Category: Новини

Kansala, Guinea-Bissau — For centuries, the history of the West African kingdom of Kaabu has been told mainly by word of mouth.
Kaabu existed from the mid-1500s to the 1800s. At its peak, it encompassed Guinea-Bissau and reached into what are now Senegal and Gambia.
Sometimes Kaabu’s story passed from father to son. Often it was passed by griots — or West African oral historians — who sang about the kingdom’s rulers.
“The griots have already sung it, but now we know it’s real,” is what Nino Galissa recounts in a recent song commissioned by archaeologists from their recent dig in Kansala — a site that was once the wealthy capital of the West African kingdom.
Galissa is a direct descendent of the griots who sang for the last emperor of Kaabu.
The song performed by Galissa is being shared along with a report of the archaeological findings, Sirio Canos-Donnay from the Spanish National Research Council, which was a lead institution of the dig, told VOA.
“He’s combined all of the ways and methods and phrases that are the trade of the griot with the archaeological information and, hence, using that we’ll be able to transmit what we’ve done to the local population in a much more effective manner.”
In Kansala, griots have long been the way history lessons were passed between generations. They often sing the history accompanied by the kora, a string instrument that resembles both a harp and a guitar.
‘The puzzle you cannot miss’
Antonio Queba Banjai, a descendant of the last emperors of Kaabu, remembers listening as a young boy to the griots sing about his ancestors.
“Griots are not just important,” he said. “They are the puzzle you cannot miss in African history, because to know what we know now is because of griots. I am from the tree of the last emperor of Kaabu. We were educated by the music of kora. The storytellers tell us where we come from.”
Banjai is also president of Guinea-Lanta, an NGO that worked with the archaeologists.
When team members began the project, they knew they wanted griots and oral history to play an important role in what is the biggest archaeological dig to ever take place in Guinea-Bissau.
Canos-Donnay said she hoped that including oral storytelling in this report would show the academic world that things can be done differently and more inclusively.
“We should pay and need to pay respect to local ways of producing and consuming history. And the collaboration and the knowledge that can come from that dialogue from these two disciplines is something that is quite extraordinary.”
Canos-Donnay and others worked closely to verify that many events griots had sung about for generations actually occurred.
One such event was the explosive ending of the kingdom.
“Kansala had a fairly spectacular end in the 1860s, when the town was sieged by an enemy kingdom, and the local king realized he was going to lose the battle,” she said. “The legend is he set fire to the gunpowder house and blew the whole site up. So, this particular point of the site is where the elders said it happened. And one of the fun things is we proved that’s where it properly did.”
The dig also produced evidence of residents’ extensive trading with Europeans – Venetian beads, Dutch gin and more.
Joao Paulo Pinto is the former director of Guinea-Bissau’s National Institute of Study and Research. He says West African ways of recording history should be taken as seriously as European techniques.
“In our system, when you talk about the ritual of passage – everything has a process, everything has a code of conduct,” he said. “All our oral history systems have a commitment to the truth. I have a commitment to the truth as I speak, just the same as a book has a commitment to the truth.”
As for Banjai, he hopes the project will allow others to learn about the histories and kingdoms of West Africa that he says are too often neglected in school.
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The state of Texas has the third-largest Asian American population in the United States, according to the U.S. census, and Chinese people, some whose families arrived more than 150 years ago, make up the largest group.
Chinese Americans trace back for generations in the Lone Star State. Their story may not be as well known as that of their counterparts in California or New York City, but it is just as intertwined with America’s history.
At Rice University, the Houston Asian American Archive, or HAAA, is keeping their stories alive and sharing them with new generations. Launched in 2009, the archive now contains the oral histories of some 500 people in its database, providing a crucial window to the past.
“Oral history gives you a sense of immediacy and maybe more informality. And it’s also unfiltered,” said Anne Chao, HAAA co-founder and program manager.
The archive also preserves memorabilia and artifacts from Asian Americans in Houston — a city known for its oil and gas industry. It is also known for space exploration and is home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Albert Gee
One Chinese American who found success in 1960s and ’70s Houston was Albert Gee, who at the time was considered the unofficial mayor of the Chinese community. Gee appeared with Hollywood celebrities in the society pages of local newspapers and was once invited to the White House of President Richard Nixon.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1920, Gee and his family moved to New Orleans, where they operated a laundry business. When his father died in 1927, Gee’s mother, who did not speak English, decided to take her children back to their home in China, hoping that her three sons would return one by one to the U.S., which they did.
