About politicians and courage: Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren’t normally short. It isn’t a useful attribute. To be morally courageous is to say something different, which reduces your chances of winning an election. Courage is in a funny way more common in an old-fashioned sort of enlightened… Read More »
Part of the anxiety over China’s presence in Africa comes from the challenge they pose to traditional ideas about aid. The Chinese operate with low costs compared to Western aid projects that pay high salaries to foreign experts and put them up in fancy hotels. A 2008 Oxfam study, for example, estimated that donors to… Read More »
CLINT EASTWOOD’S “Invictus” has given Morgan Freeman, a 72-year-old ever-rising cinematic star from Memphis, Tennessee, his best chance yet to show what a canny actor he is. The year is 1995, just 14 months after South Africa’s first multiracial elections. Nelson Mandela wants to use the rugby World Cup, for white South Africans the absolute… Read More »
In the powerful essay “Africa’s Tarnished Name,” for example, he returns to his highly polemical 1975 assessment of Joseph Conrad’s racism in “Heart of Darkness.” Adamantly refusing the notion that the British writer’s portrayal of African barbarity might be excused by his socio-historical context, Achebe makes Conrad, the man, answerable for the offensive stereotypes he promulgates… Read More »
If you like movies, or if you are in any way interested in them, you should be listening to Mark Kermode‘s film review on BBC 5 live. Kermode wrote a PhD thesis on horror fiction, and his best movie is The Exorcist. The passion with which he rants about movies he hates is matched by… Read More »
Financial Times’ Gillian Tett reviews Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street: Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street By Karen Ho Duke Press £16.99, 392 pages When I first started covering finance for the FT, I used to get embarrassed when asked about my academic past. Before I became a journalist, I did a… Read More »
I just got this article through my Twitter friend @crystalsimeoni. I like it so much that I decided to post it here. The full text: Good or bad, the African university is all we have Keguro Macharia’s article “African universities crippling their students’ (The EastAfrican — December 29, 2008-January 4, 2009) pricked me. I found… Read More »
Cover via Amazon I thought to draw attention to Jeffrey Sachs comments on Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, and Ms Moyo’s response. Mr Sachs’s comments were a bit disapointing. I have expected more in substance from him. Read the opening, for instance: The debate about foreign aid has become farcical. The big opponents of aid today… Read More »
Fukuyama wrote a review of Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, and the somewhat less popular The Challenge for Africa by Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. The following paragraph raises a very important issue about the problem with African countries. The roots of Africa’s political malaise go far deeper than the post-independence foreign-aid regime. Unlike East… Read More »
I am currently reading Naomi Klein’s ‘Shock Doctrine‘ so it was really interesting for me to read her profile here. I will come back with the review of the book in the following weeks. You can read the profile in the meantime.