Meet God's Gift

The first thing that anyone asks when they meet this young man: is that your nickname or something. But his real name is God's Gift Achiuwa. The native Nigerian's father is a minister, so the first name he chose for his son is a reflection of the family's religious beliefs. God's Gift Achiuwa is a 6' 9” forward for the Erie Community College basketball team. Coach Nwora discovered him at an annual camp the coach runs in Nigeria and brought him back to Erie, Pennsylvania.

The bruising power forward is making sure he is known for more than just his name. He is averaged 13.1 points, 13.5 rebounds and two blocked shots per game as a freshman, earning third-team All-American and leading Erie to a 27-2 record.

He also excelled in the classroom, earning a 4.0 Grade Point Average in the fall semester and a 3.8 in the spring semester. Division One powerhouses such as Kansas, Pittsburgh, St. John's and Tennessee are among the schools that shown interest. He is a bit on the raw side, but the talent is there and playing in the U. S. has helped him. And Coach Nwora said he is still training like the season begins tomorrow. God's Gift Achiuwa doesn't have a nickname, though his teammates sometimes call him "Gift" for short. For a kid as gifted as Achiuwa on the court and in the classroom, it's a fitting name.

Child Rape Survivor Helps Other Virgin Myth Victims

Hope was 14 years old when her uncle raped her. He trapped her to the ground and covered her mouth with his hand, then threatened to kill her if she ever told anybody. So, she kept quiet. A few months later people around the villages started saying that that she looked pregnant. Hope was not only pregnant, but her uncle had infected her with HIV. Like many young girls in Zimbabwe, Hope was the victim of a widely held belief that if a man with HIV or AIDS rapes a virgin he will be cured of his disease. This so-called virgin myth, perpetuated by Zimbabwe's traditional “healers”, has led to the rape of hundreds of girls, according to UNICEF. Some of these victims are too young to walk, much less protect themselves.

Betty Makoni has fought for nearly a decade to protect her country's young girls from sexual abuse. And she's witnessed some of the worst cases of the myth in action. The youngest girl she ever came across was a day-old baby who was raped. Through her Girl Child Network (GCN), Makoni has helped rescue 35,000 girls from abuse -- including now 18-year-old Hope. Ten girls per day report rape cases, which means that if unchecked, at least 3,600 girls per year may be contracting HIV and AIDS."

Ms. Makoni's own tragic experiences fuel her fierce determination. She was raped when she was 6 years old. Her attacker was a local shopkeeper. Her mother would not allow her to report the abuse. "She said, 'Shh, we don't say that in public,' " Makoni remembered. Betty Makoni had no shoulder to cry on. Three years later, she witnessed her father murder her mother. In that moment, Makoni said she realized the potentially deadly consequence of a woman's silence. She told herself that no girl or woman will suffer the same again.

Believing an education would provide her the best opportunity and means to speak out, Betty Makoni earned two university degrees and became a teacher. While teaching, she noticed that girls were dropping out of school at an alarming rate. She approached her students with an idea. “Let's have our own space where we talk and find solutions," Makoni said. Girl Child Network was born. By the end of the first year, there were 100 GCN clubs throughout Zimbabwe where girls could find support. Ms. Makoni said she was not surprised: "Every woman and girl identified with the issues that we were raising," she said.

In 2000, she quit her teaching job to volunteer with GCN full time. The following year she successfully procured a piece of land and opened the organization's first empowerment village, designed to provide a haven for girls who have been abused. Girls are either rescued or referred to the village by social services, the police and the community. The healing begins as soon as a girl arrives. In the first 72 hours, a girl is provided with emergency medication, reinstatement in school, as well as counseling.

It is important to her that the girls are in charge of their own healing. "It gives them the confidence to transform from victims to leaders," she explained. The process helps the girls work through the times when many thought their life had come to an end. Today, GCN has grown to 700 girls' clubs and three empowerment villages across Zimbabwe. An estimated 300,000 girls have received assistance.

