It now seems highly likely that within the near future, some say within the coming year, a new constitution will be inaugurated in South Africa. For any new constitution to gain a semblance of legitimacy either locally or internationally, it …
Omar Bongo, the president of the West African state of Gabon, was once famous on the continent for his fashionable clothes and colorful lifestyle. Bongo was never a model democrat, yet today the man is famous for freedom-sounding political remarks. …
It might not be fair to blame as well-intentioned an event as Bob Geldof ‘s Band Aid,’ which was staged to raise awareness of the plight of drought victims in Ethiopia, and even raise funds for them. But there is …
No phenomenon lasting for a decade deserves to be labeled a “crisis.” It has thus become acutely embarrassing to speak in 1992 of the third-world debt “crisis.” Certainly a chronic condition; arguably a cancer; some even say a conspiracy—but a …
A basic assessment about the trade-union movement in Africa would go something like the following: the emergence of postwar nationalist movements coincided with economic expansion and enormous pressure on the living standards of the rising number of African workers. In …
A marked change in the political landscape of Africa has been in the making over the past five years. Ever since demonstrators in Khartoum and Omduran drove Sudan’s Jaafar Numeiri out of power in 1985, pressure from the streets has …
How are we to understand Africa? Via universal models or by cataloguing its particularities? The economic anthropology of Marshall Sahlins or Maurice Godelier, for example, has until now used specific behavioral patterns as a weapon against the universality of economic …
It may seem churlish or nitpicking to write a critical comment on “The Future of Socialism in Africa” — especially since I agree with most of Richard L. Sklar’s admirable article. He is not only right on the mark, but …
Independent Zimbabwe was born in 1980 on the ruins of Rhodesia. For some fifteen years the guerrillas of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (PF-ZAPU) fought Ian Smith’s white government, and …
As recently as four years ago, no fewer than twenty sovereign states in Africa were governed by rulers in the name of socialism. Had my article identified any two or more of the political economies in those countries as socialist …
Beset by a horrendous economic predicament, Africa is today also haunted by a dreadful political nightmare: now that the winds of democracy are sweeping the continent, it looks as if tyranny might give way to anarchy. The term is used …
Read Chinua Achebe’s 1992 “Reflections of a Novelist” in Dissent.
Literature has been an extraordinarily influential institution in postcolonial Africa, and African writers have been prominent in the struggles to build modern democratic societies on the ruins of the colonial state and against the brutalities of the many dictatorial post-independence …
A bleak picture emerges from today’s Africa. One glaring aspect is the material deprivation suffered by most Africans: the situation has degenerated to outright destitution because of steep economic decline across the continent in the past decade or so. Nearly …
Life on the African continent has been transformed by the lethal virus that causes AIDS —the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The decade-old AIDS epidemic has already strained the social and economic fabric of African societies, taking an especially heavy toll …
