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- By Uncle Tom
- Politics & Opinion
Last week my home girl Jeanie, who is now making it big in New York, Rome and Monaco as what I fancy to be the wealthiest escort-girl of all time, sent me this link to the story of a migrant woman. The intro was catchy. The woman had come from poverty, crossed borders, defied challenges and made many sacrifices to provide for her own needs and those of her family. But as soon as I saw the sentence “I am called illegal, disease spreader, prostitute, criminal, trafficking victim,” I knew what Jeanie was on about. She had clearly read the latest US State Department ‘Trafficking in Persons’ report.
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- By ZAM reporter
- Politics & Opinion
A story taken from the AFP news agency by the South African Sunday Times, last weekend, highlighted how desperate prosecutors pass stiffer and stiffer sentences on poachers of rhinos in the country’s famous Kruger Park –without much hope that poaching will actually get any less.
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- By Bart Luirink
- Politics & Opinion
A sharp attack on US President Barack Obama in an Al Jazeera column by Ugandan media owner and opinion leader Andrew Mwenda went viral yesterday on social media. Following Obama’s recent visit to Kenya and Ethiopia, Mwenda, founder and owner of the Ugandan newspaper The Independent, accused the US President of being a ‘colonial headman’ who came to tell ‘the natives’ how to behave. "Obama, being of African ancestry, is a puppet used by the US to disguise its contempt for Africans," Mwenda wrote in the piece which has been widely shared and liked, often by -clearly anti-imperialist-westerners.
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
American-Nigerian writer Teju Cole on the Bill Cosby candal: 'We (men, Ed.) must be allies in this, in a subsidiary but vital role, to the generations of women who have been fighting it (rape, Ed.) since forever. Why should it be easy? It can't be. We have to face even the complication of confronting those few women who are themselves invested in perpetuating rape culture. It will cause us extreme discomfort, but our discomfort will be nothing compared to the pain of being a victim of rape or assault or harassment'.
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
If Africa was a bar, Nigeria would be the guys manning the toilets and making more money than the bar itself; South Africa would be that light-skinned girl who is haughtily refusing to mix with anyone else and Uganda would be the drunk uncle repeatedly asking his neighbour Kenya to return his ‘stolen’ cows. In turn, Kenya, whilst unable to pay for own drinks, would keep droning on about how his countryman Obama made it in the USA. And Zimbabwe would be daring a white guy to step on his toes.
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- By Evelyn Groenink
- Politics & Opinion
Never mind Fox News’ remarkable phrasing of the Charleston church shooting as an ‘attack on Christianity,’ or lists of mass shootings by mentally ill individuals such as this one. If ever there was a massive gun murder by a white male that cannot be explained as an ‘individual act caused by mental illness,’ this was it.
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- By Uncle Tom
- Politics & Opinion
Uncle Tom finds out about fund raising in the Gambia.
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- By ZAM reporter
- Politics & Opinion
A ‘gay revolution’ in Africa. Very likely, states Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina in Boldly Queer, African perspectives on same-sex sexualities and gender diversity. The book, published by Hivos, was launched in The Hague on Friday 5 June 2015. Mozambique has already joined the revolution. President Filipe Nyusi signed a new penal code decriminalizing homosexuality. Congratulations to Lambda, the activist group, who fought against anti-gay-legislation introduced in 1887 by the Portuguese colonial rulers.
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- By ZAM reporter
- Politics & Opinion
Martin Bosma, MP for the extremist Dutch anti-immigration party PVV, has reinvented the idea of South Africa as an empty land at the time when the white settlers arrived. In his book Minderheid in eigen land (Minority in own country) he presents South Africa’s transition to democracy as a forecast for his doomsday scenario: the low lands' takeover by Muslims. In a fact check, Bram Vermeulen, correspondent for Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, investigated Bosma’s 'empty land' claim. Find one of his sources here. His conclusion: not true.
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- By ZAM reporter
- Politics & Opinion
ZAM congratulates Mikhail Subotzky (1981, South Africa) and Patrick Waterhouse (1981, UK) on winning the prestigious 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. A six year journey into Johannesburg's 54 stories landmark building Ponte City resulted in a book (Steidl Publishers) and exhibitions from Paris to Lubumbashi and from Edinburgh to Cape Town.
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- By Uncle Tom
- Politics & Opinion
Uncle Tom takes issue with afrophobia.
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- By Nomalanga Mkhize
- Politics & Opinion
For middle class people in South Africa to accuse the marginalised of shaming the ‘rainbow nation’ is adding insult to injury, says Rhodes historian Nomalanga Mkhize.
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- By Uncle Tom
- Politics & Opinion
I sure had to giggle when, last month, Muhammadu Buhari was elected President of Nigeria as a ‘candidate for change.’
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
ZAM tries to make sense of the massacre at Garissa University in Kenya on April 2, 2015 in which 147 young students died. Here’s what we came up with.
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
The broad daylight assassination of a lawyer in Maputo fits in a series of ‘mafia-type’ murders in Mozambique.
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- By Nomvula Xaba
- Politics & Opinion
South African author Tom Sharpe (1928-2013), who comically portrayed bumbling apartheid cops disguising themselves as ‘terrorists’, then arresting one another and leaving trails of exploded ostriches to mark their ‘secret’ operations, would have had a field time with the leaked South African State Security Agency (SSA) reports as exposed by Al Jazeera earlier this week.
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
Cell phone jamming, news blackouts, violence in parliament and water cannons and armed vehicles in the streets of Cape Town marked the beginning of the new parliamentary year in South Africa on Thursday.
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- By Uncle Tom
- Politics & Opinion
Uncle Tom is a bit happy with Kenya.
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- By Dianne Massawe
- Politics & Opinion
It’s not sex work that causes high HIV rates and violence, it’s the criminalisation of it that is the problem, argues Dianne Massawe of the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce in South Africa.
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- By ZAM reporter
- Politics & Opinion
Among African writers, opinion makers and activists the news of the Charlie Hebdo attack has provoked an outpour of anger: at the attack itself, but perhaps even more so at the twin scourges of terrorism and dictatorial oppression suffered by people in Nigeria, Somalia, Cameroon, Kenya, Mali and elsewhere on the continent. The ones who attracted most fire were African leaders who had the gall to march in Paris, whilst seemingly not bothered about victims of terrorism back home.
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
Tobore Ovuorie, author of the ‘Undercover in Human Traffic’ report that was published earlier this year in the ZAM Chronicle and in the Nigerian Premium Times, has won a Wole Soyinka Institute award for her brave work.
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- By ZAM Reporter
- Politics & Opinion
The Kenya Television Network’s team of investigative journalists could be muzzled under new anti-terrorism laws.
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- By ZAM
- Politics & Opinion
Finally international media have caught up with the sentimental counterproductive patronising Band Aid initiative. We hated ‘Do they Know It’s Christmas’ the first time around and hoped they would go away. But they are doing it again with the Ebola epidemic, which only adds insult (patronising untruths) to injury.
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- By Uncle Tom
- Politics & Opinion
Uncle Tom is not scared of Ebola.
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- By Professor Oyewale Tomori
- Politics & Opinion
It’s not poverty that is to blame for the weak African responses to Ebola, but bad leadership, says the head of the Nigerian Academy of Science, professor Oyewale Tomori.
