A week ago the Huffington Post published an article written by Melissa Jeltsen on an increasingly familiar name in women’s activism in the Arab world. The article, entitled “Mona Eltahawy, Egyptian-American Activist, On the Power of Protest,” has a rather misleading title. The focus of the article was not really Ms. Eltahawy’s thoughts on protest […]
Guest Post by Jimmy Kainja* Joyce Banda, the fourth President of Malawi, is among this year’s Foreign Policy list of 100 Global Thinkers for “stepping in – and up – to fix a broken country” after her predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika died suddenly of a heart attack in April this year. She’s in there at Number 22, […]
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 […]
We at Africa is a Country think Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace should either radically rethink the Failed States Index, which they publish in collaboration each year, or abandon it altogether. We just can’t take it seriously: It’s a failed index.
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.
Before Boima rides us out this year with West Africa’s best dance tunes, we couldn’t resist including a post with some of the lowlights of 2011.
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 […]
Ah, Foreign Policy Magazine. From their perennially ridiculous lists to bizarre ramblings by the likes of our man in Africa, Jeffrey Gettleman, they never cease to amaze with the levels of sensationalism and hyperbole that seem to define their work. Now they’re back with a photo essay titled, Postcards from Hell. And as you can expect […]
The rightwing magazine, FOREIGN POLICY, is fond of publishing random lists on their blog. Like “The World’s Worst Daughters” and “The World’s Worst Sons.” Basically a list of the errant children of assorted presidents and dictators. These kinds of lists mean nothing of course. But to the list anyway. It comes as no surprises that […]
