Africa Archive

A simmering conflict is threatening to start another war in Sudan. This time, it is as much about oil as it is ethnicity. Unequal distribution of oil revenues, bungled oil contracts, and differences in ethnic power sharing are creating new fault lines in an already divided country. The South Sudan Defense Front (SSDF), a former ally of the Khartoum government in its battle against the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), has threatened to attack SPLA positions once again. The group, formed by Riek Marchar, now vice president of the Government of South Sudan, or GOSS, complains that its people […]

Had they been short on rally slogans, Sudan activists behind last weekend’s Global Darfur Day could have tapped Benjamin Disraeli’s classification of the three kinds of lies – lies, damn lies, and statistics. A new study published Sept. 15 in the journal Science says the U.S. State Department’s death toll estimates for Darfur, released last year, underestimated the count by “hundreds of thousands” of lives. The new study is no news flash for Sudan watchers who have tracked the three-year-old conflict between government-backed militia and rebel groups in western Sudan. They’ve been accusing the Bush administration of low-balling the figures […]

While Congolese waited for the presidential election results last month, I heard several half-truths about Congo. The one that has stuck with me happens to be a favorite among Western diplomats. “Kinshasa is not Congo,” they say, commenting on the east-west tension surrounding President Joseph Kabila’s candidacy. Their premise is sound, but their conclusion is wrong. Kinshasa, which lies in the country’s far west, is the gate to Congo, and whoever holds the key to the city controls national politics. With more than 7 million residents and 12 percent of voters, the capital is also the country’s most ethnically integrated […]

NAIROBI, Kenya — “Hope” is not a word used often among political and security analysts. In the face of past violence and potential genocide, it is even more rare. Yet analysts have used the term in recent forecasts of what lay ahead for the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that held its first democratic elections in four decades a month ago. Still, serious challenges remain. The open availability of small arms, unequal distribution of local resources, the political influence of foreign contractors and combatants, and, not least, the behavior of local armed factions, will also shape the future of […]

Although both China and Africa were home to two of the world’s oldest civilizations, each dating back more than 6,000 years, China has only recently discovered the true value of Africa. China’s initial forays on the continent, during the 1960s and 1970s, were driven by political ideology and thus inherently limited in scope and duration. Today, the basis of the Sino-African relationship has evolved from politics to economics. “China explicitly stated that they were going to shift their focus away from ideology in 1996,” says Christopher Alden, senior lecturer in international relations at the London School of Economics. A major […]

What’s the solution to world poverty? Some might say food aid; others, training and investment. But, for a growing number of international philanthropists, the next big thing for the Third World might just be the same force that’s been reshaping the First: technology. It all started at the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, announced an ambitious plan to improve education and stimulate economic growth in the world’s poorest countries with the development of a $100 laptop. Just over a year later, One Laptop Per Child […]