Okello Oculi

‘Today’s youth of Africa are lazy,’ lamented an angry, frustrated and contemptuous Professor Cheik Anta Diop. He expressed this view in 1980 during my first interview with him in his research laboratory in Dakar. That laboratory was funded for him by the Swedish Academy of Sciences.

In an analogy relevant to the diaspora, Julius Nyerere once likened those sent to school in Africa to messengers sent by villagers hit by famine and severe food shortage to borrow food from a far-away village.

Frantz Fanon was a man of African bloodline who became involved in African affairs while fighting German soldiers during the occupation of France in the Second World War. Fanon fought bravely against these Germans and was decorated for being a great warrior for France.

I have just immensely enjoyed reading Cameron Doudu's tribute to Basil Davidson.

With the 30 September 2009 deadline breached for Kenya’s squabbling politicians to set up a local tribunal to try ‘those who bear the greatest responsibility for the violence which claimed more than 1,500 lives’ following the December 2007 elections, former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi A

On 28 September 2009, ‘Chaka the Zulu’ in the fight against corruption in Nigeria, Mrs Farida Waziri, (officially tagged as the 'Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC)), beat a familiar but still startling drumbeat when she uttered the following daredevil words: 'I am inc

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem was born in far away Funtua in Northern Nigeria’s sahalian flatlands barely two years before Mazrui hit Makerere University as meteorite. In his own words: ‘Makerere made me a professor, less than two years after making me a lecturer’.

On 11 September 2009, it was reported that 24 people had died from angry protests by supporters of the king of Buganda, Kabaka Ronald Mutebi, for what they considered a sleight to the dignity of their monarch by the ‘national’ government.

When in the 1960s Ali Mazrui warned of emerging ‘monarchical tendencies in African politics’, his critics dismissed it as his supposed hatred of African revolutionaries and socialists in government.

From 26 to 30 July 2009, the Cheikh Anta Diop University and Senegal's Ministry of Foreign Affairs combined efforts to host a conference of scholars drawn from the African diasporas and the continent.