Mukoma Wa Ngugi

“Lisbon lies in ruins, while in Paris they dance,” Voltaire wrote of the 1755 Portugal earthquake. The contradiction arrests and startles. Barely a month into 2010, Haiti lies ruins. President Wade of Senegal offers displaced Haitians land. Can an earthquake succeed where Garvey’s return to Africa movement failed? Wait a minute! In 2009 President Wade…

Restoring a radical discourse on Africa – these words, I felt, had gone awry right from the moment they escaped my tongue; or rather, as soon as with great effort I rolled them down my tongue, and into the microphone only to see them spill at the feet of the audience. Caution – Enter at…

I have been asked many times a variation of the same question: “Why do Africans wait until it is too late?” For most Westerners, Africa is hunger, war, despotism, AIDS and poverty – full of Africans who are either helpless victims, or who choose to sit on their hands, only lifting them up to accept…

We have been looking for solutions to Africa’s problems everywhere except in the most obvious and logical place: within African cultural, economic and political institutions. From Western socialism and communism to western capitalism and today’s neo-liberal democracy, ideologies seeking to liberate Africa from the malaises diagnosed by the followers of Karl Marx and Adam Smith…

Countee Cullen, a black American poet, once asked: What is Africa to me? With the US elections just days away, and Africans holding their breath, fingers mostly crossed for Obama, I find I have to reverse the question and ask: What is America to me? Why should the outcome of the US presidential elections matter…