Pambazuka News is produced by a pan-African community of some 2,600 citizens and organisations - academics, policy makers, social activists, women's organisations, civil society organisations, writers, artists, poets, bloggers, and commentators who together produce insightful, sharp and thoughtful analyses and make it one of the largest and most innovative and influential web forums for social justice in Africa. 
ideology
Pan-Africanism in our time
Zaya Yeebo
2009-07-16, Issue 442
cc WikimediaPan-Africanism is not just a throwback to the post-colonial period, writes Zaya Yeebo, the people of Africa are still ‘united by culture, history and identity’. Africans around the continent feel each other’s pain and are bound together as a people by events, says Yeebo, whether it is the struggle for emancipation in the Niger Delta, or the crisis in the DRC. Charting a history of the Pan-African Movement from the first conference in 1900 to the present day, Yeebo calls for Pan-African solutions to African problems, with Pan-Africanism as a ‘collective understanding’ of how ‘we intend to conduct our affairs in today’s globalised world’.
Pan-Africanism in Mwalimu Nyerere’s thought
Being both king and philosopher
Issa G Shivji
2009-05-07, Issue 431
cc WikimediaOutlining the essential differences between the respective approaches of Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah, Issa G. Shivji discusses the gradualist and radical positions of two pillars of the Pan-Africanist movement. Underlining the notion of an independent African state as a ‘national liberation movement in power’ as being at the very core of the movement, Shivji stresses that genuine African nationalism can only ever be Pan-Africanism. As both a head of state and leading Pan-Africanist intellectual, Nyerere found himself supporting contradictory ideas around contesting the imposition of colonial borders while emphasising the centrality of states' sovereignty, Shivji notes. While admitting that he is without a complete answer to the question of what intellectuals' role will be in the development of a new Pan-Africanism for today, Shivji stresses that the challenge will be to push forward a 'new nationalist insurrection', one which perhaps ultimately recognises African unity as a dream rather than a vision.
Nyerere, liberation and unity
Message from Issa G. Shivji, Mwalimu Nyerere Professor of Pan-African Studies
Issa G Shivji
2009-04-09, Issue 427
cc WikimediaWith Dar es Salaam on the verge of hosting the Julius Nyerere Intellectual Festival Week from Monday 13 April, Issa G. Shivji, Mwalimu Nyerere Professor of Pan-African Studies at the city's university, offers his reflections on the pan-African struggle. Though Africa has undoubtedly suffered from the neoliberal onslaught of the past two decades, Pan-Africanism as a progressive ideology is now firmly back on the historical agenda, Shivji states, uniting in the process the continent's dual quest for unity and liberation.
Nkrumah at 100: Lessons for African leadership
Yao Graham
2009-04-09, Issue 427
© Africa WithinWhile many African leaders have aspired to inherit Nkrumah’s mantle as the visionary and driver of Pan-Africanism and continental unity, writes Yao Graham, a gaping political leadership vacuum remains at the heart of the continent’s collective expression. From an age when there were a number of outstanding African leaders, among whom Nkrumah was preeminent, Graham argues that the African Union’s election of Gaddafi as its leader is a statement of a collective failure of leadership and underlines the crisis in which the Pan-African project is currently mired at the inter-state level. Where, asks Graham, are the African leaders who see opportunities for change in the current crisis, and who are ‘ready to dare and look beyond guaranteeing the sanctity of aid flows?’
Press statement by Paul Muite on threats to his life over extrajudicial executions
Paul Muite
2009-04-09, Issue 427
Having been credibly informed that his life could well be in danger, Paul Muite considers the implications of his willingness to speak out against the Kenyan government's involvement in the assassinations of Oscar Kamau King'ara and Paul Oulu. With the Kenyan authorities themselves at the forefront of extrajudicial killings and threats, Muite highlights the Kenyan citizenry's complete lack of confidence in the government or police to protect people's rights.
The politics of fear and the fear of politics
Michael Neocosmos
2008-06-12, Issue 380
Reflecting on the causes of the recent xenophobic pogroms in the country, it is striking how most commentators have stressed poverty and deprivation as the underlying causes of the events, writes Michael Neocosmos. Yet it requires little effort to see that economic factors, however real, cannot possibly account for why it was those deemed to be non-South Africans who bore the brunt of the vicious attacks. Poverty can be and has historically been the foundation for the whole range of political ideologies, from communism to fascism and anything in between. In actual fact, poverty can only account for the powerlessness, frustration and desperation of the perpetrators, but not for their target. After all why were not Whites or the rich or for that matter White foreigners in South Africa targeted instead? Of course it is a common occurrence that the powerless regularly take out their frustrations on the weakest: women, children, the elderly... and outsiders. Yet this will not suffice as an explanation.
The committed intellectual: reviving and restoring the National Project
Yash Tandon
2008-05-29, Issue 376
A man or woman with no passion has no heart; one with no power of reasoning has no mind, writes Yash Tandon. It is the combination of heart and mind that produces the balanced person who uses their mind to pursue their passion. Let us speak truth to power, but let us also speak the existential truth of our people’s world to the negotiated truth of the diplomatic world. Our collective efforts, he continues, will lead to a new vision of a better world, one that is fair, just, peaceful and bountiful to all the peoples of the world.
Obama's Speech and the Black Man's Burden
Paul T Zeleza
2008-03-20, Issue 355
Paul T. Zeleza while recognizing the historic nature and importance of the Obama speech argues that the circumstances that made the speech necessary reveal the extent to which the United States remains an arrogantly racist society
Fu Manchu versus Dr Livingstone in the Dark Continent?
How British broadsheet newspapers represent China, Africa and the West
Emma Mawdsley
2008-01-22, Issue 338
Emma Mawdsley examines the coverage of China's growing influence in Africa by the British print media