A young African woman, raised in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya decides not to go ahead with an arranged marriage to someone in Canada. So, on her way to North America, she absconds in Germany, and escapes to Holland, where she succeeds in obtaining political asylum.
While in Holland, she starts working as an advocate for immigrant women mostly from Muslim countries. She partners with a Dutch director to develop a movie that some Muslims find offensive. The director, Theo van Gogh is murdered on the street and a death threat to Ms Ali was pinned to his chest with a knife. She obtains Dutch citizenship and runs for elected office.
She is elected into parliament. While in parliament, she changes party affiliation in a move that was the political equivalent of leaving Ralph Nader's Green Party to join the Republicans. Her application for political asylum is challenged by the Dutch Justice Minister, who questions the truth of some details in her asylum application.
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once told me. The friend not being Ghanaian, in which case his remark would have been dismissed as an outburst of chauvinism, it is surprising that the declaration did not really set my mind working at the time. Then in 1997, Kofi Annan became the new UN Secretary-General, after a fierce diplomatic battle between the US and Boutros Ghali led to the ouster of the Egyptian. What my friend had told me about a decade earlier instantly came back to mind and I found myself involved in a mental journey to Ghana. I have only read about this country, so it was quite natural for my ruminations to commence at the UN. After all, was it not Mr. Annan who started it all? 
Chinese President Hu Jintao just wrapped up a 12-day eight-nation whirlwind tour of africa. According to Newsweek, he travelled across the continent “signing trade deals, forgiving debt, extending loans and securing rights to natural resources”.
PBS TV series NOVA presents a fitting tribute to Dr. Percy Julian, one of the greatest American research chemists of the 20th century. Born in Jim Crow Alabama in 1899, a child of former slaves, Percy rose above unimaginable racial discrimination to obtain a Bachelors in chemistry at DuPauw University, a Masters at Harvard and a doctorate at the University of Vienna. Following that his name is associated with numerous 
In 1960, when the Ivory Coast became independent from French colonial rule, Felix Houphouet-Boigny and his Parti Democratique de Cote d’Ivoire (PDCI) were swept to power in a general euphoria. However, as Martin Meredith has noted in his book The Fate of Africa, “the changes that occurred were largely ceremonial.” Most of the new leaders, especially those in French-speaking Africa, were more interested in “accumulating positions of power, wealth and status…than in transforming society.” According to him, “no one illustrated this sense of continuity, or the benefits derived from it, better than Houphouet-Boigny.” As far back as 1951, he had given signal of the neo-colonial era he was about to inaugurate.
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