The Church Mission Society in London has issued an urgent call for prayer and practical help for 33,000 Sudanese refugees in northern Kenya. The inhabitants of Kakuma camp are slowly dying of malnutrition because their food rations have been cut to starvation level.
11 April 1997
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, will undergo radiotherapy for cancer in the United States. Archbishop Tutu said in a statement on 19 March, that after consulting medical specialists in the US and Cape Town, he had decided on a combination of hormone treatment and radiotherapy.
21 March 1997
The Churches in Rwanda have appealed to the global press and electronic media, international and ecumenical authorities, to stop using the ethnic vocabulary "which encloses Rwandans in the shackles of 'Hutu-Tutsi' as this term has become deadly".
21 March 1997
The bishops of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (Anglican) have publicly apologised to homosexual people who have been hurt by the "unacceptable prejudice" against gays and lesbians within the church.
14 March 1997
A proposal to use underground mine shafts as "super maximum security prisons" in South Africa has been slammed by the country's Anglican bishops as callous and offensive.
07 March 1997
The Rt Revd Dinis Sengulane, Bishop of Lebombo, Mozambique, has been made an Honorary Companion of St Michael and St George (CMG) by the Queen. According to a communique from the British High Commission in Maputo the award was given in recognition of the Bishop's effort to strengthen Anglo-Mozambique relations and for the involvement by the Bishop in the peace negotiations which led to an end of the civil war in the country.
28 February 1997
Further to calls by the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) and the Roman Catholic Church in Kenya for an extension to the deadline for the issue of new generation ofidentity cards, the President of Kenya extended the deadline by a month to the end of February. But Church leaders have again called for a further extension. The cards are a requirement for voter registration for national elections.
28 February 1997
Further to earlier reports in ACNS about Archbishop Desmond Tutu's operation for cancer of the prostate, he is now out of hospital and working again as Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The Archbishop will continue to receive treatment although it has been established that the cancer has not spread.
21 February 1997
More than 80 per cent of South Africa's medical doctors are refusing to perform abortions, following the legalisation of abortion at the beginning of this month.
21 February 1997
Uganda's Vice-President, Dr Specioza Windira Kazibwe, has criticised an Anglican bishop for urging the Government to hold peace talks with armed rebels in northern Uganda.P Addressing a crowd in the town of Kitgum on 9 February, the Vice-President described the leader of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony, and his supporters as "killers, rapists and people who had devastated the economy". The LRA is terrorising the towns and villages of northern Uganda, killing hundreds of people and abducting teenagers to force them to become guerrillas in the struggle for control of the region.
14 February 1997