PANW Editor, Abayomi Azikiwe, to Speak at Africa Liberation Day Event on Sunday

Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, holding microphone at Detroit MLK Day March on Washington Blvd. downtown, January 15, 2007. (Photo: Robert Akrawi).
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos

Detroit's commemoration of African Liberation Day continues tonight at Black Star Community Bookstore with the showing of two films

Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire will speak at tonight's film showing in honor of Africa Liberation Day, 2007

Black Star Community Bookstore
May 27, 2007

African Film Festival
In Celebration of African Liberation Day

Congo:White King, Red Rubber, Black Death describes Leopold II, King of the Belgium's private colony of the Congo between 1885 and 1908 as a gulag labor camp of shocking brutality. Leopold posed as the protector of Africans fleeing Arab slave-traders but, in reality, he carved out an empire based on terror to harvest rubber.

Families were held as hostages, starving to death if the men failed to produce enough wild rubber. Children's hands were chopped off as punishment for late deliveries. The Belgian government has denounced this documentary as a "tendentious diatribe" for depicting King Leopold II as the moral forebear of Adolf Hitler, responsible for the death of 10 million people in his rapacious exploitation of the Congo. Yet, it is agreed today that the first Human Rights movement was spurred by what happened in the Congo.

Thomas Sankara is a revealing 26 minute documentary about the revolutionary African leader who wanted to give his country, Burkina Faso, a new socio-political dimension.

Event Info
19410 Livernois
Detroit, Michigan 48221
May 27, 2007
8:00PM-10:00PM