Geography Archives: Nigeria

The past week has been a wild roller-coaster ride in and out of Southern African ruling-party politics, down the troughs of world capitalism, and up the peaks of radical social activism.  Glancing around the region and world from those peaks, we can see quite a way further than usual. Looking first to South Africa, Saturday’s […]

While taking a significant toll on public revenues,1 repayment of the public debt has, since 2004, ceased to be a major concern for most middle-revenue countries and for raw material-exporting countries in general.  In fact the majority of governments of these countries are having no trouble finding loans at historically low interest rates.  However, the […]

  Nothing expresses the widening gap between the mind frames of the Iranian ruling elite and their Western counterparts more than the headlines in their respective newspapers.  The American media, above all, have unilaterally resolved the intelligence questions over Iran’s nuclear program.  The New York Times leads the pack with articles and even editorials that […]

  You’ll be familiar with the story.  An evil or crazy (the two are interchangeable) maniac is trying to destroy the American way of life, sowing destruction in an American city, blowing up American buildings, killing American citizens.  We stand amidst the rubble, watching the firemen, wondering what happened.  This man is demented, unreasonable; he […]

Summary Paul Collier, in an attempt to bring development economics to a wider audience, has written a book that departs from what he calls the “grim apparatus of professional scholarship.”  The result is a book that is almost entirely unverifiable.  What is verifiable turns out to be an elaborate fiction.  Collier’s thesis is based upon […]

  Awash in oil, yet its people, for the most part, are destitute.  Nigeria discovered “liquid gold” half a century ago and today is the world’s eighth largest oil exporter.  But the country is plagued by corruption, inefficiency, underdevelopment, and an uprising in its Niger Delta — the area where most of its oil reserves […]

With oil prices having more than doubled over the last 12 months, various reasons are being cited for the price increases. Adhip Chaudhuri, a visiting professor of economics at Georgetown University’s campus in Doha, Qatar, explains the cause and effect of high oil prices. Is the increase in oil prices plunging the global economy into […]

A telling remark about US imperialism’s double standards was uttered by Clinton-era deputy treasury secretary Stuart Eizenstat, who a decade ago was the driver of reparations claims against pro-Nazi corporations, assisting plaintiffs to gain $8 billion from European banks and corporations which ripped off Holocaust victims’ funds or which were 1930s beneficiaries of slave labor […]

  In even the most exploitative African sites of repression and capital accumulation, sometimes corporations take a hit, and victims sometimes unite on continental lines instead of being divided-and-conquered.  Turns in the class struggle might have surprised Walter Rodney, the political economist whose 1972 classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa provided detailed critiques of corporate looting. […]

In March 2008, the President of the African National Congress of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, led a high-level delegation of South African parliamentarians to the site of the victory of the forces of liberation at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola.  This visit was linked to the numerous ceremonies in Angola to commemorate the victory of Angola, […]

Introduction In August and September of 1974, people across the length and breadth of South Africa celebrated the coming independence of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique.  People like Mamphela Rampele led massive rallies honoring the success of the liberation movements in these countries.  There was even spontaneous dancing in the streets, and the air was filled […]

  19 May 2008: Friends, this is simply an account of what I saw and experienced in a twenty four period.  It might be incomplete.  It is not an analytical piece as such, but I hope a small step towards trying to understand what had taken place in this city, in this country that I […]

“What I find a bit reprehensible is the tendency of certain Western voices to . . . raising concerns about China’s attempt to get into the African market because it is a bit hypocritical for Western states to be concerned about how China is approaching Africa when they have had centuries of relations with Africa, […]

The war for Chad is not over.  It is likely to become more bloody and involve a wider humanitarian disaster before any solutions can be grasped.  The next week will be critical for the future of the country — and for the wider region, including Darfur, as well. Last weekend’s battle in the Chadian capital […]

The National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL) concludes that the mission of Africa Command (Africom) infringes on the sovereignty of African states due to the particularity of Africa’s history and Africa’s current economic and political relationship to the United States.

On 6 February 2007, President Bush announced that the United States would create a new military command for Africa, to be known as Africa Command or Africom.  Throughout the Cold War and for more than a decade afterwards, the U.S. did not have a military command for Africa; instead, U.S. military activities on the African […]

British Petroleum, Beyond Petroleum . . . Biofuel Promoter, Biosphere Plunderer.  Regardless of what the BP abbreviation actually stands for, one thing is clear: this oil giant knows a good deal when it sees one.  For a relatively small financial contribution, BP appropriates academic expertise from a leading public research institution, founded on 200 years […]

Everything Americans do requires transportation because our individualized homes, like our jobs and shopping locations, are all considerable distances from one another except in our largest, densest cities.  The private automobile rules.  Everything we buy in a store got there by truck.  Two-thirds of US oil consumption goes for transportation, most of that for private […]

  Achievements of the Cuban Revolution are well known to Monthly Review readers.  What is striking about Raúl Castro Ruz’s address on 26 July 2007 (an excerpt from which is reproduced below), on the occasion of Cuba’s National Day of Rebellion, is not his tribute to them but his candid assessment of the “errors which […]

Harlem’s Canaan Baptist Church, long associated with human rights activism, hosted a fundraising rally for women in Darfur, on June 13.  Billed as “Voices for the Voiceless,” the program featured speeches and fund-pitches by the program’s emcee, business developer Judith Price, and main speaker, peace activist and church leader Dr. Thelma Adair, with proclamations by […]