Somewhere inside, a young man with explosives strapped around his midriff sat listening. He could hear the wails of sirens, the jeers of the crowd, the thudding of a police battering ram on the door below. He had heard the gunfire that morning, and the two claps of thunder when his friends left him. Now he had a choice to make. [more]
The Moroccan regime of Mohammed VI has fully exploited the Bush administration’s desire to magnify and advertise the faintest sign of liberalisation in the Arab world. [subscribe]
Although three of the key components of liberalism – a vigilant opposition in parliament, a pro-active civil society and a watchful press – are evident in South Africa, Professor Milton Shain’s concern that “a liberal consitution does not in itself ensure a democratic future” appears to be justified. [subscribe]
The way forward is an oil trust fund. This would distribute oil revenues for the provision of education, health and development projects, and to the Government of South Sudan. The only purpose of the initiative would be to keep money away from the Sudanese military and Janjaweed. [subscribe]
As a charity, a judicial and political pressure group, and a social movement with over 15,000 members, the TAC lobbies for treatment for HIV-positive South Africans; a country where over 5.5 million of the population is infected. [subscribe]
Writers don’t make up myths; they take them over and recast them. Even Homer was telling stories that his audience already knew. If some individuals present weren’t acquainted with Odysseus’s wanderings or the Trojan War, they were aware that this was a common inheritance that belonged to everyone. [more]
No nation has produced better essayists than France, none has produced better composers than the Germans, better painters than the Italians, nor better novelists than the Russians. And the English? The English do poetry. [more]
And what is the public? What is that great leviathan which is greater than kings, and wiser than philosophers, and more just than judges? Hath it any favourite vizier, or prime minister, or confidential valet, or kept mistress, whereby its ear may be slily gained and its favour indirectly purchased? [subscribe]
Nothing typifies the Iowa primaries more than an ambitious politician discussing the intricacies of the Central American Free Trade Agreement while munhcing on a deep-fried twinky. [more]
I have never been an adequately representative voice because I never really bought into the premise of identity politics. [subscribe]
The problem, of course, is that while Israel as a society may have entered middle age, the situation (Jewish) Israelis live in, and, even more so, most likely face, is antediluvian, revolutionary and possibly apocalyptic. [subscribe]
This year’s civil war in Somalia has killed thousands of people and created over half a million refugees. Somalia is a failed state that has failed its people. In contrast, the north-west breakaway region of the Republic of Somaliland is an oasis of peace, stability and progress in the Horn of Africa. [more]
Why have almost no African countries managed to achieve the sustained economic development which has lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty in east Asia? There are three inter-connected explanations: war, corruption, and the curse of natural resources. [more]
Islamism does not, at first glance, seem a fertile ground for irony. Its literalist doctrine and joyless demeanour identify it as an creed of severe sincereity. And the movement is more than ever defined by Ayman al-Zawahiri's monotone earnestness. [more]
In the year that the American navy broke the back of Barbary slave trade and brought low the potentates of Tunis and Algiers, a shipwreck occurred on the coast of the Sahara desert that would contribute to the end of slavery in America. [subscribe]
Parallel to the way in which the British view the trade as a precurser to the colonisation of Africa, the Americans see it, more correctly, as the condition for lynch mobs, Jim Crow laws and black ghettoes. [subscribe]
Ghana celebrated 50 years of independence on March 6th. As a gift to the nation, the state electricity company promised an outage-free anniversary. Immediately after the fireworks, the country was returned to rationed darkness. [subscribe]
That Girl Emerged
Palindrome for a Patron; or, Caution: This Door Swings Both Ways
Don't Turn Round
That Day While I Had Him
At the Treasury
Could Kings Right a People Gone Bad?
It’s Heart that Discerns
The Multiple Troubles of Man
Chiasmus for a Doe
Weak with Wine
And So It Came to Nothing
Heart’s Hollow
The Physician
My Ex
Casa de Pilatos
Prison