High unemployment and expectations among a bulging youth population, cost of living pressures, aging long-time rulers and government that is unresponsive and unrepresentative. The coexistence of these factors helped drive the 2011 uprisings in North Africa. In varying degrees and combinations, they are also evident across much of the rest of the continent, generating, over the last year, a mini-literature on the prospects for equivalent protest movements and moments in sub-Saharan Africa. Read More…
When Mandela Dies and Mugabe Goes
This month sees the anniversaries both of the first free general elections in South Africa (27 April 1994) and independence from white minority rule in neighbouring Zimbabwe (18 April 1980). And in coming months the sun could likely set in each country on the lives of two major African leaders whom history will remember very […]