The World Cup kicks off in Soccer City Stadium in ten days and your faithful scribe could not be more excited. I will be leaving in a week and after a night in Addis Ababa will land in Johennesburg with what I hope will be enough time to scramble to my b&b, drop my stuff […]
This brief article in The Atlantic makes what to my mind is a curious argument. To wit: In the Central African Republic the most common crime for people to be accused of is witchcraft. Yet for reasons that should be fairly obvious, witchcraft is a rather difficult charge to prove, which does not make convictions […]
This week’s Sunday New York Times Week in Review section has a fascinating article on censorship in repressive states. At the heart of the article are the experiences of Nobel Prize laureate JM Coetzee during his native South Africa’s apartheid era when “The censors were part of a much broader, more sinister system — the […]
What’s the old cliche? Victory has a thousand parents and defeat has none? Well, Bafana Bafana is on something of a roll. They have not lost a match in ten outings. Much of their success has been in comfortable home environs, but of course that’s not really a problem inasmuch as the World Cup is […]
Forgive the self indulgence, but Impumelelo: The Interdisciplinary Electronic Journal of African Sports (based at my PhD alma mater Ohio University, but with no history department connections) has published an article of mine that you can actually access (still a too-rare thing for scholarly articles), “Stopped at the Try Line? Rugby, Race, and Nationalism in […]
Terrible news for Ghana’s World Cup hopes. Star Midfielder (and Chelsea stalwart) Michael Essien’s knee injury is simply too much to overcome and he is out of the tournament, striking a harsh and perhaps insurmountable blow to the Black Stars.
South African rugby officials, trying to expand the sport’s appeal and in a gesture of reconciliation, will be holding the Super 14 final in Soweto’s Orlando Stadium this weekend. The game, which is sold out, will see a rare matchup of South African teams when the Bulls and Stormers face off in the finals of […]
Some tentative good news from Zimbabwe (largely because all good news from Zim has to be seen as tentative until we see how reality plays out). The new Zimbabwe Media Commission has announced that four new papers have been granted licenses to begin publishing. Media became a victim of Robert Mugabe’s increasingly draconian crackdown. Hopefully […]
With the World Cup just around the bend expect to see more and more relatively gushing profiles-cum-boosterism such as this one. But I’m ok with that. South Africa’s time in the spotlight is now, and it will be fleeting. There is no shame in a little bit of shameless promotion. We all know South Africa’s […]
In Ethiopia‘s recent elections Prime Minister Meles Zenawi claimed an overwhelming victory. The problem is that observers from both the European Union and the United States, not to mention the opposition leaders, have raised serious questions as to whether the elections were either free or fair. Zenawi denies the claims, of course, but what else […]
America’s standing in the eyes of the world has risen significantly since 2008. I’ll let you figure out the correlation or causality for that. But according to Gallup, nowhere is America respected more than in Sub-Saharan Africa (which admittedly also had a high opinion of the US during the Bush years as well).
If you have any interest in American politics whatsoever you really should bookmark FiveThirtyEight, which does fantastic analysis (usually with complicated statistical analysis that they thankfully are able to make accessible to the rest of us) about a whole host of issues but with particular strenghts on electoral politics. With the upcoming midterm elections in […]
Here are some stories that have caught my eye of late: Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics has an excerpt from what is sure to be an explosive new book on Israel’s connections to Apartheid South Africa. I’ve written a bit about the Middle East and especially Israel, and while I don’t want to […]
The Wall Street Journal has a new page on its website devoted to Africa and regardless of what you think about the Journal’s editorial stances, its news side is excellent, and you should most definitely bookmark this page. It is a great resource for news, as good as or better than any other American newspaper’s […]
Economic growth is enormously difficult to measure, never mind to predict, but signs point to economic growth rates of 4.2% to 4.8% across Africa in the next year. (As a sign of how inexact all of this is, the stories linked above vary in their assessments of the last year’s economy in Africa, with one […]