European Affairs

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown ended his much anticipated, at least in Britain, two-day visit to the United States today. What is remarkable is how little attention the visit received in the United States as the two commentaries below clearly indicate. To be sure, the Prime Minister met President Obama in the White House, for a hot twenty minutes. He addressed a joint session of Congress, the fifth British Prime Minister to do so, where he received seventeen standing ovations.  read more »

I've been asked to reflect briefly on the entanglement of Europe, America, and Obama. Well, let's just say that Donald Rumsfeld's "old Europe" has never known how to handle the enigma that is America. Here is a Frankenstein Europe created, a colony of inconsequential second-raters and failures, the dregs of European whiteness who took out their frustrations on the Native Americans they exterminated and the Africans they enslaved.  read more »

According to the stories below, U.S. President-elect Barrack Obama's grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was tortured in Kenya during the struggle for independence after the Second World War. Some in the British press wonder even worry about the effects of this on President Obama's attitudes to Britain and the British--a poignant narrative of postimperial anxieties about the colonial ‘natives' striking back. The stories offer reminders of the intricate ties that bind Africa, Europe, and America through the troubling histories of slavery and colonialism.  read more »

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 »

THIS AND OTHER ESSAYS WILL BE PUBLISHED IN A COLLECTION BY PAUL TIYAMBE ZELEZA, BARACK OBAMA AND AFRICAN DIASPORAS: DIALOGUES AND DISSENSIONS, AYEBIA PUBLISHING (Oxford, U.K.) and OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS (Athens, OH, USA) in Fall 2009. LOOK OUT FOR THE BOOK!!! 

THIS AND OTHER ESSAYS WILL BE PUBLISHED IN A COLLECTION BY PAUL TIYAMBE ZELEZA, BARACK OBAMA AND AFRICAN DIASPORAS: DIALOGUES AND DISSENSIONS, AYEBIA PUBLISHING (Oxford, U.K.) and OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS (Athens, OH, USA) in Fall 2009. LOOK OUT FOR THE BOOK!!!