You would be forgiven for wondering if things are improving in Zimbabwe or not. My inclination is to believe that with Jacob Zuma’s tougher stand on Robert Mugabe and with continued pressure from NGO’s and other outsiders things have improved and will continue to do so. But that improvement is tenuous and incremental. More importantly, […]
Here are a bunch of stories to start off your week: David Smith of The Mail & Guardian argues that District 9 represents the first in what we can expect to be a stream of post-Apartheid movies. Because of my own interest both in the negotiation process that led to the end of Apartheid and […]
Jendayi Frazer, who currently teaches at Carnegie Mellon and who was assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 2005-2009 has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal laying out “Four Ways to Help Africa.” I’ll briefly address each in turn: 1) Place Eritrea on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Eritrea does indeed […]
I’m swamped with meetings and classes and meetings and appointments and meetings and so the last few days have seen me get buried with a whole host of stories and links I’ve wanted to write about but have instead let pile up in my Firefox tabs, surely to ill effect of my computer’s memory and […]
I had planned to write a somewhat-lengthy post about the death of Ted Kennedy and his role in the anti-apartheid debate in the United States, including his 1985 trip to South Africa, but Texas in Africa beat me to the punch with a post pretty close to what I’d have written. I will only add […]
(Belated Happy Birthday! This was my 1000th post for the FPA Africa Blog!) Even as Jacob Zuma plans to head to Zimbabwe to try to channel negotiations and perhaps play the role of peacemaker the dynamic north of the Limpopo might be set to change radically — and not, as many might assume, for the […]
The new semester has begun and I have less than an hour before the first meeting of my graduate seminar in Modern African History. I have time to roll off a few stories that warrant some discussion: Former Zambian President Frederick Chiluba has been acquitted of using his country’s treasury like his own personal bank […]
I’m going to wade into the controversy surrounding South African 800 meter runner and newly crowned world champion Caster Semenya. By now the story has made the rounds globally, with its equal parts prurience and controversy and politicization causing both track & field and Africa to draw attention in circles that ordinarily pay little attention […]
Two examples from South Africa of people getting ahead of themselves: Some South Africans, including Local Organizing Committee chair Irvin Khoza, fear that South Africans are not catching World Cup fever. This strikes me as a pretty groundless concern. I was in South Africa during the Confederations Cup and saw plenty of spirit and came […]
At the Council on Foreign Relations Bronwyn Bruton, a CFR International Affairs Fellow in residence, argues that the United States needs to ensure stability in Ethiopia as part of its strategy for dealing with the crisis in Somalia, where rebels just rejected a plea for peace during Ramadan. The interconnectedness of regional politics in Africa […]
The good news: Nigerian rebel leaders from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) followed through on their agreement to hand over weapons this weekend in exchange for an amnesty from the government. The bad news: Not all of the rebels agreed, and at least one faction of MEND not only rejected […]
Texas in Africa and G. Zachary Pastal of Africa Works have a go at this Thomas Friedman column from last Sunday that I could only be bothered to call “particularly incoherent.” I did argue earlier in the week that Frieman’s larger point might be fine — that more and better cell phone and internet access would […]
Popular from Press
