An Interactive Study Map of African States

 Laura J. Mitchell

Africa is a country | December 19th, 2013

“Africa is a country,” some say with irony. Or derision. Or perhaps in sheer frustration, as those of us resident in some other part of the world try to share our interest in the vast, variegated topographies, cultures, and political constellations all called “Africa.” A critique of continents, the etymology of Ifriqiya, and a European fascination with Bilad al-Sudan are well-rehearsed elsewhere. Here in the U.S., we all operate politically and intellectually in a world-view shaped by the U.S. State Department and an area studies model of regions that presents Sub-Saharan Africa as separate from the Maghreb and Mediterranean Africa.
As Africanists, our stock-in-trade includes pushing back. As teachers, scholars, and commentators we poke and prod at constructed geographies, charting unities across previously demarcated sub-regions and identifying particularities in eco-zones or communities that are conventionally grouped with larger nations. In a post-modern landscape, geography is admittedly malleable. But that does not make it optional. I may be hopelessly old-school to say so: but to make sense of a place, you still have to find it on a map.

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Looking for Africa

An African Studies graduate student investigates the program's decline and Yale's new focus on Africa

By Scott Ross

Yale Daily News - Sunday, December 1, 2013

My welcome to Yale was quieter than I expected. On orientation day in August 2012, I took my seat among the seven other first-year African Studies Master’s students in a small classroom on the first floor of Luce Hall. We could hear chatter and laughter coming from other department meetings upstairs, but the atmosphere in our room was subdued. We introduced ourselves and waited for the meeting to begin. The eight of us came from all over — the West Coast, the East Coast, China, Ethiopia — but we had all come to Yale for the same reason: to learn about Africa.
I had just graduated from Arizona State University, where I’d fallen in love with Africa after getting involved with campus advocacy efforts to raise awareness about the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group in Uganda and Congo. I’d fundraised to rebuild schools in the region, met with elected officials to discuss U.S. involvement, and devoted hours and hours to learning about the conflict.

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If Nelson Mandela really had won, he wouldn't be seen as a universal hero

Mandela must have died a bitter man. To honour his legacy, we should focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to     

By Slavoj Žižek            

theguardian.com, Monday 9 December 2013

In the last two decades of his life, Nelson Mandela was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country from the colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power and anti-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Robert Mugabe, and South Africa remained a multiparty democracy with a free press and a vibrant economy well-integrated into the global market and immune to hasty socialist experiments. Now, with his death, his stature as a saintly wise man seems confirmed for eternity: there are Hollywood movies about him – he was impersonated by Morgan Freeman, who also, by the way, played the role of God in another film; rock stars and religious leaders, sportsmen and politicians from Bill Clinton to Fidel Castro are all united in his beatification.

Is this, however, the whole story? Two key facts remain obliterated by this celebratory vision. In South Africa, the miserable life of the poor majority broadly remains the same as under apartheid, and the rise of political and civil rights is counterbalanced by the growing insecurity, violence and crime. The main change is that the old white ruling class is joined by the new black elite. Second, people remember the old African National Congress that promised not only the end of apartheid, but also more social justice, even a kind of socialism. This much more radical ANC past is gradually obliterated from our memory. No wonder that anger is growing among poor, black South Africans.

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Africa and the Chinese Way

The New York Times - December 15, 2013

The Kamba people of Kenya claim they were warned about the evils of colonialism long before the first colonialist arrived. The legend goes that the prophet Syokimau, back in the early 19th century, told her people of “a long narrow snake spitting fire” that would make its way up from the East African Coast, bringing with it “red people” who would take away their land. She was right; it was the railroads more than anything else that enabled European colonialists to exploit Kenya’s people and extract its wealth during the first half of the 20th century.

The 1,000-kilometer track stretching from the Kenyan port of Mombasa to Uganda was Britain’s most ambitious project in Sub-Saharan Africa. The railroad, begun in 1895, was famously disrupted by the so-called man eaters of the Tsavo, two lions that stalked and attacked construction workers. More than 130 people are said to have been killed — the exact number is uncertain — before the animals were finally hunted down. Within the next five years the railroad was completed and the way opened to British domination of the region. 

