🔅 Sankara's Homecoming
And When Trump Tried to School Ramaphosa
Good morning from… can you guess where? (Answer at the bottom!)
A Fourth-Grade Storyteller Snags NPR Gold and Hands the Rest of Us a Masterclass in Family History
While most 10-year-olds are busy negotiating extra screen time, San Jose fourth-grader Ameya Desai just negotiated her way to first place in NPR’s 2024 Student Podcast Challenge. Her winning entry, Far From Home: A Story of Forced Migration, unpacks her grandfather’s abrupt eviction from Idi Amin’s Uganda in the 1970s, and does it with more narrative swagger than half the true-crime shows clogging your podcast queue.
Origin story: Ameya already had writing chops, taking top prize in the 2023 San Jose Writing Contest for Sugarcane Fields on My Mind (also grandpa-centric).
Catalyst: A classroom debate on Middle-East conflicts got her thinking: Wait, my family has a displacement saga, too.
Solution: Hand grandpa a mic, hit record, and let living history do the talking.
And the interview has made the two much closer. Because how could you not, when you find out your grandfather was, at one point, stateless. Moreover, “I always thought I was just from India,” she says. Now East Africa’s in the DNA mix, and she’s got the receipts on tape.
Ameya’s podcast drags the reality of migration out of the academic basement and into your earbuds, complete with gut-punching stats.
And her message to listeners? Archive your elders’ stories now, before those hard drives (human or digital) fail.
You can learn more about this wonderkid here.
Thomas Sankara Finally Gets a Homecoming Fit for a Revolutionary (and It’s Gorgeous)
A few weeks ago, we mentioned Berlin-based superstar Kéré Architecture was turning Ouagadougou's once-dreaded assassination site into a 450 m² beacon of hope to honour Thomas Sankara and 12 officials killed alongside him. Well, here’s a first look, and it’s gorgeous. Think terracotta-hued bricks, a 34-meter dome, and 13 triangular apertures honoring the late president.
Material flex: locally sourced laterite and clay, because Sankara preached self-reliance long before “buy local” hit Instagram.
Natural AC: gated entries channel the trade winds so visitors can reflect without melting.
Sun-path poetry: 13 tombs ring the interior, each lit by its own skylight that spotlights a different grave every hour.
This is just Phase One. Next up: a 100-meter tower with an 87-meter viewing deck (nod to 1987, the assassination date) plus parks, amphitheater, and enough cafés to keep the revolution caffeinated.
Bottom line: Diébédo Francis Kéré has swapped a place of fear for a civic love letter, and it’s sure to keep Sankara’s spirit alive.
When Trump Tried to School Ramaphosa on “White Genocide”
So much for polite Oval Office chit-chat. One minute Donald Trump and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa are trading smiles, the next the ex-reality-TV-star-turned-POTUS is cueing up a shock-video mash-up about murdered white farmers. Here are Trump’s claims and how they stack up against reality:
Viral Crosses? Actually a One-Day Protest
Trump claim: endless rows of crosses = mass graves of white farmers.
Reality: temporary memorial for one farming couple killed in 2020. Crosses gone; Google Street View says so. No cemetery, no thousand bodies, just a powerful photo-op hijacked for narrative fuel.
“White Genocide”? The Math Says Nope
South Africa’s 2023 murder tally: 26,232.
Farm-community deaths: 44 (eight were farmers).
A judge called the genocide story “clearly imagined.” Translation: numbers refuse to bend to X conspiracies.
Singing “Kill the Boer”
Video stars: Julius Malema (opposition EFF leader, zero government posts) and former president Jacob Zuma – all off-duty officials these days.
Courts say the song is hateful historic sloganeering, not a literal call to arms. Still ugly? Yes. Government policy? No.
Misfired Evidence
Trump’s show-and-tell photo of hazmat-suited medics? It’s from DR Congo, not South Africa. Wrong country, wrong story.
The Takeaway
Trump’s Oval Office hot-seat moment tried to turn a complex crime problem into a headline-friendly “white genocide” sound bite. The facts? Much messier, and a lot less apocalyptic.
Food for Thought
“Truth should be in love, and love in truth.”
— Tanzania Proverb
And the Answer is…
The photo is taken from Uganda! You can also send in your own photos, alongside the location, and we’ll do our best to feature them.