But for Betty Makoni, speaking out came with a high personal cost. In 2008, she was forced to flee her native country. She left Zimbabwe because her life was in danger as a result of her project being interpreted politically. Today, she lives with her family in the United Kingdom. She still serves as executive director of her organization and shows no signs of slowing down. GCN has partnered with the DOVE project, a group based in Essex, England, that deals with domestic violence. "We are now bringing the girls from a local community to the international scene," she said. Her efforts in Zimbabwe are highlighted in the film documentary, Tapestries of Hope.

It's disappointing to know that grown men are foolish enough to believe in such nonsense and will take to raping infants and toddlers in a ridiculous attempt to save themselves. Yes, if these men, and I use the term loosely, were educated they would know better than to believe that raping a child cures AIDS. But even if they DO believe that, it still doesn't explain why they are evil enough to go through with raping a child. This is absolutely horrific and depressing! I can't fathom anyone perpetrating such atrocities towards other people, especially newborn babies! Lack of education or not, ignorance is no excuse for such depravity! There needs to be justice and everyone involved in such horrific and unimaginable crimes SHOULD FACE “REAL” JUSTICE.

In Tanzania, Albinos fear for their lives because some "traditional healer" says using their body parts for ritual sacrifice will bring them lots of money. We are talking about another human being hunted down like an animal to be killed and sacrificed. Just recently in Nigeria, there was a case of the wife of some newspaper owner who beheaded a young boy as sacrifice in order to cure her ailing children. And stuff like this isn't just Africans - the Germans in WWII camps used to put virgins in bed with frozen corpses in the hope that they would thaw out and come back to life.

While this is terribly sad, we need to recognize that it happens everywhere, including the U.S. Maybe not for the same reasons, i.e. the virgin myth, but child molestations happen in the U.S. daily. 1 in 3 girls is molested before her 18th birthday and 1 in 5-6 boys, across the United States.

Want to get involved? Check out the Girl Child Network and Promise Place to see how to help.
http://www.promiseplace.net
http://www.girlchildnetworkworldwide.org

Amobi Okoye Gives Back to Africa

Amobi Okoye, defensive tackle with the Houston Texans of the National Football League, started a project with other athletes called the Athletes in the Diaspora Community Interventions (ADCI) which provides humanitarian support for change on the African continent.

For one of the projects, Changing Africa Through Education (CATE), Amobi traveled to Nigeria with several other professional athletes (Adewale Ogunleye, Israel Idonije (Chicago Bears), Osi Umenyiora (New York Giants), and Ahman Green (Houston Texans), to work on programs that included scholarship endowments, soccer camps, and, clean water programs and they held five mobile clinics for over 1,000 residents. In addition, medicine was distributed in partnership with physicians from Integris Health of Oklahoma. The players held two physical activity camps which exposed youth to the fundamentals of American Football and they included girls as a part of their commitment to the advancement of women in sports. During the trip, Okoye and ADCI launched the ADCI Academy of Sports and Learning which will be built in Nigeria. ADCI is presented in conjunction with the Sports and Marketing Management firm founded by Okoye, InVictus91. Additional programs that Amobi Okoye leads through C.A.T.E and the Amobi Okoye Foundation include the funding of clean water wells and the ongoing sponsorship of a maternity ward, the only hospital within 100 mile radius in Nri, a developing village in Nigeria. Other athletes who donated but were unable to make the trip include Nnamdi Asomuga and Adimchinobe Echemandu (Oakland Raiders), Kabeer Gbaja-Biamila (Green Bay Packers), Akbar Gbaja-Biamila (Miami Dolphins).

Amobi Okoye was born in Anambra, Nigeria. He moved to Huntsville, Alabama when he was 12 years old. After only spending two weeks in middle school, he tested into the 9th grade. He first started playing football as a sophomore at Lee High School, knowing virtually nothing about the game before his high school coach suggested he go play Madden NFL football to learn. By the time he was a senior, he won first-team All-State honors as both a defensive and offensive lineman. At the age of 16, Amobi Okoye became the youngest NCAA student athlete of all time. Amobi successfully graduated from Louisville within 3 ½ years, prior to entering the NFL as the youngest athlete ever drafted into the NFL in the modern draft era. Okoye was drafted by the Houston Texans as the tenth pick of the first round of the 2007 NFL draft.

