By Stephen Lewis
Read Online or Download Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa (CBC Massey Lecture) PDF
Best Africa books
The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa's Wealth
A stunning investigative trip into the way in which the source alternate wreaks havoc on Africa, ‘The Looting Machine’ explores the darkish underbelly of the worldwide economy.
Africa: the world’s poorest continent and, arguably, its richest. whereas accounting for simply 2 percentage of worldwide GDP, it really is domestic to fifteen in keeping with cent of the planet’s crude oil, forty in line with cent of its gold and eighty in keeping with cent of its platinum. a 3rd of the earth’s mineral deposits lie underneath its soil. yet faraway from being a salvation, this buried treasure has been a curse.
‘The Looting Machine’ takes you on a gripping and stunning trip via nameless boardrooms and glittering headquarters to show a brand new kind of financialized colonialism. Africa’s booming progress is pushed by way of the voracious starvation for traditional assets from swiftly rising economics comparable to China. yet within the shadows a community of investors, bankers and company raiders has sprung as much as grease the arms of venal neighborhood political elites. what's occurring in Africa’s source states is systematic looting. In nation after nation around the continent, the source is tearing on the very cloth of society. yet, like its sufferers, the beneficiaries of this looting computing device have names.
For six years Tom Burgis has been on a challenge to reveal corruption and provides voice to the thousands of Africans who are suffering the implications of residing below this curse. Combining deep reporting with an action-packed narrative, he travels to the center of Africa’s source states, assembly a warlord in Nigeria’s oil-soaked Niger Delta and crossing a warzone to arrive a distant mineral mine in japanese Congo. the result's a blistering research that throws a totally clean gentle at the workings of the worldwide economic system and should make you're thinking that two times approximately what is going into the cellphone on your pocket and the tank of your vehicle.
North of South: An African Journey (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
North of South: An African trip (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin).
The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
In an open cart Elspeth Huxley trigger together with her mom and dad to commute to Thika in Kenya. As pioneering settlers, they equipped a home of grass, ate off a damask textile unfold over packing instances, and discovered—the difficult way—the global of the African. With a rare reward for element and a prepared humorousness, Huxley remembers her adolescence at the small farm at a time while Europeans waged their fortunes on a land that used to be as harsh because it was once attractive.
The Lost World of the Kalahari
An account of the author’s grueling, yet eventually winning, trip in 1957, via Africa’s distant, primitive Kalahari barren region, looking for the mythical Bushmen, the hunters who pray to the nice hunters within the sky.
Extra resources for Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa (CBC Massey Lecture)
Think it or no longer, it used to be the 1st everlasting appointment of a girl to the put up of Under-Secretary-General within the background of the United countries. Thérèse Paquet-Sévigny’s functionality was once sublimely unmemorable (to my brain completely comprehensible; you wish essentially an entire life to grasp communications in the UN). yet that barely mattered; the barrier had eventually been damaged. i need to stay in this for a piece since it may help to provide an explanation for why the wider Millennium improvement target of gender equality has no probability of being reached through 2015. essentially, the United international locations may be riding the gender schedule. It’s the area physique with the best succeed in, and every thing that underpins its legitimacy speaks to equality. The constitution of the United countries, the common assertion of Human Rights, the conference at the removing of All types of Discrimination opposed to girls, the Covenant on financial, Social and Cultural Rights, the Covenant on Political and Civil Rights — all of them converse to equality. almost all these landmark human rights tools comprises specific clauses maintaining non-discrimination at the foundation of intercourse and stating equality among women and men. in the event that they have been undefined, this could be a special global. definitely, the covenant with the best power impression is the conference at the removing of All different types of Discrimination opposed to girls (CEDAW), which was once promulgated on December 18, 1979. It’s as if it have been the Magna Carta for girls. No different conference is kind of so powerfully worded. not just does it aggressively assert equality, however it does so, article by way of article, in each area: healthiness, schooling, justice, social welfare, for ever and ever. It’s additionally the second one so much hugely ratified conference within the historical past of overseas covenants: 181 out of 191 nations have ratified. in simple terms the conference at the Rights of the kid has a bigger variety of ratifications, at 189. it may even be remembered that after a rustic ratifies a tradition, it successfully turns into an device of binding foreign legislation in that kingdom. It speaks volumes that such a lot of nations believe they could forget about the prescriptions of CEDAW with impunity; there are easily no enforcement mechanisms, and while it’s inconvenient to uphold the conference, nations are blithely negligent. enable me remind you of Article three of the conference: “States events shall take up all fields, particularly within the social, financial and cultural fields, all acceptable measures, together with laws, to make sure the complete improvement and development for ladies, for the aim of ensuring them the workout and delight of human rights and primary freedoms on a foundation of equality with males. ” What might be extra specific? as well as the exemplary covenants of equality, it’s additionally precious to invoke the substance of the nice overseas meetings which have been held during the Nineteen Nineties, and truly shape the foundation for the time table of the United international locations within the twenty-first century, together with the MDGS.