Global South

When it comes to economic engagement in Africa, the approaches of the world's superpowers – past, present and future – have been fairly well characterised.

President Obama pretended to cross over to the Black side for a few minutes, last week, in response to near-universal Black rage at George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the stalking and murder of Trayvon Martin.

The newsletter has received contributions from thinkers and activists from various countries, both from the continent and its Diaspora. They include: Mozambique, Ghana, the United States, Brazil, Burkina Faso and South Africa.

Themes that used to be ignored in Africa such as hunger eradication and reduction of social inequality have now become top priorities as a result of collaboration between Brazil and Africa in south-to-south solidarity.

The nasal yet slippery vowels of Portuguese spoken by Brazilians echo throughout the second floor of Brazil House in Jamestown, Ghana; evidence of a language in which a subtle change of accent had developed across the Atlantic Ocean.

In 2011 while conducting research on the Yoruba legacy in Cuba, I became interested in the return movement of Afro-Cubans and Afro-Brazilians who were released and had to return to their native homeland in Africa.

The Portuguese claimed they discovered Brazil in April 1500 when Pedro Alvares Cabral sighted South America during the second Portuguese voyage to India; however, 15th- and early-16th-century manuscripts indicate Portugal had already known about Brazil.

Brazil is intimately connected with Africa: the cultural imprint left by Africans in loco is so vibrant that it has generated the contention according to which Brazil would be conceptualized at its best as an African nation [1].

Over the last fortnight, Brazil’s two million street protesters in 80 cities supporting the Free Fare Movement have declared how fed up they are with making multiple sacrifices to Brazilian neoliberalism as revitalized by one Sepp Blatter, the Swiss emperor of the Fédération Internationale de Foo

As the global economic, financial and political balance of power shifts from the West to the East, it is becoming increasingly evident that we are living through the tail end of half a millennium of Western supremacy.