Paul T Zeleza

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‘Britain has an enduring problem of racial and class inequality and exclusion, out of which riots occasionally explode,’ observes Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, following four days and nights of unrest across the UK that have ‘left this declining post-imperial country deeply shaken and searching for answers, for redress, for culprits.’

cc President Obama’s speech to the Muslim world delivered on 4 June was ‘powerful’ and ‘smart’, but PT Zeleza finds himself most interested in its ‘equivalences and silences’. With reference to media reactions and commentary from different parts of the world, Zeleza looks at Obama’s framing of the relationship between the US and Islam, the parallels Obama draws between ...read more

cc. The Obama era has begun. Like millions of people in the United States and around the world today I sat glued to the television watching the historic inauguration, relishing the man and the moment, its substance and symbolism. Tomorrow, of course the hard work starts and the harsh realities facing the new president will break today's magical spell. America's daunting ch...read more

In a broad discussion of the political circumstances behind Barack Obama’s election victory, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza argues that the US has finally grown up. This is maturing both in the sense of witnessing the election of an individual of African descent and in ending the forty-year Republican neoliberal hegemony, and is a development reflective in no small part of the Democrats’ ability to articulate a campaign true to contemporary socio-political conditions in the US. For while many challenges...read more

Amongst other things, Paul T Zeleza argues that in spite of the xenophobic violence being black on black, there is a "bequest of deeply racialized and internalized superiority and inferiority complexes at work."

The Pan-African world has been watching with mounting horror the xenophobic violence that has gripped several South African townships over the past two weeks which has resulted in the wanton destruction of many lives and property. Fifty-six people have been murdered, thousands ...read more

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/359/47203msg.jpgPaul T Zeleza looks at the long road that might yet see Mugabe's downfall and calls for a democracy that ultimately serves the Zimbabwean people through political and economic enfranchisement

As of now, results for the presidential elections in Zimbabwe have not yet been declared, five days after the elections ...read more

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

It finally came out, the predictable ogre of race and racism that has been stalking the US 2008 elections ever since Senator Barack Obama declared his candidacy and became a serious contender for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination following a str...read more

Disputed results from last week’s elections have left Kenya in deep political crisis. The opposition has refused to accept the results which have been questioned by local and international observers. Three days of violent protests have left more than 120 people dead. The battles are concentrated in opposition strongholds and shanty neighborhoods in the major cities from the coastal city of Mombasa to Nairobi the capital to Kisumu the western port city on the banks of Lake Victoria where a cur...read more

Africa has had a troubled relationship with global migrations rooted in the horrific memories of the Atlantic slave trade, which set the foundations of the asymmetrical relations between the continent and Euroamerica subsequently reproduced and reinforced by colonialism and neocolonialism. Today, many worry about the brain drain, how Africa is apparently losing its best and brightest to the global North, a phenomenon that has accelerated since the lost developmental decades of the 1980s and 1...read more

There are two widespread assumptions about university education in Africa: first that the Europeans introduced it, and second that it has declined since independence. Both are false, writes Paul Zeleza. Higher education including universities long antedated the establishment of “western” style universities in the nineteenth century and the post-independence era was a period of unprecedented growth during which the bulk of contemporary Africa’s universities were established.

Discourses ...read more

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