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- By Tinashe Mushakavanhu
- Politics & Opinion
In an imaginary interview, composed from actual quotes, the late Zimbawean writer Dambudzo Marechera (1952 – 1987) comments on the troubles his country is facing today.
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- By Bart Luirink
- Politics & Opinion
Vanaf woensdag 16 oktober gaat de Nigeriaans/Britse programmamaker Ikenna Azuike in een nieuwe serie op zoek naar Afrikaanse diaspora gemeenschappen in het Verenigd Koninkrijk (Nigerianen), Portugal (Kaapverdianen), Finland (Somaliërs), Cyprus (Soedanezen) en Belgie (Congolezen). Maar Azuike (45) gaat vooral ook op zoek naar zichzelf.
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
Award-winning author and BBC broadcaster Zeinab Badawi will be in conversation with fellow writer Vamba Sherif about her new book, dealing with a history from the dawn of humanity to independence.
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
Recently released statistics on African population growth tell a different story to what the prophets of doom want us to believe. In no other continent is population growth falling as fast as in Africa. While in 1960 African women bore an average of 6.6 children, today it is 3.8. By 2050, the annual UN report calculates, it will drop further to 2.6.
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
In a new 6 part series for Dutch television, Ikenna Azuike travels through various African communities in Europe in search of the meaning of home.
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- By Saurabh Sinha & Melat Getachew
- Politics & Opinion
What must happen to turn Africa’s strong population growth into prosperity for all?
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- By Habtom Yohannes
- Politics & Opinion
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Milan Kundera
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
South Africa has a strange tendency to put total opposites in the international spotlight. Bad boy Paul Kruger, a Boer hero who fought both the imperialist British and the country's original inhabitants, thrilled thousands of Dutch supporters in the early 1900s. Freedom fighters like Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Archbishop Tutu, or white human rights lawyer Bram Fischer inspired international solidarity movements decades later with their principled struggle against racism and oppression.
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- By Maher Mezahi
- Politics & Opinion
Removed from the facts, the firestorm around Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is the latest attempt by the right-wing in the West to find fodder for its culture war.
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
During the second Olympic Games in 1904 in St. Louis, USA, African athletes were still excluded from official competition. However, they did participate in a kind of shadow games, “athletic events for savages.” In a retrospective in this issue, sports historian Francois Cleophas recalls this “unique spectacle” in which spectators witnessed how the “savage tribes” had to pelt each other with stones in one of the events.
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- By Gilbert Nuwagira
- Politics & Opinion
Anti-government protests have spread to Uganda, where ordinary people are tired of passively accepting elite misrule. “(We) are called bazukulu, meaning ‘grandchildren.’ (…) We are certainly beyond the days of being an infantilized citizenry.”
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- By Francois Cleophas
- Politics & Opinion
The answer to that question reveals the surprising story of a 1904 marathon – and exposes the history of racism and white supremacy that characterised the Olympics in its early days.
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- By Oyunga Pala
- Politics & Opinion
The crux of the struggle lies in reclaiming the soul of Kenya from a generation that became malevolent during public duty.
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- By Nadege Bizimungu
- Politics & Opinion
When Christian missionaries established schools in different parts of East Africa, they constructed the narrative that Black hair was unsightly, ungodly and untameable. In many postcolonial schools this still seems to be the norm.
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- By By Ngina Kirori
- Politics & Opinion
This past week was the week of Kenya’s youth, which came out in thousands on the streets of Nairobi to reject austerity, new heavy taxation, and government corruption. What follows is reporter Ngina Kirori’s diary of the protests.
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- By William Shoki
- Politics & Opinion
William Ruto has gravely misjudged the nerve of his countrymen. The man who narrowly sailed to Kenya’s presidency in 2022, is trying to shove a sketchy legislative proposal down Kenyan throats. The Finance Bill 2024 aims to raise 346 billion Kenyan shillings to service debt and fund development and has been met with public outcry and widespread protests.
The movement to #RejectFinanceBill2024 is being led by media-savvy, urban Gen-Z youth.
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- By Job Mwaura, University of the Witwatersrand
- Politics & Opinion
During the ethnic violence in Kenya in 2008, the church in Kiambaa became a symbol of the horror that shook the country. Kikuyu who had sought refuge there were killed on New Year’s Day when Kalenjin youths set the building alight.
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- By Nyoxani Mazive
- Politics & Opinion
In her award-winning thesis, Rachel Dubale reveals how Ethiopian social communal practices that secure financial resources dissolve, as urban development projects rise.
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- By Tjitske Lingsma
- Politics & Opinion
Respected South African jurist John Dugard chose law as a weapon against apartheid and genocide. At an age when most people retire, he became UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine. “Meanwhile, racism in Israel has reached a level I have never seen in South Africa.”
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- By Bart Luirink
- Politics & Opinion
In a report for Dutch TV, to be broadcast on Monday 3 June, 2024, journalist Bram Vermeulen speaks to the South African connections of the newly elected Speaker of Dutch Parliament, a member of Geert Wilders’ PVV. Bosma’s 2015 book on South Africa contains dozens of factual inaccuracies. Shortly after publication, ZAM editor Bart Luirink fact-checked some of them.
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- By Leo Igwe
- Politics & Opinion
Many Nigerians still believe in witchcraft. Campaigns by evangelists to ‘free from witchcraft attacks’ only strengthen the primitive belief.
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- By Bart Luirink
- Politics & Opinion
The historiography of the Nederlandsch Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg Maatschappij pays scant attention to black workers' resistance to exploitation and oppression.
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- By Sean Jacobs & Kathryn Mathers
- Politics & Opinion
Near the start of the documentary film The Greatest Night in Pop Music, released at the beginning of 2023, the American singer-songwriter Lionel Richie describes how he and Michael Jackson came up with the melody for “We Are the World,” the charity single recorded by American artists in 1985 to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.
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- By Bart Luirink
- Politics & Opinion
Will Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo sign a law passed by parliament that will make life hell for LGBTQI+ people? The president seems to be in doubt. Sixteen Ghanaian civil society organisations are calling on him to show courage and refuse to sign the bill. Ghanaian academics are also speaking out. The country’s new anti-homosexuality bill “violates everyone's rights, not just LGBTQI+ people,” writes law professor Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua in this edition of ZAM.