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Mandela has been sanitised by hypocrites and apologists

The ANC liberation hero has been reinvented as a Kumbaya figure in order to whitewash those who stood behind apartheid

The Guardian, Wednesday 11 December 2013

We have now had a week of unrelenting beatification of Nelson Mandela by exactly the kind of people who stood behind his jailers under apartheid. Mandela was without question a towering historical figure and an outstanding hero of South Africa's liberation struggle. So it would be tempting to imagine they had been won over by the scale of his achievement, courage and endurance.
For some, that may be true. For many others, in the western world in particular, it reeks of the rankest hypocrisy. It is after all Mandela's global moral authority, and the manifest depravity of the system he and the African National Congress brought to an end, that now makes the hostility of an earlier time impossible to defend.

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Madiba Tribute

Woolies and Soweto Gospel Choir: Madiba Tribute

A New Book: Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amílcar Cabral

Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amílcar Cabral.
Edited by Firoze Manji and Bill Fletcher Jr.
Dakar, CODESRIA and DARAJA Press, 2013

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS: 
Senai Abraha • Makungu M. Akinyela • Kali Akuno • Samir Amin • David Austin • Ajamu Baraka • Jesse Benjamin • Angela Davis • Demba Moussa Dembélé • Jacques Depelchin • Mustafah Dhada • Jean-Pierre Diouf • Miguel de Barros •Aziz Fall • Grant Farred • Bill Fletcher Jr • Mireille Fanon-Mendès France • Hashim Gibril • Nigel C. Gibson • Patricia Godinho Gomes • Lewis Gordon • Adrian Harewood • Augusta Henriques • Wangui Kimari • Redy Wilson Lima • Ameth Lo • Richard A. Lobban, Jr • Filomeno Lopes • Brandon Lundy • Firoze Manji • Perry Mars • Bill Minter • Explo Nani-Kofi • Barney Pityana • Maria Poblet • Reiland Rabaka • Asha Rodney • Patricia Rodney • Carlos Schwarz • Helmi Sharawy • Olúfémi Táíwò • Walter Turner • Stephanie Urdang • Chris Webb • Nigel Westmaas • Amrit Wilson

2013 marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Amilcar Cabral, revolutionary, poet, liberation philosopher, and leader of the independence movement of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. Cabral’s influence stretched well beyond the shores of West Africa. He had a profound influence on the pan-Africanist movement and the black liberation movement in the US. In this unique collection of essays contemporary thinkers from across Africa and
internationally commemorate the anniversary of Cabral’s assassination. They reflect on the legacy of this extraordinary individual and his relevance to contemporary struggles for selfdetermination and emancipation. His well-known phrase “Claim no easy victories” resonates today no less than it did during his lifetime. The volume comprises sections on Cabral’s legacy; reflections on the relevance of his ideas; Cabral and the emancipation of women; Cabral and the pan-Africanists; culture and education; and Cabral’s contribution to African American struggles. A selected bibliography provides an overview of Cabral’s writings and of writings about Cabral.
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and DARAJA Press
ISBN-13: 978-2869785557 ISBN-10: 2869785550
BISAC: Political Science / World / African
518 pages List Price $25.

How Many Times Did Cable News Mention Steve Biko This Week?

By Tommy Christopher

mediaite.com | December 7th, 2013

The death of global civil rights icon Nelson Mandela this week has sparked hours of coverage, including some welcome (and unwelcome) revisitation of Apartheid’s history and impact. While the lion’s share of the coverage has rightly focused on the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela, the retelling of Apartheid’s history has also included many important touchstones and leaders in the struggle against South Africa’s white supremacist government, save one conspicuous omission: Steve Biko.

Even as cable news networks, to varying degrees, recounted important milestones like the Sharpesville Massacre, Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment, the Reagan-ea politics around sanctions against South Africa, and to a much lesser extent, the Soweto Uprising, even as white apartheid figures like P.W. Botha and F.W. de Klerk were written into cable news’ remembrances of Mandela’s lifelong struggle, the name of Stephen Bantu Biko was not uttered. According to the TV Eyes television transcript database and the Internet Archive TV database, Biko was not mentioned once by any of the cable news networks this week.


