Work on Bonwire Kente Museum Begins

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Accra, October 13, 2020

Today, Vice President, H.E Alhaji Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia will cut-sod for the construction of the much-anticipated Bonwire Kente Museum.

Kente has for decades been Ghana’s most prominent cultural heritage symbol. In recent years it has become the symbol representing the unity of the black race, African identity as well as a symbol for black empowerment. Kente cloth has been used by Congressmen of the US and most recently by rising tennis star Naomi Osaka in acknowledgment of her ancestral heritage after she won the US Open. Though Kente is woven in several places in Ghana such as Adanwomase and Agotime Kpetoe, Bonwire is arguably the most popular place associated with the weaving of Kente.

The Bonwire Kente Museum project is thus part of the larger plan to improve selected Crafts and Artifacts Making Sites in the Ashanti Region. The objective is to improve the performance of tourism in targeted destinations along craft villages.

The event is taking place within the Ejisu Municipal Area which is an important tourism enclave in Ghana. It is the home of Nana Yaa Asantewaa, the heroine and towering figure of African resistance against colonialisation. The area also has iconic Ashanti traditional buildings which are listed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Read More About Bonwire Kente

 

Nancy Pelosi and Democrats ‘take a knee’ in kente as they launch ‘Reform Bill’

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In a story just published by the Daily Mail, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrat members on Monday morning kneeled in memory of that George Floyd as they take steps to unveil massive police reform legislation. The House Speaker and the team of Democrats including some of the Black Caucus members who were in Ghana last year were clad in Kente Stoles which is increasingly becoming a symbol for black movements.

Highlights of her speech:

  • ‘We were there for eight minutes and 46 seconds on our knees. My members will attest it’s a very long time,’ Pelosi said
  • The bill would ban choke holds, create a national registry of police officers who have been accused of misconduct and abolish non-knock warrants in drug cases
  • It would also abolishes qualified immunity, which currently protects police from civil litigation 
  • Republicans have not signaled if they will support the bill in the Senate
  • The legislation comes as the public demands defunding of police departments

 

Nancy Pelosi claimed Monday morning that George Floyd is a ‘martyr’ of police brutality as Democrats kneeled for a moment of silence before unveiling a massive police reform bill.

‘The martyrdom of George Floyd gave American experience a moment of national anguish as we grieve for the black Americans killed by police brutality,’ the House Speaker said at the podium. ‘Today this movement of national anguish is being transformed into a movement of national action as Americans from across the country peacefully protest to demand an end to injustice.’

‘The martyrdom of George Floyd,’ she said later in the briefing, ‘has made a change in the world.’

Pelosi said Democrats in Congress are ‘standing with those fighting for justice and action,’ and mentioned other black Americans she say are ‘martyrs’ who have died at the hands of police brutality.

‘Let us, my colleagues, just go over some of those names of martyrdom,’ she said, before listing names like George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and several others.

A team of Democrats, all wearing kente cloths to either honor or stand in solidarity with those with African heritage, gathered for a press conference to reveal details of the bill, claiming the piece of legislation will combat police brutality, especially with the black community.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus memorably did not boycott Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in 2018, and instead wore brightly colored yellow, green, black and red kente cloths around their shoulders after the president infamously referred to Haiti and some African nations as ‘s***hole counties.’

The unveiling of the proposed legislation follows two weeks of protests across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

Ahead of the press conference, Democrats held a moment of silence at the Capitol for eight minute and 46 seconds – the same amount of time former cop Derek Chauvin had his knee lodged on the back of Floyd’s neck.

‘We were there for eight minutes and 46 seconds on our knees. My members will attest it’s a very long time,’ Pelosi said. ‘It’s a very long time, and I graciously led them in falling over when it was over so that they could do the same thing, but here we are.’

 

The legislation includes a ban on police using chokeholds or carotid holds, would eliminate no-knock warrants in drug cases and aims to change ‘the standard to evaluate whether law enforcement use of force was justified from whether the force was reasonable to whether the force was necessary.’

The sweeping package would also require nationwide use of body cameras by all police, subject law enforcement officers to civilian review boards and abolish the legal doctrine known as qualified immunity, which protects police from civil litigation, according to congressional sources.

It is unclear if the bill would receive support from Republicans, but the proposal from Democrats comes after Floyd died while in Minneapolis Police custody on Memorial Day.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, however, pushed during the press conference on the bill that his Republican colleagues get the bill on the floor of the Senate for debate by July.

‘In the Senate, Democrats are going to fight like hell to make it a reality,’ the New York Democrat said of the legislation, urging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to act swiftly.

‘Democrats will not let this go away,’ Schumer asserted.

Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Karen Bass said during the briefing that she hopes ‘there is a movement that has caught fire.’

A bystander video showed Chavin, a white police officer who was fired shortly after the incident, kneeling on the back of Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes. The victim repeatedly voiced his pain and claimed he could not breathe, before he went limp underneath Chauvin’s knee.

The incident, which went viral, sparked widespread outrage, unrest and launched more than two weeks of riots and peaceful protests in hundreds of cities across the country.

‘It is time for police culture in many departments to change,’ Bass, who is spearheading the legislation, told CNN Sunday morning.

She added that she hoped the wave of protests would increase pressure on lawmakers to act.

‘We’re in a real moment in our country, the passion that the people are displaying,’ Bass added. ‘That it is going to lay the basis for the momentum for us to bring about the change that we need to do.’

