Fiat Lux
September 29 2016 – Most of our cities on the African continent are bursting at the seams with motor-vehicle traffic. It is divine bliss when one finds oneself in a capital city like Lilongwe, Malawi, where one can afford to take out one’s car for a pleasure ride around the town. Generally the scene is of a chaotic mélange of nauseating fumes, suffocating dust, blaring horns and foul-mouthed drivers and…
January 21 2016 At last this newspaper is once again circulating in Tanzania a government-imposed ban that kept it out of the country’s market for a good twelvemonth. The official reason given for the ban in January last year was that the paper had been circulating in Tanzania without proper registration. Which, of course, was an exercise in extreme officious silliness, seeing as the East African had been on sale…...
Dember 24 2015 – I doubt there is a place on earth where people’s names praise God as much as they do in Rwanda and Burundi. All the Kinyarwanda and Kirundi names ending with “Imana” are talking about God. These are names such as “It-is-God-who-creates”, or “ I- trust-in-God”, or “It-is-God-who-saves,” Or, even, “What-I-have-more-than-you is-God”. Then you have names which do not mention “Imana” directly but allude to him, such…...
Under the heading, “More a marathon than a sprint”, last week’s “The Economist” wrote about the deindustrialization of the African continent. Comparing our continent with Asia, the newspaper painted a picture of a continent that has been dismantling even the few factories that it had built three decades ago and shows no signs of embarking on any programme of putting itself out of the hole it has dug itself into.…...