Foreign Policy Blogs

Sub-Saharan Africa

Journalists in Zimbabwe

NPR has a feature on how Zimbabwe represents inhospitable terrain for journalists. One journalist explores why: In Zimbabwe, practicing journalism is forbidden. Reporters caught working without government permission face beatings, long prison sentences, or worse. The job becomes especially perilous when the story about the local police force, focusing on police brutality So why do […]

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Great Decisions Fall 2007 Updates

The Foreign Policy Association has posted its Great Decisions series updates for fall 2007. Please avail yourself of these wonderful resources. (Here is the South Africa update.)

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Strange Bedfellows

Over at The Mail & Guardian the University of the Witwatersrand's Achille Mbembe wonders what Thabo Mbeki, chief architect of the “African Renaissance,” is playing at with regard to his apparent endorsement of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's galling recent comments in West Africa. At least on the issue of Pan-Africanism, Mbeki has earned the benefit […]

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Giving SADC “Room to Breathe”

Peter Kagwanja, research director and senior African fellow at South Africa's Human Science Research Council and president of the Africa Policy Institute argues that SADC's mediation of the crisis in Zimbabwe “must be given a chance to breathe.” But he also believes that Zimbabwe's salvation will only come through change: [P]olitical theatre aside, the SADC […]

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SADC’s Questions, Questions for SADC

According to the Mail & Guardian, SADC's plan for Zimbabwe's economic recovery is a non-starter because, well, SADC and its member nations do not have the necessary funds and the prospect of such support coming from the west in sufficient qualities is highly improbable.: The economic rescue package for Zimbabwe, touted at the Southern African […]

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Unnaming For the Sake of Probity

Changing the names of places, infrastructure, and institutions in South Africa tends to be a flashpoint for controversy, as I’ve discussed in this forum on several occasions. A recent story from the Daily News gets at what some might see as the lighter side of the shifting nomenclature phenomenon: The name eThekwini is to be […]

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News on Children’s Health

From a Medical Research Council report on children's health issues in South Africa: Every year almost 23,000 South African babies die in their first month of life, yet one in five of these deaths could be avoided with better education, and relatively inexpensive and easily implemented changes in healthcare, says a new study by the […]

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Dogfighting in South Africa

Some of you may be familiar with the gruesome and depressing dogfighting story of NFL star Michael Vick. (See here, and, if you have the stomach, follow the many links to the right of the story.) But dogfighting is a real problem in South Africa as well, as a story in today's Cape Times revealing […]

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SADC Caves

SADC Caves

Hopes were high for the two-day Southern African Development Community (SADC) Summit held last week in Lusaka. The crisis in Zimbabwe would be high on the agenda. Thabo Mbeki would present his progress report on his mediation between Robert Mugabe and his opponents. Some how, some way, the region's leaders would broker a solution, or […]

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Transformation en Taal

Thuli Manunga, a ten year old who speaks Xhosa at home but is fluent in three languages has become the first black junior pupil to win the prestigious national Afrikanse Taal en Kultuur Vereeneging speaking competition.

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Thabo Mbeki: Lame Duck

Thabo Mbeki: Lame Duck

In an otherwise perceptive article in The New York Times, Michael Wines seems somewhat nonplussed by the possibility that Thabo Mbeki appears to be entering a lame duck phase as the South African President. With that status comes more vocal complaints from within the ANC coalition ranks than we may have seen before, especially from […]

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China: Friend or Neo-Colonialist?

Africans North-to-South, East-to-West are hyper-wary of foreign encroachments. This should come as no surprise after the dual destabilizing phenomena of western imperialism and the Cold War threw Africa into paroxysms of chaos from which it has not ever fully recovered. So despite (or perhaps because of) the myriad examples of China's increased chumminess with Africa (which I have written […]

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Great Decisions Analysis: The Vlok Trial and a Reconciliation With the Truth

The Foreign Policy Association has published another of my Great Decisions Analysis pieces. “The Vlok Trial and a Reconciliation With the Truth” looks at the recent criminal proceedings against Adriaan Vlok, South Africa's Minister of Law and Order in the 1980s, and four other members of the security apparatus for a bizarre attempted murder that […]

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ANC Faction Fighting, The Health Ministry, and Holomisa

The African National Congress is dealing with the old Chinese curse of living in interesting times. First there are the natural tensions in a  party such as the ANC that has so many varied constituencies. There is the unseemly but unavoidable Jacob Zuma mess. There is the succession struggle, which really is two succession struggles […]

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SADC Meets in Zambia

The heads of state of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)  nations are meeting this week in Lusaka, Zambia. High on the agenda will be the crisis in Zimbabwe, though observers do not expect much on that front. It will be most interesting to see what, if anything, Thabo Mbeki, whom SADC charged with helping […]

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