More than a dozen Democratic lawmakers gathered to discuss the bill at a 10:30 a.m. press conference – and while they wore masks, the Democrats did not keep in line with social distancing guidelines, which recommends people remain six-feet from one another.

The legislation would create a national misconduct registry that would show all police officers who have been accused of misconduct.

The National Police Misconduct Registry, Democrats say, would prevent officers found guilty of misconduct too often from moving from one department to another.

The ‘federal registry of all federal, state and local law enforcement officers’ would include misconduct complaints and discipline or termination records, and police departments would be required to declare that each new officer hired is certified.

 

 

The bill would also officially make lynching a federal crime and include rules that would make it easier to sue a cop for police brutality.

Republicans, who control the Senate, and President Donald Trump will need to support the bill before the new measures aimed at policing become law.

Trump has repeatedly warned on social media that if Democratic candidate Joe Biden were to win the presidency in November, he would defund the police and U.S. military.

Prominent Democrats have dodged the question of defunding police and the bill being proposed Monday does not include provisions that would drain funding from police departments.

The GOP is likely to hang the defund movement on Democrats in an effort to keep their majority in the Senate and paint all their opposition on the left as extreme.

“House Democrats have gone so extreme with their ‘abolish culture’ that they’re one step away from wanting to outlaw fire departments,” Chris Pack, a spokesman for the NRCC, said. “This is insanity and not what Democrats ran on two years ago.”

The Democrat’s legislation does not address the issue of funding or cutting funding to police departments – but does make contingent on police receiving training on racial and implicit bias at the federal level.

Bass did assert, however, that the bill “does not provide any new money for policing.”

Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, where a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, was the latest in a string of killings of black men and women by U.S. police that have sparked anger on America’s streets and fresh calls for reform.

 

Source: dailymail.co.uk

Ghana’s creative arts “thriving”; “our kente now African identity symbol” – Akufo-Addo

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President Nana Akufo-Addo has said Ghana’s creative arts industry is thriving.

Speaking at the Baba Yara Sports Stadium at the 63rd independence anniversary celebration in Kumasi, Ashanti Region on Friday, 6 March 2020, the President said: “The creative arts are thriving, and there are exciting things to interest a wide range of people”.

The fashion scene, he said, “is vibrant, and unearths new talent every day”.

“Take a look around this stadium today, and feast your eyes on the riot of colours and the wide variety of styles that our kente weavers can conjure.

“Every day, this ancient, royal, eye-catching, beautiful fabric is reinvented to win over new generations. The kente, of course, has crossed over our borders and is no longer exclusively Ghanaian, but the symbol of identity for peoples of African descent everywhere”, the President noted.

 

He observed that: “Our designers, tailors, and dressmakers keep Ghanaian-made clothes in the top range of attractive clothes”, adding: “Art galleries are alive with established and new painters and sculptors, and there are signs of their innovative works all around us”.

“We have always been known for musical talent, and this generation is keeping up the tradition”.

The President also urged Ghanaians to keep being Ghanaian in this election year.

“Fellow Ghanaians, there is renewed confidence in our foods and a strong belief in the things that define us as Ghanaians. We have always been known for arguments and debates, and, in an election year, it is predictable that the decibel level would go up. That is what we are currently experiencing, but, as the saying goes, even as the arguments get louder, we keep a keen lookout for each other’s eyes.

“There is an Akan proverb that says: ‘Omanni ko, y3ko a, y3keka nwi so; yenntutu ase?’. When we fight as members of a community or family, we bite off hair; we do not uproot it. In other words, in our gravest moments of fury, we strive to avoid bloodshed.

“The consensus is holding for all of us to work towards the prosperous, peaceful and happy Ghana we want. We all recognise that the responsibility we carry as the first sub-Saharan colonial country to gain independence is not simply to build a successful country. We owe it to the rest of the continent and the black race to demonstrate that, indeed, we can build and run a successful, prosperous and happy country. This is a task we do not shirk, and which all Ghanaians accept”, he said.

Source: Ghana Today online

Congressional leaders and Black Caucus mark 400th anniversary of slavery in Kente

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Members of Congress observed the 400th anniversary Tuesday of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in America at a time of renewed interest over the history of slavery and its continued impact on contemporary society.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer arrive for a Congressional Black Caucus ceremony commemorating the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies.

 

Questions about income inequality, reparations for slavery and other issues from the nation’s history of enslaving people are spilling into politics and culture with a reckoning not seen since the Civil Rights era.

The Republican leader of the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, said slavery in America led to “many shameful moments” in the country, including in Congress.

Congressional Black Caucus Visit Ghana

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., did not attend the ceremony but said as he opened the Senate that slavery was in many ways the country’s “original sin.”

McConnell’s own family history came under question earlier this year after it was revealed his ancestors reportedly owned slaves generations ago. On Tuesday, he said, while progress has been made, “change has come too slow.”

Speaker Pelosi and CBC delegation tour historic sites in Ghana

Pelosi called for passage of the Voting Rights Act, legislation that is part of a package of House Democratic priorities for Congress, ahead of the 2020 election.

Rep. Karen Bass, D-Ca., the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, called on colleagues to examine and embrace all parts of the nation’s history.

Congressional Black Caucus delegation lay wreath at Nkrumah park to mark 400th anniversary

“We are so fortunate to live in this amazing country with our incredible history,” Bass said.

“All of our history is what makes this country a great country,” she said, and encourages all Americans to contribute to the “fight to build a more perfect union.”

Source: Myjoyonline