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Madiba (Tata) and Western Imperialism

West praises Mandela for own interests
Interview with Abayomi Azikiwe
Press TV - December 6, 2013
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/12/06/338562/west-praises-mandela-for-own-interest/

Mandela's African legacy
By William Gumede in Johannesburg and Patrick Smith
Theafricareport.com - 06 December 2013
http://www.theafricareport.com/News-Analysis/mandelas-african-legacy.html

C.I.A. TIE REPORTED IN MANDELA ARREST
By DAVID JOHNSTON
Special to The New York Times - June 10, 1990
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/10/world/cia-tie-reported-in-mandela-arrest.html

The Conservative Movement’s Long-Time Hate Affair With Nelson Mandela
By BILL BERKOWITZ
TRUTHOUT - December 6, 2013
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18354-conservative-hate-nelson-mandela

The real Mandela: Don’t let his legacy be abused
By John Wight
Russia Today - December 6, 2013
http://rt.com/op-edge/mandela-legacy-abused-cameron-obama-846/ 

Six Things Nelson Mandela Believed That Most People Won’t Talk About
By Aviva Shen and Judd Legum
Think Progress - December 6, 2013 
http://thinkprogress.org/home/2013/12/06/3030781/nelson-mandela-believed-people-wont-talk/

Lest We Forget, on Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, Mandela Was a Radical
By  Mehdi Hasan
The Huffington Post - 06/12/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/nelson-mandela-iraq-israel_b_4396638.html 

Nelson Mandela – an African nationalist
Socialist Resistance - December 5, 2013
http://socialistresistance.org/5331/nelson-mandela-an-african-nationalist

Nelson Mandela: Icon of Africa’s Liberation Struggle, Creation of the Real Movers and Shakers of the Global Scene
By Mike Molyneaux
Global Research - December 06, 2013
http://www.globalresearch.ca/nelson-mandela-icon-of-africas-liberation-struggle-creation-of-the-real-movers-and-shakers-of-the-global-scene/5360531

It was the CIA that helped jail Nelson Mandela
Crocodile Tears to Mask US Imperialism’s Role as the Enemy of African Liberation 
By Brian Becker
Liberation - July 18, 2013
http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/cia-helped-jail-nelson-mandela.html

Mandela on U.S. imperialism in Africa in 1950s
By Nelson Mandela
The Militant - Vol. 74/No. 45      November 29, 2010
http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7445/744549.html

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013) Official Trailer

Don’t Sanitize Nelson Mandela: He’s Honored Now, But Was Hated Then

By Peter Beinart

The Daily Beast - December 5th 2013

If we turn the late South African leader into a nonthreatening moral icon, we’ll forget a key lesson from his life: America isn’t always a force for freedom.

Now that he’s dead, and can cause no more trouble, Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint. But not long ago, in Washington’s highest circles, he was considered an enemy of the United States. Unless we remember why, we won’t truly honor his legacy.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

From their perspective, Mandela’s critics were right to distrust him. They called him a “terrorist” because he had waged armed resistance to apartheid. They called him a “communist” because the Soviet Union was the ANC’s chief external benefactor and the South African Communist Party was among its closest domestic allies. More fundamentally, what Mandela’s American detractors understood is that he considered himself an opponent, not an ally, of American power. And that’s exactly what Mandela’s American admirers must remember now.

We must remember it because in Washington today, politicians and pundits breezily describe the Cold War as a struggle between the forces of freedom, backed by the U.S., and the forces of tyranny, backed by the USSR. In some places—Germany, Eastern Europe, eventually Korea—that was largely true. But in South Africa, the Cold War was something utterly different. In South Africa, for decades, American presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without irony, called South Africa’s monstrous regime “essential to the free world.”


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America’s Shameful Treatment of Mandela Still Lingers

