21st Century Afropolitan

Image Source: the Sun Newspaper. The China and Taiwan impasse is a rather simple issue of leadership arguing over who has authority over who. Modern Taiwan was established by a government (Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government) who were ousted by rebels (Chairman Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party).   Chiang Kai-shek's government ran away to the Chinese Island territory of Taiwan (or Formosa in the Western literature) after Mao's Communist rebels won the Chinese civil war. Both Chiang Kai-shek's government and the Communist government by Mao claimed authority over all of China (mainland and Taiwan) after the Civil War. So the official name of Taiwan according to Chiang Kai-shek and his predecessors in Taiwan is the Republic of China(ROC). The victorious communists, for obvious reasons, named their country the Peoples Republic of China(PRC).   Realpolitik led to the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek's ROC (Taiwan) losing international recognition as ...

  Source: BBC Research Why was NATO formed? The realpolitik answer is that in part it was mostly formed to defend member countries against possible attack by the Soviet Union. At the time of its founding and early years, Germany (West Germany occupied by the Americans and East Germany occupied by the Soviets) alongside all the countries to the east had not joined the alliance.   All countries east of Germany were under Soviet influence in one form or another till the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The immensity of the Soviet union one might argue necessitated the existence of NATO. Of course the other unsaid reason for NATO's existence is the fact that Europeans are rather fond of killing each other as history will attest . So, all or most of Europe, including perpetual enemies France and England, being part of one military alliance is a panacea to their fondness for occasional bloodletting.   When the Soviet leadership allow ed for the reunification of Germany and...

The Vulnerability of Compassion I'm going out on a limb here with what I am about to write. So I hope you the reader treats this with utmost softness that you can amass. When Anthony Bourdain's death-suicide hit the news and airwaves yesterday, I purposefully tried not to engage the topic because it hits closer to home to me than I'd have liked. So I purposefully tried to immerse myself in things of love and fulfillment all day. Went to the Afa Ajura Mosque to pray Jummah, visited my best friend Ibrahim at work, visited my brother's friend Mr. Hassan, and his children whom I used to tutor Maths and English before I left for the US. But I deliberately avoided visiting my mom for obvious reasons which I will get to below. There's different kinds of people in the world and one of these kinds are sensitive and compassion driven people. I believe that I fall in this category of people in much the same way as Anthony Bourdain. Our sensitivity to the other people...

The role of women in African society is a hotly debated issue and has been so since the turn of the 20 th century. This debate is often carried out in reductionist terms by people from various sides of the debating position. While Western Institutions and policy think tanks and opinion shapers like the Brookings Institute often appear to champion the need to and the importance of empowering African women, it is often done with neoimperialist tones and with the broader goal of depicting Africa as the dark continent and Africans as culturally in the dark ages. It must be said that it is not just think tanks that do this, but Western leaders as well in their so-called culture wars. Recently, French president Emmanuel Macron said Africa is held back by civilizational problems instead of the reality of the many factors, including French stranglehold on Africa’s resources since the colonial and slavery days that continue to leave Arica poor. On the other side of this...