The Amobi Okoye Foundation was founded on the belief that all youth have the basic human right of hope for a brighter future. Programs and services have been implemented domestically and abroad that address the basic needs of children and their surrounding communities.
These programs include: Kick-off for Kids, Tackle Hunger, Amobi’s House, C.A.T.E (Changing Africa Through Education) and AO’s Young Professionals.

Hollywood and Bollywood Make Room for Nollywood

Nigerian movies have found a place next to those from Hollywood and Bombay, India's equivalent, Bollywood, in English-speaking Africa. The Surulere district of Lagos, Nigeria, is a center for filmmaking in West Africa’s new moviemaking capital.

Since the late 1990's, Nigerian movies have found a place next to offerings from Hollywood and Bollywood in the cities, towns and villages across English-speaking Africa. Though made on the cheap, with budgets of about only $15,000, the Nigerian movies have become huge hits, with stories, themes and faces familiar to other Africans. It is now, according to conservative estimates, a $45 million a year industry.

Serious movies about Africa that win awards in the United States and Europe are usually made by African filmmakers based in Paris or London, and attract little attention among most Africans. But Nigeria's pulp movies have had a wide influence on African popular culture — so much so that they have suddenly made acting an attractive profession in Nigeria and have transformed the Surulere district from a dull neighborhood of two-story businesses and houses into a mecca of dreams and desires.

"This is Hollywood in Nigeria," said Emeka Ani, an actor whose two-room office in Surulere serves as the center for the Actors Guild of Nigeria. In Mr. Ani's inner office he keeps a file of Nigeria's famous actors and a list of guild members, which has grown to 5,000 from 500 since its creation in 1996. In the other room, he sells videocassettes of hundreds of movies, which are known here as home videos. Christian songs flow through the office. By midmorning, the music changes to the dance rhythms of Nigerian night life and the young would-be actresses working in his office dance to popular Nigerian music.

Outside, on Folawiyo Bankole Street, a steady stream of eager young men and women pause before the audition notices on two boards. They hang around on the street, exchanging gossip and tips, causing traffic jams on the narrow two-lane street. When a star comes by, a crowd gathers. The crowd gradually moves to Winis, a hotel and restaurant a couple of buildings away from Mr. Ani's that is the hangout for actors, directors and producers. They sit in the bar and make deals over Gulder beer and hot pepper soup.

With such low budgets, the movies are typically filmed over several days, with just one digital camera. The stories are perhaps no different from those found in Hollywood movies, though many have Africa-specific themes. By all accounts, the first big hit was the 1992 movie "Living in Bondage." It gave birth to the film industry, which is dominated by the Ibo tribe, said Remy Ohajianya, an actor who is chairman of the actor’s guild. But the explosive growth occurred after 1998, when Nigerian movies began to be exported all over Africa, especially in the English-speaking countries. So many films were being made that, early this year, producers spat out 54 titles in a single week. After a four-month voluntary recess, the industry has agreed to limit the releases to eight a week.

A week or two after shooting ends, the movies flood the Nigerian market. They are sold for $2.15 a cassette and shown to the public for a few pennies in restaurants, video centers or private homes operating as movie houses. An average movie will sell about 50,000 copies and a blockbuster four times that. The Nigerian movie industry now produces more than 400 movies a year. At that rate, the producers bring in an estimated $45 million a year; but other people, at movie centers, and bootleggers, also capitalize from the movies.

