Steve Sharra's blog

The current issue of Foreign Policy magazine (May/June 2008) has a list of what the magazine says are the top 100 public intellectuals living today. The subjective nature of the definition "public intellectual", and the names of people I notice included, and left out, is enough to make me not take this exercise seriously.

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When I learned that the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright was going to give a speech at Michigan State University on February 7^th, I spread the word to friends and colleagues I knew would love to hear Barack Obama's pastor speak. Of the half dozen or so people I mentioned his name to, none of them had heard of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, let alone his spiritual connection to Barack Obama. I prepared a question to ask Rev. Dr. Wright, but as it turned out, I did not need to ask the question. Such was the freestyle nature of the luncheon with Rev. Dr.  read more »

Pan-Africa and the Third World are certainly on the move insofar as the west’s colonialist and racist perceptions of African and Third World people are concerned. However there are certain areas in which negative perceptions of African and Third World peoples are deeply entrenched, and will require specialized forms of informed and analytical critique to address them.  read more »

Earlier this month The Nation newspaper in Malawi reported that its readers voted the country’s president, Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika, as the ‘Nation Achiever’ for the year 2007.  read more »

When in 2003 I wrote on the Malawi discussion listserv Nyasanet, asking if anybody knew the whereabouts of Kanyama Chiume, somebody responded and said Kanyama had sold his property around 1996 and left Malawi for good, announcing that he would never be back in Malawi again, unless “in a coffin.” This week Kanyama Chiume, a Pan-Africanist who was at the forefront of Malawi’s independence throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and was later forced into exile by Dr.  read more »