Word: africas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...expected to win a fourth consecutive term in South Africa's parliamentary and presidential elections on April 22. But for the first time since it came to power with the end of apartheid in 1994, that result is not guaranteed, and by any measure - popularity, membership, moral authority - the party is in decline. Its leaders are embroiled in a series of scandals involving both corruption and ineptitude. As a government, it has failed to stem raging violent crime and the world's largest HIV/AIDS epidemic. It has presided over an economic boom that has made millionaires of a well-connected...
Zuma's supporters insist he is just the man to fight for the interests of those left behind in South Africa's first years of freedom. Still, there are questions over Zuma's commitment to racial reconciliation - famously, in a country still wracked by racial violence, he chose the Zulu war anthem, "Bring Me My Machine Gun" as a theme song - and about his competence and judgment. He refuses to answer questions on policy, deferring instead to the ANC's executive committee. His coyness may be wise: those opinions he has aired have been startling. On trial for rape...
...repressed by a regime whose racism recalled the worst of European imperialism. Mandela, locked up for 27 years only to emerge with forgiveness for his oppressors, was a secular saint. There was no equivocation here. With the ANC and Mandela on one side and apartheid on the other, South Africa was literally a question of black and white...
...pattern that has been particularly pronounced in Africa, whose post-independence history has been dominated by Big Men, despots like Mobutu Sese Seko, ruler of Zaire for 32 years, who took the country as personal reward for "liberating" it. But it is also observed around the world. A tide of leftwing revolt in Latin America, China and Southeast Asia left much of the same sour legacy of totalitarianism. In India, the Gandhi family has towered over its democracy for 60 years. In the Middle East, after helping broker a historic peace deal with Israel in 1993, Yasser Arafat's Fatah...
...which this identity crisis is expressed is in the modern ANC look - the mix of bling and camo worn by the Prada proletariat on display in East London. At a more serious level, while business, civil society and the press provide far more of a check on South Africa's government than they do in, say, Zimbabwe, the party's critics see the same bad underlying dynamics at work. Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC MP who resigned in 2001 in protest at the way his party was frustrating an investigation into a corrupt $5 billion arms agreement (the same deal...