Politics
The Other African election: France’s First Round
Both of the front-runners, incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist François Hollande, have run against FrançAfrique. Easier said than done.
In Praise of Jeffrey Gettleman’s Pulitzer
Pulitzer awarded Gettleman $10,000 for "his vivid reports, often at personal peril, on famine and conflict in East Africa."
Goldman Sachs’s Angolan interests
When the Financial Times commits an entire article to topics Angolan, it fills my Google news alert for a week.
Why is so much coverage of the Mali crisis so bad?
We mean the kind of bad that comes from being caught in a Beckettian loop of either saying nothing at all or having nothing to say.
The War in Mali’s North–To What Effect?
The rebels — that is, the MNLA and their disavowed and dangerous allies — hold Mali hostage.
The good Senegalese woman
Madame Faye Sall is the first woman of Senegalese birth and ancestry to become First Lady of Senegal. Some women in Senegal hope it will affect the debate about women and power there.
Coup d’Etat is the New Black
Military takeovers are happening so quickly and so fast in Africa, and instapundits need back facts. We are here to help. Here are some basic facts about Guinea-Bissau, site of the latest coup d'etat.
Bamako-sur-Seine
A sense of how the Malian diaspora experiences the political tensions and instability back home.
Germany’s Namibian Legacy
Jim Naughtom's images of Herero wearing German colonial outfits, is a powerful and necessary form of post-colonial critique.
The shareholders of Jesus Inc.
God is the fastest-growing business in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. It may be time we agitate for our governments to raise taxes on these corporations.
The new type of Senegalese
One of the key groups that engineered the ousting of Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade - he wanted to change the constitution to stay in power - was a youthful grassroots social movement group founded by a collective of rappers.
Mali’s Democracy–Down but not out
Is the adoption of a new constitution by Mali's military regime a starting point for getting the soldiers back under civilian rule? Let’s game this out a little bit.
Okonjo-Wahala
Nigeria's very unpopular finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, whose last name in local slang is made to sound like trouble, wants to be World Bank President. She's the "African Renaissance" candidate. What do Nigerians make of it all?
Mali’s Coup–‘Politics is Bad’
The idea that because the coup happened, it's no longer worth taking positions on it is wrong-headed and dangerous. We should ask why, and why now.
Mali’s coup — First Thoughts
A few things are worth saying about the mutiny and the coup that rocked Bamako over the last few days.
The Price of Leadership
A new series of documentaries explore the politics of leadership via an imaginative, malleable, deeply personal treatment of history.