Given it's role as the largest anti-apartheid liberation organization, its central role in the transition to democracy, and its virtually insuperable status in the country's politics today it should come as no suprise that the African National Congress is far and away the most scrutinized (and criticized) political party in South Africa. From issues of politics […]
Although African agriculture is often underdeveloped, there exist many possibilities for maximizing the continent's resources. According to a report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: With food security often at the mercy of erratic weather patterns, Southern Africa could bank on its “tremendous” potential to farm fish to sustain its predominantly […]
Over at The New Republic John Talbott has a rather radical suggestion for how to end AIDS in Africa: “Compulsory testing and notification of every citizen.” Talbott is not a medical doctor nor is he an Africanist — his tagline lists him as “an author, former investman banker for Goldman Sachs, and former visiting scholar […]
I’m back from a week in England and am still absolutely buried with email and work and deadlines. But here are a lot of links on some of the crucial issues facing Africa and Africans: The online news editor of The Economist is in Zimbabwe trying to get a feel for things there, to stay […]
Your faithful scribe is leaving the country for about a week and as a consequence I may not be able to blog. I thus want to leave you with a lot of links from South Africa and Africa generally to take you to the weekend. I’ll be back next week. According to The New York […]
Reports of dissent within Zimbabwe's security forces represent hope for change in Mugabe's regim Hints of police dissatisfaction are not new — back in December and January similar rumors circulated. Here is what I wrote about the possibility of police backlash then: [The recent revelation] represents an interesting development inasmuch as Mugabe relies on both […]
As I type South Africa is running down England in their World Cup Cricket Super Eight match. This is the game I have been waiting for since the Super Eight fixtures were announced, and as the weeks have passed it grew more and more clear that the South Africa-England competition would be huge and probably […]
A couple of weeks back I wrote about controversy over the renaming of the South African town of Louis Trichardt. It seemed obvious to me that a country that had so long seen the majority population trampled under the foot of the white minority ought to have the fairly fundamental right to reclaim the naming […]
Over at the Council on Foreign relations website Francis Kornegay, a senior researcher at the Center for Policy Studies in Johannesburg, and Tom Wheeler, a research fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs, discuss whether South Africa is living up to its responsibility as Africa's leader in an edifying exchange. Meanwhile other observers […]
One of the biggest problems that African policymakers face is the risk of being reduced to one or two usually failing policies. The majority of Americans pay Africa virtually no heed as it is, and so complexity gets lost in favor of simple, and thus simplistic, renderings of African leaders. Ask even educated Americans (or, […]
Philip Gourevitch has a fine piece in the latest New Yorker about the plight of Zimbabwe. There is not a lot that will be new to readers of this blog, but it provides a nice summary of Mugabe's treachery and South Africa's laissez faire response.
In some ways these ought to be salad days for Thabo Mbeki and South Africa. The country's continued growth rate has been in the black for something like one hundred straight months, a claim that few countries in the world can stake. South Africa, already arguably Africa's hottest tourist destination, is poised to show the […]
Thabo Mbeki is worried that eleven months is not enough time to provide a climate for Zimbabwe to hold free and fair elections. SADC appointed Mbeki to serve as mediator between Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF, which put the old tyrant up as the party's candidate to serve another term in office, and the Movement for […]
One of the many reasons why Africa ought to matter more to the United States than it does is because it will continue to provide an important source of oil imports. This week Slate has been running four excerpts from John Ghazvinian's book Untapped: The Scramble For Africa's Oil. The excerpts include: Does Africa Measure […]
Thabo Mbeki, whom leaders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) appointed to act as mediator between Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) when it held its summit in Tanzania last week, appears remarkably sanguine about the crisis in Zimbabwe, all in all. In a recent interview Mbeki, when asked if he […]