Africans Investing in Africa

It is not foreign investment or importation of knowledge and capacity from the outside what Africa needs, but to unleash its own potential. As Paul Collier mentions in the introduction of Africans Investing in Africa, “although for Africa, the past decade has been economically benign, attention in the international business media has been narrowly focused” (p. 1). International investors have largely concentrated on the natural resources sector, but Africa has a lot more to offer. Africa’s economies have huge potential for growth diffused across many sectors. 

Africans Investing in Africa is the result of a project conceived in 2011 by the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation and the Lagos-based Tony Elumelu Foundation. The book has sixteen different contributors hailing from respected universities and research institutions in Africa, Europe and North America; all of them with deep knowledge of the issues under consideration as well as a thorough mastery and experience in African affairs.

Sacrifice as Terror

Genocide is a challenging subject since it encourages scholars to contribute to its elimination. There are much-studied aspects of the genocide that has proliferated across various genres such as in Gérard Prunier’s The Rwandan Genocide, Linda Melvern’s A People Betrayed: the Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide, Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and Roméo Dallaire’s Shake Hands With the Devil.  By confronting the complexity of the subject, the shift of structures of empathy, history and politics are becoming complicated. We are still struggling to comprehend the trauma that took place in Rwanda in 1994. The Rwanda genocide is one of the malevolent patches of the garden of evil in the conflictive and complex state of our world and discipline. The peculiar type of violence; the accomplishment of killing with grenades, machetes and nail-studded, makes this carnage more terrifying. In Christopher C. Taylor’s Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994, he analyses the cri de coeur of the people in Rwanda during the genocide where more than one seventh of the nation’s population were brutally massacred. Taylor was an ethnographer of the genocide and was a witness of Rwanda’s slow descent into chaos.  In this paper, I will focus on Taylor’s ethnographic research, the use of the political and historical background of Rwanda, the Hamitic hypothesis, the cosmology of terror and human bodies and the role of gender.

How South Africa Works

It is common knowledge that South Africa is in a critical point; some sort of crossroads where a misstep may determine a rapid recovery or a drawback from where it would take decades to recover. A number of factors have made the South African economy vulnerable. But not only is the economy in a bad shape. That is also the case of the political and social spheres. And even though How South Africa Works perfectly illustrates all these topics, it is especially concerned about the economic perspective. Because of that, I would also like to point out here another liberal analysis published recently tackling these issues. R.W. Johnson’s How long will South Africa survive? The looming crisis is a good complement for How South Africa Works, since it comes at the same issues from a political angle.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

Jason Stearns’ Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa discusses a number of topics related to the conflict in Congo. The author is a political activist and a journalist who had been worked on the conflict for the past ten years as well as working with a Congolese human rights group. Later he worked for both, the International Crisis Group and the United Nations peacekeeping operation.

The author traces the evolution of the conflict, which began in 1996, has continued intermittently until today. Stearns provides a clear theoretical analysis of the causes that led the heart of Africa, Congo, to bleed. Also, he used powerful stories from real life to keep things revival and interesting for the reader. He wrote this book in order to grasp the roots of the brutal war and violence that has engulfed in Congo. At least nine governments and twenty various rebel groups have been involved in this conflict. It has cost a staggering five million lives. Nevertheless, this enormous war has received little media coverage, particularly in the Western press. The author attempts to answer why, for example, the conflict in Darfur has received more than four times the conflict in Congo, though the death rate in Congo is more than ten times that in Darfur.