Africa

I'm not a big fan of Adele's music, but this week I'm a huge fan of her as a human being.

Bob Geldof was assembling a bunch of celebrities to relive that "Do They Know It's Christmas?" glory 30 years later, but for Ebola this time. Never mind that a lot of people in Europe and North America have gotten a little more self critical in recent decades about things like paternalism, white-savior complexes, and the fact that Africa isn't one big country of backward horribleness.

Climate change will bring a laundry list of catastrophes to Africa. Across the continent, people are trying to adapt to the changing weather.

A century ago, William Wade Harris began his march across the Ivory Coast. He proclaimed a Christ who was not the property of the master race.

Kenyan Muslims are a marginalized minority. Many are concentrated in Coast Province, where unfair land distribution is a festering wound.

The developed world's negligence has produced one of Africa's cruelest ironies: its farmers are its hungriest people.

After ten years, the ICC has convicted someone: Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga. But why does the court only investigate situations in Africa?

Orthodoxy's roots in Egypt and Ethiopia are ancient. In East Africa there is a younger movement: a native Orthodoxy, locally grown.

If Martin Luther King Jr. had written a book exposing his personal failings, it would have been seen as undermining his cause. But Leymah Gbowee does not want to be thought of as a hero.

Here is my unscientific rule: if Martin Luther treated a biblical book
with disdain, then that book is really popular in
modern Africa.

When I was in southern Ethiopia in 1994, I watched truck after truck roll into a community with food aid. I asked a farmer if the harvest had been bad. He told me he had an abundant harvest of tomatoes and onions—cash crops. Because of all the food aid they were receiving, he could use his land to make some extra cash—and his family would eat wheat from America. That same year I could purchase corn oil at the local grocery store—in big metal containers labeled "A gift from the people of America." I resented having to pay for what was clearly intended to be food aid.