Gather round children and hear “[all] Africans seem naturally networked to religion.” Bow thy heads in shame yea northern heathens for the “Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination, is part of the fabric of all African societies.” Heaven forbid you should get on your high horse and talk of gross generalizations swathed in the tropes […]
Post by Jonathan Faull and Sean Jacobs Apathetic liberal hearts in South Africa (and some in the mainstream media) will beat a little faster, but fleetingly, for the cause of “Agang” (‘Let us build’ in Sesotho; though some claim it means something else completely), the new political platform launched earlier this week by Mamphela Ramphele, to […]
Perhaps it is unfair to be skeptical of the announcement a few weeks ago by South Africa’s first black dollar billionaire, Patrice Motsepe, that he will donate half of the value of his family’s assets to charity under the guise of the Motsepe Family Foundation. The gesture – for want of a better word – […]
The spiritual Rottweiler, Pope Benedict XVI, is knackered. Just short of eight years into his papacy, the “R” bomb has been dropped on the Holy See; resurrecting a tradition established by Pope Gregory XII in 1415. Citing a deterioration of “strength [in] mind and body,” our man Benny will stand down at the end of […]
The month of August came and went explosively in South Africa, with 34 striking miners killed in a hail of police bullets. Ten more have died in the protracted strike (2 police, 2 security guards, and an additional 6 mineworkers). While the Africa is a Country collective was officially on vacation, we tweeted extensively about the […]
US Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently praised the South African Constitution making process–over that of the United States–as an example that could be instructive for a post-revolution Egypt. Ginsburg’s comments, in a wide-ranging interview with Egypt’s Al-Hayat TV, in which she repeatedly praised her country’s Constitution, have sparked outrage among tea-partying right-wing pundits in the US.
On July 6 2011, the world’s diplomatic elite flocked to one of the globe’s most underdeveloped regions to bask in the warm glow of the birth of a new nation. That South Sudan’s struggle for independence had claimed the lives of an estimated 2million people, and that the majority of its inaugural citizens had been […]
It was with some intrigue that my J.M. Coetzee google alert recently informed me that the elusive author had published something new; this time, apparently, in a contribution to a book celebrating, of all things, Australian cricket.
A survey of the University of Pennsylvania’s recently released Global Go To Think Tank Report’s “Top Thirty Think Tanks in sub-Saharan Africa” may leave the average reader of AIAC slightly perplexed as to what it takes to get respect for thinking on the continent.
In my previous life as a South African political analyst, I would spend long hours on the telephone to a ‘political risk analyst’ in New York, working for a major international investment advisory group. The conversations were not always easy, and much of my time was spent rebutting base assumptions that South Africa was the […]
