European Affairs

Nicholas Sarkozy has not ceased to entertain. His visit to Chad and South Africa, much like George W. Bush’s “African Safari,” makes better fodder for political satire and tabloid gossip than what the Western media giants like to consider  respected journalism.

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With more than eleven million copies sold and translations available in more than thirty-five languages, one can safely claim that Unoka, the lazy father of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, is as familiar to the global literary community as Miss Havisham or Aureliano Buendia.  read more »

It is probably written somewhere that between Paris and its former colonies in Black Africa, nothing should follow the norms accepted by the rest of the world.  read more »

Dear President Sarkozy,

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The Second EU-Africa Summit is now underway in Portugal. It has brought together more than 70 leaders from African and European countries.  read more »

The display of King Tut-Ankh-Amen’s remains earlier this month and the exhibition of the treasures from his tomb in Europe and the United States are utterly disrespectful to his memory and to the dignity of living Africans who trace their heritage to Ancient Egypt.  

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Nicolas Sarkozy’s Africa by Achille Mbembe; Sarkozy and Africa: Misunderstanding or Change?  read more »

The history of African Europeans is little known, but this is beginning to change as more research is conducted on the subject.  read more »

Fraternal greetings to you from Canada. I have elected to write you on the occasion of your resounding victory in the recently concluded presidential elections in France, your country of birth and your father’s country of adoption. I hope you do not mind the personal and familiar tone of this letter. We have one important thing in common and I feel so close to you on its account – our common roots in immigration.  read more »

Over the past couple of weeks an international crisis has erupted fueled by cartoons caricaturing and condemning the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist figure first published in a Danish newspaper last September and subsequently reprinted with indignant insensitivity in some western countries.  read more »

For more than two weeks now, fires of postcolonial fury have been raging across France, burning public buildings and private businesses, torching schools and police stations, incinerating cars and the conceits of this proud post-imperial country, exposing its contradictions and conflicts hidden deep in the suburbs—the banlieues—of post-industrial squalor and the national psyche of racial and religious intolerance.  read more »