The recent crackdown by the Ghanaian government on illegal gold mining put the livelihood of hundreds of Chinese workers in the country at stake. On October 11, when Ghana’s police and immigration bureau raided mining fields in Ashanti province, a security officer shot and killed a 16-year old Chinese worker. More than one hundred Chinese […]
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On October 2nd, the South African website Politics Web published an extraordinary historical document, a 26-page memorandum from then-British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Loyd detailing the issues that he thought would affect British policy in Africa over the next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 […]
Rebel leader Joesphy Kony, head of the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army, has achieved greater notoriety than any other Ugandan in the world today. Idi Amin, who ruled the country through most of the 1970s, still stands as a symbol of African dictators who abused power and inflicted gross human rights abuses.Yet, as Uganda prepares to celebrate […]
Egypt‘s experiment with an Islamist government has passed 100 days. Mohammed Morsi, the second choice of his party, soft-spoken and hardly charismatic, has managed to stay in power and is even seen to be making progress. He has pulled off several tricky political set pieces – successfully challenging the old guard of army generals, hectoring […]
Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi has won grudging respect from detractors in his first 100 days by sending the army back to barracks faster than anyone expected and raising Egypt’s international profile in several newsmaking visits abroad. Yet his political fortunes and those of the Muslim Brotherhood which propelled him to power may well depend on his […]
Africa is more important than ever to the United States. The continent, home to six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies, is booming. And democracy has become the African norm rather than the exception. This year alone, no fewer than fifteen sub-Saharan countries will hold elections. With their combination of liberal politics and market economics, […]
The biggest problem facing the global economy is not climate change, trade imbalances, financial regulation, or the eurozone. It is short-term thinking. An epidemic of myopia has swept over the world in the past few decades, and it threatens our living standards like nothing else. t’s an epidemic with more than one cause, and not […]
Nelson Mandela was the country bumpkin made good, running away from his rural home as a teenager to become a lawyer in the big city and, later, one of the world’s most famous guerrilla leaders and most lionized political prisoners. After 27 years of incarceration, he was freed in 1990 and, in 1994, elected leader […]
Across Africa, oil, gas and minerals are being discovered more often than ever before. Nowhere is the global commodities boom being felt more acutely. Over the next decade, billions of dollars will flow into countries previously starved of financial capital, Kofi Annan writes. Read Here – International Herald Tribune
looking beyond borders 