You come from Africa. Now you are an American. Are you an African-American? Yes, but only if your skin is dark enough! What’s worse, if your skin happens to be not-so-dark and you put yourself in the new category of ‘white African-American’ as nothing else seems to fit, dark-skinned people who […]
Remember my disagreement about South Africa’s Peaceful Transition? Well, it was so peaceful that they have made a movie about all the violence: "The period between [Nelson] Mandela’s release from prison [February 1990] and the first democratic election [April 1994] was extraordinarily violent. More people died in that four-year period […]
What exactly was wrong with apartheid? At root the act of defining people in arbitrary phoney ‘racial’ categories then allocating them special territories accordingly (‘homelands’). Just as happens in some bookshops these days (HT Ed Driscoll): What a great idea! Putting all the novels about black people in a single […]
This story of the ghastly township violence in South Africa against real or suspected lesbians – ‘corrective rape’ – has drawn a lot of attention. The ferocity and brutality of Simelane’s murder sent shockwaves through Kwa Thema, where she was much known and loved for bringing sports fame to the […]
I liked Clare Short when I first met her in Bosnia a couple of years later. Her febrile anti-Americanism aside, she was tough-minded, down-to-earth and perspicacious on Bosnian issues. Why did someone as smart as Clare Short get that letter to the Zimbabwe government so wrong? Let’s look at the context. […]
In Zimbabwe the Africanist tendency led by Robert Mugabe is making one last heave to destroy ‘white farmers’. The so-called power-sharing deal which is meant to start to pull Zimbabwe out of its crisis leaves the Agriculture Ministry in Mugabe’s hands. So, out they go: At the meeting in Chegutu, […]
So, as expected, good money drives out bad at last in benighted Zimbabwe. The authorities have started to allow people to trade in real money and not scraps of paper covered in zeroes. Or, for now, not covered in zeroes. I had an interesting discussion this afternoon with someone writing a […]
Matthew Parris writes eloquently about the role of Christianity in African development: In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. […]
Does ‘bad’ money drive out ‘good’ money, as Sir Thomas Gresham claimed back in the mid-C16? This turns out to be Complicated. See Wikipedia on the subject, as well as this lively and elegant analysis. The issue arose because once upon a time the core standard of value was gold. […]
… means (if I recall correctly) "too little too late" in Afrikaans. You know things are looking bad for President Mugabe when Archbishop Tutu calls for him to step down: The Nobel Prize winner told Dutch television that Mr Mugabe should be removed by force if he refuses to go. […]
