Fellowship for Peace hosts Africa tour in mid-Columbia

Dr. Molefe Samuel Tsele, the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, will speak about the crippling burden of Africa's foreign debt, and the AIDS crisis on that continent. Tsele studied law briefly before his academic career was interrupted by various stints in jail, especially after the 1977 death in detention of associate Steven Bantu Biko.

Tsele was ordained as a Lutheran minister in 1982. In 1985, he founded the famous Soweto Parents Crisis Committee. He spent two years being tortured and in solitary confinement as a "State of Emergency Detainee" between 1986 and 1988.

In 1989, he left South Africa to study for a doctoral degree in theology, which he earned at Chicago's Lutheran School of Theology. After returning to South Africa in 1995, he established an office for socioeconomic transformation at the South African Council of Churches, and then went to work as a government advisor.

Nunu Kidane will speak about Africa's debt crisis. She is the Africa program director for the International Development Exchange in San Francisco, and the coordinator of the NGO Networking Services for the Inter-Africa Group in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Both speakers will be featured for 30 minutes and take questions from the audience.

For more information visit the Columbia River Fellowship for Peace website: www.ColumbiaRiverPeace.org.

Admission to the event is free.