Top actors like Kate Henshaw-Nattall, who is well recognized throughout Africa, now earn about $4,000 a movie, a sum that was inconceivable only a few years ago and one that remains out of reach for most working Nigerians. Charles Awurum, another popular actor, began his acting career in sleepy Imo State in 1982. He appeared on a weekly soap opera called "Dusk of the Gods" and made less than $7 an episode. After his first movie in 1994, he left Imo State for "greener pastures" in Surulere. He had a breakthrough with "Ekulu," a love story about an African slave and a White woman who frees him. When they come to Africa, she is rejected by his society, and they flee into the jungle.

Nigerian intellectuals dismiss these movies as exploitation. But their growing popularity, coupled with the big salaries, has changed the traditional perception of acting and actors in Nigerian society. "Before, if you were an actor, people would just wave you away," Mr. Awurum said. "Before, you would kill your daughter if she told you she wanted to become an actress. Actresses were regarded as no better than prostitutes, kissing on the screen. "Now, everywhere I go, people embrace me. Everybody wants to be my friend."

Genevieve Nnaji, maybe the hottest actress on the Nollywood scene, is also a singer and producer has starred in over 60 movies. Her beauty has been praised as incredible, and she has been compared to Gabrielle Union and Nia Long. Her smoldering good looks and her intelligence are hard to ignore and her presence on screen is always memorable. Her foray into acting started in 1998 and helped launch her modeling career when she was chosen to be the face of Lux soap in 2004. In March 2008, she launched a new clothing line called St. Genevieve, adding fashion designer to her list of titles. The line has gained in popularity and was chosen as a feature for the magazine, Today’s Woman. Her business savvy has guided her career and helped her build a niche for herself both in and out of Nollywood.

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. was born September 16, 1950 as the son of Henry Louis Gates, Sr. and Pauline Augusta Coleman Gates. He is a literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Henry Gates emerged from Mineral, West Virginia, to become one of the leading scholars in the U.S. He was one of the first Black students to attend the newly desegregated public schools of Piedmont following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Gates took an interest in local civil rights issues and with three other blacks, known as the "Fearsome Foursome," pressured the Blue Jay restaurant and nightclub to integrate.

He initially enrolled at Potomac State College, transferred as an undergraduate to Yale where he spent a year volunteering at a mission hospital in Tanzania and traveling throughout the African continent in order to complete the year-long “non-academic” requirement of his five-year Bachelor of Arts program; upon his return, Gates wrote a guest column for the Yale Daily News about his experience. Having been appointed a "Scholar of the House" during his final year at Yale and thus relieved of academic coursework requirements, Gates spent his final undergraduate year writing, under the guidance of John Morton Blum, an unpublished book entitled The Making of a Governor, which described John D. Rockefeller IV's gubernatorial campaign in West Virginia. In 1973, Gates graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history from Yale.

The first Black American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the day after his undergraduate commencement, Gates set sail on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 for the University of Cambridge, where he studied English literature at Clare College. With the assistance of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, he worked toward his MA and Ph.D. in English. While his work in history at Yale had trained him in archival work, Gates' studies at Clare introduced him to English literature and literary theory.

At Clare College, Gates was also able to work with Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer denied an appointment in the department because, as Gates later recalled, African literature was at the time deemed "at best, sociology or socio-anthropology, but it was not real literature." Soyinka would later become the first African to be awarded the Nobel Prize; he remained an influential mentor for Gates and became the subject of numerous works by Gates.

Gates was hired as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale in October 1975. In July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of Lecturer in Afro-American Studies with the understanding that he would be promoted to Assistant Professor upon completion of his dissertation. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984. He left Yale for Cornell in 1985, and stayed until 1989. After a two-year stay at Duke University, he moved to his current position at Harvard University in 1991. At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and as Professor of English. Additionally, he serves as the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary law and has instead insisted that Black literature must be evaluated by the artistic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a "tone deafness to the Black cultural voice" and result in "intellectual racism." Gates tried to articulate what might constitute a Black cultural artistic in his major scholarly work The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner; the work extended the application of the concept of “signifying” to analysis of Black works and thus rooted Black literary criticism in the African vernacular tradition.

