Stories that have accumulated on my desk over the last few days with commentary as apt:
Increasingly ANC Youth League (ANC-YL) president Julius Malema finds himself in President Jacob Zuma’s bad graces. And this, of course, is shorthand for the increasingly tendentious relationship between the ANC and the Youth League. This is yet another of the fissures in the ANC coalition the resolution of which will be central to South Africa’s political future. The ANC-YL might bear the party’s name, but its political temperament is more in line with the leftists of the Tripartite alliance, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). If those two decide to leave the governing coalition, don’t be surprised if the Youth League flees with them.
Finally, Thomas Friedman uses the Mandela/Invictus analogy to make a not-at-all-original point about leadership in the Muslim world.
Chris Blattman asks an interesting question: Where have all the African revolutionaries gone? he provides many useful possible explanations. I think part of the answer might lie in the fact that in Africa revolutionaries have always been perceived as being aligned against outside forces, most notably the colonial powers. Those outside forces are pretty much gone, and the end of the Cold War eliminated Africa as a proxy field for global superpower competition, and so “revolutionary” activity tends today to fall to rebels who themselves are not always all that sympathetic, especially when placed next to their anti-imperialist predecessors.
Terrible news from South African rugby circles. Blue Bulls prop Jacobus Stefanus “Bees” Roux has been charged with murder for beating a Tshwane metro police officer to death early on Friday morning.
Depressing AIDS denialist story of the week: Prince Mangaliso Dlamini, a controversial high-profile cousin of Swaziland’s King Mswati III, announced that he is “not scared of AIDS, claimed that greedy pharmaceutical companies were withholding a cure for HIV/Aids in order to maximize their profits from anti-retroviral drugs, and dismissed abstinence, monogamy, and circumcision for curbing the spread of HIV/Aids. According to UN estimates Swaziland has the highest HIV/Aids infection rates in the world, with just over one in four adult Swazis living with the disease.
It’s hard to argue with the lead of this New York Times article by Jeffrey Gettelman (about whose work I have been fairly lukewarm over the years, largely because it is oftentimes so shoddy, so credit where credit’s due): “Somali insurgents disguised in government military uniforms stormed a Mogadishu hotel on Tuesday and killed at least 30 people, including 6 lawmakers, laying bare how vulnerable Somalia’s government is, even in an area it claims to control.”
