Geography Archives: Africa

Over the past few years, numerous West African states have taken steps toward greater economic and security sovereignty, often in opposition to Western (specifically French) designs on the region.

It was a spectacular example of a non-event, alloyed by pure symbolism and cynicism. Here was a British government offering—how generous of them—to return sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, whose residents had been brutally displaced between 1965 to 1973, to Mauritius.

WEST Africa, which had been largely under French colonial rule, never saw decolonization of the sort that India did.

U.S. efforts to control information in Africa will ultimately backfire, says African journalist, author, and filmmaker David Hundeyin.

The aftermath of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) is clear: Washington’s economic and diplomatic influence on the continent is set to wane even further.

China’s economic ascendency and the ensuing rivalry between Beijing and Washington, representing the world’s two largest economies, are being played out across the resource-rich African continent.

Lumumba had seen hope in the African diaspora to invest what capital and skills it had in building the Congo. Arghiri Emmanuel made similar recommendations to Antoine Gizenga, Lumumba’s former deputy prime minister who led the rebel socialist Free Republic of Congo from December 12th 1960 to January 1962.

Writing about Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange, Jairus Banaji noted that it is “the closest Marxist counterpart I can think of to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth”.

Burkina Faso will nationalize two gold mines at a cost of about US$80 million.

What do two South Pacific countries, two North American countries, one country in the Middle East, and (until recently) one country in southern Africa have in common with Europe?

Nigeria is experiencing its worst economic crisis in a generation. Annual inflation stands at more than 30%. Prices for food like yams, a staple food, are almost four times higher than last year.

That warning was 20 years ago, but in the years since, the U.S. has continued in its violent and aggressive ways, cloaking its violence and aggression with bromides about a rules-based international order and defence of democratic values. If only that was true.

The articles, speeches, and communiqués of Amilcar Cabral are required reading for revolutionaries today who are struggling with the agrarian question and the current wave of revolutions.

ON Independence Day–August 15th–we generally take stock of the path we have travelled since 1947. Today, I will take a different tack and focus on how or why a handful of European countries end up controlling major parts of the world.

As hunger threatens millions in southern Africa, some of the governments in these wildlife-rich countries have started harvesting game such as elephants, hippopotamuses, buffaloes, zebras, and others to feed their citizens.

“As such, it was necessary to engage authorities in Namibia on issues of concern to ensure our decisions and actions domestically are aligned with our obligations in terms of international law and our policy stance of many years on Palestine.”

Black August is a month to commemorate and tell the history of those African men and women brutalized, locked up, and killed by the U.S. criminal justice system.

The Society for International Relations Awareness (SIRA) Conference on Aug. 12-13 in Abuja, Nigeria, served as a powerful testament of solidarity and commitment for peoples fighting for self-determination.

For decades, most Black political commentary has expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people, but recently, a new phenomenon has appeared, particularly on social media platforms, which accuses all Palestinians of being anti-Black racists, and asserts that aligning with them is either of no use to Black people or even that it is detrimental to our own cause.

Baldwin theorizes whiteness as the psychology of empire.