Comment & analysis

In the week of 26 August, Liberia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Augustine Ngafuan chided Africa for leaving countries hit by Ebola in the lurch.

Liberia and Sierra Leone are two fragile countries in West Africa with long histories of civil wars that claimed thousands of lives and displaced millions. Decades after their brutal civil wars, both countries are confronted with their greatest test yet: the Ebola epidemic.

In his book, ‘Infections and Inequalities’, Paul Farmer writes that we live in a world where infections pass easily across borders, while resources, including cumulative scientific knowledge are blocked at customs. The recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa is a case in point.

Many American families pay their undocumented immigrant housekeepers and gardeners fractions of what it would cost them to hire Americans to do the same job.

July 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This event was perhaps the most significant achievement and benchmark of the civil rights movement that had been so ably led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others from 1955-1966.

‘My advice to African leaders is to make sure that if, in fact, China is putting in roads and bridges, number one, that they are hiring African workers; number two, that the roads don’t just lead from the mine, to the port, to Shanghai.’ These were the words of US President Barack Obama, uttered

Since the end of the Cold War, in which it became the sole Super Power, the United States has preferred to go alone, on many issues where multilateralism would have been better. America’s single-minded unilateralism has bred discontent across the globe.

‘Prisoner of Love’ is the title of a memoir by the celebrated French novelist and playwright, Jean Genet, the enfant terrible of French literature and literary society in the postwar period.

TRANSFORMING MOBILIZATION INTO ORGANIZATION

As I started writing this piece on the sacred day of 30 June 2014, the 54th anniversary of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s independence, Patrice Lumunba’s Independence Day speech constantly filled my mind, especially when he said: ‘We are going to make of Congo the center of the sun’s radiance