No room for ambiguity
Kenyan activists raise their voices, placards and fists over US$500 million allocated but not yet spent for anti-retroviral medications. That’s a lot of money, drugs, and lost lives.
Politics
Don’t Talk About Somebody’s Mama
Malians have little patience for Amadou Toumani Touré, Mali’s former president, deposed in a coup on 22 March.
The geo-branding war
Geo-branding is a serious thing. It is particularly serious when people from other geographic areas decide to brand your geographical area and the people in it, the way they see fit and the way that fits their purposes. No other country, region or continent, I’d argue, suffers from other peoples’ nonsense as much as the […]
David Cameron’s Libya Doctrine
Britain's secret service, MI5, passed on sensitive information to their Libyan colleagues to torture dissidents.
The verdict on Charles Taylor
A comment on the enigmatic, and ambivalent, presence of rebel leader and former president, Charles Taylor, ten years after he left Liberia.
Uganda, now you have touched the women
In October 2011, the Ugandan government sent Ingrid Turinawe to the infamous Luzira Prison–Uganda’s Guantánamo–for the treasonable act of walking to work. This week, the State, again, attacked Turinawe and other women activists for the “crime” of standing, speaking out, driving, and generally being. Big mistake.
The Other African election: France’s First Round
Both of the front-runners, incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist François Hollande, have run against FrançAfrique. Easier said than done.
In Praise of Jeffrey Gettleman’s Pulitzer
Pulitzer awarded Gettleman $10,000 for "his vivid reports, often at personal peril, on famine and conflict in East Africa."
Goldman Sachs’s Angolan interests
When the Financial Times commits an entire article to topics Angolan, it fills my Google news alert for a week.
Why is so much coverage of the Mali crisis so bad?
We mean the kind of bad that comes from being caught in a Beckettian loop of either saying nothing at all or having nothing to say.
The War in Mali’s North–To What Effect?
The rebels--that is, the MNLA and their disavowed and dangerous allies--hold Mali hostage.
The good Senegalese woman
Madame Faye Sall is the first woman of Senegalese birth and ancestry to become First Lady of Senegal. Some women in Senegal hope it will affect the debate about women and power there.
Coup d’Etat is the New Black
Military takeovers are happening so quickly and so fast in Africa, and instapundits need back facts. We are here to help. Here are some basic facts about Guinea-Bissau, site of the latest coup d'etat.
Bamako-sur-Seine
A sense of how the Malian diaspora experiences the political tensions and instability back home.
Germany’s Namibian Legacy
Jim Naughtom's images of Herero wearing German colonial outfits, is a powerful and necessary form of post-colonial critique.
Joyce Banda is President of Malawi
In her first order of business since being inaugurated as Malawi’s new president on Saturday, Joyce Banda fired the country’s top policeman. No reason was given for the firing, but the BBC reports that the police chief, Peter Mukhito, was in charge last year during anti-government protests over the worsening economy.
The shareholders of Jesus Inc.
God is the fastest-growing business in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. It may be time we agitate for our governments to raise taxes on these corporations.
Tinariwen speaks on the coup in Mali
Tuareg musicians Tinariwen, on tour in Europe these days, spent some time in Belgium this weekend. Belgian public broadcaster VRT [they’ll do a feature on Mali blues once a year, usually at the end of June, covering the one high-profile ‘world music’ festival Brussels has in summer, squeezing them into a one-minute slot alongside performers […]
The Hissène Habré “political and legal soap opera”
In recent weeks media coverage of African criminals and their victims have been dominated by capture (Kony) and conviction (Lubanga), largely overshadowing the latest twist in the most comprehensive and longest-running African legal case, that of Chad’s Hissène Habré. His crimes — the torture and extra-judicial killing of tens of thousands of Chadians during his […]
The new type of Senegalese
One of the key groups that engineered the ousting of Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade - he wanted to change the constitution to stay in power - was a youthful grassroots social movement group founded by a collective of rappers.