It was a bit like appointing Count Dracula as the goodwill ambassador for the blood donor service. Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint, and regularly produces events that would never be credible in a novel. Like the decision last Thursday to appoint Zimbabwe’s Robert …
There is momentous change in Angola. The oil-rich country of 28 million people on Africa’s southwestern coast has just elected J-Lo as president. There is also very little change in Angola. The new president is not Jennifer Lopez, the American J.Lo (which would definitely mean big change). It is João Lourenço, a member of the …
“We will win the biggest landslide this country has ever seen,” said The Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh before the small West African country’s recent election, and he had every reason to be confident. Jammeh had been in power for 22 years, and he knew how to run an election. Jammeh, who was an 29-year-old army …
20 July 2003 Sao Tome and the Curse of Oil By Gwynne Dyer Why has Algeria been devastated by tyranny and civil war, while neighbouring Morocco is peaceful, relatively democratic, and no poorer? Why is Angola, once Portugal’s richest African colony, a wasteland of poverty, violence and corruption with enclaves of glittering wealth, while Mozambique, …