Fire flickered from the matches in the crowd, jostling alongside the young men that had gathered below the steps of one of Benin’s most recognisable landmarks, the Martyrs Square monument, which commemorates victims of a French coup d'état attempt in 1977. 40 years after that attempt, the crowd of young Beninese men had congregated in the West African capital of Cotonou in August 2017 to rid the region of a symbol of its French colonial era: by burning banknotes of the CFA franc, the France-backed...
Fire flickered from the matches in the crowd, jostling alongside the young men that had gathered below the steps of one of Benin’s most recognisable...
The Mnangagwa regime responds to protests with violence and the arrests of activists and journalists. A call for solidarity with those fighting for social justice has gained the support of many. With hyperinflation, mass unemployment and increasing violence under the guise of corona lockdown policies, many Zimbabweans now say: enough is enough. The Mnangagwa government, welcomed after the fall of Robert Mugabe in November 2017 as a new promise for the country, has now lost its credibility. Emmerson...
The Mnangagwa regime responds to protests with violence and the arrests of activists and journalists. A call for solidarity with those fighting for...
Amid the furore about #cancelculture it may be appropriate to commemorate the outrage that targeted Achille Mbembe, Cameroonian historian and social scientist, and a profound thinker and visionary, earlier this year. People who equate Mbembe's stance against the occupation of Palestine territories and his support for a boycot of Israel with anti-semitism then campaigned to withdraw his invitation to speak at a cultural festival in Germany. Fortunately, scholars worldwide, among whom, many in...
Amid the furore about #cancelculture it may be appropriate to commemorate the outrage that targeted Achille Mbembe, Cameroonian historian and social...
A German conservative politician has accused the Cameroonian historian and social scientist of antisemitism and demanded that an invitation for him to speak at a cultural festival in Germany be withdrawn. This is an edited excerpt of an interview with Achille Mbembe conducted by culture journalist René Aguigah for Deutschlandradio Kultur. René Aguigah: How would you describe your relationship with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement? Achille Mbembe: I bet those who accuse me are...
A German conservative politician has accused the Cameroonian historian and social scientist of antisemitism and demanded that an invitation for him to...
Zindzi Mandela, the 59-year-old daughter of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, has died. She was born in the year of the Sharpeville massacre, when South African police shot 69 peaceful demonstrators protesting against the Apartheid pass laws. Her father was already in prison for six years. As a teenager, Zindzi joined the struggle against white minority rule, often at her mother's side. In 1985, she made a momentous speech at the Jabulani stadium near Soweto. In that speech Zindzi read a letter from her...
Zindzi Mandela, the 59-year-old daughter of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, has died. She was born in the year of the Sharpeville massacre, when South African...
‘Sandwich’ helps tech giants avoid tax in Africa via the Netherlands and Ireland. Google's office at the airport residential area in Accra, Ghana, sits inside a plain white and blue two-storey building that could do with a coat of paint. Google, which made more than US$ 160 billion in global revenue in 2019, of which an estimated US$ eighteen billion in ‘Africa and the Middle East’, pays no tax in Ghana, nor does it do so in most of the countries on the African continent. Google Street View of the...
‘Sandwich’ helps tech giants avoid tax in Africa via the Netherlands and Ireland. Google's office at the airport residential area in Accra, Ghana, sits...
Hungry children and white saviours are still very much present in campaigns by Dutch aid organizations. But also, many of the new aid campaign genres are problematic, observe media scholars Emiel Martens and Wouter Oomen. Every year they present the Fly in the Eye Award for the worst campaign on behalf of IDleaks, a Dutch non-profit organization committed to better humanitarian communication. What is going wrong, and how can it be done better? This week, Save the Children UK, the oldest...
Hungry children and white saviours are still very much present in campaigns by Dutch aid organizations. But also, many of the new aid campaign genres are...
What a sad week it has been, as we have witnessed acts of femicide, genocide and senseless killings. It seems unconscionable that a 14-year old girl could stab a 28-year old man to death. Kirvan Fortuin was a respected dancer, choreographer, and LGBTIQ+ activist, who ploughed his artistic talents back into the community of Macassar, the community from which he hailed. The arts is a powerful tool through which to engage communities, empowering them and giving a voice to the voiceless. The arts...
What a sad week it has been, as we have witnessed acts of femicide, genocide and senseless killings. It seems unconscionable that a 14-year old girl...
On 24 April, 2020, the al-Naba newsletter reported a massacre by a local affiliate of the transnational jihadist IS killing 52 villagers in Cabo Delgado, a province in the northern part of Mozambique. António Guterres, the United Nation Secretary-General warned that extremist groups are taking advantage of Covid-19 lockdowns to spread hatred and intensify the recruitment of young people. Tibor Nagy, the Assistant Secretary for the US State's Bureau of African Affairs, compares the IS operations in...
On 24 April, 2020, the al-Naba newsletter reported a massacre by a local affiliate of the transnational jihadist IS killing 52 villagers in Cabo Delgado,...
Amsterdam based South African writer Richard de Nooy envies his daughter's insistence to march. ‘Things are easier to judge from the helicopter’, I tweeted to a friend yesterday, when she expressed concern about the Black Lives Matter demo on the Dam, to which I’d been invited by my youngest daughter. She’s 19, but has been doing her own thing in Amsterdam for quite a while. I see her less often than I’d like, but when we do meet we talk about music, ambition, love, relationships, politics and...
Amsterdam based South African writer Richard de Nooy envies his daughter's insistence to march. ‘Things are easier to judge from the helicopter’, I...
With more than 22 percent of its residents coming from over 220 foreign countries , the Netherlands is one of the most diverse nations in the world. As a result, the country is home to a variety of diaspora communities and organisations that represent them. It has been argued that these diaspora organisations could play a crucial role in making Dutch development policies and programmes more effective . At present, however, both the Dutch development sector and the Dutch government seem to struggle...
