A number of stories piling up in the tabs on my Mac:
United States envoy Scott Gratius is in Sudan to try to hold together the fragile peace that runs the risk of shattering in the country’s South. He will also visit Darfur. But unless he has a mandate to coerce, flatter, cajole, or otherwise to pressure Khartoum, Gratius’ presence will likely not amount to much.
Meanwhile, also from Sudan, Lubna Hussein, a female journalist, has been sentenced for having the temerity to wear trousers. She managed to avoid a lashing but will serve time in jail rather than pay her fine. This case pretty well embodies the problem with countries where religious law prevails. While the freedom to observe religion should be sacrosanct, so too should be the freedom from that religion. All women should not be forced to adhere to the practices of a religious group, no mater how powerful. As The Boston Globe points out, this case simply illustrates the misogyny of Sudanese law.
Kenya has replaced the vast majority of the country’s senior police officials in a (belated) response to the post-election violence from the end of 2007. Many have seen the police as a barrier to real reform and hope that the firings mark a serious step toward systemic change in Kenya’s civil culture.
The chorus of voices opposing the appointment of Egypt’s Farouk Hosni to become UNESCO’s new director general has crescendoed to a fortissimo. That tends to happen to anti-semites and censors.
In case you wondered, issues of race and its legacy continue to vex in South Africa. The proximate cause of the latest concerns come in the form of Canada’s willingness to grant asylum to a white South African because he “stuck out like a sore thumb” in his native country, a story that caused quite a maelstrom in South Africa over the past few weeks.
Howard French has a fine, extensive review essay on “Kagame’s Hidden War in the Congo” in the New York Review of Books.
Given that few aspects of life in Zimbabwe have avoided massive disruption from the political chaos that Robert Mugabe hath wrought, there should be no surprise that education has gotten caught up in the gears of fraught party loyalties.
Few regions in Africa have avoided bouts with food insecurity. Just a sample of the countries currently dealing with food scarcity includes Ghana (as the result of multinational conglomerates forcing small farmers off their land), Somalia (general chaos, drought), Kenya (drought — observers are hoping El Nino provides relief soon), Zimbabwe (Robert Mugabe; the country hopes to have the problem beat by the end of 2010 — of course the country would also love to be rid of Mugabe by then as well). There is almost certainly no single solution to food scarcity issues across the continent given their diverse origins in a wide variety of geographical, climate, and political contexts, although taking a holistic approach at least allows some to conceptualize the varying approaches that will be necessary, and of course some proposals are controversial.
