Africa

Here on APR Notebook, I've invited you to listen into my chats with actors and authors. Those talks are pretty light. Then there was my conversation with Alex Drueke, who spent 105 days as a POW in the hands of Russian forces after he volunteered to fight for Ukraine. That one was tough to listen to, and fair warning, here's another one. But hear me out. Genocide has been going on in part of the African nation of Sudan for years. The region I'm talking about is roughly the size of Spain. It's called Darfur. An estimated 2 million people have been killed there, but for some of the survivors, there has been justice, and an attorney who hails from Mobile made it possible. Kathryn Lee Boyd argued the case against the French bank BNP Paribas. It was accused of funding the mass killings in Darfur. Boyd won, and she's my guest next on APR Notebook.

In this edition of StoryCorps, Jason Lewis talks about how joining the military connected him to his ancestors and how he wants to unite cultures between Africa and the United States.

A pygmy hippopotamus calf at the Montgomery Zoo is soon turning six months old. Ronda was born on Feb. 11 and has since been welcomed and celebrated as a significant addition to the zoo’s family.

The 11th annual Tuscaloosa Africana Film Festival, co-sponsored by The University of Alabama College of Community Health Sciences, will be Saturday, Feb. 10 from 2 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the UA Student Center.

Alabama Public Radio is diving into our archives as APR observes forty years on the air. The U.S. State Department recently invited APR to address a delegation from Africa on our fourteen month investigation into human trafficking. Part of that talk was on an experimental database that law officers and victims’ advocates could use at the same time. Here’s that story from the APR archives.

This Wednesday marks fifty years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior. Throughout March, the APR news team is reporting on King’s…

A new book about global attitudes to the AIDS epidemic in Africa says lays some of the blame at writer Joseph Conrad's door. Conrad's Heart of Darkness, says author Uzodinma Iweala, connected inferiority and disease with Africans in way which is still evident today. Host Scott Simon talks the author about Our Kind of People.