[Editor’s note: Heat has been out for some time, but given it’s Earth Day, and also given the recent shutdown of so much air traffic after the Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption, we thought it wasn’t a bad time to revisit it here.] Few issues require as much research as climate change science. You have to know […] More »

Among Africa’s considerable problems is the pressing issue of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). Armed conflicts and violence on the continent has effectively made it the foremost home of forced migrants, with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimating that 3.5 million of the world’s 9.2 million refugees, and 13 of the […] More »

The unprecedented election for president of an African American south of the border probably looked to many like the culmination of a grand process of inclusion. African Americans, the story goes, can now see their efforts for civil rights and participation in the American Dream as embodied in Barack Obama. The struggle is over and […] More »

In many different parts of the world wars are fought by men and women and, unfortunately, sometimes with children as well. Usually led into guerrilla regiments out of abject desperation or because they were captured, these children are commanded to commit the most heinous of acts. They kill, they loot, and, in the meantime, they […] More »

When civil war between representatives of south Sudan and the government — or north Sudan — erupted in the early 80s, the debris took the form of mass displacement, thousands upon thousands of southern Sudanese leaving their villages that had been ravaged by government-financed militia. Among the unhappy travellers were newly orphaned young males, the […] More »

Until 1999, Nigeria was a land of military rule, repression, and instability. Helon Habila’s novel, Waiting for an Angel, evokes the mental and social climate of the country during the military’s last few years of power in the late 90s. Matching the chaos that rapid changes of power — mainly by military coups — must […] More »

The story of Africans being brought to the Americas, mainly in bondage, is well known. The transatlantic slave trade has been exhaustively mined and narrated and, if the plot is misunderstood, one only needs to peruse the history books for clarity. We know relatively little, though, about African-Americans and their voyages back to the other […] More »