06/5/2016
When my email was hacked recently I shocked myself dreaming up the most horrific forms of torture I would personally inflict on the perpetrators. But when Mossack Fonseca was hacked last Monday – in an organised attack by journalists – I cheered the hackers. We at RAS have been talking about the effect of tax …
If Shakespeare were alive today, he would probably be writing plays about African presidents rather than medieval kings. Nowhere else in the world has such dramatic and personal politics. Uganda is a case in point. In this East African nation, the re-election ...
24/3/2016
Africa is no longer a continent of palaces and peasants. There is now a solid middle class, which is one of the chief factors that drove Africa’s economic growth from around 2000. This coincided with more aid for development, an end to many of the wars that ...
10/3/2016
Congo: UK And US Must Play More Consistent Hand To End World’s Worst War Al Jazeera coverage of the M23 movement’s advance on Goma in Eastern Congo Africa is covered in epithets, like graffiti. It has been labelled dark, lost, hopeless. B...
19/6/2015
A few years ago I would have celebrated the end of US global hegemony but it is hard to be optimistic about the future of democratic values, human rights and a free market global economy – the formula which America proclaimed as the future when the Cold War ...
01/12/2014
“The Price of Things” Last night, after leaving the festival site, called the June 12th Cultural Centre, I took a motorbike taxi home; in the first instance, the taxi driver got my destination wrong, and then when I got to the hotel, after agreeing the fee...
01/12/2014
Last year, a major festival of Arts and Books launched in Nigeria, and surprisingly it wasn’t based in one of the larger cities in the country, Abuja, Calabar, or even Lagos; instead the festival took place in the small town of Ake, famously the hometown...
04/11/2014
So…a while back, ahead of Africa Writes, in collaboration with the Bookshy Blogger’s Zahrah Nessbit-Ahmed, we published a list of 25 Books by African Women that everyone should read – it’s been very popular, and we thought it wasn’t fair that women...
03/11/2014
One hundred years ago this week, self regarding, ignorant and weak leaders with the primitive belief that God was on their side, ancient tribal hatreds and total disregard for human life, combined to make decisions that killed an estimated 16 million people an...
28/10/2014