A few months ago, I was standing in line at the Gap when I overheard a mother talking to her young daughter. “Buying this shirt will help us to save Africans,” she said, smiling as she waved a child-size shirt that read “INSPI(RED)” across the chest. I wondered if this could possibly be true. We’ve all seen the ads for Product (RED)’s Gap t-shirt campaign: a celebrity stands against a neutral backdrop and stares at the camera, sporting a red t-s...
www.nigerianembassy.nlThe success of the African Union will depend largely on the commitment of the leaders of a few powerful nations, like Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria (above). “Extreme poverty can be ended, not in the time of our grandchildren, but our time,” wrote Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia’s Earth Institute and Special Adviser to Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, in his new book, The End of Poverty. To turn his ideali...
China’s recent activity in Africa goes beyond the mere muscle-flexing and oil-grabbing tendencies of an emerging global power. In the last five years, media reports of China’s growing presence in Africa have increasingly reinforced and intensified Western fears of an unrestrainable imperialist state. Articles brandishing headlines such as “China’s Economic Invasion of Africa” and “Africa: China’s New Backyard” depict Africa as the victim of Chin...
...nd 2011, Ethiopia leased 3.6 million hectares of land to foreign investors, and more than two million hectares remain available for lease or purchase. What is happening to these 1.5 million Ethiopians is not an anomaly within Africa. In fact, it is an increasingly common occurrence, given the quantity of land that foreign investors have purchased on the continent following a spike in food prices in 2008. As governments and financial organizations...
Western media coverage of the conflict in Kenya has been enormous, especially for a story coming out of Africa. The reportage has been a staple of the Economist and the New York Times since the beginning of the year, and even the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has run the AP’s dispatches from Nairobi. Yet for all its breadth, the coverage has been dangerously lacking in depth. The media’s principal crime has been to recycle plot lines from past Afric...
...Further exposition of both the brutality and the composition of Qaddafi’s forces came from former Libyan Ambassador to India, Ali Al-Essawi, in a sit-down interview with Al Jazeera. He characterized these mercenaries as black Africans who could not speak Arabic – “foreigners” who were “doing terrible things” to women and children. Both Western and Arab news outlets fed the public with a barrage of violent images that resulted in the construction...
...its launch of the highly publicized Inspi(RED) campaign. The clothing giant, which has long been accused of exploiting third world countries through its use of sweatshop labor, has created a campaign that creates factories in African nations and donates large sums to support HIV/AIDS research in the Third World. Buying as Protest But do we buy into ethical consumption as a new form of activism to excuse ourselves from more proactive forms of prot...
...has surpassed 90 million views on YouTube. Invisible Children stated that the purpose of its video is “to end the use of child soldiers in Joseph Kony’s rebel war” and to restore peace and prosperity to the affected areas of Africa. But soliciting humanitarian aid is not its main objective. Kony 2012 is not a quasi-documentary like the group’s first title, “Invisible Children.” It is instead an impressive propaganda piece created by its co-foun...
...ange. Al-Qaeda’s “strategic defeat” might have been imminent, but the United States was no closer to smothering the growing movement of other violent Islamic extremist and jihadi organizations across the Middle East and North Africa. One look today at the smattering of organizations across the region shows this dangerous reality. And so it is essential that the international community begins to understand this phenomenon, and respond to it in a t...
...and Worst Countries to Live In?”—if you’ve ever looked at a map of Europe, I promise you’ll do great! Eleven out of the 15 “best” countries are located in Europe while (surprise!) 14 out of 15 of the “worst” countries are in Africa. So, I guess life in Africa must really suck. You could say, “It’s just the worst.” At least the quizzes on Sandra Bullock movies don’t impart a value judgment (and that quiz might actually need one). The first type o...
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