“Albert found himself only around 11 years old, coming back to the United States,” said his daughter Linda Wu. “He was just working — working and trying to send money back to his mother.”
Gee returned to the U.S. with his godfather, whom he lived with for a few years in San Francisco, California. Eventually, with the help of friends and relatives, Gee ended up in Houston.
He eventually opened grocery stores and restaurants, which became a draw for Hollywood celebrities, who would stay at a nearby hotel when in town. Wu has photos of celebrities such as singer Elvis Presley and comedian Bob Hope posing at the restaurants, some next to her father.
Helping newcomers
Wu said her parents saw themselves as Americans but never forget their roots. Her mother, Jane Eng, the child of Chinese immigrants, was born and raised in Texas.
“I always remember different people coming to live with us at the grocery store, family members who would start their roots here,” she said.
By assisting newcomers, the established Chinese Americans helped fuel the growth of the Gee family surname in Houston. Not all the Gees in Houston were related, however.
Stories about some of the city’s Gees can be found in the HAAA database and in the 1998 anthology “The Gees in Houston, Texas.”
“For the Gee family, it’s been discerned that we’ve come from about three to four villages in China,” said Rogene Gee Calvert, who contributed stories about her father, David Gee — no relation to Albert Gee — to the anthology.
David Gee
David Gee migrated from China to the U.S. in the late 1920s, during the Chinese Exclusion Act, which allowed Chinese merchants, diplomats and students into the country but banned laborers. Gee was 17 when he arrived, but his passport indicated he was four years younger. He was a so-called paper son.
“‘Paper sons’ and ‘paper daughters’ are the names given to people who buy false papers,” said Casey Dexter-Lee, an educator at Angel Island State Park in San Francisco Bay. Part of the island served as a major immigration station from 1910 to 1940.
“It’s about $100 for each year of life that the person claims,” she said. “So a 10-year-old would cost about $1,000 to buy false papers.”
After arriving in the U.S., David Gee was detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station for almost a year. Eventually, he received permission to stay.
David Gee worked in San Francisco with a relative. In 1938, he moved to Houston to join a family friend. He returned to San Francisco to get married, then brought his wife to Houston, where he worked in the grocery business.
“There was discrimination and, of course, there were natural barriers of language and just knowing how to navigate … how to get around and what to do,” Calvert said. “So, there were some elders who were well-spoken that were respected in the mainstream community that really helped our family.”
Houston and Jim Crow
Chao said the first large group of Chinese immigrants arrived in Houston in the 1940s and ’50s. At that time, racial segregation was legal in Texas and Southern states through a series of codes known as Jim Crow laws.
“Even though Houston also was subject to Jim Crow law, the law wasn’t applied the same way as [in] the other Southern states. And so, there’s a sense of more equitable equity in Houston.” Chao said, adding that people, including Chinese Americans, settled in Houston because there was a “sense of business opportunity.”
Being neither Black nor white, the Chinese Texans occupied a gray area under Jim Crow law.
“They were just in between and just dependent upon how well the neighborhood or people accepted them,” said Ted Gong, senior adviser to the Chinese American Museum in Washington.
Albert Gee, as president of the Houston Restaurant Association, took part in the desegregation of the city’s restaurants in the early 1960s.
Decades later, his work in the community was immortalized in a web comic for Texas students in 2023.
The comic is part of a free website called Adventures of Asia, developed by Asia Society Texas, which also collaborated with HAAA to create lesson guides for teachers called Asia in the Classroom.
“Our Asian American students in particular said they want to see themselves represented in the curriculum,” said Jennifer Kapral, director of education and outreach at Asia Society Texas Center.
The Asian population in the U.S. nearly doubled from 2000 to 2019 and is expected to continue to grow, according to the Pew Research Center. But the history of the Asians who settled in the U.S. is missing from many textbooks, Kapral said.
“There was a study that looked at 30 U.S. history textbooks from across the U.S., and they found that Asian American history was only mentioned in half of them. And of that half, it was an average of about one to two pages in the entire textbook. So, it’s been a big gap.”
Asian American Houstonians are filling this void by sharing their stories, preserving artifacts from their past, and educating the next generation about how their forebears carved a place for themselves in Texas’ largest city.
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NEW DELHI — The decadeslong ban of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in his native India is now in doubt — not because of a change of heart more than two years after the author’s near-fatal stabbing, but because of what amounts to some missing paperwork.

