Two years after he set himself on fire, Mohamed Bouazizi remains history’s most famous fruit vendor. Like many enterprising Tunisians, Bouazizi, 26, was subject to constant fines of as much as 10 times his daily earnings as he tried to make a living on the streets of Sidi Bouzid. After his scale and cart were […]
South African politics have been on a collision course toward Mangaung all year. The African National Congress is holding its National Conference in Mangaung, (the metropolitan region that includes Bloemfontein) this week and all of the political intrigue of the last few years will come to a head. Indeed, one can draw a straight line from the […]
THE first act of the rebel army that conquered Goma, a city in eastern Congo, on November 20th was to march up to the border with neighbouring Rwanda, as if for a celebratory inspection. A few hundred fighters with Kalashnikov rifles paraded past the silent guns of the United Nations peacekeepers, who were meant to […]
One of Congo’s biggest eastern cities fell to a powerful rebel force on Tuesday, Nov. 20, in a war that may redefine the region but has produced little political action by the United Nations, the United States, and international powers that heavily support neighboring governments — notably Rwanda, a Western darling and aid recipient — that are backing the […]
The usual story about African development over the last few decades is, simply, that it hasn’t developed. It is a region mired in permanent poverty—destined by geography or disease burden or corruption or ethnic division to everlasting misery. That story should be placed in the fiction aisle. Quality-of-life measures have been improving for decades across […]
AFTER giving a speech at a business conference in London a young analyst chatted with investment executives in the audience, then followed two of them to a nearby hotel lobby. Over glasses of Chablis the executives raved about their company’s worldwide network of extravagantly decorated offices and their fat annual bonuses. Then they offered the […]
ON JUNE 26th 1955, 3,000 South Africans gathered in a dusty square in Kliptown, a district of Soweto, a sprawling black township on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Members of the African National Congress (ANC) congregated alongside their anti-apartheid confederates to proclaim a new vision of the future. The next day police broke up the meeting […]
Africa is undergoing a period of unprecedented economic growth. According to The Economist, six of the ten fastest-growing countries in 2011 were in Africa. Average external debt on the continent has fallen from 63% of GDP in 2000 to 22.2% this year, while average inflation now stands at 8%, down from 15% in 2000. This positive trend […]
It was an important day for Angola, June 20th, 2006. Amid the diplomatic pomp and handshakes of an official visit, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao opened the Luanda General Hospital and had his picture taken peering into a microscope surrounded by officials in suits and medics in white smocks. The capital’s General Hospital, a sprawling eighty-thousand […]
On October 2nd, the South African website Politics Web published an extraordinary historical document, a 26-page memorandum from then-British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Loyd detailing the issues that he thought would affect British policy in Africa over the next decade. The memo gives a sense of just how much was at stake for a British empire in […]
looking beyond borders 