African Affairs

The red flag one is most likely to be confronted with for criticizing the thoroughly illegitimate ‘leader' of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, is imperialism and racism. If you are an African criticizing Mugabe, you are likely to be accused of being guilty of working in cahoots with racist-imperialists.  read more »

I commend Ndugu Horace Campbell and Ndugu Eusi Kwayana for the best insight I've seen so far into how Africans can view Zimbabwe's crisis.  read more »

For those who have followed the debates around the African Pavilion at the 52^nd Venice Biennale before the exhibition itself, especially those who had no opportunity of seeing the show in Venice, nor of monitoring critical responses to it in the international art media, here are three excerpts from reviews by three major international art magazines: Flash Art, and Art in America and Frieze. These reviews point to the gains and losses of the African project in this year's Venice.  read more »

China has become an important economic resource for Africa in the 21^st century. China's rapidly growing economy has overlapped with an urgent need to diversify African economies, which remain largely based on the export of unprocessed raw materials. China's industries have turned to Africa in search of their mineral and raw material needs. And China has offered Africa the opportunity to develop its infrastructural base to support economic diversification and to improve the transfer of skills in science and technology.  read more »

Fourteen years ago I had the strange experience of being named by the then Malawi opposition party, the United Democratic Front (UDF), as Shadow Minister for Industry and Energy, strange because I knew nothing about either field. The UDF went on to win the elections thereby ending the thirty-year old dictatorship of President Kamuzu Banda, but I was saved the capricious life of a cabinet minister preferring to continue the far less glamorous career of an academic.

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Zimbabwe is burning with unprecedented levels of violence intended to intimidate the population into voting for the octogenarian dictator, President Robert Mugabe, in next week's elections who lost the first round of presidential elections last March to the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai.  read more »

Yesterday I arrived in Kenya, my home when I'm not in the United States. I spent most of my first day back in front of the TV watching our president and our prime minister launch Vision 2030, which is supposed to turn us into Singapore. The document is a supposed compromise between Prime Minister Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement and President Mwai Kibaki's Party of National Unity. I started off my usual cynical self about local politics and was planning to write something about Barack Obama's triumph instead.  read more »

Ever since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981, Egypt has been governed under Emergency Law: 27 years worth of "emergencies" constitutionally designated for use only when facing a direct threat, such as a military invasion or a natural disaster. The law, which is supposed to be used in exceptional circumstances, has become the permanent method of governance in Egypt. Interestingly, President Hosni Mubarak has been the country's ruler for all those 27 years.

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Zimbabwe, a week before the run off elections for the Presidency, presents many progressive Pan Africanists with a conflict, be it in analysis or action.There are four main competing interests in Zimbabwe, as it is today. First, but not in order of importance are the interests of the ruling party and its supporters. These are followed by those of the Opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and its supporters.  read more »

Hardly a few months now go by without a major summit between Africa and the world's leading economic powers. One and half years ago, in November 2006, there was the glittering Beijing Summit which I wrote about in an earlier blog that brought leaders from 48 African countries to China and signaled to the world China's entry into the world's second largest continent.  read more »

The cartoonist, aka, Brandon, could not have drawn the nation's collective despair more accurately when he this week likened South Africa Inc to an aeroplane in flames, nosediving out of control, ever downwards to the envitable deadly crash.

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One of my favorite contemporary authors, Pearl Cleage, centers her novels on the interaction of women's lives with the decay of black masculinity instigated by the consumerist, racist era in which we live today. Babylon Sisters, my least preferred of her novels, contains the statements that aptly capture this dynamic.

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In a previous column I documented the long history of racism towards global Africans. An editorial decision was taken to re-title the piece "We Have a History" (New African, January 2008), which gave some readers the wrong impression that I was suggesting that centuries of anti-Black racism are the only defining feature of our history.  This was not my intent.  read more »

I am worried about Professor Pat Utomi. Anyone who, like me, has been in awe of the unimpeachable progressive bona fides of this engagé public intellectual in the last three decades should be worried.  read more »

Like Mwalimu Zeleza, when I heard of the outbreak of violence directed at African non-citizens in South African townships, I recognized the pathology of Africans attacking fellow Africans, of our self-hatred and an apparent blindness to the European originators and primary beneficiaries of Africa's biggest problems.

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The Pan-African world has been watching with mounting horror the xenophobic violence that has gripped several South African townships over the past two weeks which has resulted in the wanton destruction of many lives and property. Fifty-six people have been murdered, thousands seek sanctuary in police stations, churches, community halls and 'safe havens' or camps, and many more are fleeing back to their countries of origin as several governments desperately try to repatriate their nationals.

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A high powered delegation from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPA) and representatives of the Nobel Prize committee for Physics have arrived in Abuja, Nigeria, on a fact finding mission. The two important delegations aim to verify and authenticate the scientific essence of certain developments in Nigeria that have literally caused a tsunami in the global scientific community.  read more »

The deep extent to which Sudanese, both in Sudan and abroad, have been and continue to be engaged in what is happening in their country, was brought into sharp focus during an international conference: "Darfur and the crisis of governance in Sudan", convened at the Institute for Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University on 22-23 February.

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As a frequent traveler, I am struck by how much international travel has changed over the last three decades, much of it for the worse. Especially distressing is the manic security at airports which began with the highjackings of the 1970s and escalated following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States, and has been ratcheted up with every new threat, real and imagined. It now takes ingenuity to even travel with toiletries.  read more »

Conventional wisdom, at least in the academic world, states that the colonial "divide and rule" policy created the acrimonious institution of "tribes" by freezing African identities and favoring one group frozen in that identity to the detriment of the others. The Tutsi of Rwanda and the Agikuyu of Kenya are often cited as examples of those who were favored; but upon close examination of history, this thesis reveals some loopholes.

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