After a racism debate in Davos on the invisibility of African climate activists, Greta Thunberg held a press conference Friday with fellow eco-warriors from Kenya, Uganda and South Africa to stress the importance of their voices.
Vanessa Nakate of Uganda was at the heart of a viral debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos after she was cropped out of a news agency photo of young activists, including Thunberg, taken after a press conference.
A 23-year-old graduate in business administration, Nakate was the only black person and only African in the photoshoot.
She accused the Associated Press of racism in cropping her out.
The agency said the photographer had modified the photo for composition purposes and later apologised, calling it a “terrible mistake”.
Nakate said she did “not want to talk about” the incident, other than to say that “it was quite a frustrating moment.”
“This is the time for the world to listen to the activists from Africa and to pay attention to their stories… This is an opportunity for media to actually do some justice to the climate issues in Africa,” Nakate told reporters via video link from Kampala.
She was joined on separate screens by Ayakha Melithafa and Ndoni Mcunu of South Africa and Makenna Muigai of Kenya, who spent an hour answering questions from journalists gathered at Greenpeace Sweden’s offices.
‘We are the most impacted’
So far, Africa is relatively blameless when it comes to climate change.
The continent is home to 17 percent of the world’s population and more than a quarter of its nations, but only accounts for about five percent of the greenhouse gas emissions pushing the planet toward runaway warming.
“Yet we are the most impacted” by climate change, said Mcunu, a PhD student at Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand University.
“Almost 20 million people have fled the continent due to these changes” and major droughts have caused “almost 52 million people to become food insecure,” she added.
Mcunu said Africans have begun to adapt, using “indigenous knowledge systems” incorporating “the knowledge that we have as Africans into the international research science and climate data awareness”.
But, she stressed, “how is it that we’re not being spotlighted in these stories, that’s the main challenge we have as a continent.”
Billions of locusts are swarming through East Africa, the result of extreme weather swings which could prove catastrophic for a region still reeling from drought and deadly floods.
If unchecked, the infestation could become a plague that will devastate crops and pastures in a region which is already one of the poorest and most vulnerable in the world.
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