The Spirit of Marikana
Marikana's workers were active agents in controlling their own destinies in the midst of plutocratic mine-owners and “pocket trade unions.”
Politics
Kenneth Kaunda and the national question
Was the 27 years of Kaunda's rule better for Zambians than the neoliberal governments that have ruled there since his departure in 1991?
Lessons from Kaundanomics
In Zambians' hurry to get rid themselves of President Kenneth Kaunda, they lost their way in the process.
How the Congo crisis reshaped international relations
In July 1960, within a week of achieving independence from Belgium, the Congo (later renamed Zaire and now known as the DRC) was plunged into a civil conflict that soon turned into a political and constitutional crisis that besieged the country for almost five years. The Congo crisis challenged how the superpowers and the United […]
South Africa needs a new public debate
Much of the criticism about neoliberalism is coming from the dominant faction of the ANC, the center-left party trying to hold onto power.
Brave new world
As Western government enforce stricter policing of non-native bodies, who who are the activists who will stop them?
Is South African trade unionism at a turning point?
Does the gradual increase in the number of strikes indicate that a new wave of offensive strikes has begun? Or is it just a short-lived revival among a depressing long wave of defensive strikes?
Too deep for mere outrage
Anticorruption activist, Chuma Nwokolo, reflects on the pervasive nature of official corruption in Nigeria.
Weekend Special, No. 1211
(1) Identity politics is neoliberalism, as Adolph Reed once said. And it delivers like clockwork. The hip hop producer Sean Diddy Combs (he produced Biggie Smalls) opened a for profit charter school in Harlem where he was born. Because–as he said–he would rather do “something about” education than just complain about it. (And he chose to “do it” with a […]
What’s in an apology
President Emmanuel Macron's apology to Algerians over French colonialism us about presidential elections in France.
The unfinished business between Cameroon and France
France would rather play puppeteer than transparently acknowledge its role in first shaping — and now underhandedly curating — its colonial past.
A cure for the Dutch disease
The Netherlands needs a politics that is about race and class and gender and sexuality – not just about class in a reductionist sense.
We are all Helen Zille
Or, why the West thinks that colonialism was not all bad.
The New York Court and Namibia
Namibia taking Germany to court in a country with its own history of genocide against indigenous peoples, hoping they may honor the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.
Germany’s Marshall Plan for Africa
What are the political dynamics that may have led to the adoption of Germany's ambitious framework to reinvigorate Africa's development.
The roots of the current crisis in South Africa
The ways in which state elites and the private sector have found ways to swindle the poor.
Where is the Central African Republic?
The Central African Republic has become shorthand for “failed postcolonial African state,” basically the prototype of a country in permanent crisis.
The Border Crossing
The unwelcome atmosphere for refugees from Africa in the United States, result in some of them risking their lives to get to neighboring Canada.
The Kalahari cattle market
Land, landlessness and the German genocide of Namibians at the turn of the 20th century.
Weekend Special
We’re bringing back Weekend Special. Borrowing its title from a song by the late Brenda Fassie, this is basically a list of 10 (ten) things we couldn’t publish; only shared on our social media (which we know some of you are not on); or that we rant about but did not have the time to […]