Africa

South Africa plays an important role in the Southern African region and on the African continent, as a whole. SACSIS will provide news about the region and the continent, with a particular focus on South Africa's relationship to the rest of the African continent.

Frantz Fanon Fifty Year Years Later

Picture: www.bam.org Richard Pithouse - Some days ago we saw a sunset that turned the robe of heaven a bright violet. Today it is a very hard red that the eye encounters.    - Frantz Fanon, Towards the African Revolution Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean philosopher and revolutionary who joined the Algerian Revolution, died of leukaemia at the age of 36 on the 6th of December 1961. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, was published soon after his death and so we are fifty years on from both Fanon and the first...

Has Obama Just Kicked Off Another Oil War -- This Time in Africa?

Picture: Alternet Steve Horn - Here's what is likely behind Obama's decision to send special forces to Uganda. On Friday, October 14, President Barack Obama announced he would be sending 100 Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) forces to Uganda to "remove from the battlefield" (meaning capture or kill) the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony. "I believe that deploying these U.S. Armed Forces furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant...

The US Power Grab in Africa

Picture: osipovva Pepe Escobar - Beware of strangers bearing gifts. Post-modern amazon and United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finally landed in Tripoli - on a military jet - to lavish praise on the dodgy Transitional National Council (TNC), those opportunists/defectors/Islamists formerly known as "North Atlantic Treaty Organization rebels".  Clinton was greeted on Tuesday "on the soil of free Libya" (her words) by what the New York Times quaintly described as an "irregular...

The New Scramble for Africa

Picture: www.indymedia.org.uk Conn Hallinan - Is current U.S. foreign policy in Africa following a blueprint drawn up almost eight years ago by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, one of the most conservative think tanks in the world? Although it seems odd that a Democratic administration would have anything in common with the extremists at Heritage, the convergence in policy and practice between the two is disturbing. Heritage, with help from Joseph Coors and the Scaife Foundations, was founded in 1973 by the late Paul Weyrich, one of...

Reinventing Africa as a Country

Picture: Fotopedia Liepollo Pheko - Africa is again becoming a “country” in the popular discourse of Western media intent on rebranding the entire continent as the eternal basket case.  Despite North Africa’s Arab Spring (which has inspired a global movement against corrupt and undemocratic leadership) and the birth of Africa’s 54th state, Southern Sudan (the result of the Sudanese people’s will expressed via a referendum), the idea of Africa as an uninterrupted landscape of human suffering...

How al-Qaeda Got to Rule in Tripoli

Picture: Maggie Pepe Escobar - His name is Abdelhakim Belhaj. Some in the Middle East might have, but few in the West and across the world would have heard of him.  Time to catch up. Because the story of how an al-Qaeda asset turned out to be the top Libyan military commander in still war-torn Tripoli is bound to shatter - once again - that wilderness of mirrors that is the "war on terror", as well as deeply compromising the carefully constructed propaganda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's...