Opinions

Dear editor,

When Mr and Mrs Gridley came to The Gambia some 30 years ago, the Britons fell in love with the tiny West African country, straight off. Holidaying in The Gambia has since become an annual pastime for the couple from Essex, UK.

The purpose of art is to enrapture the heart through portrayal of beauty either by words or forms. The beautiful with all its vastness was meant for but one thing: the elevation of the heart, mind and soul of the rational creature towards higher altitudes and undiscovered dimensions..

'Africa for Africans... Europe for Europeans...', poignant and poetic. Marcus Garvey made this triumphal declaration in reference to the challenges and humiliation people of African descent experienced after they were catapulted into the Americas through slavery and found themselves meandering between east, west, north and south of the universe in pursuit of peace, happiness and wealth...

Preserving Mali's heritage In 1993, Haidara quit his job at the Ahmed Baba Institute and went out on his own, trying to raise funds to house the family archive. A breakthrough appeared imminent in 1996, when he received a call from the Libyan government, promising him "assistance." Weeks later a delegation dispatched by Muammar Qaddafi showed up at his home, pored through the Mamma Haidara collection—and offered to buy everything on the spot and take it all back to Tripoli...

The past two decades have witnessed phenomenal changes in the development arena throughout the world particularly in the developing countries. These changes have ushered in a paradigm shift in development thinking. The state was in the center stage of development controlling the market and playing the role of provider and sustainer.

It was early in the summer of 2012, and at the Mamma Haidara Library in Timbuktu, a clandestine operation was under way. Night after night, a team under the direction of the library's founder, Abdel Kader Haidara, quietly packed the ancient works of astronomy, poetry, history, and jurisprudence into metal chests, then spirited them out of the library in mule carts and 4x4s to safe houses scattered around the city.

Islam, development, and International terrorism

President Yahya Jammeh has been accorded a rousing welcome as he returned to Banjul on Saturday for the final stages of his 21-day nationwide tour...

Global press freedom has fallen to its lowest level in over a decade, according to a Freedom House report released on Saturday. The decline was driven in part by major regression in several Middle Eastern states, including Egypt, Libya, and Jordan; marked setbacks in Turkey, Ukraine, and a number of countries in East Africa; and deterioration in the relatively open media environment of the United States....

Dear editor,

Africa is the second largest continent on the planet. It is the home of early man; it is the cradle of life from which human beings branched out to populate the globe...