When BLM demonstrators tore the bronze statue of the seventeenth century slave ship owner Edward Colston from its plinth in Bristol, they triggered a discussion on whether statues and monuments of those who helped Britain extend her colonial tentacles around the world should also be removed. Hopefully, this discussion will also lead Kenyans to review their monument landscape.
Science-based containment strategies, including nationwide surveys, significantly reduced COVID-19-related infections and fatalities in Uganda and Rwanda. In contrast, the Kenyan government turned the public health crisis into a “law and order” issue, while the leaders of Tanzania and Burundi went into denial mode.
The early Pentecostals rejected war, militarism, patriotic indoctrination, wage slavery and racism, believing that the love of Jesus had to supersede the love for nation-state, money, social class and whiteness. We must revive the passions of early Pentecostal leaders and examine Pentecostalism in fresh ways.
The recent news of evictions and mistreatment of African students in China during the COVID-19 pandemic is rooted in a history of violence and discrimination.
The colonial powers that reside within the conservation sector often tout “alternative livelihoods” as key to the economic empowerment of pastoralist communities. But this flimsy window dressing barely hides the fraud within. Conservation interests have built a cauldron into which the extremely wealthy are pouring startling amounts of money to subvert systems, grab lands, and plunder resources.
America needs a cure for what amounts to a psychosis affecting a significant part of white American culture, brought on by centuries of being steeped in the blood of innocent people.
No place in Kenya has been more affected by brutal curfews, lockdowns, and policing of bodies than northern Kenya. While state-sanctioned violence has been a central feature of life in northern Kenya for over a century, egregious human rights violations have not found closure, even after the release of the TJRC’s report and recommendations.
The mass protests and the coronavirus crises in the United States and Europe have exposed the fault lines in representative democracies, and appear to confirm the relative superiority of Eastern political capitalism over Western liberal capitalism. They point to a convergence of Western liberal democracy and Eastern political capitalism, the most likely future of the system that will rule the world.
The mistreatment of Africans living in China has tested the quality of African leadership. The responses of African leaders to this crisis were predictably technical, tactful, and softly worded. This has generally been registered by the wider African public as a failure by the political elite to provide a voice and accountability to African citizens.
America’s failure to have a concerted conversation on race and racism is not surprising because too much is at stake for too many people, interests, and institutions. But racism will not disappear by ignoring it, dismissing it, or wishing it away through fanciful invocations of a post-racial society.
