A marked change in the political landscape of Africa has been in the making over the past five years. Ever since demonstrators in Khartoum and Omduran drove Sudan’s Jaafar Numeiri out of power in 1985, pressure from the streets has …
How are we to understand Africa? Via universal models or by cataloguing its particularities? The economic anthropology of Marshall Sahlins or Maurice Godelier, for example, has until now used specific behavioral patterns as a weapon against the universality of economic …
It may seem churlish or nitpicking to write a critical comment on “The Future of Socialism in Africa” — especially since I agree with most of Richard L. Sklar’s admirable article. He is not only right on the mark, but …
Independent Zimbabwe was born in 1980 on the ruins of Rhodesia. For some fifteen years the guerrillas of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (PF-ZAPU) fought Ian Smith’s white government, and …
As recently as four years ago, no fewer than twenty sovereign states in Africa were governed by rulers in the name of socialism. Had my article identified any two or more of the political economies in those countries as socialist …
Beset by a horrendous economic predicament, Africa is today also haunted by a dreadful political nightmare: now that the winds of democracy are sweeping the continent, it looks as if tyranny might give way to anarchy. The term is used …
Read Chinua Achebe’s 1992 “Reflections of a Novelist” in Dissent.
Literature has been an extraordinarily influential institution in postcolonial Africa, and African writers have been prominent in the struggles to build modern democratic societies on the ruins of the colonial state and against the brutalities of the many dictatorial post-independence …
A bleak picture emerges from today’s Africa. One glaring aspect is the material deprivation suffered by most Africans: the situation has degenerated to outright destitution because of steep economic decline across the continent in the past decade or so. Nearly …
Life on the African continent has been transformed by the lethal virus that causes AIDS —the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The decade-old AIDS epidemic has already strained the social and economic fabric of African societies, taking an especially heavy toll …
This special issue of Dissent devotes itself entirely to Africa today. In the past three years the world has altered fundamentally, and virtually everywhere across Africa there is a dialectic of crisis and change at work. Old regimes and ideas …
All American ethnic groups—Irish, Jews, Italians, Poles, blacks, and so on—have struggled in a rather schizophrenic way with their self-image or identity. Any group’s ethnic identity within American society is carved out of a delicate, tension-laced mixture of its origin …
The collective taxi had just passed the square, white Social Security Administration building. One of the two young men next to me asked his friend, “Do you know how much the director there earns? Five hundred thousand zaires (about $7,500 …
Both these statements are true, and yet there is a terrible irony in them. The Dinka woman, driven from her home by the savage raids of Sudanese Arab militiamen, was, that very same month, entitled to vote in the first …
In Africa, as elsewhere, the debacle of socialist thought can be attributed to intellectual as well as circumstantial causes. During the colonial era, and for some years thereafter, socialist intellectuals in Africa had routinely identified capitalism as a barrier to …