Earlier this week, a court in New Delhi closed proceedings on a petition filed five years ago that challenged the then-government’s decision to ban the import of the novel, which enraged Muslims worldwide because of its alleged blasphemy, just days after its 1988 publication. In a ruling issued Tuesday, according to the Press Trust of India news agency, a bench headed by Justice Rekha Palli said authorities had failed to produce the notification of the ban.

“We have no other option except to presume that no such notification exists,” the judges concluded.

The petitioner, Sandipan Khan, had argued that he couldn’t buy the book because of a notification issued by the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs on October 5, 1988, which forbade its import into India, adding that he was unable to locate the notification on any official website or through officials. Khan’s lawyer, Uddyam Mukherjee, said that the court’s ruling meant that as of now, nothing prohibits anybody from importing the novel into India.

“But whether this means it will be sold in bookstores — I don’t know, that depends on the publishers or sellers,” he told The Associated Press.

When reached by phone, several bookstores in the country’s capital were unaware of the news. An employee of Jain Book Agency in New Delhi said that they did not know whether this news meant that the novel would be available again in stores in India, adding that if that was the case, it could still take time and that they would need to hear from the publisher.

“What the ruling does is open up a potential path for the book to become available here,” Mukherjee said, but added that any aggrieved individual, group or the government can also appeal against it.

Rushdie’s literary agent, Andrew Wylie, declined comment to the AP. Rushdie, now a citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States, has yet to comment publicly. He has more than 1 million followers on his X account, on which he last posted in September.

Rushdie’s publisher in India, Penguin Random House India, issued a statement Friday called the ruling a “significant new development” and adding that it was “thinking through next steps.”

This week’s ruling adds a new twist to Rushdie’s complex relationship with India, where he was born in 1947, just before the country’s independence. He left as a child and was living in the United Kingdom at the time of his breakout novel, Midnight’s Children, which came out in 1981 and infuriated India’s prime minister at the time, Indira Gandhi, who was satirized in the book. After she sued over a reference to her having caused her husband’s death, Rushdie agreed to remove it, and the case was settled.

When India banned The Satanic Verses, Rushdie condemned the action and doubted whether his censors had even read the novel. In an open letter to then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, published in The New York Times in 1988, he alleged the book was “being used as a political football” and called the ban not only “anti-democratic, but opportunistic.” Over the years, Rushdie has made private trips to India and attended the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2007. But five years later, he canceled plans to attend the Jaipur gathering because of security concerns. The festival did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.

Besides the ban in his native country, The Satanic Verses elicited a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death from Iran’s Ayotollah Ruhollah Khomeini, forcing the author into hiding in 1989. He gradually resumed a normal life, especially after Iranian officials announced in 1998 that the government had no plans to enforce it. But his relative calm abruptly ended in 2022, when he was stabbed repeatedly onstage by a young assailant during a literary festival in western New York. Rushdie survived the attack, which left him blind in one eye, and wrote about it in the memoir Knife, a finalist this year for the National Book Award.

On Friday, Khan’s lawyer said that his client was an avid book reader driven to find answers after he found out the novel was banned. He filed numerous requests for information with various authorities — and tried for over a year to get a hold of the notification. Mukherjee said Khan was told by authorities that it was not traceable.

“When we realized there was no hope, we proceeded to go to court and challenge the notification,” Mukherjee added.

The court also said that Khan has the right under law to procure this book. So how does he plan to get it now?

“He doesn’t have a clear answer to this yet — if it becomes available in India, he will buy a copy of it,” Mukherjee said. “But he can also potentially buy it from international booksellers online, as it’s no longer illegal to import the book into the country.” 
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paris — As dusk falls over the City of Light, a new spectacle is illuminating Saint-Sulpice church, a monument whose interiors are even larger than Notre Dame’s — and arguably just as breathtaking. 

The cavernous walls of the neoclassical gem on Paris’ Left Bank are coming alive with 360-degree video projections, sparkling cutting-edge technology and actors, all telling the story of the church and its place in French history. 

Blending centuries of intrigue, revolution and family drama, the show reimagines the Saint-Germain district during the Fronde, the 17th-century civil war, and the lead-up to the French Revolution. 

“Paris Cœur de Lumières” (Paris Chancel of Lights), which runs until November 23, transforms the church’s sprawling 6,000-square-meter (65,000-square-foot) interior into a digital stage through advanced video mapping. 

“From a technological standpoint, it’s a laser scan of the entire building that allows us to reconstruct the space in three dimensions,” director Damien Fontaine explained. 

“We then ‘unfold’ it like origami … and put it back into 3D to be projected as a single unified image. We have over 45 projectors, each covering a part of the vaults, a section of a pillar, or a piece of the nave. It’s … a mosaic of images to form one large picture.” 

Projections transform stone carvings into animated storytellers, while immersive soundscapes, paired with an original score, wrap the audience in a sensory experience. 

The actors brought history to life. Over 350 performers and volunteers, clad in more than 500 historical costumes, move among the audience portraying local families and rivalries, threading personal narratives into the broader history. 

