Pope rejects ‘war of words', urges release of jailed reporters
Pope Leo XIV, in his first address to the media, spoke out against partisan bickering and called for the release of imprisoned journalists.
'The way we communicate is of fundamental importance: we must say 'no' to the war of words and images, we must reject the paradigm of war,' Leo told thousands of journalists who covered his election and the death of his predecessor.
He also spoke up for jailed journalists who, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, numbered 361 at the end of last year.
'The suffering of these imprisoned journalists challenges the conscience of nations and the international community, calling on all of us to safeguard the precious gift of free speech and of the press,' he said.
Leo, the first pope from the U.S., addressed the journalists in the Vatican's large audience hall in Italian but started in English in jocular fashion.
'Good morning. Thank you for this wonderful reception. They say that when they clap at the beginning, it doesn't matter much. If you're still awake at the end and still want to applaud, thank you very much,' he said.
The pontiff also spoke about artificial intelligence, saying it should be used with responsibility and discernment.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Maverick
a day ago
- Daily Maverick
ANC succession battle — the pros and cons of the top candidates vying for Ramaphosa's job
While it is unclear who will take over from President Cyril Ramaphosa as leader of the ANC, their ability to win votes will be extremely important. It may be constructive to examine what five of the most likely candidates would bring to the electorate. As our politics becomes more competitive than ever before, the identity of the leader of each party has become more important. One of President Cyril Ramaphosa's great strengths when he became leader of the ANC was that he was more popular than the party. The ANC itself said that he played a major role in helping it win the 2019 election (this was hugely contested at the time, and the then secretary-general, Ace Magashule, was forced to publicly disavow his comment that Ramaphosa had not played an important role). Ramaphosa's deteriorating popularity among voters, partly due to his inaction against corruption, and the Phala Phala scandal, might well have played a role in the ANC's dramatic decline last year. This shows how important the vote-winning ability of a new ANC leader will be. While it is not clear who will contest the position at the ANC's electoral conference in 2027, there is plenty of well-informed speculation that candidates could include Deputy President Paul Mashatile, International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola, Police Minister Senzo Mchunu, Electricity and Energy Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa and the ANC secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula. Paul Mashatile There is little evidence that Mashatile has broad support among the electorate. His apparent inability to communicate a distinct message during his time as Deputy President suggests he is finding it difficult to create space in which to move. This could be a function of the position he holds. Deputy presidents are often subject to intense scrutiny, and people look for evidence of their ambition for the top job, which could be why he has not, so far, articulated a particular vision. Mashatile's public speeches in English are often stilted. His answers to parliamentary questions are, frankly, boring. He does not say anything new, and his delivery comes across as wooden. As a result of having no apparent message, the narrative around him is dominated by claims that he has benefited from fishy financial deals. He has failed to properly and publicly condemn the violence used by his security officers when they assaulted the occupants of a vehicle on the N1 highway. It is difficult to imagine him crafting a coherent message as the leader of the ANC. On the election trail he probably won't provide much help to the party. His position as Deputy President means he doesn't have responsibility for any particular portfolio. However, for the contenders Lamola, Ramokgopa and Mchunu, what happens on their watch reflects on their public images. Ronald Lamola The minister of international relations and cooperation is a high-profile position — but it is overshadowed by the President. In some instances, for example, SA's genocide case against Israel, Lamola has been able to take the lead. However, in the hardest and most high-profile issue, dealing with the Trump administration, Ramaphosa has taken over. What Lamola does have, almost uniquely in the ANC, is the ability to connect with younger voters. His age (41) makes him one of the youngest leaders in the party. He is relatively unscathed by the scandals that have surrounded so many people in the party. That said, if he were to undergo more scrutiny, he would have to answer questions about how his law firm failed to notice the massive corruption at the National Lotteries Commission, when it was tasked with investigating it. Kgosientsho Ramokgopa The public perception of Ramokgopa is entirely linked to load shedding. He is an excellent communicator and has ensured that he, the government and Eskom have controlled the narrative whenever load shedding