ZOOMa

ZOOMa

His face says it all. His eyes glance at me through the picture of spite and revenge that laid waste so many. But his head can’t turn: he’s too old. Flabs of neck skin reveal the greasy gutter food on which he ravenously fed whenever he lost a battle, which were many. But he always avoided his Waterloo. He always won the big ones, and the rivulets of the sweat of those battles seemed this morning to have congealed his pugnacious face as prep for Madame Tussaud’s ultimate judgment:

He’s lost. There will be no granite or even concrete statues. His legacy is wax.
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Survival Suicide

Survival Suicide

Feel the epiphanous relationship of the disaster in The Sudan with Kaylin Gillis and Ralph Yarl.

It’s called destruction. It emerges from hate, love or some other intense emotion. Amplified by modern technology it grows exponentially, quickly fuses into cultural movements and governments like a Covid virus strangling our pulmonary cells. And then – always – it explodes into war.
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Failed Demo

Failed Demo

Tomorrow the modern African country that started the Arab Spring in 2010 will officially end democracy in Tunisia. This is neither a coup or proletarian revolution. It’s what the people want.

Tunisia is and always was one of the most progressive and developed societies in Africa. It was no surprise that the “Arab Spring” started here. And I don’t think it’s really their fault that the democratic experiment of 2014 will fail. It’s the fault of democracy itself.

This massive political and social retrograde is happening because democracy is seen as having suffocated economic development. Too much talk and not enough action.
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OnSafari: Israel

OnSafari: Israel

Three soldiers — all very young – like stick men in a video game strutting awkwardly across an intersection at the very far end of a very long, dark street. Too far to hear their boots on the lose rocks. But the shrill shouts of very young children displace their cadence, and they lift their TAR-21s to hip level and face the sounds of the screaming children.

It just so happens that the kids are between me and the soldiers. I’m in the line of fire.
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Hawking Democracy

Hawking Democracy

I hear a giant ho-hum following the grunt-grunt of the lion walking through the night.

Two days after the election with 10% of the polling stations still outstanding the two rivals for the Kenyan presidency are divided by less than 1 percent. It will be days before we know who is President. Maybe weeks as it gets hung up in the courts. Kenya is as tense as a cocked mousetrap.

But right now the country is peaceful. Young people didn’t vote. Parts of the country – particularly heavily populated parts near the coast – hardly turned out at all. The slums which account for more than half of the greater Nairobi population and which were instrumental in past elections’ violence, are quiet tonight.
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Gutting Democracy

Gutting Democracy

Some of the best legal scholarship of our times created Kenya’s new constitution 15 years ago and South Africa’s a decade earlier.

In the end both Kenya and South Africa adopted a three-branch federal government like the United States. But both societies established a creed practical for the modern age. And it’s the reason both countries protect the right for abortion and the U.S. no longer does.
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Simplicity

Simplicity

Six dollar-a-gallon is less painful than radiation burns. Devil in the details, of course, so celebration of America’s “ban of Russian oil” should be suspended until all the details are known. But my African friends think my ardent support for this is hypocritical. One of my favorite commentators, Joy Reid of MSNBC, last night echoed that sentiment. They’re all wrong.
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GoodvBad

GoodvBad

Africa, make no mistake: abstaining from morality is immoral. Serious moves afoot to boycott those African countries that abstained from demanding that Russia withdraw from Ukraine. This includes South Africa which by abstaining from this historic vote condemns its own courageous struggle for democracy.

The majority of African countries, as with the majority of countries worldwide, voted to demand that Russia cease hostilities and withdraw. It was a historic and brave moment for the world. The results demonstrate which African countries are weak and withering, and which are strong and prospering.
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African Cowardice

African Cowardice

“We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.”

When Kenya’s Martin Kimani, ambassador to the UN, concluded his lambasting of Russia in the UN Security Council last Tuesday we waited for the rest of Africa to follow suit. They didn’t.

My surprise has turned to anger. A life of empathy with Africa’s condition riles my intellect. What the hell is wrong with Africa, the part of the world that has suffered more from foreign occupation than any other?
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Unholy Alliance

Unholy Alliance

South Africa’s repugnant refusal to condemn Russia is a dangerous over estimation of the importance of its BRICS trade alliance. As a leader of much of the African world, it’s cultish suicide.

Attempts to frame the Ukrainian invasion as just another dispute among us rich and powerful is shameful. The South African Rand plunged today. Apparently the Rand understands.
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On The March

On The March

Western fixation with terrorism at the expense of poverty and basic human rights is finally coming home to roost in Africa.

New or reinvigorated democracies supported by the U.S. and France are imploding. Military coups are rearranging the rubble. A decade or so ago this would have represented serious political backwardness. But now it’s quite different. I’m surprised to find myself saying so, but these military coups look a lot better than the regimes they’re toppling.
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Dream Away

Dream Away

I was 15 years old, wasting the last bits of summer wandering with my dog alone in the forests behind my house and the prairies behind the forests returning late for cold dinners.

“I have a dream,” Martin Luther King said as I was wandering on August 28, 1963, at the opening of the “March on Washington” in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

I always got home in time for Walter Cronkite at 6 p.m. Walter had just started with the “March on Washington” when my local Memphis affiliate cut out of the newscast to run a car dealership ad three times in a row before shifting early to local weather!
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Divy Up

Divy Up

Minutes after Biden’s speech ended the media of sub-Sahara Africa fired up. No matter they were all ending their day: “Biden tears into Trump,” Nigeria’s Independent online newspaper proclaimed. South Africa’s Business Insider focused on Barak Obama’s praise of the speech.

“Democracy is at a greater risk,” Business Insider concluded.

You have to go outside America to see what the speech means. No matter how historical or consequential the speech may be for Democrats and progressives, it doesn’t exist for Trumpians.
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