The World Cup is coming to Africa for the first time. The Cup will provide many opportunities to Africa and Africans; for example, Africa will have an opportunity to shine in the spotlight of world attention and forge a new post-post-colonial identity in the 21st century. The Cup also provides an opportunity for me to reflect on how my own identity has been caught up with Africa and soccer.
After five days of voting, the withdrawal en masse of virtually all the opposition presidential candidates and countless accusations of ballot tampering, voter intimidation, and worse, Sudan’s elections drama has drawn to an unsurprising conclusion.
When Barack Obama took office as president of the United States in January 2009, it was widely expected that he would dramatically change, or even reverse, the militarized and unilateral national security policy toward Africa that had been pursued by the Bush administration. But, after a little more than one year in office, it is clear that the Obama administration is essentially following the same policy that has guided US military involvement in Africa for more than a decade. Indeed, it appears that President Obama is determined to expand and intensify US military engagement throughout Africa.
Since Senator Barack Obama became the president of the United States, visiting his paternal grandmother — “Mama Obama” — in her remote west Kenyan village of Kogelo became slightly more difficult. A small military camp had been built next to the access road to her house, and the compound is protected by a metal gate and security post.
Zimbabwe is currently the subject of sanctions designed to pressure Robert Mugabe and his colleagues to cease human rights abuses and remove other barriers to democratization in the country. Yet despite some recent positive developments — such as the appointment of independent commissions on human rights, elections, and the media — the future of democracy in Zimbabwe remains highly uncertain.
ANDRE VLTCHEK: Can you tell us something about the media coverage of Kenya? It seems to be almost exclusively negative.
MWANDAWIRO MGHANGA: The negative coverage translates to negative and hostile actions against Kenya. Up to now, the United States still has travel ban against Kenya. It is amazing Obama’s government still says that Kenya is not a safe place to travel to.
How to judge the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the second north-south civil war in Sudan, one of the bloodiest and longest on the African continent? In short, the CPA is a decent agreement that suffers from lack of implementation.
In December 1984, I walked into the HMV store on London’s Oxford Street to spend a little discretionary money on an LP. Other albums drew me, but one had an advantage. It combined the talents of all the major ‘Top of the Pops’ singers in one song. Given the standards of British pop at the time (leaving aside Scritti Politti’s ‘Jacques Derrida’ and perhaps the Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’), the diminishing marginal returns at the cash register were held in check with only one purchase. It had to be Bob Geldof’s ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ The ‘charity single’ had all of Britain’s finest, from Paul McCartney to Boy George, from Siobhan Fahey (of Bananarama) to Sting. The song opens with African drums and Phil Collins’s drum kit, and then the flow of British vocalists, with a young Bono in full flight. Geldof named their charity super-group Band Aid, a name that morphed as the fever caught, into Live Aid, Sport Aid and so on. BBC ran the Band Aid song non-stop. It raised millions of pounds to buy relief for the survivors of the Ethiopian famine.
In the Mayan game of pitz, the first team sport in human history, two sets of players squared off in a ball court that could stretch as long as a football field. The object of the game was to use hips and elbows to keep the ball in the air and, if possible, get it through a hoop set high on a stone wall. The ball was roughly the size and heft of a human head. Indeed, given the sheer number of decapitations in the Popol Vuh, the sacred Mayan text that prominently features the game, scholars have not ruled out the possibility that the teams sometimes played with the heads of sacrificial victims. It’s also probable that, at the conclusion of the game, one team or the other fell en masse beneath the priests’ daggers.
The 2010 FIFA World Cup is coming to Cape Town, the first to be held in Africa. But the anger of many South Africans is brewing. The righteous wrath stems from the continuing social rifts that divide this “rainbow nation” along racial lines. Sadly, xenophobia and extreme nationalism are also muffling the legitimate demands of the poor.