The broad daylight assassination of a lawyer in Maputo fits in a series of ‘mafia-type’ murders in Mozambique.

24/03/2015

South African author Tom Sharpe (1928-2013), who comically portrayed bumbling apartheid cops disguising themselves as ‘terrorists’, then arresting one another and leaving trails of exploded ostriches to mark their ‘secret’ operations, would have had a field time with the leaked South African State Security Agency (SSA) reports as exposed by Al Jazeera earlier this week.

26/02/2015

Cell phone jamming, news blackouts, violence in parliament and water cannons and armed vehicles in the streets of Cape Town marked the beginning of the new parliamentary year in South Africa on Thursday.

14/02/2015

Among African writers, opinion makers and activists the news of the Charlie Hebdo attack has provoked an outpour of anger: at the attack itself, but perhaps even more so at the twin scourges of terrorism and dictatorial oppression suffered by people in Nigeria, Somalia, Cameroon, Kenya, Mali and elsewhere on the continent. The ones who attracted most fire were African leaders who had the gall to march in Paris, whilst seemingly not bothered about victims of terrorism back home.

13/01/2015

Tobore Ovuorie, author of the ‘Undercover in Human Traffic’ report that was published earlier this year in the ZAM Chronicle and in the Nigerian Premium Times, has won a Wole Soyinka Institute award for her brave work.

13/12/2014

The Kenya Television Network’s team of investigative journalists could be muzzled under new anti-terrorism laws.

11/12/2014

Finally international media have caught up with the sentimental counterproductive patronising Band Aid initiative. We hated ‘Do they Know It’s Christmas’ the first time around and hoped they would go away. But they are doing it again with the Ebola epidemic, which only adds insult (patronising untruths) to injury.

20/11/2014

Up to today, Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso featured on a tongue-in-cheek Facebook chart called ‘Africa Presidents’. Timeline that dates this particular old man’s rule back to the introduction of the cellphone (1988): a bit after Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea (the walkman, 1979) and a bit before the ‘old fat white chicken’ Yahya Jammeh of the Gambia (the DVD, 1994).

01/11/2014

Halloween seems a perfect time to scare the world with the Dutch tale of the bone snatcher. Dutch artist Tinkebell, previously known for provocative art that denounced battery farming, has taken to dead people as art material. Specifically, in this case, the victims of the textile building collapse disaster in Bangladesh last year. 

31/10/2014

Dutch-resident Nigerian ‘Comrade’ Sunny Ofehe, portrayed last June 2014 in the ZAM Chronicle, stands accused of fraud and human traffic. The Dutch daily newspaper Trouw of 30 October, reporting on the current court case against Ofehe in the Netherlands, calls him a suspect ‘with two faces’.

31/10/2014

Most of the time, understanding ‘Africa’ reads like a pendulum. One article on the state of the continent exhibits hysterical optimism. Another analysis swings right back to a fundamentalist apocalyptic view. The Economist’s cover pages shouted Hopeless Africa in 2000, and Rising Africa in 2013.  Ever since then, the two co-exist. In 2014, we are swinging between ebola paranoia and ‘Africa Works!’, the motto of a recently held conference.

28/10/2014

‘The Nest’ in Nairobi, Kenya, has issued an invite to any African person who has travelled or hoped or attempted to travel across borders to share their ‘visa stories’.

26/10/2014

There should be no censorship and the powers-that-be should exhibit whatever they want, but is looking at human pain really art?

05/10/2014

Showings of white South African artist Brett Bailey’s 'Exhibit B' at the Barbican in London have been cancelled due to protests.

30/09/2014

It took four years and considerable risk to own life and limb, but Ghanese investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas finally achieved his goal: not just to name and shame, but to actual jail wrongdoers, especially wrongdoing civil servants.

29/09/2014

When Ebola first appeared in Liberia, many of the people in the country thought it was a scam crafted by the government to attract funds from international donors.

23/09/2014

South African social critic Jonny Steinberg described the outpourings of anger from fellow whites at girlfriend killer Oscar Pistorius as ‘racial shame’. And unleashed much wrath in return.

23/09/2014

The Peace Parks Foundation in South Africa has paid back one-and-a-half million Euros to a Dutch Lottery, admitting that their project to protect rhinos from poaching by poisoning the horns doesn’t work. Scientists had been pointing out all along that there was no evidence to support the ‘poison solution’. The ‘Postcodeloterij’ had made more than 14 million Euros available to Peace Parks for a number of anti-poaching projects in February this year.

18/09/2014

The 'funny' slogan used by Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan for his re-election campaign, "Bring Back Jonathan 2015", is the subject of a recent, vehement attack by Nobel laureate author Wole Soyinka on the country's leaders. Soyinka wrote in the online Premium Times this week that "the dancing obscenity of (Boko Haram's) gang of psychopaths and child abductors, taunting the world, mocking the BRING BACK OUR GIRLS campaign on internet, finally met its match (...) by the unfurling of a political campaign banner."

17/09/2014

It was a small note in the newspaper that caught South African columnist Marvin Meintjies’ eye: it said that the diamond-rich country of Lesotho had signed a ‘relation strengthening’ agreement with the tax haven island of Barbados”.

03/07/2014