New Bushs Old Ghosts
Cyber crime is a burgeoning business in West Africa, despite often primitive infrastructure, intermittent electricity supply and Western assumptions that Africans surely could not be capable of the third largest bank heist in history. Louis Chude-Sokei tells otherwise. Despite being accused of mangling Africa’s past and embarrassing its present, author Amos Tutuola was really after the […]
Migration Business is Good Business
Jean-Christophe Servant argues that while Africa is being welcomed into the pool of global capitalism, one of its most precious resources – its citizenry in the diaspora – remains prey in the shark-infested waters of international remittance and western government complicity. A Western Union office in Paris. Outside, on the sidewalk, a call to make […]
La Frontera
Klas Lundström finds himself in an isolated corner of the Amazon jungle – where three states collide and their citizens crash-land to a life in limbo. This is no man’s land: the “three-state border” in the northwest of the Amazon – a human, ecological and political melting pot of which the rest of the world has […]
Uncertainty in Cuba after the Death of Hugo Chávez
As the world bids adiós to Hugo Chávez, Ivan García (of Desde La Habana) reports on how questions of ‘¿Y ahora qué?’ will ring out through Cuba as well as Venezuela. For Joel, a 29-year-old engineer, the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez marks a before and after moment in the Cuban political landscape. “It’s too soon to be able […]
Moving ‘White Man’s Deads’ is no second hand business
With no right to protection from the states between which they trade and move illegally, second-hand clothing traders in Benin and Nigeria appeal to powerful, but respected, dispute settlement committees to rule in their favour. Olumide Abimbola reports. The office is a small rectangular room on the first floor of a two-storey building, in the […]