The African National Congress (ANC) continues to suffer high-profile defections to the Congress of the People (COPE) in the run-up to April’s elections in South Africa. Former deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and prominent businessman, Robben Island veteran, and former parliamentarian Saki Macozoma have joined the Congress of the People. So too has the ANC’s Limpopo […]
Violent upheavals, including the assassination of the president of Guinea-Bissau, Joao Bernardo Vieira, has thrown the country into chaos. These events have led to an emergency meeting of West African leaders hoping to forestall further tumult.
There is no doubt that the people of Zimbabwe desperately need aid. Years of Robert Mugabe’s malign neglect, punitive policies, and utter disregard for the masses in his country have meant that access to basic food, health care, and other essentials has been limited to nil throughout the country. And so now, under the new […]
Maybe it was just a harmless aside that means absolutely nothing. Still, when I read that South Africa’s Kgalema Motlanthe recently said that Jacob Zuma would drop out of the race for the presidency if he thought it for the best for the country, my jaw dropped. Motlanthe was asked on Tuesday night by an audience […]
Well, who didn’t see this coming? Whether out of plain opportunistic avarice, fear that their window for self-gain was closing, or a desire to destabilize the unity government, Mugabe’s ZANU-PF cronies, especially the so-called war veterans (many of whom were not even born during the war against Ian Smith’s regime) have started trying to grab […]
Here is where I give cause for celebration (and then in perentheses rain on the parade): In Mozambique there are hopes that the country is going to be able to add 6,000 Megawatts of new capacity to the region’s power pool by 2014. (This seems optimistic. Infrastructure in Maputo, never mind much of the rest […]
Not only will setting things even vaguely right in Zimbabwe likely cost billions of dollars (US), as Morgan Tsvangirai asserted this week. It will also have the unintended consequence of destroying or at least wounding the only economy that has even vaguely worked in recent years — the black market.
As if you need an excuse, this weekend’s New York Times travel section features Cape Town as a destination, emphasizing all of the wonderful aspects of the city and its environs, but also the relatively inexpensive costs (from the vantage point of a reader of the Times‘ travel section, anyway). For South Africans the idea of […]
Look, I’m no fan of the Democratic Alliance. And I have long argued that a primarily white opposition party is going nowhere in South Africa in the 21st century. I expect that the ANC-COPE division will serve many purposes, not the least of which will be to consign the DA to its rightful place as […]
Just a handful of stories that have caught my eyes in the last couple of days, with relatively little commentary: Business Report reminds us just how vital South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel is not only for the country’s economic policy, but how vital he might end up being for Jacob Zuma (and the ANC’s) […]
Respected and beloved Africanist and human rights campaigner Alison Des Forges died last week in the plane crash near Buffalo. Best known for her indefatigable work on Rwanda, Des Forges not only is one of the foremost experts in the world on that country’s 1994 genocide, but she continued to reveal the complexities of that […]
The Boston Globe has a story about a partnership between a prominent Boston AIDS doctor, Bruce Walker, and an unexpected partnership he has formed in South Africa. As important as government and international action is in addressing Africa’s HIV-AIDS epidemic, it is important to remember that these sorts of partnerships in the scientific and medical […]
A pretty good case can be made for South Africa representing the epicenter of the sporting universe right now. The country and the world are gearing up for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and while Bafana Bafana just lost rather unceremoniously to Peru, South Africa’s national team had been riding a five-game winning streak, giving […]
Even as some observers find rays of hope in Zimbabwe’s new coalition government, which took power yesterday, yet another bizarre story plays out that makes one wonder just how earnest Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF are about sharing with the Movement for Democratic Change. Last week Zimbabwean police arrested an MDC official, Roy Bennett, on gun […]
The negotiations about the possibility of negotiations between Sudan’s leaders and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), Darfur’s largest rebel organization, have gone about as well as can be expected, assuming you know enough to keep expectations low. One of the problems is that while JEM is crucial to any peace prospects, its presence at […]