A Guide to Key Personnel in U.S.-African Relations

We live in interesting times, times of dramatic change and constantly shifting intellectual fashions. Two years ago, historian Paul Kennedy triggered one such fashion by writing of the decline of America as a great power. This idea enchanted many Western intellectuals, and...

The years from 1978 until1989 saw profound changes in South Africa which, cumulatively, might prove as important to the region as the events currently sweeping Eastern Europe and China.

For the white ruling elite, it was an era that witnessed the...

Since the implementation of the United Nations' independence plan for Namibia began on April1, 1989, two crises have temporarily threatened to derail the...

South Africa's senior military strategists are still taking stock of the implications of the end of the P.W. Botha era, of Namibia's imminent change from a...

After six days of agenda-shaping by the Council of (foreign) Ministers, the twenty-fifth annual Assembly of Heads of State of the Organization of African Unity...

In the early morning hours of June 30, 1989, a military coup led by Staff Brigadier General (now Lieutenant General) Umar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir terminated one...

1. The World's Last Colony?

South Africa is not a colonial...

In C.P. Cavafy's poem, "Waiting for the Barbarians," the townspeople find their leaders in a state of great unease over rumors of a barbarian invasion. As time passes and it becomes clear that the invaders are not coming, the people return home in deep and...

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have come to wield unprecedented influence over economic policies a11d institutions in sub-Saharan Africa in...

The past eight years have wrought fundamental changes in the relations between the United States and Africa. I believe the prospects for this relationship have never been as bright as they are now. For the first time in our history, the United States has a president who...

One of the images of Africa that began to evolve soon after the first Europeans set foot on its shores is that masses of mineral wealth exist under the forbidding tropical terrain of the continent's vast middle belt.

As the World Bank's Andrew...