Friendly Fire - Daily News Opinion Blog

June 30, 2013 by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

During his trip to South Africa, President Obama graciously and reverentially praised Nelson Mandela as a leader who inspired people around the world and that included himself. This was more than just praise for one of the planet’s most respected leaders, the man Obama called by his traditional tribal (and affectionate) name Madiba. He also accurately noted that Mandela was a driving force in the freedom struggle against apartheid and the post-apartheid struggle for democratic, non-racial rule in South Africa. Obama’s heartfelt remarks about Mandela have been part of the consistent U.S. government’s narrative about Mandela since the official dumping of apartheid in 1990 and black majority rule in 1993.
But the embrace of Mandela and the reality of black majority rule in South Africa have come at a steep price. The price was the U.S. government’s decades old assault on Mandela’s character and leadership. The malign treatment by the U.S. of Mandela didn’t end with his release from prison in 1990, the official unbanning of his African National Congress, or even his becoming the first democratically elected President of South Africa in 1993. It didn’t end when he took the rare, tactful and universally praised step of stepping down from the presidency in 1999 after one term. It didn’t even end as then Democratic presidential candidate Obama in 2008 inched close to his election as America’s first African-American president.
The U.S. government still continued to brand Mandela a terrorist and the ANC a terrorist organization. This ridiculous tag on Mandela as a terrorist chilled U.S. relations with Mandela and the South African government even after the power takeover. The chill began with the Reagan administration’s well-documented fierce resistance to the demand that corporations and non-profits divest their financial investments in South Africa, and the administration’s refusal to support UN and international trade sanctions and an arms embargo against South Africa. The Reagan administration’s line was that the ANC was Cuban backed and posed a communist threat to South Africa and by extension U.S. investments. Mandela by then was well into his second decade in prison on Robbins Island, posed no threat to the South African government, and had no direct say in the political or military operations of the ANC. Yet he was still regarded by the Reagan administration as a dangerous subversive. Mandela’s release from prison, the recognition by the apartheid government of the ANC, and his subsequent presidential election changed little, except the terminology of how Mandela was tagged. This dovetailed with the U.S.’s shift to the global fight against terrorism. Mandela instead of being a communist and a subversive simply had the terrorist label slapped on him. Though Regan had dumped him and the organization on the terrorist watch list in the 1980s and it stood unchallenged during those years. It took a concerted effort by civil rights activists and many congressional Democrats to end the political targeting of Mandela. But it was not a slam dunk. As late as 2007, ANC officials, and that included Mandela, who sought to travel to the U.S. still had to get a State Department waiver or special certification in order to enter the country. Mandela had to get that even for his White House visit with George W. Bush in 2005.
The issue finally came to a head that year when Barbara Masekela, the former South African ambassador to the United States, was denied a visa to visit a dying cousin in the United States. A chagrined Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called it “embarrassing.” In April, 2008, she urged Congress to remove Mandela and the organization from the terrorist watch list
With a big prod from the Congressional Black Caucus, Congress finally voted to remove the now 90 year old (and Nobel Prize winner in 1993) Mandela and ANC from the U.S. government’s official terrorist watch list. But even the language of the bill that removed him from the list was hardly a full throated, ringing praise of the ANC and Mandela, or a disavowal of the disgraceful history of his treatment. It did not acknowledge the towering role and stature of Mandela in the fight for justice. It simply said that it would add the ANC to a list of groups that should not be considered terrorist organizations. The closest Congress came to repudiating the official maltreatment of Mandela was then Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s retort that it was “a great shame” that his name was on the watch list. Rice, for her part, followed this and called Mandela “a great leader.”
Bush promptly signed the bill in July, 2008 after Senate passage. This seemingly closed the book on not a 20 year but the forty year branding of Mandela as a political pariah by the US government. This vicious legacy left a deep scar of suspicion and doubt, and distance from South Africa’s government leaders, and colored relations between the governments that hasn’t ended even today as the U.S. and the world publicly celebrate Madiba’s colossal place in history.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new ebook is America on Trial: The Slaying of Trayvon Martin (Amazon). He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.

Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

South Africa's Future Foreign Policy By Nelson Mandela

Foreign Affairs November/December 1993 Issue
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/49408/nelson-mandela/south-africas-future-foreign-policy

NEW PILLARS FOR A NEW WORLD

As the 1980s drew to a close I could not see much of the world from my prison cell, but I knew it was changing. There was little doubt in my mind that this would have a profound impact on my country, on the southern African region and the continent of which I am proud to be a citizen. Although this process of global change is far from complete, it is clear that all nations will have boldly to recast their nets if they are to reap any benefit from international affairs in the post-Cold War era.

The African National Congress (ANC) believes that the charting of a new foreign policy for South Africa is a key element in the creation of a peaceful and prosperous country. Apartheid corroded the very essence of life in South Africa. This is why the country's emerging political leaders are challenged to build a nation in which all people-irrespective of race, color, creed, religion or sex-can assert fully their human worth; after apartheid, our people deserve nothing less than the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This vision cannot be realized until South Africa can again participate fully in world affairs. For four decades South Africa's international relations were dogged by the apartheid issue. By the end of the 1980s, South Africa was one of the most isolated states on earth. Recovering from this will be no easy task. Conscious of this difficulty, the ANC is involved in developing those policies which will be necessary to take South Africa into the new world order as a responsible global citizen. Additionally, it is concerned with the need to forge a truly professional diplomatic service which will serve all of South Africa's peoples and represent their rich diversity. Fortunately, foreign governments have recognized the importance of this and are generously providing training for young South Africans who wish to make careers in foreign affairs.

