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XXXL…
Your correspondent has a reasonable grasp of the world’s geography, at least insofar as the relative locations of the world’s nations. But prisoner of a worldview that has been framed by a lifetime of...
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What goes around…
George Packer described in the New York Times what happens to the clothes that one drops with charity… If you’ve ever left a bag of clothes outside the Salvation Army or given to a local church drive,...
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“Trying to plan for the future without knowing the past is like trying to...
It’s happening by hook (violence) and by crook (economic development)… Palmyra, an ancient oasis city and one-time capital of a short-lived empire, has been razed before. In the third century, Roman...
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“We face neither East nor West; we face forward”*…
To the Western mind, “African Electronics,” the theme of this year’s annual Chale Wote street art festival in Ghana’s capital, might conjure up images of social media revolutions, telecommunications...
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“No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of...
What if the Black Plague had killed off almost all Europeans? Then the Reconquista never happens. Spain and Portugal don’t kickstart Europe’s colonization of other continents. And this is what Africa...
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“A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog,...
Savior Barbie stands in front of a chalkboard in a run-down classroom somewhere in Africa. “It’s so sad that they don’t have enough trained teachers here. I’m not trained either, but I’m from the...
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“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize,...
This map of Canada shows the country’s familiar vastness. A single line drawn across its deep south adds a surprising layer of information. The line runs well below the 49th parallel that constitutes...
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“The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it”*…
Aristotle held that philosophising begins with wonder. The African philosopher Jonathan Chimakonam suggested that, while wonder might have instigated Western philosophy, it was frustration that...
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“The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past”*…
Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, approached by a Berber on camelback; detail from The Catalan Atlas, attributed to the Majorcan mapmaker Abraham Cresques, 1375 There is a broad strain in Western...
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“There is always something new out of Africa”*…
“A factory worker at Unilever’s oral care plant in Ethiopia” by DFID – UK Department for International Development, CC BY 2.0 Afrofuturism is a fun and interesting subgenre of science fiction and...
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“This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are”*…
Joel Stein on the ascendance of Miami… The last time Miami was relevant, it wasn’t important. In the 1980s, Miami provided nothing more than drugs, clubs, pastel blazers, jai alai gambling and, most...
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“How Africa’s population evolves, and how the continent’s economies develop,...
In these tumultuous times, there’s a lot of competition for one’s attention: Russia and its aggression? China and it’s ever-more-assertive rise? The tensions within Europe? The divisions within the...
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