No that’s not a stadium rock concert, it’s the musical references in the introduction to a scenario report, “African Futures 2050,” from the South African ‘Institute for Security Studies’ think tank.* The report, published in collaboration with the Pardee Center for International Futures, was published last month. We finally got around to page through the PDF: dry and packed with stats but an informative and readable analysis of ‘a’ projected course of African development to 2050 (covering demographics, economics, sociopolitical change, the environment and “human development itself”). In their preface, the authors are quick to admit that “[n]o one can predict the future and we do not pretend to do so. Instead [we] provide one possible future, shaped by recent and likely future developments, but with the clear statement that it is only one such vision.” (A necessary footnote, I believe.) The animated infographic above serves as a short introduction. The full report can be found here. [Read more...]
In Praise of the South African Constitution
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. [Read more...]
February 11, 1990
Today, 22 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked free from a prison outside Cape Town. Four years later, in April, the ANC won South Africa’s first democratic elections and in May 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president. These were, however, only 22 years in the 100 year history of the ANC and in the long history of colonialism, Apartheid and now brief freedom in South Africa. Last month the ANC held a massive party in Mangaung, the place where it was founded in January 1912 by a small group of activists. Hundreds of thousands people headed to the capital of the now Free State province. But this is also a different ANC. Its legacy is not so clear cut anymore and we have covered the personalities that shape it as well as some of its calamities on this blog. Amongst the thousands at the ANC celebrations in Bloemfontein was Prexy Nesbitt, a trade unionist, college professor (he’s taught for years at Columbia College) and leading figure in the US anti-apartheid movement as well as the liberation struggles in Angola and Mozambique between the 1960s and the 1980s. He has a long association with Southern African freedom movements. When Prexy returned to his home in Chicago, he jotted down his impressions of the celebrations, of the ANC and South Africa. With his permission we republish it here. We think it is a fitting reflection on the commemoration of a momentous day. –Sean Jacobs [Read more...]
What’s wrong with abortion?
The Two Sudans
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 displaced by decades of war, ensured that the Juba inauguration was all the more remarkable – brimming with the promise of peace, and the fruits of freedom. Now, in an act of apparent economic suicide, South Sudan has literally turned off the taps of their economy. “This is a matter of respect,” Pagan Amum, the South’s chief negotiator with Khartoum asserted, “We may be poor, but we will be free.” By shutting down 90% of the country’s oil production Juba seems willing to entirely forego 98% of the government’s non-aid related foreign currency earnings. How did we get here?
Angolan Solutions
The Angolan anti-corruption activist and journalist Rafael Marques de Morais recently made the pages of Africa Confidential, which discussed his having filed a criminal complaint against three prominent Angolans with the Angolan Attorney General’s Office.
More Benetton Politics
I swore I wasn’t going to add a thing to the discussion about the idiotic poster campaign by the student/youth wing of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance about a future non-racial love-fest. I have remained shtum (yiddish for ‘quiet’) about its horrid aesthetics, its awful family snap-shot quality. (Some have claimed it’s like a Benetton or Calvin Klein commercial which should leave said brands reeling). I have silenced myself in the face of the straight(ened) hair of the black model which, seriously DA students, is insulting. And, of course, I, like many others out there, have been annoyed at the shallowness of their vision of a non-racial future. Here in North America, it’s reported as a “racial furore” and “heated debate”. But then I heard “Q” on CBC radio the other day. And watched CNN yesterday morning. [Read more...]
The ‘football riot’ in Egypt
Since its founding in 1907, Al Ahly S.C. has been known as ‘the people’s club,’ representing resistance against the many forms of colonialism that have long plagued the African continent. Initially the first sporting club to allow Egyptians to join, Al Ahly remains the most popular of Egyptian teams, wearing to this day the red kits that honour the pre-colonial Egyptian flag. It is no great surprise, then, that Al Ahly Ultras – officially founded by Mahmoud Ghandour in 2007 (who is reported to have died in Wednesday’s violent attacks) – were on the front lines of both the initial “#Jan25” uprising and the continuing movement intended to topple the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF). Egyptians inspired by Tunisia and over 30 years of corrupt governance have utilized every resistance tactic at their disposal, including the well-organized and nearly fearless ultras.
Stop Land Grabs Petition
Several international organizations have been investigating and reporting on the corporate and foreign government’s land grabs happening across Africa. We’ve covered it and the Ethiopian government’s policy of forced villagization here, here and here. Now the Oakland Institute has put together a petition to U.S. president Barack Obama and the USAID administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah, asking them to stop their support to the Ethiopian government while they engage in such deals. You can do something. [Read more...]
The CIA’s Charles Taylor Revelation
The international dimension of Liberia’s civil war is rarely given the attention it deserves. The fact that Charles Taylor stands on trial for war crimes in Sierra Leone points to it partially, but often not realized are the roles that countries like Libya, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria played in initiating a truly multinational war. Recent revelations by the CIA — which have always been suspected — put the United States’ role in the war at center stage, adding fuel to claims of outside intervention in Liberian politics, since its founding as a Western style nation-state, up until today.
