African Affairs

As a frequent traveler, I am struck by how much international travel has changed over the last three decades, much of it for the worse. Especially distressing is the manic security at airports which began with the highjackings of the 1970s and escalated following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States, and has been ratcheted up with every new threat, real and imagined. It now takes ingenuity to even travel with toiletries.  read more »

Conventional wisdom, at least in the academic world, states that the colonial "divide and rule" policy created the acrimonious institution of "tribes" by freezing African identities and favoring one group frozen in that identity to the detriment of the others. The Tutsi of Rwanda and the Agikuyu of Kenya are often cited as examples of those who were favored; but upon close examination of history, this thesis reveals some loopholes.

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Academics are often accused of being preoccupied with theory rather than practice, and semantics instead of actions, while favoring microscopic details over the big picture. Scholars working on Africa, in particular, are often accused of being intellectually self-indulgent, while the continent faces an array of very real challenges.  read more »

Rwandans are remembering the genocide of Tutsis 14 years ago, which was the culmination of a racist script written in Europe and then rehearsed in the continent for over 100 years with an African cast.  read more »

Very senior officials of the American, French, British, and German governments recently held fruitful discussions with their Nigerian counterparts in Accra, Ghana. The purpose of the meeting was to amicably resolve disputes that have developed over exclusive rights to treat the minor ailments of Nigerian rulers and ‘top government functionaries'.  read more »

I met black America for the first time in 2005, after three years of living and teaching in America, and one year before I returned to Canada. The long journey to this eventful meeting started in my father's library in Isanlu, a small town in central Nigeria. I came of age in Nigeria as the locust decades of military despotism and civilian kleptocracy set in, destroying everything including what used to be known as the middle class.  read more »

It is with great admiration, pride and respect that I pen this belated homage to Aimé Césaire, a son of Martinique and a child of Africa.

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Dear President Yar'Adua,

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As of now, results for the presidential elections in Zimbabwe have not yet been declared, five days after the elections were held last Saturday, March 29. In the meantime, the results of the parliamentary elections, which had been announced at snail's pace by the Electoral Commission over the past few days are now complete. They show that President Mugabe's ruling party, ZANU-PF, has lost its parliamentary majority. The opposition party, MDC, has won 99 to ZANU-PF's 97 out of 210 parliamentary seats.  read more »

Preparations for a seminar on African prison writing made me return to Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died during the Easter break. It was a second reading, coming some twenty-two years after the first. You do not approach the genre of African prison writing without an obligatory engagement of The Man Died, the text that cleared the path for later offerings by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Jack Mapanje, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Kunle Ajibade, Chris Anyawu, and even some later Robben Island narratives.  read more »

Shame on the throng of unpatriotic pessimists and subversive elements who never reckon with the valiant efforts of Nigeria’s leadership to “move the country forward” by taking the “dividends of democracy” to every doorstep in the country.  read more »

I came to Boscobel Beach on vacation but what did I get?  read more »

From as early as the campaign period preceding the hotly contested General Elections in Kenya last December, I, like many other Kenyans, could sense that something was not right, but could not put my finger on exactly what the problem was.  read more »

Pambazuka News spoke with Wangui Wa Goro, a public intellectual, writer, translator and academic and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Human Rights and Social Justice at London Metropolitan University about the power sharing agreement reached by Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga on February 28, 2008. Pambazuka News readers will remember her for her incisive commentary on Kenya pre and post the crisis.  read more »

Pan-Africa and the Third World are certainly on the move insofar as the west’s colonialist and racist perceptions of African and Third World people are concerned. However there are certain areas in which negative perceptions of African and Third World peoples are deeply entrenched, and will require specialized forms of informed and analytical critique to address them.  read more »

Nicholas Sarkozy has not ceased to entertain. His visit to Chad and South Africa, much like George W. Bush’s “African Safari,” makes better fodder for political satire and tabloid gossip than what the Western media giants like to consider  respected journalism.

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Give it to politicians, the military, and other professional hijackers of the state in Africa!  read more »

With more than eleven million copies sold and translations available in more than thirty-five languages, one can safely claim that Unoka, the lazy father of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, is as familiar to the global literary community as Miss Havisham or Aureliano Buendia.  read more »

Someone in the White House has proved to be as incompetent as the writer of Nicolas Sarkozy’s disastrous speech of July last year. He or she advised Bush to redeem his image by visiting Africa, a continent believed by many Euro-Americans to be politically insignificant but powerfully cathartic. Instead, the US president has confirmed how impotent and transparent the United States has become.

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Yesterday President Bush left for a six-day trip to five Afriucan nations.  read more »