Within the context of the current multiparty negotiations, preliminary discussions are also under way between political parties with an interest in foreign affairs in an effort to bridge the divides between them on important policy questions. The pillars upon which our foreign policy will rest are the following beliefs:

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Catch a Fire - Tim Robbins Movie (2006) HD

The Life and Death of Steven Biko

Remember Sobukwe! - South Africa

Nelson Mandela, Former Leader of the ANC and President of South Africa, Has Died at 95

Nelson Mandela dies

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the father of the nation, has died on December 5 2013 at the age of 95.

05 Dec 2013 23:27 Staff Reporter
South African Mail & Guardian
http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the father of the nation, died on December 5 2013 at the age of 95.

President Jacob Zuma made the announcement from the Union Buildings in Pretoria on Thursday night. He said Mandela passed away at 20:50 in his Houghton home surrounded by his wife, Graça Machel and members of his family.

Zuma said Mandela would have a state funeral and that the flags would fly half-mast from December 6 until after the funeral.

Long illness

Mandela was hospitalised on June 8 with a recurring lung infection. Initial reports from the Presidency suggested Mandela was stable, although his condition was serious. But on June 23, the Presidency announced that Mandela's condition had deteriorated and he was critical.

Court affidavits soon confirmed that the former statesman was on an assisted-breathing, life support machine. More reports emerged about Nelson Mandela in the days that followed, that he was in a "permanent vegetative state", although the presidency denied these, maintaining that he was "critical yet stable".

On his 95th birthday, July 18, President Jacob Zuma announced an improvement in Mandela's health. Mandela was discharged from hospital in September and transported to his home in Houghton. In November, his family said he remained "quite ill", but his pneumonia had cleared up. President Jacob Zuma visited Mandela on November 18 and said Mandela was still in a critical condition, but that he continued to respond to treatment.

On December 3 his daughter, Makaziwe Mandela, said the former president was "strong" and "courageous", although he was "on his death bed". Mandela's grandson, Ndaba Mandela, said his grandfather was "not doing well", although, "he is still with us".

His declining health has been the subject of much speculation over the past few years. He was diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer in 2001 but made a full recovery. In 2011, he was admitted to hospital following a severe respiratory infection and a year later underwent a scheduled surgery for a longstanding abdominal complaint.

Mandela was plagued by recurring lung ailments in recent years. He spent 18 days in hospital at the end of 2012 and, despite receiving home-based high care thereafter, was back in hospital in March and April 2013.

There were renewed fears for his health when he returned to hospital in June. Despite assurances from the presidency that he was in a "serious but stable" condition, South Africans began preparing themselves for the worst as Mandela's family members flocked to Johannesburg, struggle stalwarts paid visits to the icon, and the world's media gathered in Qunu, Houghton and at the Pretoria hospital where he was treated.

The much-loved Mandela, known affectionately as Tata Madiba, became increasingly frail and retired from public life in 2004 at the age of 85.

Mandela's last public appearance was a brief one, at the end of the 2010 soccer World Cup. Since then, he has split his time between his home in Houghton, Johannesburg, and his ancestral home in Qunu in the Eastern Cape.

Mandela became the symbol of the struggle against apartheid after he was convicted in the Rivonia Trial of charges of sabotage and was sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island.

At the end of his trial, Mandela gave a now iconic speech in which he said: "I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Mandela, a key figure in the African National Congress, who helped found the party's youth league and armed wing,Umkhonto We Sizwe, was imprisoned for 27 years before he was finally released in 1990 at the age of 71.

Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, together with former president FW De Klerk, for the 'peaceful termination of the apartheid regime and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa". A year later, he was elected president in the country's first democratic election.

He stepped down from the presidency in 1999 after one term in office but continued with a busy public schedule. He brokered negotiations for peace in Rwanda, established the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation for educational scholarship, and launched the 46664 Aids fundraising foundation.

Africa's Happiest Countries

Largest African Populations

Why Central African Republic is slipping close to catastrophe

By Paul Melly, Associate Fellow, Chatham House,

Special to CNN December 2, 2013

Is the Central African Republic the world's next Rwanda? That's the question some are beginning to ask about a crisis that has been going on for most of this year but has only just burst through into the mainstream international mass media.

Warlords ruling the countryside by terror, a government that is almost toothless and the collapse of institutions have forced 0.4 million people to flee their homes and left a million dependent on aid.

And now reports of Muslim and Christian communities engaged in inter-communal violence have sparked concern about a slide into religious conflict. The "G-word" -- genocide -- has even been floated as a real risk by some observers.

In fact the country has not yet sunk that far. There is no sign of ideological motivation or the systematic political organization of mass killings.

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