Africa

Destiny is a funny thing. From Day 1 to Day 24 - and the months before and after a four-week shoot in Ghana - Deron Albright's first feature film, The Destiny of Lesser Animals , appeared doomed. "It was just the relentlessness of the challenges," said Albright, 42, of Narberth, a director and associate professor of film at St. Joseph's University. "Any one given bad day is doable. This was day upon day. . . . It has been an exhausting process. " On more than one occasion, everyone involved - from the L.A. cameraman who slept on Albright's couch to the lead actor who paid his own airfare to Ghana - wondered whether the film four years in the making would ever see the big screen.

'Possible Cities: Africa in Photography & Video" is a major exhibition now at Haverford College, developed in conjunction with the 2011 Mellon Symposium "Imaging Africa," an international event held there recently. The display acknowledges that we live in a "city century" or "urban millennium," and that Africa is growing more citified at a faster rate than any other continent. Lagos, Nigeria, is one of the largest cities on Earth, and Nigeria's Nollywood is the world's third-largest and fastest-growing film industry.

US Airways and Spanish carrier Spanair announced today an agreement that will give US Airways passengers access to additional destinations in Spain, the Canary Islands, continental Europe and Africa. The deal, which substantially expands an existing agreement between the two airlines, is effective Saturday. It gives passengers so-called single-source booking, ticketing and baggage connections for flights on either airline. US Airways is the dominant carrier serving Philadelphia International Airport, with about 60 percent of the traffic.

The wandering ash ship from Philadelphia has set out into the Atlantic again, this time headed for an undisclosed destination in Africa. The Coast Guard in Miami said today the Khian Sea, which has roamed the oceans for 17 months, left for Africa over the weekend after repairs were made to the vessel off the Florida Coast. "I'm not able to find out where he's going in Africa and it's really no concern of ours to pursue it any further," Coast Guard Petty Officer Steven Allen said.

The United States has two ways to export its most prized beliefs and pursue the fight against terrorism. One means, as seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, is to use unparalleled military might to crush regimes implicated in terror (or at least alleged to be). This works to chase despots out of capitals, but it has some ever-more-obvious drawbacks. The other means are good deeds that show the benign side of the American superpower by aiding struggling nations, including many in Africa, that might become havens for terrorists.

"Americans, and particularly American children, are quite unfamiliar with contemporary Africa and especially the positive and progressive aspects of Africa," says Jack Lutz, a retired educator and a Mount Laurel resident. "When children here think of Africa, they think of it as being Tarzan and the jungle, . . . which is a shame because it's really quite a beautiful place. " Lutz should know. He and his wife, Paz, spent more than 20 years in Africa working in small villages helping to develop programs for education, health and community development.

You arrive in the West African nation of Senegal and board a bus. Out the window is a palm tree-lined street that leads to downtown Dakar, a city of 1.2 million. People in traditional as well as Western clothes crowd the street, and many of the buildings are modern. Leaving the city, you pass through a pleasant suburb. As the bus heads into the countryside, there are fewer people and fewer trees. Dust drifts on the road. Suddenly, you've arrived at the ocean. Men occupy scull-like, brightly colored boats; on the beach, fish flop out of water.

Whenever A. Glenn McClure glanced at the tiny black elephant statue in his office at Valley Forge Christian College, he'd say a little prayer for Jessica Buchanan. He knew his former student, now an aid worker in Somalia, had been held captive by pirates there since October. Buchanan graduated in 2007 from Valley Forge Christian, where McClure heads the education department. The elephant, he said, was "her way of saying thank you" for his help in setting up a student teaching gig for her in Africa that would help cement her enduring commitment to that continent.

10 tonight CHANNEL 12 Filmmaker Landon Van Soest (right) explores how well-meaning attempts by the international community to alleviate poverty in Africa may be harming the very communities they strive to help.

8 p.m. HISTORY This two-hour special takes viewers to six locations believed by some to be actual entrances to hell itself, including a cave in the Central American jungles, a volcano in Iceland and a lake of fire in Africa, all of which share eerie and striking similarities.

Vieux Farka Toure is a second-generation guitar luminary who has made a career successfully merging Africa and the diaspora. When he appeared at the Annenberg Center's Prince Theatre for the first of two sets Friday night, he showed the world he is not blending the music of his native Mali with that of other places. With an array of songs that ranged from African chamber music to Maghreb-Andaluz romps to slashing, incisive blues to joyous, rocking dance tunes, the guitarist showed the world that it's all been in Africa since the beginning.

