Word: burials
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...carved up the continent with arbitrary national borders, to capitalists who have plundered its natural resources, "often bequeathing decay rather than development." The series contains no on-camera interviews, just Mazrui's narration set against striking shots of African life and landscapes. The rhetoric is sometimes excessive ("the collective burial of a people," "Western sharks in search of a pound of flesh"). And Mazrui's approach can be annoyingly simplistic: his blaming, for instance, virtually all African violence on weapons imported from the West and his naive romanticizing of Gaddafi...
...leaves are astonishingly well preserved. "This fossil forest is not petrified, turned to stone by minerals entering and replacing the wood cell structure," says Neil McMillan, of the Geological Survey of Canada, who discovered a similar but much smaller site 30 years ago on nearby Ellesmere Island. Instead, shallow burial in the Arctic soil has left the forest in a mummified state. As a result, says Basinger, "you can saw the wood. You can burn it." Indeed, during an expedition to the site in July, he actually brewed a pot of tea over burning fossil debris...
...Soweto seemed virtually inevitable. Two days before the mourners gathered, authorities had announced restrictions clearly designed to derail township plans for a mass funeral for those who had died in the previous week's police crackdown on rent strikers. When outraged Sowetans defiantly ignored the ban, even sacred burial grounds were transformed into battlefields...
...outdoor ceremonies, no flags or slogans, no gatherings of more than 200 mourners. The police asked the families of the dead to sign a paper agreeing to these rules. The families refused. Police then went to the area's mortuaries and warned undertakers not to release any bodies for burial without official permission. When a priest filed an urgent court petition in Johannesburg to have the orders set aside, the request was denied. Undeterred, the families and antiapartheid organizations pushed ahead with plans for the funeral...
...final stop in the procession was Avalon Cemetery. Security forces broke up the crowd and seized four undertakers for ignoring police orders to maintain custody of the bodies. The four were later released. In the end, the deceased got the burial that the government wanted: no flags, no slogans, no crowds even approaching 200 mourners...