While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of Black literature and Black culture, Gates does not advocate a "separatist" Black law but, rather, a greater recognition of Black works that would be integrated into the main stream literature. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition but envisions diverse works integrated by common cultural connections. Moreover, Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes and maintains that it is "ridiculous" to think that only Blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature.

As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, an archive of Black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. To build Harvard’s visual, documentary, and literary archives of Black texts, Gates arranged for the purchase of “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” a collection assembled by Dominique de Menil in Houston, Texas. Earlier, as a result of his research as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates had discovered Our Nig, the first novel in the United States written by a Black person, Harriet E. Wilson, in 1859; he followed this discovery with the acquisition of the manuscript of The Bondswoman’s Narrative, another narrative from the same period.

As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has focused throughout his career not only on his research and teaching but on building academic institutions to study Black culture. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for Black Americans and has written pieces in The New York Times that defend rap music and an article in Sports Illustrated that criticizes Black youth culture for glorifying basketball over education. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. Gates' prominence in this field led to him being tapped as a witness on behalf of the controversial rap group 2 Live Crew in their obscenity case. He argued the material the government alleged was profane, actually had important roots in dialect, games, and literary traditions and should be protected.

Gates has been the recipient of nearly 50 honorary degrees and numerous academic and social action awards. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1981 and was listed in Time among its “25 Most Influential Americans” in 1997. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. In January 2008, he co-founded The Root, a website dedicated to African-American perspectives published by The Washington Post Company. Gates currently chairs the Fletcher Foundation, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is on the boards of many notable institutions including the New York Public Library, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Aspen Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, HEAF (the Harlem Educational Activities Fund), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, located in Stanford, California.

The popular Harvard-area burger restaurant, Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage, sells a Professor Skip Gates burger topped with pineapple and teriyaki sauce.

Gates has been the host and co-producer of African American Lives and African American Lives 2 in which the lineage of notable Black Americans is traced using genealogical resources and DNA testing. In the first series, Gates learns of his White ancestry (50%), and in the second installment we learn he is descended from the Irish King, Niall of the Nine Hostages. He also learns that he is descended in part from the Yoruba people of Nigeria. In 2006, Gates was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution, after he traced his lineage back to John Redman, a Free Negro who fought in the Revolutionary War.

Professor Gates is co-editor, with K. Anthony Appiah, of the encyclopedia Encarta Africana, published on CD-ROM by Microsoft and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. He is the author of Wonders of the African World, the companion book to the six-hour PBS television series of the same name.

In addition, Professor Gates is the author of several works of literary criticism, including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the 'Racial' Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, winner of the 1989 American Book Award; and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. He is the author of Colored People: A Memoir, which traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s; The Future of the Race, co-authored with Cornel West; and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.

Professor Gates's publications also include a 1994 cover story for Time magazine on the new Black Renaissance in art, as well as numerous articles for The New Yorker. In addition, he has edited several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and The Oxford-Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers, and is the co-editor of Transition magazine. Previously for PBS, Professor Gates produced and hosted Wonders of the African World, America Beyond the Color Line, African American Lives and Oprah's Roots.

Delaware State University: Fourth in the Series about HBCU Schools

Delaware State University (DSU), the second-largest university in the state of Delaware, is a historically black university. The school was established in 1891 and over the last 116 years, it has evolved into a fully accredited, comprehensive university with the 400-acre main campus located in Dover, Delaware and satellite sites in Wilmington and Georgetown, Delaware. It encompasses six colleges and a diverse population of undergraduate and advanced degree students. The graduating class of 2008 is the largest in the University's history, consisting of over 500 seniors and graduate students. It is two hours away from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., and three hours away from New York City. DSU also has satellite sites in Wilmington and Georgetown. The main campus in Dover contains 30 buildings.

The university was established by the Delaware General Assembly on May 15, 1891 as "The State College for Colored Students" in response to the 1890 Amendments to the Morrill Act, which required that states either open their land-grant colleges to all races or else establish a separate land-grant educational facilities for blacks. The first class graduated in May 1898. In addition to four-year bachelors programs, the university offered a 3-year normal course leading to a teaching certificate. In 1893, the university added a Preparatory Department for students who were not qualified for college work upon admission. In 1916, this program was converted to a Model Grade School and in 1923, a Junior College Division was added. The High School Division was discontinued at the end of the 1951–52 school year.

