Patricia Daley

While there have been jubilations in the streets in Bujumbura because of the 'attempted' military coup on 13 May after just under three weeks of protest, and 19 deaths, following the announcement of the candidacy of President Pierre Nkurunziza to run for an unconstitutional third term, Burundians

spent my teenage years on the Pembury Estate in Hackney – one of the locations of last week’s riots in London. For the last 20 years, I have been an Oxford University don. I left home and Hackney in 1976. I have continued to visit friends and family in the borough.

The controversy over sexuality in Africa today rests essentially on the legality or acceptability of sexual practices that deviate from the norm.

As I watched the scenes of revolutionary protest in Egypt and the reluctance of democratic western nations, self-claimed champions of democracy, to support the will of the Egyptian people, I started to ponder why the use of the term ‘liberal democracy’ has always made me feel uncomfortable, even

African peoples of all backgrounds, academics and governments have long been concerned about the image of Africa in the West.

The high incidence of rape and domestic violence in Africa suggests that African men need to have a conversation about masculinities – on what it means to be a man in contemporary Africa and how they define their relationship with women.

Over 35 years ago, the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, in his widely-acclaimed book, How Europe underdeveloped Africa, defined development in human society as a ‘many sided process’: