Chair of Black Studies Department - Portland State University

https://jobs.hrc.pdx.edu/postings/15591 

Position Summary
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences invites applications for a tenure track position (associate, full professor) for appointment in the Department of Black Studies beginning September 1, 2015.
Responsibilities: Tenure track faculty are expected to provide classroom instruction; engage in research activities, including the pursuit of grants and external funding; the publication and/or dissemination of scholarly and research based knowledge; advise students; participate in department and university governance through committee work and related activities; participate in community involvement activities that support the goals and objectives of the Black Studies Department.
Qualifications: Doctorate and a record of effective teaching, scholarly research and community involvement with a focus on the Black experience are required. The candidate must be able to instruct courses focused on the African American and/or African experiences drawing on the history and traditions of the Black Studies and Africana Studies disciplines. Candidates with strong credentials in the areas of local, national and diasporic history are encouraged to apply. Candidates with experience and expertise in the traditional disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences are also welcome to apply if their background is appropriately linked to a focus on the Black and/or African experiences. All candidates should be comfortable and competent working within a framework of interdisciplinary assignments and responsibilities.
Demonstrated success and ability in obtaining funded research as well as scholarly publications commensurate with rank are expected. Evidence of excellent classroom teaching and effective interactions with students is advantageous. The candidate is expected to be qualified to assume the administrative and management responsibilities of the Chair of the Black Studies Department. The Department expects that the successful candidate will assume the chair role immediately or soon after hire. Appointment may include tenure or credit towards tenure depending on experience and qualifications.

Minimum Qualifications 
Doctorate and a record of effective teaching, scholarly research and community involvement with a focus on the Black experience are required. The candidate must be able to instruct courses focused on the African American and/or African experiences drawing on the history and traditions of the Black Studies and Africana Studies disciplines. Candidates with strong credentials in the areas of local, national and diasporic history are encouraged to apply. Candidates with experience and expertise in the traditional disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences are also welcome to apply if their background is appropriately linked to a focus on the Black and/or African experiences. All candidates should be comfortable and competent working within a framework of interdisciplinary assignments and responsibilities.
Demonstrated success and ability in obtaining funded research as well as scholarly publications commensurate with rank are expected. Evidence of excellent classroom teaching and effective interactions with students is advantageous. The candidate is expected to be qualified to assume the administrative and management responsibilities of the Chair of the Black Studies Department. The Department expects that the successful candidate will assume the chair role immediately or soon after hire. Appointment may include tenure or credit towards tenure depending on experience and qualifications.

Key Cultural Competencies
Creates an environment that acknowledges, encourages and celebrates differences.
Functions and communicates effectively and respectfully within the context of varying beliefs, behaviors, orientations, identities and cultural backgrounds.
Seeks opportunities to gain experience working and collaborating in diverse, multicultural, and inclusive settings with a willingness to change for continual improvement.
Adheres to all PSU policies including the policies on Prohibited Discrimination & Harassment and the Professional Standards of Conduct.

Complete the on-line application and include a statement of interest; a curriculum vitae; three writing samples (optional); and provide the names and email addresses of individuals (minimum of 3 – maximum of 5) who have agreed to serve as references.
Review of applications will begin May 14, 2015 and continue until finalists are identified.

"BALDWIN'S NIGGER" (James Baldwin and Dick Gregory)

The U.S. military is never leaving Africa: How 9/11 spawned a permanent war

The war on terror extends beyond the Middle East, and a new agreement could keep soldiers on the ground for decades

Nick Turse

TomDispatch.com -  Thursday, Apr 16, 2015

For three days, wearing a kaleidoscope of camouflage patterns, they huddled together on a military base in Florida. They came from U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and U.S. Army Special Operations Command, from France and Norway, from Denmark, Germany, and Canada: 13 nations in all. They came to plan a years-long “Special Operations-centric” military campaign supported by conventional forces, a multinational undertaking that — if carried out — might cost hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of dollars and who knows how many lives.
Ask the men involved and they’ll talk about being mindful of “sensitivities” and “cultural differences,” about the importance of “collaboration and coordination,” about the value of a variety of viewpoints, about “perspectives” and “partnerships.”  Nonetheless, behind closed doors and unbeknownst to most of the people in their own countries, let alone the countries fixed in their sights, a coterie of Western special ops planners were sketching out a possible multinational military future for a troubled region of Africa.

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8 African Countries Whose Independence Is a Direct Result of the Teachings of Marcus Garvey

by Taylor Gordon 

Atlanta Black Star - April 16, 2015

Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe, formerly known as Rhodesia, is one of the greatest examples of a country being impacted by Garveyism. According to an article titled “The Seeds are Sown: The Impact of Garveyism in Zimbabwe in the Interwar Years,” Marcus Garvey’s teachings had an “electrifying effect on colonial Zimbabwean migrant workers in South Africa, inspiring them to form various associations.” Garvey’s emphasis on Black nationalism along with other principles that were considered radical at the time helped spark the “colony’s most radical African movement in the interwar years.” The teachings ultimately helped shape the political, religious and social landscape for the associations that eventually came together to form Zimbabwe.
Ghana
Garvey’s teachings inspired many great leaders including Kwame Nkrumah. As a result of this influence, Nkrumah went on to start working to free Africa of colonial with rule starting with Ghana, according to Black Business Network. From 1952 to 1966, Nkrumah acted as the leader of what was then known as the Gold Coast before he led the country to win its independence from British colonial rule. This made Ghana the “first Black African country to become independent,” according to the BBC. It also led to many people in the country crediting Nkrumah with “stabilizing a turbulent political scene and leaving a legacy of democracy.”

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14 African Nations Being Forced By France to Pay Taxes for the ‘Benefits’ of Colonialism

Atlanta Black Star - September 30, 2014

Fourteen nations listed below are in agreement to deposit 65 percent of all foreign currency reserves in a shared reserve fund to France. The countries established the Monetary and Economic Union of West Africa. Their currency, the CFA-Franc, is printed under supervision of the French National Bank in Chamaliéres, France.
Christof Lehmann wrote for nsnbc.me in 2012, “France is indebting and enslaving Africans by means of Africa’s own wealth; for example: 12.0000 billion invested at three percent creates 360 billion in interests which France grants as credits to Africa at an interest rate of five to six percent or more. The allegory of ‘Bleeding Africa and Feeding France’ is no exaggeration, not alarmist, and not revolutionary.”
All numbers below according to the World Bank.

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Minister Farrakhan on 60 mins. with Mike Wallace

Persona non-grata: Judge Jane Matilda Bolin and the NAACP, 1930-1950.

Black women have always boasted a strong presence in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They have served overwhelmingly as fundraisers and proselytizers tying the organization to the Black community and creating a Black-led NAACP. (2) But a number of Black women have also made their mark as national officers serving as members of the Board of Directors, and as vice-presidents early in the organization's history. Jane Matilda Bolin, the nation's first African American woman judge, is among this small cadre of Black women which includeds such notable educators and clubwomen as Mary McLeod Bethune and Nannie Helen Burroughs. (3) Bolin became a member of the NAACP national leadership in 1943, serving consecutively as a member of the Board of Directors and then as vice-president before resigning in 1950. An active member and officer of the New York Branch of the NAACP and a recent judicial appointee, Bolin's nomination for election to the Board of Directors came as no surprise. Her resignation, however, broke with convention and was dissected in the Black press. The question is therefore not so much how Bolin rose to prominence in the NAACP, but more importantly, how and why she plummeted to the depths of its disregard. She allows us a rare glimpse into the tenure of Black women as national officers in the NAACP. But, an examination of Bolin's positioning within the NAACP leadership also affords us some insight into her philosophy of leadership, its conformity to that of the National Office, and how she became "persona non-grata" to the organizational leadership.

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African Origin in America ~Dr Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan

Celebrating Dr. Ben’s extraordinary life

AMSTERDAM NEWS | 4/9/2015

As family and friends prepare to commemorate the lifelong achievements of renowned factologist, Dr. Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan, affectionately known as “Dr. Ben,” at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, 132 W. 138th St., Thursday and Friday, April 9 and 10, thousands from all walks of life are expected to attend.
He was born Yosef Alfredo Antonio ben-Johannas, Dec. 31, 1918, in Ethiopia, the homeland of his father, Kriston ben-Jochannas. When he was 6 years old, the family moved to Fajardo, Puerto Rico, the native town of his mother, Julia Matta, where his younger sister was born.
The family practiced the Beta Israel way of life, and ben-Jochannan credited his parents for instilling the hardened discipline in him that allowed him to feed his insatiable appetite for knowledge.
When ben-Jochannan was a teenager, his father suggested he go to Egypt and study that country’s Black heritage. He made his first voyage there in 1938. And until the late 1990s, “Dr. Ben’s Alkebu-Lan Educational Tours” conducted annual fact-finding journeys to Egypt, taking hundreds at a time.
During his early years, ben-Jochannan also spent time in St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he was heavily influenced by Pan-African pioneers Edward Wilmot Blyden and Hubert Harrison.

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Chinese Dreams and the African Renaissance A China in Africa Podcast

Eric Olander, Cobus van Staden, Mothusi Turner    

CHINA FILE - April 10, 2015

Leaders in both China and Africa have articulated new visions for their respective regions that project a strong sense of confidence, renewal, and a break from once-dominant Western ideologies. In both cases, argues East is Read blogger Mothusi Turner, Chinese and Africans are using these new slogans to define themselves as something other than victims of their colonial pasts. Mothusi joins Eric and Cobus to discuss how these two ideologies converge and why this new intellectual framework is so important for both sides of the Sino-African relationship.

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BOUND: Africans vs African Americans OFFICIAL TEASER TRAILER 2015

Remember Sobukwe! - South Africa

Life and Times of Chris Hani

Chris Hani’s political legacy

Africa is a country -  April 10, 2014

The American political scientist Adolph Reed Jnr. once wrote about Malcolm X that “… he was just like the rest of us—a regular person saddled with imperfect knowledge, human frailties, and conflicting imperatives, but nonetheless trying to make sense of his very specific history, trying unsuccessfully to transcend it, and struggling to push it in a humane direction.” Like Malcolm X, Chris Hani, who was also assassinated (Hani was murdered on this day in 1993), should not be made into an ideal type or used to settle political scores in the present.
Yet, any observer of contemporary South Africa can’t help noticing that while Chris Hani is still lionized and his name invoked in speeches and songs, the principles he stood for no longer  animate the political project of the liberation movement he laid down his life for or that his erstwhile comrades in the ruling party, its Communist ally and the main trade union federation have been disappointing.

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ZULU 1964 - BATTLE SCENE

Paul Robeson: On colonialism, African-American rights (Spotlight, ABC,1960)

Song of Freedom (1936) - Paul Robeson Film

The Rise of a Post-colonial University

Africa is a country - April 6, 2015

In the last two weeks, students belonging to the #RhodesMustFall collective have rechristened and remade of one of University of Cape Town’s key administrative building as ‘Azania House.’ They have been occupying the building since March 20and it has become a nodal point for the student led collective. At the end of one of the first teach-ins at Azania House, a UCT student and member of the collective, Ru Slayen, half-jokingly and half-seriously suggested instituting teach-ins like the one we had just had in a new summer school to be named the Post-colonial School of Cape Town.

Ru’s words might have been half-serious and half-joking but they also, as I grasp them, iterated a desire to institute and inhabit a university that in the first instance enables an understanding of the after-effects of colonialism and then reflects on how to ‘go beyond’ them, as Stuart Hall argued in 1996. Cecil John Rhodes’ statue is one such manifest symbol of colonialism and the students’ passionate calls for its removal are a reminder of the visceral ways in which history is experienced. But the visceral sting of colonial inheritances can be felt repeatedly and in many places. At Azania House students remind us of that experience through the posters that they have put up on its walls. Amongst the many that have come up in in the last two weeks, one announced that, “we are no longer at ease.” Several others bear printed copies of the many racist Facebook responses that the #RhodesMustFall page has received; these Facebook comments appear intent on hurting and demeaning the students who are part of the movement. Some of these racist comments are from fellow students, and others perhaps from members of the wider Cape Town and South African citizenry who disagree with the #RhodesMustFall collective’s cause and dispute its members’ position. On its part, the university administration has also had to deal with vicious outpourings. It had put up writing boards around the statue to invite comments from the university community on transformation issues but had to remove them because, according to a university missive, many of the comments penned there constituted ‘hate speech.’

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Will Africa’s Industrial Revolution Be Made in China?

Africa is a country -  April 3, 2015

Over the past three decades, consumers have grown used to seeing the “Made in China” label adorning their less expensive purchases. Once China opened its economy to international trade and investment in the 1980s, it did not take long for it to wrest domination of the lower-end manufacturing sector from its East Asian neighbours and flood the world’s high streets with cheap goods.

Low wages were at the heart of China’s success. The majority of the population lived on less than a dollar a day, so businesses had no need to pay high salaries. Combined with high productivity, this enabled them to undercut manufacturers in more advanced economies.

As China has grown wealthier and wages have increased, however, this advantage is eroding. Higher wages render Chinese producers less competitive in low-value, labour-intensive manufacturing, but they are unlikely to want to relinquish control over the lucrative cheap goods market. Higher technology products contain many low technology components and China will need a supply of such inputs as its economy becomes more sophisticated. To whom will it turn to fill its shoes?

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Sagallo, Russia's Short-Lived Cossack Colony In Africa

RADIO FREE EUROPE - 2 April 2015  

In 1888, the "Scramble For Africa" was nearly over. European powers had carved out their colonies, and Imperial Russia still lacked a "place in the sun." But adventurer Nikolai Ivanovitch Achinov came up with a bizarre plan to create a Russian territory in what is now Djibouti. The following year, he and a small group of Cossacks raised their flag above the village of Sagallo. But after French objections, the tsar disowned them and the colony lasted less than a month.

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A Nigerian autocrat who embraced democracy: Story of Muhammadu Buhari

AFP, Lagos | Apr 01, 2015

Muhammadu Buhari, the one-time coup leader who won Nigeria's historic presidential election Tuesday, is not a man who is easily put off.
He tried three times previously to become head of state since the return to civilian rule in 1999 -- and failed on each occasion.
But the straight-backed former major general, who overthrew elected president Shehu Shagari -- widely seen as inept and corrupt -- in a military coup in 1983, was determined to lead the country again.
He was given the chance when President Goodluck Jonathan conceded his loss, paving the way for the first ever peaceful transfer of power between political parties in the history of Africa's most populous country.
"Our country has now joined the community of nations that have used the ballot box to peacefully change an incumbent president in a ree and fair election," he said on Wednesday.
"To me this is indeed historic."

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‘Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa’ – Thomas Sankara

By Paula Akugizibwe 

This is Africa - July 23, 2012 — A week before he died, Sankara said, “revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, but you cannot kill ideas”. And so, for us today, the final challenge rests not in finding more Sankaras, but in becoming them – in bringing these ideas to life

Thomas Sankara, former leader of Burkina Faso, was the apparent opposite of everything we are often told that success should look like. Mansions? Cars? Who? What? Get out of here. As Prime Minister and later as President, Sankara rode a bicycle to work before he upgraded, at his Cabinet’s insistence, to a Renault 5 – one of the cheapest cars available in Burkina Faso at the time. He lived in a small brick house and wore only cotton that was produced, weaved and sewn in Burkina Faso.
Going by his lifestyle, Sankara was the antithesis of success, but it is this very distinction that enabled him to become the most successful president Africa has ever seen, in terms of what he accomplished for and with his people. Sankara would not have chopped P-Square’s money given twice a chance – in fact, he might have sat him down and taught him a thing or two about the creeping menace of pop culture patriarchy – because Thomas Sankara, “The Upright Man”, was a feminist. In this and many other ways, Sankara was the African dream come true, the only living proof that hopes of African independence are not dead on arrival.

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The fall of Rhodes’s statue is only the first step, says Malema

Bongani Nkosi

MAIL&GUARDIAN - 30 Mar 2015

The fall of late imperialist Cecil Rhodes’s statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) won’t be a meaningless token action, but a major step towards defeating white supremacy in South Africa.
This is what Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), told delegates at the summit of the party’s student wing at the University of the Witwatersrand on Sunday. Members of the EFF Student Command from 103 university and college campuses across the nine provinces attended the summit.
Delivering a keynote address, Malema urged the students to reject attempts by some influential people to trivialise the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign by students at UCT. Those people ask “when Rhodes falls, then what?” as if the campaign is “just a small thing”.
“It is not a small thing. [The campaign] is an onslaught against white supremacy,” said Malema.
“It is that statue that continues to inspire [whites] to think that they are a superior race, and it is through ­collapsing of these types of symbols that the white minority will begin to appreciate that there’s nothing superior about them.”
Downfall of race supremacy
The UCT students’ protest campaign to have Rhodes’s statue on campus removed enters its third week on Monday. Malema described it as just “one very important step in the correct direction”.

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WhiteHistoryMonth: Was Cecil Rhodes really an entrepreneurial genius? Zambia says no

AFRICA IS A COUNTRY - March 30, 2015

We owe a great deal of gratitude to the students at the University of Cape Town whose #RhodesMustFall campaign has forced us to reengage and debate, in a new and invigorated manner, the legacy of Cecil John Rhodes. Because of their brave and spirited campaign, a lot more people now know a little more about Rhodes than they did before. That in itself is quite an achievement.   Parsing the online conversations around Rhodes’ legacy, one sees the claim advanced that Rhodes was an entrepreneurial genius. The proof of this assertion is seen in the wealth that Rhodes accumulated over his lifetime: So much wealth could only ever have been amassed by a Captain of industry. The claim is often made by those pushing for a “bigger picture” appraisal of Rhodes’ legacy: Being a Captain of industry is an achievement worthy of memorials of one type or the other. But I have also noticed that even those who, on the whole, are critical of Rhodes’ legacy tend to concede, perhaps implicitly, the point about Rhodes’ entrepreneurial genius and choose instead to focus on other aspects of his life in making their case.

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10 Black Scholars Who Debunked Eurocentric Propaganda

Atlanta Black Star - October 6, 2013 

Dr. Chancellor Williams

Dr. Chancellor Williams (1893 – 1992) was an African-American sociologist, historian and writer. His best known work is “The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.”, for which he was awarded honors by the Black Academy of Arts and Letters.
In “Destruction of Black Civilization,” Williams chronicles how high civilization began in black Africa, contrary to what mainstream  historians have espoused to  the world. He meticulously lays out the history of Africa in great detail and demonstrates that the continent’s  current underdevelopment came after  thousands of years of consistent onslaught by Eurasians, and not because Africans made no significant contributions to the world.

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A New Book: The Scholar Denied W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

Aldon Morris 

University of California Press, 2015

In this groundbreaking book, Aldon D. Morris’s ambition is truly monumental: to help rewrite the history of sociology and to acknowledge the primacy of W. E. B. Du Bois’s work in the founding of the discipline. Taking on the prevailing narrative of how sociology developed, Morris, a major scholar of African American social movements, probes the way in which the history of the discipline has been written, giving credit to Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, who worked with the conservative black leader Booker T. Washington to render Du Bois invisible. Uncovering the seminal theoretical work of Du Bois in developing a “scientific” sociology through a variety of methodologies, Morris examines how the leading scholars of the day disparaged and ignored Du Bois’s work. The Scholar Denied is based on extensive, rigorous primary source research; the book is the result of a decade of research, writing, and revision. In uncovering the economic and political factors that marginalized the contributions of Du Bois, enabling Park to be recognized as the “father” of the discipline, Morris delivers a wholly new narrative of American intellectual and social history that places one of America’s key intellectuals, W. E. B. Du Bois, at its center.

The Scholar Denied is a must-read for everyone interested in American history, racial inequality, and the academy. In challenging our understanding of the past, the book promises to engender debate and discussion.

1. The Rise of Scientific Sociology in America
2. Du Bois, Scientific Sociology, and Race
3. The Du Bois–Atlanta School of Sociology
4. The Conservative Alliance of Washington and Park
5. The Sociology of Black America: Park versus Du Bois
6. Max Weber Meets Du Bois
7. Intellectual Schools and the Atlanta School
8. Legacies and Conclusions 

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Africa is new ‘El Dorado of espionage’, leaked intelligence files reveal

Continent emerges as the focus of international spying, with South Africa becoming a regional powerhouse and communications hub

Seumas Milne and Ewen MacAskill 

The Guardian - Tuesday 24 February 2015

Africa emerges as the 21st century theatre of espionage, with South Africa as its gateway, in the cache of secret intelligence documents and cables seen by the Guardian. “Africa is now the El Dorado of espionage,” said one serving foreign intelligence officer.
The continent has increasingly become the focus of international spying as the battle for its resources has intensified, China’s economic role has grown dramatically, and the US and other western states have rapidly expanded their military presence and operations in a new international struggle for Africa.

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1937-1938 Portraits of African-American former slaves

By Chris Wild

MASHABLE - JAN 31, 2015

We honor 150 years since the abolition of slavery in the United States. On Jan. 31, 1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the country.
These portraits of black American men and women who had been slaves were taken in the late 1930s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the Work Progress Administration (WPA). They are part of a group of 500, together with more than 2,000 first-person accounts of the experience of being a slave.
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) operated during the Great Depression of the 1930s and tasked unemployed writers cross the USA with collecting the life stories of Americans across society. This particular set of pictures and testimonies was published in 1941 as the seventeen-volume "Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves."

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Renzo Martens – the artist who wants to gentrify the jungle

It is one of the poorest parts of the planet, a place where workers earn $1 a day – which is why, according to one artist, the plantations of eastern Congo really need an art gallery

Stuart Jeffries

The Guardian - Tuesday 16 December 2014

Next month, Renzo Martens, along with his wife, son and baby daughter, are going to live in eastern Congo so he can continue his five-year plan to gentrify the jungle. The 41-year-old Dutch artist is trying to create an arts scene in one of the most impoverished parts of the world.
It sounds like a sick joke. “It’s not,” Martens tells me when we meet in London. “I mean, it’s funny to call your programme a central African gentrification programme, but I’m basically putting a white cube in the forest to see what it does.”
There’s a little more to it than that. Martens is artistic director of an outfit called the Institute for Human Activities, which has helped artists from Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, establish a critical curriculum akin to a foundation arts course for plantation workers. The Congolese Plantation Workers Art League has now started to organise exhibitions of self-portraits. At workshops, workers’ children drew what they imagined their futures would be. “Most of these kids had never had a pencil in their hands before,” he says.

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African Development Successes

Success Story from Liberia: Dr. Rajesh Panjabi’s Last Mile Health

Success Story from Uganda: Andrew Rugasira’s Good African Coffee

Success Story from Cameroon: Samuel Eto’o Gives Children a Chance

Success Story from Somalia: Fatima Jibrell’s Conservation Initiatives

Success Story from Nigeria: Nwankwo Kanu’s Heart Foundation

Success Story from South Sudan: John Dau’s ‘Lost Boys’ Clinic

Success Stories from Africa: Judith Rodin’s Books 

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The black experience: portraits of a community

A fascinating collaboration between the V&A and the Black Cultural Archive charts the changing lives of black people in Britain and tells us much about who we are today

Matthew Ryder

THE GUARDIAN -  Saturday 7 February 2015

In 1988, I bumped into a friend walking back from a lecture. “I didn’t see you at the black students’ group,” I said.
“It’s just… all we ever seem to talk about is racism,” she said, sighing. I was immediately filled with undergraduate indignation: “What do you mean ‘all’? It’s important!”
“I know,” she replied, “but isn’t there more to being black and British than that?”
It’s a question I have been trying to answer ever since. And it lies at the heart of the exhibition Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s, which is the culmination of a seven-year collaboration between the V&A and Brixton’s Black Cultural Archive. Over the two locations it features 118 images by 17 artists. The exhibition shares the name of the famous book by Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). But while Fryer’s landmark work was largely concerned with slavery, colonialism, immigration and racism, this exhibition is different. Racism, insofar as it features, is merely one element of the historic backdrop. Instead the focus is on images of the ordinary lives of black Britons – those of African and Caribbean heritage – in the UK. Like the conversation with my friend back in 1988, it makes you question what it is to be black and British.

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Africa ama Ita 1972

Don’t Be Like That Does black culture need to be reformed?

By Kelefa Sanneh

The New Yorker - February 9, 2015 Issue

It was just after eight o’clock on a November night when Robert McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, announced that a grand jury would not be returning an indictment in the police killing of Michael Brown, who was eighteen, unarmed, and African-American. About an hour later and eight hundred miles away, President Obama delivered a short and sober speech designed to function as an anti-inflammatory. He praised police officers while urging them to “show care and restraint” when confronting protesters. He said that “communities of color” had “real issues” with law enforcement, but reminded disappointed Missourians that Brown’s mother and father had asked for peace. “Michael Brown’s parents have lost more than anyone,” he said. “We should be honoring their wishes.”
Even as he mentioned Brown’s parents, Obama was careful not to invoke Brown himself, who had become a polarizing figure. To the protesters who chanted, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” Brown was a symbol of the young African-American man as victim—the chant referred to the claim that Brown was surrendering, with his hands up, when he was killed. Critics of the protest movement were more likely to bring up the video, taken in the fifteen minutes before Brown’s death, that appeared to show him stealing cigarillos from a convenience store and then shoving and intimidating the worker who tried to stop him—the victim was also, it seemed, a perpetrator.

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Remembering Stuart Hall: Stuart Hall’s South African Legacy

By Sean Jacobs

Social Text - August 8th, 2014

My early university education at the then-very white University of Cape Town coincided with South Africa’s transition from Apartheid to democracy. Stuart Hall didn’t feature much, despite the fact, as I would later learn, I was indirectly influenced by his ideas about identity politics, language, culture, race, and social movements.  For example, I remember writing a seminar paper as a final year student at the University of Cape Town about “black Afrikaans”—a movement of coloured (STET) poets and educators in Cape Town and the Cape West Coast allied to teacher unions and the United Democratic Front who sought to counter white histories of Afrikaans by emphasizing its hybrid origins in a slave economy and encouraged use of spoken Afrikaans in classroom settings. Nevertheless, culture (or studying culture) was hardly a priority for my late-1980s/early-1990s cohort—South Africa then was in the midst of a violent transition; protest movements and their academic allies were tactically focused on electoral power and state institutions.  Strategic considerations, too, pushed us to eschew analyses of race in favor of class. Lynette Steenveld, a media scholar at Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, wrote to me that “… identity was a problem because of the Apartheid state’s racialization of identity and its essentialist stance on culture. So the one progressive move was to eschew identity and focus on class.”  That said, there is ample evidence that South African scholars, students and media activists were very familiar with Hall’s work in that period. In 1980s Apartheid South Africa, academics who studied culture, came at it from two diametrically opposed schools: on one side a more traditional behavioralist approach (the Afrikaans “communications studies”) and on the other, leftist /political economy approaches to culture (reflecting dominant positions in the liberation movement and old school Marxist influences).

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Turkish African Friendship

A Movie: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

A Documentary: We come as friends

A Documentary: Concerning Violence

Vanguard of the Revolution

Bringing Fanon's "Concerning Violence" to Film

By Alnoor Ladha

Truthout | Interview - Thursday, 05 February 2015

Activist and author Alnoor Ladha interviews Joslyn Barnes, co-producer of Göran Hugo Olsson's film, Concerning Violence, which explores African liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

Alnoor Ladha: I recently watched Concerning Violence and was in awe during the entire duration of the film. What is it about these scenes from colonialism and imperialism that strike a chord at the deepest core of our humanity?
Joselyn Barnes: That they are true. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak says in her preface to the film, "The issue of colonization is a greed shared by humankind. No one is better than anyone; every generation must be trained in the practice of freedom, caring for others, as did [Frantz] Fanon, and that is what colonization stops. Within the greed for capital formation, colonization allows already existing ignorant racism to spread the markets in the name of civilization or modernization or globalization, as it does today. This film captures the tragedy of the moment when the very poor are convinced in the name of a nation, that is going to reject it once it is established on its own two feet, to offer themselves up for a violent killing. Fanon insists that the tragedy is that the very poor is reduced to violence, because there is no other response possible to an absolute absence of response and an absolute exercise of legitimized violence from the colonizers."
Spivak's preface was indeed powerful. And poignant. One could argue, and indeed we do, that our current brand of capitalism, neoliberalism, is simply a continuation of colonialism. That the logic of capital requires extraction, exploitation, violence etc. Would you agree with this line of thinking?
Decolonization, as Fanon pointed out, needs to work in both directions. The colonized and the colonizer both must be decolonized.

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BLACK HISTORY: Black Women who were Lynched in America

Black Women who were Lynched in America
http://www.funkydineva.com/black-history-black-women-who-were-lynched-in-america/

The Waco Horror: A Report on a Lynching
http://www2.uncp.edu/home/berrys/courses/hist362/hist362_docs_waco_lynching.pdf

Edgar Lungu Wins Zambia Election Ruling Party Patriotic Front Stalwart Elected President

By Patrick McGroarty in Johannesburg and Nicholas Bariyo in Kampala

The Wall Street Journal - Jan. 25, 2015

Zambians elected ruling party stalwart Edgar Lungu their next president, setting the stage for more haggling between a mercurial government and the powerful mining firms that drive its economy.
Mr. Lungu, a former defense and justice minister, won 48.3% of the votes cast this week, the southern African country’s electoral commission said on Sunday. He was chosen to lead the Patriotic Front party after former President Michael Sata died in office in October, following a long and secretive illness. Mr. Lungu will govern Zambia over the next 20 months to complete Mr. Sata’s term until the next general election, scheduled for September 2016.
Mr. Sata was elected in 2011 on a populist pledge to recover more mining revenue and counter tax evasion. He also attacked the practices of Chinese miners in Zambia. But in office Mr. Sata warmed to Chinese investors and endorsed a flurry of contradictory mining policies.

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8 Disturbingly Racist Children’s Books Designed to Devalue Black People

By G. Thorpe

The Atlanta Black Star - February 21, 2014

Let’s Hurry or We’ll  Miss the Public Lynching
In the late 19th and early 20th century, many books were developed in the United States and the United Kingdom to propagate the devaluation of Black people in their relative societies.   Some of the books were so outrageous, comedian Bob Staake’s  made ‘Let’s Hurry or We’ll  Miss the Public Lynching‘ parody cover to bring light to the era. Below are the real books. These few are just a fraction on the hundreds that were made during that time.

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Akon: 'America was never built for black people'

The Senegalese-American recording artist talks frankly about US race relations, "rebranding" Africa, and his music.

Al-Jazeera - 23 Jan 2015

Senegalese-American artist Akon is a five-time Grammy nominee who has sold over 35 million records worldwide, and has collaborated with some of the biggest names in popular music, such as Michael Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Lady Gaga and David Guetta.  The musician, songwriter and producer, who was born in the US but spent much of his childhood in Senegal, is also an activist and a philanthropist - and he has turned his sights on helping Africa.  How many African-Americans do you know actually consider Africa as a vacation spot? Not one... Even just for knowledge, just to know where they came from, just to get an idea of what that is; there is so much fear instilled in them that they wouldn't even want to go there to visit. You mention Africa, they start shaking.  Akon  His current ambitious project, "Akon Lighting Africa," is working to bring solar-powered electricity to Africans in 49 countries by the end of 2020.Akon is also an ambassador for the non-profit organisation Peace One Day. Last year, he and actor Jude Law brought their celebrity power to Goma to a concert to promote peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  But Akon has also caused controversy through his performance style and his lyrics.  Akon talks to Al Jazeera about running his musical career as a business; his projects - both philanthropic and artistic; singing songs for peace and whether he thinks it can really make an impact; and being an African in the US.

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Africa Debt Rising New publication

By Paul Adams

AFRICA RESEARCH INSTITUTE - JAN 22, 2015

Average gross domestic product (GDP) growth in Africa is second only to that of South Asia. The improvement of macroeconomic and public sector management since the 1990s is widely praised. Substantial investment in infrastructure is now among the most pressing priorities. Public debt levels are mostly well below 50% of GDP, a rule of thumb being that 40% is sustainable in emerging economies. Global investors’ hunt for yield has enabled many African countries to tap international bond markets for the first time. While Eurobond issues are often depicted as evidence of the continent’s economic resurgence, they should also encourage close scrutiny of public financial management and debt sustainability. Against a backdrop of falling commodity prices, the US dollar’s strength and forecasts for higher global interest rates, this Counterpoint highlights the pitfalls of rising debt levels in Africa and underscores measures for mitigating risk.

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Life Never Ran These Striking Images of What It Was Like to Be Black in 1950s America

By Jordan G. Teicher

Salon - Jan. 18, 2015

Gordon Parks hadn’t been to his hometown, Fort Scott, Kansas, in more than 20 years when he returned there in 1950 as a photojournalist on assignment for Life magazine. Growing up as the youngest of 15 children, Parks attended the Plaza School, an all-black grade school in the heavily segregated town. Now, as the first black man hired full-time by the magazine, Parks wanted to find and photograph all 11 of his classmates from grade school as a way of measuring the impact of school segregation. The photo essay he created, which was never published, is on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the exhibition, “Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott,” beginning Jan. 17.

In the years since Parks lived in Fort Scott, segregation had remained. But the black population, which had been at a high of 20 percent when he was child, had dwindled to around 6 percent, as a deficit of agricultural work caused blacks to move to nearby cities in search of jobs.

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Gentrification: white people following white people

By Kevin Hartnett
Globe Correspondent 

Boston Globe - August 06, 2014

When we think of gentrification, we imagine swarms of young upper middle class white people moving into previously minority neighborhoods, bringing pour-over coffee and higher property tax bills in their wakes. It’s a controversial migration, not least because of the existing residents who are displaced, but it’s also seen as a welcome step away from the segregation that set in after the “white flight” of the 60s and 70s.
Now an inventive new study using Google Street View and an archive of 1990s videotapes has found that gentrification may involve less racial mixing than we assume—and in fact, may reinforce residential segregation.
In an article this month in the American Sociological Review, doctoral student Jackelyn Hwang and Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson used Google Street View to take a virtual walking tour of Chicago. As they went, they looked for details like home renovations or new construction that indicate gentrification is underway, or litter and graffiti, which indicate it’s not. Based on those observations they gave each census tract in Chicago a gentrification score. Then they compared those scores against a similar but far more labor-intensive study Sampson had carried out twenty years earlier. 

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Uncle John Scruggs - Little Log Cabin in the Lane

Critical Race Theory - Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the US (Essential Reading List)

1. Racism Without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
2. From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America by Ronald Takaki 
3. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki
4. Beyond the Melting Pot, Second Edition: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan
5. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton
6. THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO by W.E.B. DuBois
7. The Wretched of the Earth  by Frantz Fanon
8. Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
9. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (Critical Social Thought) by Michael Omi and Howard Winant 
10. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness  by Michelle Alexander
11. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
12. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation by Leo R. Chavez
13. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations by Joe R. Feagin
14. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing by Joe R. Feagin
15. The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism by Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin 
16. Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression by Joe R. Feagin
17. White Party, White Government: Race, Class, and U.S. Politics by Joe R. Feagin
18. Latinos Facing Racism: Discrimination, Resistance, and Endurance (New Critical Viewpoints on Society)  by Joe R. Feagin and José A. Cobas
19. Globalization and America: Race, Human Rights, and Inequality (Perspectives on a Multiracial America) by Angela J. Hattery and David G. Embrick (Editors)
20. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America  by Ira Katznelson 
21. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
22. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas (Editors)
23. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins
24. Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs by Deirdre A. Royster 
25. The Crucible of American Indian Identity Native Tradition versus Colonial Imposition in Postconquest North America By Ward Churchill
26. One Nation, Indivisible: Is It History?  Todd Bigelow/FTWP In Los Angeles, demographers see "white flight" beyond the suburbs and into rural areas. (By Todd Bigelow for The Washington Post) First in a series of occasional articles  By William Booth Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, February 22, 1998; Page A1
27. Mexican Americans and the American Dream by Richard Alba
28. We the People: Asians in the United States (CENSUS BUREAU REPORT)
29. We the People: Blacks in the United States (CENSUS BUREAU REPORT)
30. We the People: Hispanics in the United States (CENSUS BUREAU REPORT)
31. We the People of Arab Ancestry in the United States (CENSUS BUREAU REPORT)
32. How many Jews are there in the United States?  By Michael Lipka - PEW RESEARCH October 2, 2013. 
33. A Portrait of Jewish Americans - PEW RESEARCH, October 1, 2013.
34. Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora by Sarah M. A. Gualtieri.
35. Brown Skin, White Masks by Hamid Dabashi. 
36. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani. 
37. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People by Jack Shaheen. 
38. The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions by Vilna Bashi Treitler.

Judaism Added to the African Studies Agenda

New panels on Black Judaism offered at annual scholarly conference

By Len Lyons|

Tablet - December 30, 2014

For the first time in its 57-year history, the African Studies Association’s annual conference this year offered panels discussing the rising tide of Black Judaism—communities in sub-Saharan Africa and in the African Diaspora identifying themselves as descendants of Jews or practicing some form of Judaism. I attended the November conference along with 1,600 participants from 30 countries, and presented new research on Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Five other researchers and authors in the field of Black Judaism also contributed to the panels.
The panels were proposed by William F. S. Miles, a political scientist from Northeastern University. His academic interest in Nigeria took a personal turn in 2008 when he discovered, while reading Edith Bruder’s The Black Jews of Africa, that the several thousand Nigerian Igbo who practice Judaism had religious traditions quite similar to those of his own family. Miles, who returned to Nigeria several times to visit the Jews of the capital city of Abuja—where there are now four synagogues—describes Jewish life in his book, The Jews of Nigeria.

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African American Movies From 1920, 30 and 40s

The Girl from Chicago (1932)

 Murder on Lenox Avenue (1941)

The Symbol Of the Unconquered (1920) 

Body and Soul (1925)

The 20 Best Videos By African Artists (and Those Inspired By Africa) of 2014

Afripop - December 29, 2014

Mookho Makhetha

African artists have released some amazing visual work these past 12 months. Some videos gave us a powerful introduction to new artists, powerful enough to etch them in our memories and encouraging us to keep an eye on them in the New Year. Others cemented the popularity of already established artists. Some musicians opted to produce more filmic, iconic music videos. As is customary at this time of year, we have sifted through the huge library of musical releases to find the best visual accompaniments to those releases. We have compiled a list of those, in no particular order, for your viewing pleasure.
Okmalumkoolkat – Holy Oxygen
Director: Wim Steytler
Holy Oxygen is the title track off Okmalumkoolkat’s EP released on Affine Records. Quite like the song itself, the video for Holy Oxygen explores rejection, neglect and redemption. A group of people are cast out of society for a perceived physical or social illness. Rapper Okmalumkoolkat is part of this group of outcasts who are carried off into the boondocks wrapped in thick layers of plastic because presumably whatever malady they suffer from is contagious. However, out in the acrid boondocks and led by the rapper, a new society is born where everyone is treated equally. It is very interesting that this video came out when the world was gripped with fear about the growing Ebola epidemic.

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Our Man in Africa By Michael Bronner

Foreign Policy - 1/24/2014

On the last night of november 1991, the city of N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, was on edge. President Hissène Habré, who had seized control of the country in a coup eight years earlier, was in power -- but the vice was closing.
Rebels were converging on the city in Toyota pickup trucks mounted with machine guns and packed with fighters -- turbaned against the dust and sand, armed to the teeth, and screaming pedal-to-the-floor across the desert. Supplied and funded by Libya, they had crossed into Chad from their camp on the Sudanese border some 700 miles to the east, led by Habré’s former chief military advisor, Idriss Déby.
It was an odd time, then, for a diplomatic dinner party.
The gathering was a last-minute affair organized by the wealthy and well-connected Lebanese consul at the urgent personal request of a key minister in Habré’s cabinet. The presence of some two dozen Chadian elites, French businessmen, and notable expats was really just a ruse to invite the one guest who really mattered: Col. David G. Foulds, the U.S. defense attaché.
The minister pulled Foulds to a quiet corner. “He was chain smoking -- extremely nervous, shaking all over,” Foulds recalled. Habré’s forces had beaten back Déby’s rebels once before, and conventional wisdom, including in Washington, which had long been starstruck by Habré’s military prowess, was that they’d prevail again. But the Americans knew little more than the optimistic picture Habré’s camp was giving them, and the minister knew better. The rebels could reach the capital that night, he said, much sooner than anticipated.

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Decolonising white Berlin

Cornelia Knoll

Africa is a country - December 19, 2014

The myth of an all-white, Christian German society largely persists. So does the idea that anyone who is black only arrived here in the late 20th century or the 21st as refugees, or for economic reasons. Though many Germans actually remain unaware or do not acknowledge it, German colonialism did exist—and no, it was not a “benign” form of colonialism, either; German forces were responsible for the genocide of indigenous Herero populations in Namibia (to find out more: see here and here). These are facts that are difficult for Germans to bear, especially since they also bear the responsibility for the trauma and genocides during World War II So colonial atrocities – and the fact that the nation was involved in slave trade and exploitation of Africans – are, for the most part, happily forgotten. And since German society represents itself as racially white, black lives and bodies are invisible and voices of resistance against this dominant narrative of Germany – those that question Germany as a “white space” without a colonial history in Africa – are hardly ever heard.

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China 'shocked' by deaths at Madagascar plant

Violent labour dispute at Chinese-run factory kills four as workers demand better wages.

Al-Jazeera - 13 Dec 2014

China's embassy in Madagascar has said it was "very shocked" by a violent labour dispute at a Chinese-run sugar factory in the west of the island that resulted in four deaths this week.
A spokesman at the embassy told the AFP news agency in a statement it was "regrettable" that "troublemakers incited by people with bad intentions" were using violence at the Sucoma plant.
The embassy also complained that Malgasy authorities were not upholding a duty to protect the factory.
On Wednesday, clashes between police and Sucoma workers demanding the release of two of their leaders who had been arrested turned deadly, with two people killed and nine wounded. The plant's sugar stocks were also looted.
On Thursday, a policeman and a soldier posted to the factory were slashed to death with knives.

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Africa Ugandan leader calls on Africa to quit ICC

On a visit to neighbouring Kenya, Yoweri Museveni says International Criminal Court is a tool for "oppressing Africa".

Al-Jazeera - 12 Dec 2014

oweri Museveni, the Ugandan president, has called on African nations to pull out of the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, amid accusations that it unfairly targets Africans.
Museveni's comments, made at a ceremony to mark Kenya's 51 years of independence from Britain, came a week after the chief prosecutor at the Hague-based court dropped crimes-against-humanity charges against Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Museveni criticised the ICC for continuing with Kenya's deputy president William Ruto's case despite an African Union (AU) resolution that no sitting African head of state or deputy should be tried at the court.
"I will bring a motion to the African Union's next session. I want all of us to get out of that court of the West. Let them [Westerners] stay with their court," he said in Swahili.
Although prosecutors dropped charges against Kenyatta, the trial of Ruto on similar charges is under way at the ICC.
"With connivance, they are putting Deputy President Ruto, someone who has been elected by Kenyans, in front of the court there in Europe," Museveni said
The AU is scheduled to hold its annual summit of heads of state at its headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at the end of January, but has not announced a specific date.

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John Pilger - Apartheid Did Not Die

James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley (1965)

Remembering Slavery in South Africa

Africa is a country - December 7, 2014

“I recognized Cape Town the first time I saw it,” Deborah Thomas revealed at a lecture she gave in the city in July 2014. A sociologist who works in Jamaica, she knew instantly that she was looking at a place shaped by slavery.
What do you see when you recognize slavery?
December 1st, 2014 marked 180 years since the abolition of slavery in South Africa. Few remember that apartheid was built on the systemic violence, displacement, racial formation and institutions of social control that marked slavery in the South African colonies from 1658 to 1834.
In fact, for 176 years, slavery was the central form of social and economic organization in the territories that would form South Africa. People were captured in Mozambique, Madagascar, India and South-East Asia to be brought as slaves to the Cape, the first and largest of the colonies that would form South Africa. Though the Dutch East India Company was forbidden from enslaving indigenous people at the Cape, the latter were subjected to genocide and conditions as brutal as slavery. Over the course of almost two centuries of slave-holding, enslaved people came to constitute the majority of the population of the Cape Colony, numbering more than 60,000 people (Ross, 1999, 6).

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Still Chasing Freedom: South Africa's Struggle After Mandela

God, Not Again: White People and an ‘Out of Africa’ Wedding in Kenya

Africa is a country -  December 5, 2014

Oh no. Africa has “touched” someone “deeply” again. This time, it’s Melbourne-based wedding photographer Jonas Peterson, who has reportedly “shot brides and grooms in all sorts of beautiful places around the world,” but none like this infamous lothario of a continental landmass, which “sung to [him] in a way [he] didn’t know possible, found new chords and played on strings [he] didn’t know [he] had inside [him]”. Africa! You sure know how to make white men swoon.  Surely, Peterson knew what he was getting into when he went to photograph the wedding of Nina, “a wildlife photographer and senior marketing advisor to wild cat conservation organization Panthera – and her fiancé Sebastian” in Masaai Mara in Kenya. This is primal Africa central. White people go there, and bam! They get touched and their chords get strummed. Then they usually end up throwing themselves all over “tribal jewellery” given to them by their close and personal Masaai, dancing about some acacias, taking pictures with smiling African children, and the rest is history.

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Angola's diplomatic dancing

By Zoe Eisenstein and Patrick Smith

The Africa Report - 02 December 2014

The four horsemen of the apocalypse seemed to be galloping towards delegates in New York in September for the UN General Assembly.  Top of the agenda was climate change and the devastation it could cause to Africa and other developing regions, then the growth of terrorism and religious intolerance and finally the most serious public heath emergency for half a century – the spread of the Ebola virus in West and Central Africa.  At the special summit on climate change on 23 September, Angola's vice-president Manuel Vicente spelt out the stakes: "We are at a unique moment of opportunity to safeguard the global climate system on which sustainable development and sustained economic growth depend."

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China trades investment for resources in Africa

Western countries increasingly see Beijing’s relationship with the continent as a threat

Bill Corcoran

The Irish Times - December 2, 2014

The crucial role China has played in Africa’s economic development over the past 15 years has become so pronounced that western countries now see it as a significant threat to their interests across the continent.

The Asian giant’s stated objectives in Africa are to promote development and mutually beneficial trade, much like the goals cited by the US and European Union in regard to their involvement on the continent. But the manner in which China goes about its business there is very different to that of western nations.

China has adopted a policy of “non-interference” when getting involved with African nations, which means it usually does not publicly intervene in countries’ internal affairs or impose political preconditions as part of its rules of engagement with them.

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Africa Cup of Nations Group Draw 2015: Date, Time, Seedings, Live Stream Info

By Tom Sunderland

Bleacher Report - Dec 2, 2014

Only six weeks remain until the Africa Cup of Nations makes its triumphant return to the football calendar, with Equatorial Guinea waiting to welcome the continental elite to its shores in January.

Wednesday's draw brings us a massive step closer to the competition, where we'll find out who will face off against who for the 2015 title.
To ensure you don't miss a minute of this week's draw, read on for viewing information detailing where and when to watch the event, along with discussion of which sides warrant extra attention.

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Robtel Neajai Pailey on Band Aid 30