is instituted. He is associated with the successes in dealing with load shedding — and also the failures. He will also appeal to voters who want a technocratic face for the ANC. He can give the impression to black professionals that he is one of them, that he speaks their language and can get things done. Sipho Mchunu Mchunu appeals to a slightly different constituency. Crucially for him and the ANC, he could win back voters in KwaZulu-Natal. This province voted for the ANC when former president Jacob Zuma was its leader, then appeared to move in the direction of the ANC and the IFP when Ramaphosa took over, only for large numbers to vote for Zuma's uMkhonto Wesizwe party in the last elections. Mchunu may well be able to develop a crucial constituency in this province for the ANC, where he was once its provincial secretary. Nationally, it would be a huge card in his favour if he were seen to be leading a successful effort to reduce violent crime. However, the problem of SA's crime is so large and is so intertwined with aspects of our politics that Mchunu is unlikely to be able to make much difference. Fikile Mbalula Mbalula, of course, is not in government. It is his position as secretary-general of the party that might give him the edge in any internal ANC race. In the past, the position of secretary-general has been shaped by the personality occupying it. Gwede Mantashe imbued the office with huge authority, while Kgalema Motlanthe had more of a quiet legitimacy. Lately, Mbalula has appeared to be trying to portray more of a sober appearance than in previous years. However, it is unlikely that voters have forgotten what happened when he was transport minister and how he was responsible for so many missteps. As previously pointed out, Mbalula has a history of running his mouth off. People are unlikely to have forgotten how he tweeted that he had 'Just landed in Ukraine', or that he had taken Prasa into administration with no legal authority to do so, or that he used such vulgar language when talking to taxi drivers that the SA Council of Churches was moved to to make a public comment. Or that he was found by a Public Protector to have received a paid holiday from a sporting goods chain while minister of sport. These are the consequences of his long history in the public eye. It is unlikely that he can change the way the public views him. While it would be entirely rational to assume that ANC delegates would have the 2029 elections in mind when they vote for the position of ANC leader, history shows that sometimes internal dynamics are more important. And the ANC appears to have done virtually nothing to win back votes since the polls last year. This suggests that the electability of candidates will not be the most important factor in the ANC's leadership election. DM
TimesLIVE
4 days ago
- TimesLIVE
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author who reckoned with colonial legacy, dies at 87
Celebrated Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whose sharp criticisms of post-independence elites led to his jailing and two decade in exile, has died at the age of 87, Kenya's president said. Shaped by an adolescence where he witnessed the armed Mau Mau struggle for independence from Britain, Thiong'o took aim in his writings at colonial rule and the Kenyan elites who inherited many of its privileges. He was arrested in December 1977 and detained for a year without charge in a maximum security prison after peasants and workers performed his play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want). Angered by the play's criticism of inequalities in Kenyan society, the authorities sent three truckloads of police to raze the theatre, Thiong'o later said. He went into exile in 1982 after he said he learnt of plans by president Daniel arap Moi's security services to arrest and kill him. He went on to become a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California-Irvine. Thiong'o ended his exile in 2004 after Moi left office after more than two decades in power marked by widespread arrests, killings and torture of political opponents. Kenya's President William Ruto paid tribute to Thiong'o after his death in the US after reports of a struggle with ill health in recent years. 'The towering giant of Kenyan letters has put down his pen for the final time,' Ruto said on his X account. 'Always courageous, he made an indelible impact on how we think about our independence, social justice and the uses and abuses of political and economic power.' Though Thiong'o said on returning to Kenya in 2004 that he bore no grudge against Moi, he told Reuters in an interview three years later that Kenyans should not forget the abuses of the era. 'The consequences of 22 years of dictatorship are going to be with us for a long time and I don't like to see us returning to that time,' he said. Thiong'o's best-known works included his debut novel Weep Not Child, which chronicled the Mau Mau struggle, and Devil on the Cross, which he wrote on toilet paper while in prison. In the 1980s, he abandoned English to write in his mother tongue Gikuyu, saying he was bidding farewell to the imported language of Kenya's former colonial master.
Daily Maverick
4 days ago
- Daily Maverick
Weep Not, Child: A tribute to Africa's literary giant, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.
