Africa Archive

JOHANNESBURG — The divisions that have time and again beset South Africa’s tripartite alliance — consisting of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) — have returned to haunt the union and further threaten its existence. This time, the rifts are playing themselves out in a devastating public-service strike that pits South Africa’s president and head of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, on one side and the leftist allies that propelled him to power within his party and the country on the other. No sooner had Zuma […]

JUBA, Sudan — In an exclusive interview, Southern Sudan President Salva Kiir Mayardit told World Politics Review that he doesn’t think “there is any point where southerners will declare a unilateral independence.” The semi-autonomous region of Southern Sudan will hold a referendum in January 2011 on whether to secede from the North. The vote is one of the final steps of a comprehensive peace agreement (CPA) signed in 2005 that ended the country’s two-decade long civil war. At a Congressional hearing (.pdf) last year, former U.S. envoy to Sudan Roger Winter said the South’s ruling party, the Sudan People’s Liberation […]

While the world doesn’t yet face a food crisis on par with the summer of 2008, it’s clear that the drought currently affecting the Black Sea trio of Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan — all big-time global exporters of wheat and barley — has suddenly made food inflation a primary threat to the somewhat fragile and decidedly uneven global economic recovery. At the very least, it reminds us just how tight global food markets are, due to the contradictory combination of rising middle-class demand and the enduring commitment by brittle governments around the world to keep prices low — at whatever […]

WikiLeaks, the controversial website where anonymous users can submit highly classified government and corporate documents, has recently come under fire for posts involving the war effort in Afghanistan. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange discusses the site and his motivation.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame won a landslide victory in the country’s controversial presidential election. In an interview with Al Jazeera, Kagame addresses critics who say there was no real opposition represented in the polls and adds that he has no intention of tampering with the Rwandan constitution in the future to extend his time in office as other African leaders have done.

In voting overwhelmingly to support a new constitution, Kenyans sent a clear message on Aug. 4 about the need for reform in a country brought nearly to its knees by corruption and bad governance. And in going to the polls peacefully and en masse, capping a campaign season that included a bomb attack in the early days and persistent rumors of preparations for rancor around the country, the more than 70 percent of eligible voters who cast their ballots spoke volumes about the need to obviate the memory of previous elections: the last of which left more than 1,000 dead […]

In the post-Cold War world, the rapid social, political and economic transformations associated with globalization have coincided with the continuing spread of HIV/AIDS. In fact, it’s possible to argue that AIDS is both a product and a cause of globalization, understood here as the whole gamut of economic, social, political and epistemological ways in which more and more of the world is brought within similar systems of governance, consumption and imagination. Up to an estimated 14,000 people a day are infected with HIV, and in most parts of the world, infections are increasing more rapidly than are effective responses. In […]