Word: african
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Zimbabwe, the physical heart of southern Africa, is once again its political and spiritual battleground. As I write this, President Robert Mugabe is trying to block democratic change that challenges his 28-year rule. But he and his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union?Patriotic Front, do not regard the people's votes as the arbiter of power - or, if they do in theory, they do not accept in practice that they could ever lose an election. In Mugabe's eyes, his right to rule derives from his status as the leader of the liberation movement, the breaker of white...
...politics of southern Africa. Ruthlessly grabbed by Cecil Rhodes and a ragtag army of white adventurers in the 19th century, it became virtually a European country, the original inhabitants driven from their land and reduced to workers and servants. Although Rhodesia had one of the continent's best-educated African populations, it denied Africans political power. In 1965, after Britain tried to force change on the white settlers, they declared it an independent, white-ruled republic. Black majority rule? "Not in a thousand years," proclaimed the white leader, Ian Smith. That led to a vicious liberation war that lasted until...
...African governments have taken freedom of speech and fair elections more seriously recently. Most notably, President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria was forced out last year when his term was up. At the same time, continent-wide reforms have improved governance. At the end of the last century, African rulers, led by Mbeki and South Africa, began to commit to the rule of law, human rights, and free and fair elections. The Organisation of African Unity, little more than a club for dictators, was reconstituted as the African Union, with aspirations to rule Africa better and a mandate to intervene...
Mbeki was desperate to demonstrate that this was an African initiative. Any hint that he was doing the West's bidding would create an anticolonial backlash. The anticolonial struggle, though won over half a century ago in most of Africa, remains one of the few unifying causes for the continent...
...record 11 percent of the admitted students come from African American backgrounds. Over 18.5 percent are Asian American, 9.7 percent are Latino, and 1.3 percent are Native American. Just over half of the admitted students are women...