Africa Focus

Just shy of a year before a popular uprising toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a little-noticed revolt took place that shows how Egypt’s future is more closely tied to Africa than to the Middle East.

In an exclusive interview with TNJ, his Excellency John Dramani Mahama, vice president of Ghana, addresses why Ghana attracts African descendants.

In an exclusive interview with The Network Journal, His Excellency John Dramani Mahama, vice president of Ghana, addresses why his country attracts African descendants

Early in August, at a conference organized by Resource Driven Technology Centre for South Africa, Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor rolled out a prototype of a hydrogen-powered electric bicycle nicknamed “Ahi fambeni,” Tsonga language for “Let’s go.”

In 1960, Britain’s political elite conceded that the sun was indeed setting on the British Empire. Their capitulation is enshrined in a Feb. 3 address by then-British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to the parliament of South Africa during his tour of the dying empire’s African colonies.

Cameroon President Paul Biya’s remarks as he opened the Africa 21 Yaoundé International Conference in his country’s capital city were a necessary reminder of the global context in which Africa has been developing for the past 50 years.

In the new wave of filmmaking rolling across Africa, there’s Nollywood, Nigeria’s $250 million industry, which, according to a May 2009 UNESCO report, has overtaken Hollywood as the world’s second largest producer of feature films, behind India’s Bollywood; and there’s Gollywood, the Ghanaian industry with a plethora of talent and gumption.

In one of the latest cases of biopiracy, Tanzania is being pressured to do battle in court to stop the United States and Brazil from patenting a gene isolated from a variety of sorghum grown by farmers in southern Tanzanian.

At 92, Dudley Thompson, Esq., is perhaps the oldest Pan-African activist still active. Born in Jamaica, where he held several ministerial positions and holds the Order of Jamaica, the nation’s highest honor, Thompson was a friend and colleague of renowned 20th-century Pan-Africanists.

On the surface, the Association of  a New Generation of Leaders for Africa, or AngelAfrica, can’t hold a candle to the Corporate Council on Africa, Washington, D.C.’s longtime power broker of investment and commerce between the United States and Africa. Yet the future of Africa lies more in the hands of AngelAfrica than in the dealings of the CCA.