In 1944, the university received provisional accreditation by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. In 1947, its name was changed to "Delaware State College." In November 1949, Middle States revoked its accreditation. However, full accreditation was restored in April 1957 and has been maintained since. On July 1, 1993, the college was renamed "Delaware State University."

The school has an enrollment of 3,722 students (340 are graduate students), who come from 28 states and 31 countries. The faculty consists of 168 members in 20 academic departments. The university consists of six colleges: College of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Technology; School of Business; College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; College of Health and Public Policy; College of Education; and College of Agriculture and Related Sciences. The University offers PhD programs in Applied Mathematics/Mathematical Physics and Neuroscience, doctoral program in education and Master's programs in various fields of sciences, nursing, social work, education, MBA program, and natural resources. The university offers 66 undergraduate degrees, 20 graduate degrees, and two doctoral degrees. Degree options include the disciplines of mathematics, natural and social sciences, education, airway sciences, visual and performing arts, management, accounting and finance, agriculture, natural resources, nursing, social work and others.

The University has over 20 formal international partnerships with institutions in countries such as Egypt, Nigeria, Serbia, Mexico, China, Cuba and many others, which facilitate student exchanges and research and conference collaborations.

Delaware State University's athletic programs participate in NCAA's Division I (I-AA for football). The university's nickname is the Hornets. The university fields teams in football, men's and women's basketball, baseball, softball, track and field, tennis, wrestling, volleyball, soccer, and bowling. The Delaware State men's basketball team won the 2005 Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) championship and earned a berth in the 2005 NCAA tournament. Playing as a 16-seed, the Hornets lost 57-46 in the opening round to 1-seed Duke. The Hornets made back to back NIT appearances in 2006 and 2007. The Delaware State women's basketball team won the 2006 MEAC championship and earned a berth in the 2006 NCAA tournament. The Delaware State Football team won the 2007 MEAC football championship with a win over Norfolk State into the playoffs.

The school received national headlines when two students were shot on the campus on the morning of September 21, 2007. The students were shot near Memorial Hall around 1 a.m. One student was hospitalized in stable condition, and another student, a 17 year-old freshman, was hospitalized with serious injuries and later died. The campus was "locked down" with students confined to their dormitories and traffic blocked at the campus gate, through September 23. Classes resumed on Monday, September 24. On that day, a freshman student was arrested for attempted murder in connection with the incident, and has been expelled from the University. The episode is significant because it marks the first test of a university in handling a campus shooting following the Virginia Tech shootings.

Some notable alumni include: Clyde Bishop, ambassador to the Marshall Islands; Wayne Gilchrest, U.S. Representative for Maryland; John Taylor, wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers 1987-1995;

President Carter Hints Supports Senator Obama

Former President Jimmy Carter wouldn't officially say it, but he left little doubt this week about who he'd like to see in the White House next year. Speaking to local reporters Wednesday on a trip to Nigeria, the former Democratic president noted that Senator Barack Obama had won his home state of Georgia and his hometown of Plains. "My children and their spouses are pro-Obama. My grandchildren are also pro-Obama," he said at a news conference, according to the Nigerian newspaper This Day. "As a superdelegate, I would not disclose who I am rooting for, but I leave you to make that guess." Carter was in Nigeria for a ceremony celebrating a reduction in Guinea worm disease in West Africa.

President Carter is one of 13 Georgia Democratic superdelegates --- elected officials and party elders who have a vote at the national convention this August in Denver and are free to support the candidate of their choice. Only three of those have not said who they support: Carter, state Representative Jim Marshall, and former Representative Richard Ray, who is president of the Georgia chapter of the AFL-CIO. Among those who have committed, Senator Obama holds a 7-3 lead.