forms of abuse including force-feeding them medicine and herbs and whipping as part of their treatment.
A 22-year-old woman who suffered a mental health crisis after her mother’s death told the human rights group that she had been held captive in a church for five months and denied food as part of a “spiritual cleanse” for her condition.
“I was tied with chains for three days straight so I could fast. For the three days, I had no food or water. It wasn’t my choice, but the pastor said it was good for me. Sometimes if they say I should fast and I drink water or take food, they (the church staff) put me on a chain,” she said in the report.
Similarly, an Islamic faith healer in northern Nigeria told HRW that he whips patients, leaving scars on their body, as a way to ‘treat’ them.
“If you are treating someone who is mentally unwell and he acts in a way that is causing a disturbance, you will have to treat him. Some of them might be talking to themselves or suffer from lack of sleep…. For some of them, getting enough sleep will help. For others, we need to whip them — once, twice … up to seven times,” he said.
Dr. Nancy Orjinta, a resident psychiatrist at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Lagos, said keeping people with mental illness in such facilities can impact their health negatively and damage their self-esteem.
“I have seen patients who were chained for months battle with self-esteem issues. Keeping someone locked up will not only harm them physically, but they will start to feel low and dehumanized too,” she said. She added that such conditions can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder caused by traumatic or distressing events.
Not enough psychiatrists
One of the reasons people visit religious and traditional healing centers for mental illness is a lack of understanding of mental health issues in the country, according to Dr. Orjinta.
Dr. Orjinta, told CNN that in many cases, Nigerians seek mental health care from unorthodox places, especially religious centers before considering going to the hospital.
However, delaying mental care by not immediately going to hospital prolongs the time the patient stays without appropriate care and “may create the worst outcome for the patient as they have more symptoms,” she said.
“There is still a stigma around mental illness. People perceive it in a negative light and as a result they don’t want to address it if they have symptoms. They want to keep on hiding it,” she explained.
She also added there aren’t enough mental health professionals in the country, making it difficult to access mental health care. For example, with a population of more than 200 million people, there are only 250 practicing psychiatrists in the country.
“There is a disproportionate sharing of mental health professionals, we don’t really have them in rural areas. And if someone lives in such areas without mental health care, of course, they will find alternatives for care like traditional healers or churches,” Dr. Orjinta explained.
Clampdown on rehabilitation centers
In recent times, authorities in Nigeria have rescued hundreds of people held under inhumane conditions in a clampdown on religious rehabilitation centers.
In September 2019, for example, police rescued more than 300 men and boys from an Islamic school in Kaduna, northern Nigeria. Some of them told the police they had been sexually abused and tortured by their teachers.
But mental health advocates say this is not enough.
Hauwa Ojeifo, a mental health activist and coach told CNN that Nigeria needs strong legislation that will set the standards for psychiatric treatment.
Data on mental health in the country is hard to come by, but an estimated 20-30% of the country’s population is suffering from mental disorders, according to a 2016 report in the Annals of Nigerian Medicine Journal.
And in 2017, a World Health Organization report found that Nigerians have the highest incidences of depression in Africa, with more than 7 million people in the country suffering from depression.
Ojeifo who is also the founder of She Writes Woman, a non-profit focused on providing mental health support in the country said she wants a mental health bill that will encourage mental awareness in the country to be passed.
She described Nigeria’s 1958 Lunacy Act, the current legislation governing mental health in the country as “outdated” and “discriminatory.”
Under the act, people with mental health conditions are allowed to be detained, even without the provision of medical treatment.
“I don’t just want any mental health bill to be passed. I am very particular about the content of the bill too. I want it to be respectful and accommodate the rights of persons with mental health conditions,” she told CNN.
Mental health awareness
Mental health awareness is needed to combat the widespread use of religious and traditional healing centers for mental care, according to Dr. Orjinta.
“The media needs to come in to report mental health without framing it in a bad or scary way like some do. The same way you can say someone has a problem with his leg, you should be able to say someone has a brain problem. It should be like every other illness,” she said.
She added that she is optimistic Nigeria will eventually get to a place where there is a minimal stigma regarding mental health. “It won’t be drastic and it will require many people like the government, media, and religious institutions putting in the effort, but I am optimistic.”
Godwin who was initially taken to church for prayers says care outside medical facilities should not be the first resort.
“There are drugs and medical facilities that can help with mental illness. I am not saying people who attribute it to spirituality are wrong, but I’d say there are other ways. Medicine is capable,” he said.
He added that in his case, he wished he was taken to the hospital first for quicker diagnosis, before being subjected to religious healing.
In a move sure to titillate those who believe we may be living in a simulation, the European Union is set to create “digital twins” of the planet — massive simulations incorporating the Earth’s natural systems as well as human activity. The moonshot project, called Destination Earth (or “DestinE”), will unfold over the coming decade, aiming to leverage ultra-high-resolution modeling to inform and demonstrate the impact of European environmental policies and usher in a new era of sustainable development.
“[DestinE] will unlock the potential of digital modelling of the Earth’s physical resources and related phenomena such as climate change, water/marine environments, polar areas and the cryosphere, etc. on a global scale to speed up the green transition and help plan for major environmental degradation and disasters,” the European Commission wrote in a statement.
The Commission sees a number of high-profile uses for DestinE: monitoring the health of planetary systems like the climate, the cryosphere and land use through high-precision simulations; improving modeling and predictive capabilities for extreme weather events; supporting EU policy-making and implementation; and generally reinforcing Europe’s abilities in simulation, modeling, analytics, AI and HPC.
The “heart” of DestinE, the Commission says, will be a federated, cloud-based modeling and simulation platform. Users of the cloud platform will be able to access services, models, scenarios, simulations, forecasts and visualizations – and will even be able to develop their own applications and integrate their own data.
DestinE falls under the umbrellas of the European Commission’s Green Deal and Digital Strategy programs, which respectively aim to ensure a sustainable economy for the EU and position the EU as a global player in a fair, democratic digital economy. This also links DestinE with the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU), a concerted HPC effort currently comprising 32 member states across the European Union that just announced plans for an €8 billion investment in supercomputing.
Powering the digital twin and other simulations under DestinE will, of course, be a compute-intensive task. DestinE will be powered by one of three pre-exascale supercomputers in the works through EuroHPC: the LUMI system, which will be hosted by CSC in Finland; the MareNostrum 5 system, which will be hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center; or the Leonardo system, which will be hosted by the CINECA consortium in Italy. The three systems – which range in expected cost from €120 million to €151.4 million – are planned for installation in late 2020 to early 2021.
This aligns with the plan announced by the European Commission, which is to ready and implement DestinE beginning in 2021 and continuing across the following seven to ten years. The first steps are already in motion: following an initial stakeholder meeting last November, the Commission’s Joint Research Centre is preparing a report on DestinE’s use cases (expected this month) and hosting two workshops on the first of DestinE’s digital twins: one on a digital twin for extreme weather (October 21st) and one on a digital twin for climate change adaptation (October 22nd).
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