In early 1997, a cohort of members of parliament from the long-neglected pastoralist rangelands defied President Daniel arap Moi to hold a meeting that formed the Pastoralist Parliamentary Group. Paul Goldsmith looks back his contribution to the meeting.
Sixty-five years after he was executed by the British colonial government, freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi remains, perhaps more than any other public figure in Kenya’s history, the focal point of nationalism.
Despite political interference and financial mismanagement, football remains the most popular sport in Kenya as it is in many countries across the world.
Yusuf Serunkuma asks how the continued and violent colonisation of the continent has not been more systematically resisted. In a long-read, Serunkuma looks at the extraordinary control of the continent, from banking, the coffee trade, land grabs and mining. Why have Africans failed to see these forms of foreign control as ‘colonial,’ in which former colonisers have continued the pillage of the continent?
Casting Africans as the wretched of the pandemic seems to make sense, given the obvious inequalities. But it deprives us of agency and urgency.
This is the first of a ten-part series of reflections on various aspects of my experiences over six years as Vice Chancellor of USIU-Africa that will be expanded into a book.
Opposition to livestock has become part of climate activism. Veganism is growing, particularly amongst affluent Westerners, and billions of dollars are flowing into the associated “animal-free meat and dairy” industry. This will result in yet more people forced off their land and away from self-sufficiency, give more profits and power to corporations, and may have little or no positive impact on the environment.
For the developed countries higher education internationalization is part of their arsenal of global soft power, while the developing countries value it for its potential to build high quality human capital.
Conservation practice today is based on settler colonialism because it is invariably led by the needs, sentiments and aspirations of outsiders. This is a fundamental flaw that began with European immigrants to North America.
The Federal Government of Somalia has spent the past four years waging a war on federalism, on political pluralism and on democratic norms, but not on Al-Shabaab.
Kudakwashe Tagwirei, who is close to Zimbabwe’s president and his inner circle, leveraged his privileged access to fuel and mining markets to strike a lucrative partnership with commodities giant Trafigura. Sanctioned by the U.S. and U.K. for corruption, Tagwirei continued to do business by relocating his network to Mauritius.
The fake councils of elders invented by the political class have robbed elders in northern Kenya of their legitimacy. It will take the intervention of professionals and true elders to end this adulteration of traditional institutions.