Many of those who volunteered themselves marveled at learning about little known aspects of French history. 

Anne Dubosc, a 65-year-old amateur actress, played Anne of Austria, mother of Sun King Louis XIV. 

“She was a remarkable woman, very involved in politics and religion,” Dubosc said. “I hadn’t realized how important she was. If Louis XIV became the man he was, it was partly thanks to this woman, this mother who was like a tigress, doing everything to protect her son and teaching him to be a great statesman.” 

Performing in Saint-Sulpice, she added, was extraordinary: “It’s exceptional. You lose track of what’s happening, of where fiction ends and history begins.” 

Her historic costume shaped her performance — literally. 

“I have a corset that squeezes me so tightly,” she said. “You realize there’s a very 18th-century way of holding yourself, of carrying your shoulders and neck, which gives a natural majesty. The costume really impacts how you carry your body, and that posture influences your mind, giving character to this woman of state.” 

The production underscored a growing trend in Paris of using light technology to show off the city’s storied church interiors. A similar illuminations display took place at Saint-Eustache church until September, featuring video projections, lighting effects and spatialized electronic soundtrack. 
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ROME — The Pompeii archaeological park plans to limit visitor numbers to 20,000 a day and introduce personalized tickets starting next week in a bid to cope with over-tourism and protect the world heritage site, officials said Friday.

The move comes after what authorities called a record summer that saw more than 4 million people visiting the world-famous remains of the ancient Roman city, buried under ash and rock following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

The park’s director Gabriel Zuchtriegel said visitors to the main archaeological site now exceed an average of 15,000 to 20,000 every day, and the new daily cap will prevent the numbers from surging further.

“We are working on a series of projects to lift the human pressure on the site, which could pose risks both for visitors and the heritage (that is) so unique and fragile,” Zuchtriegel said.

Starting November 15 tickets to access the park will be personalized to include the full names of visitors. A maximum of 20,000 tickets will be released each day, with different time slots during the peak summer season.

The park’s management is also trying to attract more tourists to visit other ancient sites connected to Pompeii by a free shuttle bus under the “Greater Pompeii” project, including Stabia, Torre Annunziata and Boscoreale sites.

“The measures to manage flows and safety and the personalization of the visits are part of this strategy,” Zuchtriegel said.

“We are aiming for slow, sustainable, pleasant and non-mass tourism and above all widespread throughout the territory around the UNESCO site, which is full of cultural jewels to discover,” he added. 
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Washington/Istanbul — Local authorities in Turkey’s metropolitan Istanbul province banned a screening of the LGBTQI-themed movie “Queer” on Thursday because of concerns that it would endanger public peace and security.

The screening of “Queer,” a film directed by Italian director Luca Guadagnino and starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, was scheduled to open a film festival in Istanbul’s Kadikoy district on Thursday. The festival was organized by Mubi, an international streaming platform and film production and distribution company.

Mubi canceled the entire festival, noting “This ban not only targets a single film but also undermines the very essence and purpose of the festival.”

In a statement shared on X, Mubi announced that the Kadikoy District Governor’s Office had notified them of the ban hours before the festival was set to begin.

“The decision states that the film is prohibited on the grounds that it contains provocative content that could endanger public peace, with the ban being imposed for security reasons,” Mubi wrote.

“We believe this ban is a direct restriction on art and freedom of expression,” Mubi added.

The Kadikoy District Governor’s Office has not made a public statement on the ban and has not responded to VOA’s inquiry at the time of this story’s publication.

Rising anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric

The Turkish government has toughened rhetoric against its LGBTQI+ community in recent years, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan repeatedly calling its members “perverts” or “deviants.”

Authorities have banned pride marches throughout the country since 2015, citing security concerns. At least 15 people were detained in Istanbul in June for taking part in a pride rally.

Yıldız Tar, editor in chief of the LGBTQI news portal KaosGL, does not find the ban surprising considering the government’s anti-LGBTQI stance.

“The reason for the ban on ‘Queer’ is of course that it is a film about LGBTI+ people. When you try to organize any LGBTI+-themed event in Turkey since 2015, you already encounter such bans,” Tar told VOA.

Tar noted that the Kadikoy District Governor’s Office banned the screening of another movie, “Pride,” as part of Pride Month events in June 2023.

The Istanbul festival, which was scheduled to take place November 7 to 10, included a variety of film screenings, talks and performances. According to Mubi, tickets for the festival had sold out days in advance.

Tar views Mubi’s decision to cancel the festival after the ban as “an important and valuable message” and argues that the platform’s decision should be exemplary.

