By Jonathan Power February 12, 2019 Nigeria is a veritable factory of sophisticated novelists. It was no surprise that Ben Okri won the British Booker Prize that goes annually to the best novelist of the year. Considering that high-class novel writing in English only began in Nigeria in 1958 with Chinua Achebe’s famous work, “Things […]
By Jonathan Power January 24, 2019 The Algerian philosopher and revolutionary writer, Frantz Fanon, wrote, “Africa is shaped like a gun, and Congo is its trigger. If that explosive trigger bursts, the whole of Africa will explode”. The Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s largest country, is now caught up in the aftermath of its first proper […]
By Jonathan Power December 27, 2018 The general election has been postponed yet again. Will this country, the largest and potentially the richest in Africa, ever escape from its continuous dictatorship, and its propensity to civil war? It’s not so long ago that Susan Rice, then the US’s Ambassador to the United Nations, was talking […]
By Jonathan Power September 18, 2018 Zimbabwe messed up its land reform. Now South Africa has decided to give a great push to its slow moving land reform. We’ll see if it can avoid Zimbabwe’s mistakes. President Donald Trump tweeted that he’d asked his secretary of state to look into “farm seizures and expropriations […]
Chinese President Xi Jinping and foreign leaders attending the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) head for the venue of the summit’s opening ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Sept. 3, 2018. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei) By Curtis Stone People’s Daily Online September 4, 2018 […]
By Jonathan Power The new, vicious, fighting in the Congo is the fourth round of warfare since independence in 1960. No other country has seen so many “blue berets”- UN peacekeeping troops- in its short history. The Belgian colonialists may have exploited it and transferred massive amounts of its wealth back to Belgium but […]
By Jonathan Power February 20, 2018 It’s been an odd couple of months for southern Africa. No one predicted last year that in almost the same breath the long-serving dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, and the super-corrupt president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, would be soon overthrown – and non-violently to boot. In […]
Burundi’s ongoing political instability highlights the stark divide between global conflict prevention rhetoric and practice. By Priyal Singh for ISS TODAY. First published by ISS Today • Since Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza announced that he would run for a third term in early 2015, political instability across the country has tested the limits of […]
By Juan Cole January 15, 2018 – Informed Comment In 1957 Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta went to Ghana in connection with its independence from Britain. The British had grabbed the fabled West African Gold Coast in the nineteenth century in order to profit from its gold and other resources (after having profited […]
By Jonathan Power January 2nd 2018. It was late 2003, the Liberian war was winding down after taking the lives of 250,000 civilians, spawning a small army of deadly child soldiers, and I was sitting at lunch in Monrovia inside the president’s palatial office and residence with the American ambassador on my right and […]
