What will it take for African leaders to recognize how bad the situation is in Zimbabwe? Well several high-profile activists, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, are making a stand - supporting the launch of Save Zimbabwe Now.

Graca Machel, a member of the Elders and former Mozambican first lady, spoke out at the launch of Save Zimbabwe Now on Wednesday. "We trusted too long, it's time we tell our leaders we lay the lives of all those who passed on... in the hands of the SADC [Southern African Development Community] leaders because they took the responsibility to stop that mess there ... Politicians have very huge egos to protect. They don't care if another thousand, another thousand and another thousand die, as long as they protect their egos."

To show their solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe, members of Save Zimbabwe Now are going to fast - Desmond Tutu and around 54 others will do so every Wednesday for the next three months. Kumi Naidoo, a veteran of the anti-apartheid movement and President of the World Alliance for Citizen Participation, Nombiso Gasa, Chairwoman of the SA Gender Commission, and Zimbabwean Pastor Wison Mugabe (no relation), a member of the National Pastor's Forum, have said they will undertake a 21-day, water only, hunger strike.

A spokesman for Save Zimbabwe Now has said that African leaders need to abandon the policy of quiet diplomacy and instead recognize that there is no legal government at present in Zimbabwe.

Edinburgh University Press are offering free access to all their journals until the end of February. Of particular interest will be Africa, the journal of the International African Institute. Articles are available in pdf format, for four issues a year going back to 2000 (volume 70).

Africa is a quarterly journal which publishes across the disciplines: humanities, social sciences and environmental sciences. Each issue contains five or six major articles, a review essay, and book reviews. It was first published in 1928.

Access Africa for free online until the end of February at http://www.eupjournals.com/journal/afr.

"They were all very inquisitive, but they viewed me at first with looks of horror, and repeatedly asked if my countrymen were cannibals. They were very desirous to know what became of slaves after they had crossed the water. I told them that they were employed in cultivating the land, but they would not believe me; and one of them, putting his hand upon the ground, said, with great simplicity, 'Have you really got such ground as this to set your feet upon?' A deeply rooted idea that the whites purchase Negroes for the purpose of devouring them, or of selling them to others, that they may be devoured thereafter, naturally makes the slaves contemplate a journey to the coast with great terror."

Comments about joining a slave caravan traveling down the river Gambia made by Mungo Park, in his book Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 1799.

On 18 January 1953 the Governor-General of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, imposed the death penalty for anyone who administered the Mau Mau oath. The Mau Mau were a militant African nationalist movement active in Kenya during the 1950s whose main aim was to remove British rule and European settlers from the country. The oath was often forced upon Kikuyu tribesmen at the point of a knife, and calls for the individual's death if he fails to kill a European farmer when ordered. It would be another 11 years before independence was achieved.