Africa

Reprinted from Ma’ariv January 1, 2008

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Knesset recently that while he would like to grant asylum to 489 Muslim refugees from Sudan’s Darfur region to protect them from genocide, he is inclined to send...

Slavery still exists in Sudan. The enslaved—of whom there are at least several thousand—are Christians, according to Simon Deng, who was himself enslaved as a boy by an Arab Muslim family.

Last night Mr. Deng spoke at a dinner hosted by...

“Who is the real enemy of Mohammed,” asks Simon Deng, an escaped slave from Sudan and leading human rights activist, “a child who names a teddy bear, or the one who is killing little Muhammed in Darfur?” Mr. Deng, whom I have...

November 27, 2007

“This is the mother, who has leprosy, [and] this is the son,” says Adeboye Subuloye, looking down at a photograph of a woman and a tall young man. “We bought a sewing machine for him.

“We decided to empower the...

Wednesday, July 4th 2007, 4:00 AM

Even after Dr. Mehret Mandefro had repeatedly warned them to always use a condom, girls and women would return to her office with sexually transmitted diseases. She was deeply disturbed and wondered...

Thursday, May 3rd 2007, 8:54 PM

An ordinary mortal can’t help but wonder how Dr. Philip Ozuah does it. At 44, Ozuah is physician in chief of the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx. He also is chairman of...

Thursday, March 22nd 2007, 9:02 AM

When Bizu Riki Mullu was a girl, the people of her village of Mauri, in northern Ethiopia, would come out in January and sing to the storks crossing the sky. “The villagers knew the birds came...

August 31, 2006

It was “desperation” to raise awareness about the plight of black Africans in his native land of Sudan, Simon Deng says, that prompted the Harlem resident to walk the 300 miles from the United Nations to...

Monday, June 5th, 2006

“When I lost my arm, I thought, ‘That’s the end of my life,'” says Muctar Jalloh.

“My goals had been to attend school and to write. Sometimes I would think, ‘I don’t think it...

March 21, 2006

“As a child, I was abducted and taken into slavery, at a time most people assumed slavery was a thing of the past,” says Simon Deng, 45, to a reporter over coffee in an upper East Side cafe on a recent sunny...