Africanisms

Winnie and Mandela biography: a masterful tale of South Africa's troubled, iconic power couple

Retrieved on: 
Thursday, August 31, 2023
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A new book on South African liberation struggle icons Nelson and Winnie Mandela is a masterful biography of the pair.

Key Points: 
  • A new book on South African liberation struggle icons Nelson and Winnie Mandela is a masterful biography of the pair.
  • Jonny Steinberg’s splendid 550-page biography, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, ends on a note of pathos with a poignant tale from Nelson Mandela’s deathbed.
  • Four days from death in December 2013, Nelson is in an advanced state of dementia and refuses to eat.
  • Winnie, on the other hand,
    is at once the most commanding figure and a figure of terrible subjection.

Ambition and expedience

    • The early Nelson is portrayed as a man consumed by insecurity and ambition.
    • Sometimes ambition and expedience get in the way of altruism and principle.
    • He joins the Communist Party, but when the Pan-Africanist Congress takes off, he proposes sidelining whites and dropping the Party.
    • This book gives space to just two of his many lovers – the Women’s Federation leaders Lilian Ngoyi and Ruth Mompati.

Nelson and Winnie post-1990

    • It was in his bid to save her after the murder of Seipei that Nelson bared his teeth and emerged in the least favourable light.
    • First, when Winnie failed to get elected to the executive of her local ANC branch in Soweto, he got his aides to set up a new branch, which duly elected her.
    • Nelson did all this to save Winnie.

Four murders

    • The book directly implicates Winnie in the murders of two young men, Lolo Sono and Siboniso Tshabalala (both falsely accused of being informers, when the real informers were Winnie’s lover Johannes Mabotha and Jerry Richardson).
    • It also strongly implies that she was behind the murder of her doctor Abu Baker Asvat (who’d examined Seipei) but leaves the question open as to whether she’d ordered Seipei’s murder.

West African countries show how decades of working together build peace, and stop wars breaking out

Retrieved on: 
Thursday, June 1, 2023
Poverty, Solidarity, Violence, ASEAN, Diplomacy, Economy, Collaboration, Research, Terrorism, History, Africanisms, Pan-Africanism, Global ceasefire, ECOWAS, Philosophy, Time, Association, Economic development, European, Horn, Senegalese Americans, Environment, Drug, Video game, Arms industry, Tourism

Out of 54 countries on the African continent, 45 have had at least one coup attempt since 1950.

Key Points: 
  • Out of 54 countries on the African continent, 45 have had at least one coup attempt since 1950.
  • We found evidence that the principles of non-aggression and peaceful settlement of disputes defined the relationships between west African countries.
  • The regional body was formed in 1975 by west African countries seeking to promote economic development.
  • We found a strong correlation between decades of regional cooperation and the rarity of conflicts between states in west Africa.

Making sense of the ECOWAS peace

    • That region has witnessed conflicts between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and between Ethiopia and Somalia, for example.
    • In the west African region, we found that the security arrangements agreed under ECOWAS have helped to foster peace between states.
    • For example, a border dispute between Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire was settled in 2017 through an international tribunal.
    • In both Liberia’s and Sierra Leone’s wars, which threatened to engulf other countries in the region, ECOWAS used these settlement mechanisms.
    • It has also created a sense of shared identity and solidarity among member countries.

Conclusion

    • This has happened with the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
    • Their collective identities are based on norms that reflect the history and political cultures of their member states.