The Year of the Woman
2011 was the year of pro-democracy movements and they were largely pushed and pulled by women.
Politics
The Year of Frantz Fanon
What gives Fanon's thinking its force and power is the air of indestructibility and the inexhaustible silo of humanity which it houses, argues Achille Mbembe.
Health care for all
The health news - with major implications for Africans living on the continent - that made the headlines in 2011.
Dances with Samburu
The Samburu of northern Kenya are pastoralists, and they are under attack. According to Survival International, two US-based charities — the Nature Conservancy and the Africa Wildlife Foundation — bought lots of land, from Daniel arap Moi. How did he get the land? Good question.
Helen Zille’s ‘AIDS Gestapo’
The leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance makes offensive remarks about AIDS, then smears her critics, AIDS activists and journalists, as Nazis.
Nigeria's Prophet
By now you’ve probably watched the (British) Channel 4 TV documentary film about Nigeria’s millionaire preachers–the fake healings, buckets full of money collected by church leaders (“tithes”), police escorts, mall openings as well as all that flash. This all against a background of grinding poverty. I watched it last night. Most Nigerian blogs not surprisingly […]
Swazi Bull
Politics, repression, religion, exile, tradition and mysticism in Swaziland, Southern Africa's last absolute monarchy.
The business of selling beer
SABMiller's new Impala Beer is marketed to poor people who don’t buy other commercially distributed beers because they are too expensive.
The ‘safest option’ in Congo
For all the huffing and puffing in the West about the DRC’s cooked elections — President Joseph Kabila “polled” 49% and the Electoral Commission, stacked with Kabila cronies, “gave” opposition candidate Etienne Tshisekedi 32% of the vote — there’s a bottom line for elites. The Financial Times, in an editorial yesterday, gives it to us […]
The Economist’s “Africa”
The Economist changed its verdict from "Hopeless Africa" to "Africa Rising" in eleven years. But few care about the latest verdict.
The new sheriff
About a week ago, the International Criminal Court announced that Fatou Bensouda would succeed Luis Moreno Ocampo as Chief Prosecutor. This could be big news, but you wouldn’t know it from The New York Times, who barely reported the announcement. Fatou Bensouda is from Gambia. And she means business. Some people think she may be exactly what […]
Helping Themba
The Dutch ‘Stop Aids Now!’ campaigns have a long tradition of appealing to potential donors in Holland’s streets. November and December are the months the posters and TV ads pop up (around World Aids Day on December 1, coinciding with the arrival of Saint Nicholas and his Black Petes, and the ensuing spending spree) — […]
On Brand Nigeria
A quick read of comments to recent posts defending gay rights, point to how deep-seated and widespread homophobia is in Nigeria.
Something in the water
Africa's best football players come from West Africa. That's just facts.
Congo votes
Over the past week, it was hard to find an article published in a major international press outlet not looking at the build-up to today’s presidential elections through the lens of fear and/of violence. With the exception of a few, most foreign journalists didn’t make it outside of Kinshasa (citing logistical problems). People did get […]
The return of the one party state
The regime of Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, Liberia's first post-conflict president, is increasingly guilty of lack of accountability and abetting corruption.
Pizza Aid
What happens when humanitarian agencies ditch the tried-and-trusted fundraising method of splashing disaster porn across screens and news pages?
Parachute Journalism
Blind clichés, projections and stereotypes masquerading as analysis in Foreign Policy by Karen Leigh, Time Magazine’s correspondent for West Africa.
"You're a South African, what's your story?"
New Zealand is often sold to prospective (mostly white) South African immigrants as “South Africa 30 years ago” (wink, wink). That version of an Edenic idyll is not entirely what a young South African found New Zealand to be recently in a local version of Occupy Wall Street in Dunedin. In a scene captured by […]
Mapo do mundo
Remember the Mapping Stereotypes Project and the Afrographique project? (The former maps popular national stereotypes from around the world, while the latter turns any set of data about the continent into a graphic, including a series of maps.) A reader of this blog points us towards this “map” of stereotypes that’s been circulating online among […]