With more than 22 percent of its residents coming from over 220 foreign countries , the Netherlands is one of the most diverse nations in the world. As a...
The death of George Floyd under the knee of now former Minnesota Police Officer Derek Chauvin shook me to the core, as it has a lot of people around the world. And yet I did not even watch the video of the heartbreaking incident. Just like I did not watch the video of the point-blank shooting of a boda boda rider by a Local Defence Unit (LDU) militia-man in Masaka district in central Uganda. And just like I have not watched videos of other violent or gruesome murders that seem to litter social...
The death of George Floyd under the knee of now former Minnesota Police Officer Derek Chauvin shook me to the core, as it has a lot of people around the...
George Floyd is not dead He lifts his fist with us Who shout repeatedly, 'I can't breathe'. George Floyd is not dead not in Denver not in Atlanta not in New York not in Los Angeles not on the paved streets of Minneapolis where he died breathless while a police officer held a knee to his neck George Floyd is not dead he is present at all assemblies and law-givings he peers through the windows and into the hearts of people George Floyd who only wanted to live with dignity in the Minneapolis sunshine...
George Floyd is not dead He lifts his fist with us Who shout repeatedly, 'I can't breathe'. George Floyd is not dead not in Denver not in Atlanta not in...
In this piece on The Elephant , John-Allan Namu revisits a gruesome chapter in East-African history, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. On 16 May, 2020, exactly 26 years later, one of the prime instigators of this mass murder, Felicien Kabuga, was arrested in Paris, France. The arrest could have happened 17 years ago if Kenyan journalist William Munuhu, who was set to lead Kenyan and US authorities to Kabuga, was not murdered. "Kenyan police first claimed that he had killed himself by lighting a charcoal...
In this piece on The Elephant , John-Allan Namu revisits a gruesome chapter in East-African history, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. On 16 May, 2020,...
I’m a sick man. My liver hurts. Maybe it’s my kidneys. I’m not really sure. I’ll be dead soon. We’re all dying here. The whole city is dying. We are stardust. We are stardust. We are star … dust. I miss my garden. I need to get back to my garden. This is no longer the city I used to love. The stench of death is all around us. It hangs in the air like diseased molecules. Mass graves are being dug in the outskirts of the city, the radio said. Every night, I stand on my balcony and watch my curfewed...
I’m a sick man. My liver hurts. Maybe it’s my kidneys. I’m not really sure. I’ll be dead soon. We’re all dying here. The whole city is dying. We are...
Nigeria had been waiting for it, expecting it, anticipating it. But no one knew exactly as it came in. Only in hindsight would the country piece together the story of an Italian man who arrived by air in Lagos on March 24, infected with SARS-CoV-2. By four weeks later, 1,337 people had been infected, among whom 40 people had died, and 255 people had been discharged from hospital. The number of people released from hospital is encouraging but questions swirling about the virus are prompting concerns...
Nigeria had been waiting for it, expecting it, anticipating it. But no one knew exactly as it came in. Only in hindsight would the country piece together...
'People need help to comply with rules', say ex SA Revenue Service employees. Collecting tax and organising a COVID 19 lockdown have more in common than you’d think. In both cases, people have to be convinced to do something that is considered unpleasant, but that nevertheless needs to be done. In an op-ed published in South Africa , former South African Revenue Services (SARS) officials Ivan Pillay, Sridharan Kesavan* and Yolisa Pikie draw on their experience in getting people to pay their taxes...
'People need help to comply with rules', say ex SA Revenue Service employees. Collecting tax and organising a COVID 19 lockdown have more in common than...
While America’s black people die at 2 to 3 times the rate of the white population, and like a wicked witch suffering from nocturnal insomnia, the Orange Man announces a midnight defunding of fire-fighting WHO, mid-blaze, peak-inferno. I feel frustrated that no matter the slew of impeachable offenses and costly display of unpresidential conduct, Americans continue to pretend they have a person fit to remain in their White House. And in a world joined at the hips by Corona yet severed at the limbs by...
While America’s black people die at 2 to 3 times the rate of the white population, and like a wicked witch suffering from nocturnal insomnia, the Orange...
A response to the Coronacrisis. The threats that are hanging over the African continent with regards to the spread of COVID-19 demand our individual and collective attention. The situation is critical. Yet this is not about mitigating another 'African' humanitarian crisis but to diffuse the potentially damaging effects of a virus that has shaken the global order and put under question the bases of our living-together. The coronavirus pandemic lays bare that which well-to-do middle classes in...
A response to the Coronacrisis. The threats that are hanging over the African continent with regards to the spread of COVID-19 demand our individual and...
It’s going to be terrible, she says. People will be dying in the streets. Have you seen the images from Ecuador? Piles of bodies. It will be like that in Africa. These vulnerable people in their small shacks cannot protect themselves. They don’t even have water. The disease will strike poor people in Africa more than anywhere. It is the eyes that annoy most. Those big, concerned, white saviour eyes. ‘It is as if she actually hopes for disaster, so she can come to save us from ourselves again’,...
It’s going to be terrible, she says. People will be dying in the streets. Have you seen the images from Ecuador? Piles of bodies. It will be like that in...
The Corona virus rages through the world and affects us all. Almost everywhere, people are in a state of readiness and doing everything in their power to protect themselves and their loved ones. The lack of vaccines and medication is cause for great uncertainty. Economies falter. A state of job insecurity and food scarcity—an ever existing daily reality for millions—is now also prevalent in a once prosperous world. Health facilities are buckling under great pressure. Public life is paralysed, often...
The Corona virus rages through the world and affects us all. Almost everywhere, people are in a state of readiness and doing everything in their power to...
