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…...
September 22 2016 – Am I alone in having this feeling, that we are witnessing unprecedented police shootings of African Americans in the United States? Feelings, of course, do not need empirical evidence to be credible, but I suspect that if one did a scientific study in this area, this feeling would be borne out. This is true: There is hardly a week that passes by these days without news…...
September 1 2016 We now find respite to pause on the verge of a plunge, and ponder just what might have been. Or, imagine just might be after the pause ends and the perilous race to the abyss resumes. We have had a shrill shouting match between the authorities – President John Magufuli, his assistants, the Police – and the main opposition Chadema party on whether the latter could go…...
August 4 2016 South Africans went to the ballot box this past week to elect local councilors in what was described as a hotly contested election presenting the ruling African National Congress (ANC) with its stiffest challenge since the end of Apartheid. Indeed, early trends in the tallying of the votes indicated that the ruling party was struggling in places like Gauteng as the Democratic Alliance (DA) looked like a…...
July 10 2016 Don’t you worry, sir, I will of course write about Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, who left us this past week. He is the man who made us of a certain generation feel like we had a big brother who would “whup” the Big Ugly Bear that dared bully us, whoever that was. And did we love the “Chump” or did we love him. He beat all the…...
July 7 2016 This past week has witnessed a resurgence of Israel’s diplomatic activity within the Eastern African region with the high-profile visit of the Jewish state’s prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu (“Bibi”), to a number of our countries. The occasion of his visit was made to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the famous “Raid on Entebbe” in which Bibi’s younger brother, Yonatan, was killed when he led an Israeli…...
May 26 2016 – Another example of my romance with T-shirts with catchy words in my youth came from Paris, and it went (my translation): “They all notice when I’m drunk but not when I’m thirsty.” Obvious, wouldn’t you say? It sure would be a crazy world if people went around looking at other people and saying, “Hey, you look thirsty; what’s the matter with you?” First, in our overly…...
May 12 2016 – The reader may still remember the nickname “La Pasionaria” I wrote about a few years ago in this space. Well, she was that Spanish woman who stood at burning barricades in 1930s Madrid, under the fire of the fascists under General Francisco Franco, and urged the republican resisters with the immortal words, “No Pasaran!” They Shall Not Pass! Her real name was Isidora Dolores Ibarruri Gomez,…...
April 7 2016 It was a foregone conclusion; it was not going to succeed, and it sure as hell failed. The move by a section of the South African parliament to impeach President Jacob Zuma over the so-called Nkandla scandal was always going to flop, because of the lopsidedness of the House, which still has a huge majority of African National Congress (ANC) members. The political organization which spearheaded the…...
April 4 2016 – Two years have gone by, and still no end in sight for the ordeal that has been meted out to the so-called Chibok girls. These are the unfortunate young women who were abducted en masse – more than 250 of them — from a school in north-eastern Nigeria. The dramatic abduction set off a global outrage as political leaders and other public individuals and bodies called for…...
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Saidia uandishi wetu kwa kujiunga, au jisajili bure ili uendelee kupata taarifa.
