Bee Bee
19 November 2009 marked the 100th anniversary of the Great Congo Demonstration held at the Royal Albert Hall, chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Randall Davidson and supported by other clergy, prominent activists and writers, to raise awareness ab...
Dipo
On 16 October, the day a group loyal to Henry Okah broke from an amnesty and vowed to keep fighting in the creeks, another key figure in the armed struggle held forth in more rarefied settings. At Chatham House, the London-based think tank, in the room fr...
Patrick Smith
One of Nigeria’s biggest banks announced this morning that it wants to raise US$3 billion on the local stock market, my old friend Nduka Obaigbena has hosted the glitterati of Lagos in a characteristically grand birthday party and the Lagos go-slow was as...
Patrick Smith
Accra
12 July 2009
Barack Obama's homecoming lived up to the billing. Ghanaians accorded President Obama the warmest Akwaaba! He returned the compliment, meeting with Ghanaian health workers, activists, politicians and traditional rulers.
Then at his i...
Stars Foundation
On 7 April 2009, the anniversary of Rwanda's 100-day genocide, Reportage Press is publishing Genocide:My Stolen Rwanda by Reverien Rurangwa. This is a personal account of the massacres by Reverien Rurangwa, who witnessed the murders of 43 of his family me...
Dipo
The African Union leaders made history by electing one of their longest surviving dinosaur dictators, Colonel Qaddafi, to be the African Union president for the 2009 term. They made history not because they elected Qaddafi; but rather because this was the...
Dipo
Protests in Lincolnshire recently by British workers irate over jobs there going to Italian and Portuguese ones raise some interesting issues.
Total, the French oil company had caused to be brought in about 300 construction workers from those two EU coun...
Patrick Smith
After Somali pirates, Congolese warlords and Zimbabwe in the time of cholera, Ghana’s elections just don’t cut it. Or that’s the verdict of the international news organisations, which have studiously ignored election campaigning in a country that has some...
Meerkat
In September's Africa-Asia Confidential, we reported on Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou's proposed diplomatic truce with China (AAC Vol 1 No 11, 'Dollar diplomacy fails'). No word on the truce yet; but the current chumminess of Ma's Kuomintang (KMT) and Chi...
Dipo
Lunch, last Tuesday at the Dorchester, was an immoveable feast. The tables were laden with food in a sumptuous spread worthy of a royal dinner. The invited guests, try as they did, could not make a dent in the sheer amount of the food made available for t...