The social-networking website Facebook has launched in Swahili, targeting more than 110m speakers of the language.

A group of Swahili scholars launched the new version with the permission of the California-based internet firm.

Facebook use has spread over the past five years in East and Central Africa, where most Swahili-speakers live.

Analysts say a Hausa version could be launched next in West Africa and Zulu for southern Africa. Facebook already exists in Afrikaans.

Symon Wonda, one of the project’s initiators, said they wanted to launch a Swahili version to safeguard the future of the language.

“The youth, the future generation, if you look at the biggest percentage of users on Facebook, they are the youth,” he told the BBC’s Network Africa programme.

“They can easily navigate through when it’s maybe a language they understand, which makes it easier to use the Swahili than to use the English.”

The BBC’s Ruth Nesoba, in Nairobi, says the Swahili site has already been on trial for some time and word has spread quickly.

The bulk of Swahili-speakers live in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, parts of the Horn of Africa, Malawi, Mozambique and the Indian Ocean islands.

Facebook already exists in some 50 language versions.

After extensive study, British scientists have concluded that all human beings originate from Africa. They made the announcement after studying 6,000 human skulls from academic collections around the globe.

The study apparently proves conclusively that humanity originated from a single point in Africa. This disproves the opposing theory that the roots of humanity began in different areas of the planet.

“We have combined our genetic data with new measurements of a large sample of skulls to show definitively that modern humans originated from a single area in Sub-Saharan Africa,” says Andrea Manica, a researcher from the University of Cambridge’s Zoology Department.

In her team’s article in the Nature journal, they claimed that their study showed a decrease in variations to a skull’s size and shape the further it got from that point in Africa.

Scientists agree that the team’s findings are important for in confirming the theory that humanity’s current diversity came from one source rather than multiple locations.

Furthermore, breeding with other early human groups like Neanderthals were found to be either non-existent or insignificant to affect the evolution of man.

The findings reflect that only a few number of our ancestors left Africa, effectively creating “bottlenecks” in diversity.

A Congolese student has launched legal action in Belgium to have the comic book “Tintin in the Congo” declared racist and removed from bookstores.

The book portrays Africans as stereotypical black characters and shows whites as their colonial masters.

“I want to put an end to sales of this cartoon book in shops, both for children and for adults. It’s racist and it is filled with colonial-era propaganda,” said Mbutu Mondondo Bienvenu, who lives in Brussels.

Bienvenu is also seeking symbolic damages of one euro ($1.38) from Moulinsart, the publisher that owns the rights to Tintin.

A call by Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality earlier this year for bookstores to remove the Tintin edition from their shelves prompted one chain to move the book from its children’s section to the shelves for adult graphic stories.

Sales of Tintin In The Congo subsequently soared following protests over 3800 percent. The book, which first appeared in Belgian newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle as a comic strip in 1930-1931, is part of the series “The Adventures of Tintin” by the Belgian author and illustrator Herge.

In May, the centenary of the birth of Herge – real name Georges Remi – was marked with a set of stamps, a 20-euro coin and an exhibition in honour of the ageless reporter – one of the country’s most famous exports.

If Angelina Jolie gives birth in Namibia, she would have done for our tourism sector what our tourism board budget cannot do in a year. The publicity we are receiving is because of Angelina and Brad and not the paparazzi. The paparazzi will not come to Namibia on their own. They will only do so when following a celebrity. Angelina and Brad Pitt can boost tourism but the paparazzi cannot.

The future in Africa is woman, in view of the commitment that woman have had in participating in civil society.