Nigeria faces a critical crossroads as it wages war on the terrorist group Boko Haram. This April, the country’s citizens elected Muhammadu Buhari president, forwarding a broad mandate to overhaul the nation’s counterterrorism strategy. Since its inception in 2002, Boko Haram has been responsible for numerous kidnappings, suicide bombings, and armed attacks on popular landmarks. … Read more
The global divide between rich and poor is startlingly large and has only increased in recent decades. Currently, the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population holds less than 1 percent of global assets. These high levels of wealth inequality are most obvious in one of the poorest regions in the world: sub-Saharan Africa. 45 … Read more
Many media outlets and Western anti-Ebola campaigns have perpetuated the devaluing of black lives everywhere by misrepresenting almost 10,000 black lives taken by the Ebola virus in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Mali. Much of the public discourse has taken the liberty of sensationalizing Ebola deaths, and others have erroneously used dehumanizing video footage of Ebola victims … Read more
In 2011 Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato was beaten to death after a national newspaper’s cover featured his face above the words “Hang Them.” In the summer of 2013, two gay Russian men were stabbed for their sexuality. That July, Jamaican teenager Dwayne Jones was chopped to death for cross-dressing. In August 2014, Bryan … Read more
What do Ron Paul and the President of Ghana have in common? One is a former libertarian congressional representative from Texas and perpetual presidential candidate; the other is the reformist leader of a sub-Saharan African nation with a GDP per capita nearly one-twelfth that of Texas. Yet both, separated by an ocean of differences, could … Read more
In Johannesburg in April 2008, Eudy Simelane’s naked body was found face-down in a ditch. She had been stabbed nine times. She had been raped. Eudy had also been one of South Africa’s foremost female soccer players. She had dreamed of becoming the first female World Cup referee, and through her successes on the field, … Read more
On September 1, the United States conducted aerial strikes in Somalia that killed the leader of terrorist group al-Shabaab, Ahmed Abdi Godane. Immediate responses from many observers have been quite optimistic. Abdi Aynte, director of the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies, claims that Godane’s death leaves “a serious possibility of [al-Shabaab’s] gradual disintegration.” Other experts … Read more
The unrest that dethroned Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure and his administration in 2012 has marred the country for the past two years, generating a stream of conflicts involving the military, the Tuareg National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), and Islamic fundamentalist groups. Several towns have been taken over by combatants, who in … Read more
In the spring of 1994, South Africa overcame mountainous obstacles to end apartheid and elect Nelson Mandela as its first black president. Twenty years later, it’s facing many more challenges, this time without the leadership of the man who united and healed a nation bitterly divided. Mandela left behind a legacy of democracy that in … Read more
Even as the Somalian pirate movie Captain Phillips receives rave reviews, airwaves that had been rife with Somali pirate stories are now strangely silent. At first glance, piracy in the once perilous Gulf of Eden seems to have gone AWOL as camera lenses refocus on land conflict between the Somali government and Islamist terror group … Read more