It was incredibly humbling standing in a congested gathering of people at the Wits Great Hall to hear 'greatness' lend its wisdom to receptive ears on the topic, Decolonising the Mind: Secure the Base, in March 2017. I had the privilege of attending the address when I was in my mid-twenties. The hairs on my arms stood on end and my internal voice said unto me, 'You are in the presence of greatness. Keep quiet and listen.' I attended with my mother and my uncle, her brother, both of whom self-identify as black in the broad Biko sense. I am racially ambiguous, though sometimes perceived as white. In that particular moment at his address, aware of being in the presence of greatness that stood on the shoulders of the deceased legends Aimé Cesaire and Franz Fanon, I really had no other response but to stand in awe and listen to a hero who (at the time) was very much alive. Greatness, the man who was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, received standing ovations and cheering on in African languages when he spoke. I remember his anecdote about middle and upper-class parents in Kenya calling their children to greet their guests, and pretending to look embarrassed that their children spoke only English. Meanwhile, they were secretly proud of that fact, as though it was a badge of honour, showing education and their class. It gave me food for thought about globalisation and the loss of indigenous culture through the loss of languages. What does it mean? Is it really true that in the age of technology, only English will get you to succeed, or shouldn't we be promoting many languages and getting technological apps to write and speak in these languages too? He, himself, practised what he preached when he gave up English in the 1970s and started writing in Kikuyu and kiSwahili. The legacy Ngũgĩ leaves for us and generations to follow Ngũgĩ was born in colonial Kenya in 1938 and died on Wednesday, 28 May 2025 at the age of 87. His daughter, Wanjiku Wa Ngũgĩ, announced his death on social media. She wrote, 'he lived a full life, fought a good fight'. Indeed, he fought a good fight – for justice, intellectual freedom and inquisition for Africa. Both my mother and I read his (English translated) works in our respective undergraduate years in our twenties. To this day, his discourse shapes our conversations, and I hope, one day, it will shape the conversations of my own children, whom I pray will be thinkers who will also hold reverence for the greatness of Ngũgĩ's works. Ngũgĩ's work, just as that of Cesaire and Fanon, holds legacy power. He stands as a revolutionary whose pen served as a weapon of resistance against injustice and illegitimate political power, a tool for decolonisation mobilisation, and a literary genius. Ngũgĩ's work redefined the boundaries of African languages and identities as limitless. He redefined the African 'post-colony' for all that it is and all that it has the potential to be. Ngũgĩ's work echoes the cries, the resilience, and the aspirations of a continent still healing from the scars of colonisation and empire. His call was never for Africans to claim victimhood and dwell therein, but to reclaim identity by decolonising our thinking, behaviours and daily practices. Secure the base, he said. Make Africa count. Through his novels, plays, essays and prison memoirs, Ngũgĩ's work challenges imperial power, questions inherited colonial structures and reimagines liberated, self-defining Africa. It embodies a radical vision for Africa defining itself on its own terms — politically, socially and linguistically. The chronology of his intellectual journey through his works stands as a larger political project aimed at dismantling colonial legacies and reimagining African identity from the inside out. That is, an Africa defined by its own people, not the superimposed Western narratives. Ngũgĩ's literary genius His debut novel, Weep Not, Child (1964), explores the Mau Mau uprising through the eyes of a young boy. This piece was the first novel in English written by a black East African. In Decolonising the Mind (1986), he poetically posits that 'the bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation' and develops this thought through his central argument that language is the carrier of culture, memory and identity. When a people lose their language, he argues, they risk losing their ability to define their own reality. In The River Between (1965), a poetic and tragic tale of cultural conflict between Christianity and traditional beliefs in a Gĩkũyũ village, he pens 'a people without a history is like the wind over buffalo grass'. Various commentaries posit that in this metaphor, the wind represents the gale-like forces of colonialism and cultural imperialism, and buffalo grass, a plant that bends and yields to external pressure, represents a people without strong roots in their own history — easily swayed, easily displaced. Here, it stands to reason that Ngũgĩ's fundamental point is that people who do not know or affirm their history are at the mercy of external forces. Here, Ngũgĩ alerts us to the dangers of not being rooted in one's identity and being absorbed by the histories handed down about Africans, written by non-Africans. Of course, what he meant was we must write our own stories, in our own languages. His body of work collectively contemplates the ways by which history is not simply a record of the past — it is the foundation of a people's present dignity and future direction. Without an understanding of where one comes from, both individually and collectively, one becomes vulnerable to manipulation, alienation and erasure, he argued. In remembering Ngũgĩ and his legacy, it compels me to want to know more about my own history; to write down the stories, recipes and memories of my grandmothers and great aunts who are still alive (coming as they all do, and I do, from a diverse cultural and racial history of three continents: India, Africa, Europe).