GRAAFF-REINET, South Africa — "All right, this is where we get out and walk," said Charl Pretorius, our ranger, as he jumped from the safari vehicle and began to scan the horizon. I turned to my friend: "He's kidding, right?" But Charl was very serious. He'd gone into that tracking-mode trance that had become so familiar over the last few days, and he was onto something. Sure enough, within a few minutes Charl had found her. Not more than 15 feet away, under the shade of a shepherd's tree, lay a cheetah.

Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the Nigerian bandleader and political firebrand whose life and legacy are celebrated in Fela! , the Broadway musical that completes its eight-show run at the Academy of Music with two performances Sunday, is a singular figure in pop-music history. As an artist, Fela - who's best known mononymously, like Madonna or Adele - continually expressed his contempt for the military dictatorship of his own country, as well for what he saw as the rapacious colonialism of Western business interests.

Destiny is a funny thing. From Day 1 to Day 24 - and the months before and after a four-week shoot in Ghana - Deron Albright's first feature film, The Destiny of Lesser Animals , appeared doomed. "It was just the relentlessness of the challenges," said Albright, 42, of Narberth, a director and associate professor of film at St. Joseph's University. "Any one given bad day is doable. This was day upon day. . . . It has been an exhausting process. " On more than one occasion, everyone involved - from the L.A. cameraman who slept on Albright's couch to the lead actor who paid his own airfare to Ghana - wondered whether the film four years in the making would ever see the big screen.

A field diary partially written with berry juice on old newsprint, paper scraps, and book margins in the last years of the life of British explorer David Livingstone is legible for the first time in 141 years with the help of modern spectral-imaging technology and the old-fashioned sleuthing of a professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Adrian S. Wisnicki, an assistant professor of 19th-century British literature, studies the works of Victorian-era explorers and novelists, including Livingstone, Richard Burton, and Joseph Conrad, based on their travels to Africa and across the British Empire.

TRANSCRIPT of Joe Rainey's Dec. 29, 1964, "Listening Post" show: Joe Rainey: "So what does the future hold for the black man in Mississippi?" Malcolm X: "There used to be an expression used in this country that [something] doesn't have a Chinaman's chance - because he wasn't respected, he wasn't protected. His rights were ignored. . . . But the expression has become outdated. It doesn't fit anymore. . . . By that I mean, since China itself had become a power on this earth, wherever you find the Chinese person, since China is respected, that Chinaman is respected.

DAKAR, Senegal - This is Africa, the place where human history began and where the new world order is evolving. Twice I've stood in Senegal, on the eastern edge of the Atlantic Ocean, meeting people and sharing experiences that make me understand my own family history and black history much better. Each trip, first in December 2010 for the World Festival of Black Arts and Culture and now this past December with the World Summit of Mayors, has made me want to go deeper - to explore more, to learn more, and to understand more about this continent and our world.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Some condoms burst. Others leaked like sieves. South Africa's leading anti-AIDS group said Tuesday that the allegedly faulty condoms were among more than 1.35 million handed out at the African National Congress' 100th birthday party. Health officials confirmed that all of those condoms have been ordered to be recalled. But the Treatment Action Campaign said no warning had been issued to people that they may have carried away defective condoms that could now cause them to unsuspectingly spread or contract HIV. South Africa has the world's highest number of AIDS patients, about 5.6 million.

The Hershey Co., the nation's largest chocolate manufacturer, will invest $10 million by 2017 to reduce child labor and improve cocoa supply in West Africa. A non-profit coalition calling itself "Raise the Bar, Hershey" said it was a first step toward improving child-labor conditions in the cocoa industry. The group had said it would run a 15-second advertisement criticizing Pennsylvania-based Hershey on a giant video screen outside Lucas Oil Stadium during this Sunday's Super Bowl.

Whenever A. Glenn McClure glanced at the tiny black elephant statue in his office at Valley Forge Christian College, he'd say a little prayer for Jessica Buchanan. He knew his former student, now an aid worker in Somalia, had been held captive by pirates there since October. Buchanan graduated in 2007 from Valley Forge Christian, where McClure heads the education department. The elephant, he said, was "her way of saying thank you" for his help in setting up a student teaching gig for her in Africa that would help cement her enduring commitment to that continent.