Governance

‘There was a dim grandeur about it all, and also these seemed to a fate.

At the end of my first term in high school, I watched a screening of Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, the tale of an ordinary family unknowingly living in a house built over a graveyard without the bother of moving the bodies.

‘All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than

INTRODUCTION

Of Black historians Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the second African American to earn a PhD at Harvard University, is perhaps the most widely recognized name among this generation of young Black college and non-college goers.

At first glance, the West African state of Sierra Leone looks like an impressive exercise in democracy. Eleven years after extinguishing the flames of its civil war, Sierra Leone has conducted periodic elections, followed by the transfer of power from one political party to another.

What is wrong with Africa? Save for a few promising exceptions, why has Africa become the land where dictatorships, disrespect for elementary human rights, economic mismanagement, corruption, nepotism, ethnic confrontations, etc., proliferate and endure?

Phyllis Naidoo, or Phyllie as I used to call her, was my ‘mum’. Like many others, most of them highly placed cadres in the ANC today, I was adopted as her son, something I am extremely proud of.

Regular readers of Pambazuka News will remember a debate held a year or so ago in its pages between the US-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) and ourselves about a lengthy report that HRW had issued on labour rights violations of copper mining firms in Zambia owned by the Chinese state-owned ente

In the last one month, there has been an increase in the number of heinous and violent crimes targeted at young girls and women in South Africa.