Are we really about to let three-quarters of a million people starve to death? The U.N. thinks we might. Figures describing the famine in Somalia from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) paint a consistent, horrifying picture. As of late September, hunger is besieging 12.4 million East Africans, with …
If ever proof was needed that competition – and its political manifestation, democracy – is as humanly innate as Darwin claimed, it is in the constant, sometimes violent challenges that confront one-party states. The Arab world is experiencing the ultimate expression of the universal opposition to a life without choice and the desire …
An excellent guest blog on how technology can struggle to keep up with giant human events, from TIME’s East Africa correspondent and Sudan specialist, Alan Boswell.
If a new country is born, and no one sees it online, does it really exist? More than a month after South Sudan’s independence, the new African nation is still not on …
The difference between a drought and a famine is down to man. Texas is in the middle of its worst drought on record right now but cowboys aren’t starving – because Texas, and the US, have government and economy enough to ensure they don’t. Somalia doesn’t have any government worthy of the name and that’s one reason why persistent …
All war is chaos, but after 20 years of fighting Mogadishu resembles perfect anarchy. The streets are surfaced with decades of compacted garbage and to drive them is to be tossed about like a small boat on a rough sea. The buildings still standing are pock-marked with hundreds — generally thousands — of holes from bullets, …
The aid and development world likes to deal in simple certainties. Africans are starving (1985)? Feed the world. Communism has failed (1989)? Privatize the world. A new mantra that has found wide acceptance in recent years runs something like this: Your country is still poor? You’re probably sexist.
The reported death of the mastermind of the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Nigeria Tanzania finally brings to a close the opening chapter of what went on to become the war on terror. Photographs and DNA analysis on the bodies of two men shot and killed at a Transitional Federal Government (TFG) roadblock in Mogadishu overnight on …
With NATO ever more confident of, and explicit about, deposing Muammar Gaddafi and the Libyan leader losing even some of his longest-standing supporters in Africa, the question increasingly becomes not whether he will go but, assuming he survives, where. Here’s five possible retirement homes for the 69-year-old.
1. Zimbabwe. Even if …
Good news from Zimbabwe where, despite Western media reports of political crisis, economic stagnation and widespread poverty, the electoral roll indicates the country is actually one of the healthiest on earth. The October 2010 count finds 41,100 voters in Zimbabwe aged 100 or more – four times the number of centenarians in Britain, …
South African President Jacob Zuma flies into Tripoli Monday to try to forge peace between Libyan leader Mouamar Gaddafi and the country’s rebels. Top of the agenda, according to Agence France-Presse: persuading Gaddafi to go. Zuma’s initiative, conducted on behalf of the African Union (AU), has met widespread skepticism, particularly …
News that last week’s shocking claim that 48 women are raped every hour in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is actually a shocking piece of statistical methodology makes me wonder what other parts of our world view are based on erroneous stats. Over the years, I’ve collected a few choice examples of my own but I’d be delighted to …
In the last year, to visit Sudan has been to undertake an exercise in schizophrenia. In the run-up to a referendum in January on whether to split Africa’s largest country in two, the mostly Christian south was – against all odds – about to pull off a peaceful and credible referendum on independence, despite medieval poverty and barely …
Early results in South Africa’s local elections suggest gains for the opposition, indicating a gradual but profound shift of power in Africa’s economic and political powerhouse. The ruling African National Congress (ANC), the party that defeated apartheid in 1990 under Nelson Mandela, will remain the ruling force in South Africa. But a …