“If LGBTI+ themed films are being censored so openly at this point, then festivals and the world of culture and arts need to raise a very strong voice against this censorship,” Tar said.

Academic and film critic Yeşim Burul also sees the district governor’s ban as censorship.

“We are talking about unacceptable censorship here. It is truly absurd that a district governorship would make such decisions to prevent a film from reaching the audience,” Burul told VOA.

“We, as adults, can decide which film we can and cannot watch. Such festivals are already organized for those over the age of 18, and tickets are sold that way,” Burul added.

The 2024 film “Queer,” with a screenplay adapted from William S. Burroughs’ 1985 novel, tells the story of an American expatriate living in Mexico City in the 1950s who establishes an intimate connection with a younger man.

In October, Mubi acquired distribution rights for the film in multiple territories, including Turkey, India, the United Kingdom, Germany and Latin America.

Reactions

Several rights groups and organizations reacted to the ban on the screening.

According to the LGBTI+ Rights Commission of the Istanbul branch of the Human Rights Association, the ban is “a continuation of criminalizing LGBTI+ individuals.”

In a post on X, the rights group argued that the ban violates not only domestic law but also the “protection from discrimination” principle of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Turkey is a signatory.

The Actors’ Union of Turkey called the ban “clearly an application of censorship.”

“The duty of art and artists is to broaden the horizons of societies and offer them new perspectives while telling their own stories,” the union said in a statement published on X. The union also reminded that the law on freedom of expression protects artistic activities in Turkey.
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AMSTERDAM — Amsterdam police said Friday that five people were hospitalized and 62 arrested after what authorities described as systematic violence by antisemitic rioters targeting Israeli fans following a football match.

The Dutch and Israeli leaders denounced the violence, and condemnation poured in from Jewish groups. Israel’s foreign minister left on an urgent diplomatic trip to the Netherlands. Security concerns have shrouded matches with Israeli teams in multiple countries over the past year because of global tensions linked to the wars in the Middle East.

The Amsterdam police said in a post on X that they have started a major investigation into multiple violent incidents. The post did not provide further details about those injured or detained in Thursday night’s violence following the Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv.

Authorities said extra police would patrol Amsterdam in coming days, and security will be beefed up at Jewish institutions in the city that has a large Jewish community and was home to Jewish World War II diarist Anne Frank and her family as they hid from Nazi occupiers.

Earlier, a statement issued by the Dutch capital’s municipality, police and prosecution office said that the night “was very turbulent with several incidents of violence aimed at Maccabi supporters” after antisemitic rioters “actively sought out Israeli supporters to attack and assault them.”

It was not immediately clear when and where violence erupted after the match.

“In several places in the city, supporters were attacked. The police had to intervene several times, protect Israeli supporters and escort them to hotels. Despite the massive police presence in the city, Israeli supporters have been injured,” the Amsterdam statement said.

“This outburst of violence toward Israeli supporters is unacceptable and cannot be defended in any way. There is no excuse for the antisemitic behavior exhibited last night,” it added.

The violence erupted despite a ban on a pro-Palestinian demonstration near the football stadium imposed by Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema, who had feared that clashes would break out between protesters and supporters of the Israeli football club.

There were also incidents involving fans ahead of the match. Dutch broadcaster NOS reported that a Palestinian flag was ripped off a building in the center of the city and riot police blocked pro-Palestinian supporters trying to march toward the Johan Cruyff Arena stadium where the match was being played.

Israel initially ordered that two planes be sent to the Dutch capital to bring the Israelis home, but later the prime minister’s office said it would work on “providing civil aviation solutions for the return of our citizens.”

A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that “the harsh pictures of the assault on our citizens in Amsterdam will not be overlooked,” and that Netanyahu “views the horrifying incident with utmost gravity.” He demanded that the Dutch government take “vigorous and swift action” against those involved.

Netanyahu’s office added that he had called for increased security for the Jewish community in the Netherlands.

Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof said on X that he followed reports of the violence “with horror.”

“Completely unacceptable antisemitic attacks on Israelis. I am in close contact with everyone involved,” he added, saying that he had spoken to Netanyahu and “emphasized that the perpetrators will be tracked down and prosecuted. It is now quiet in the capital.”

Security issues around hosting games against visiting Israeli teams led the Belgian football federation to decline to stage a men’s Nations League game in September. That game against Israel was played in Hungary with no fans in the stadium.

The violence in Amsterdam will lead to a review of security at two games this month being organized by European football body UEFA. France plays Israel at Stade de France near Paris next Thursday in the Nations League and Maccabi Tel Aviv’s next Europa League game is scheduled in Istanbul on November 28 against Besiktas.

Ajax won the Europa League match 5-0. 
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