South Africa’s first democratic president is 93 years old today.

The artwork is a collaboration between the two Dutch artists Anton Corbijn and Berend Strik. (Via: ZAM Magazine)

* It would be appropriate to click through to our February 11, 2010 post “Songs for Nelson Mandela” (on the 10th anniversary of Mandela’s release of Mandela). Here.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.