South Africa’s gold and platinum might be doing well, but it is the rhino index that is going stratospheric. With 11 rhinos a week biting the dust and the horn going at $55 000 a kilogram, a lot of pockets are being lined. Last week local activists publicly ruffled some feathers with an advert that asks […]
Africa
Posted inBusiness
Why South Africa is not the world’s gateway to Africa
By Jacqueline Muna Musiitwa and Charles Wachira South Africa’s election into the Brics bloc of big emerging economies (along with Brazil, Russia, India and China) comes with many expectations and obligations. As Africa’s only Brics member, we need to ask whether SA’s inclusion is solely for its own benefit or as the gateway to the […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Senegal’s democratic leap forward
“Democracy is constructed like an edifice, freedom by freedom, right by right, until it reaches its snapping point.” When Senegal’s former president Abdoulaye Wade prophetically coined this saying years ago, he definitely didn’t have the 25th of March 2012 in his mind as the day when he would unceremoniously “snap”. The 85-year-old was trounced by […]
Posted inGeneral, Media
Simplification and child soldiers: Turning victims into victims
By Kelly-Jo Bluen Watching violence on TV screens does not sensitise viewers to the reality of the conflict. Rather, it serves to numb viewers, to instill within them a sense of fatigue and, most pertinently, from the vantage point of passive observer, to allow for oversimplified ethical polarisations of good vs. evil. These are the […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, General, News/Politics
Drilling Africa’s Arctic
The Virunga National Park, Africa’s oldest Unesco World Heritage Site, is situated along the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda. It contains more species of mammals, reptiles and birds than any other protected area on the continent. It has an exceptional diversity of landscapes stretching from the glaciers of the […]
Posted inGeneral
A Zambian’s response to “You Lazy (Intellectual) African Scum!”
By Jacqueline Muna Musiitwa I read the “transcript” of your conversation with my compatriot with much intrigue. Your view of the “third world” is not only dated in nomenclature, it is also dated in reality. When was the last time you were in Zambia? The Zambia of the 1980s is not the Zambia of 2012! […]
Posted inGeneral
As uncertainty deepens, the human condition further worsens
In a compelling poem by the great African intellectual giant Amílcar Cabral, a powerful ‘story’ of Return is told. A relatively young Cabral, in his 20s, published a timeless poem that remains relevant – though written in 1949 – even today. It is worth presenting a couple of verses from it: Old Mama, come and […]