Nearly 15 years since apartheid ended, millions of black South Africans still live in self-built shacks - without sanitation, adequate water supplies, or electricity.
Yash Tandon (2008) Ending Aid Dependence. 
Dorothy-Grace Guerrero and Firoze Manji (ed) (2008) China’s New Role in Africa and the South: A search for a new perspective. 
Features
Zimbabwe on the edge of the precipice
Mary Ndlovu (2008-12-17)
With its power-sharing agreement manifestly failing, Zimbabwe is on the brink of collapse, writes Mary Ndlovu. The author argues that in the face of an entrenched kleptocratic elite, life grows ever more difficult for the country’s population, a situation markedly exacerbated by a broader political culture of selfishness undermining the development of any form of effective collective action. Without an internationally sponsored, technocratically based transitional authority to replace ZANU-PF as soon as possible, Zimbabwe may yet be spoken of in the same breath as Somalia and the eastern DR Congo, she concludes.
Mamdani, Mugabe and the African scholarly community
Horace Campbell (2008-12-18)
Concerned scholars should revitalise their opposition to Zimbabwe’s Mugabe regime, writes Horace Campbell. While against any form of opportunistic, external intervention in the country, Campbell argues that scholars must come to offer an effective challenge to ZANU-PF’s persistent retreat into spurious anti-imperialist discourse. Heavily critical of writers like Mahmood Mamdani for echoing ZANU-PF’s simplistic claims around the effects of economic sanctions levied against Zimbabwe, Campbell argues that blocking international payments would prove a far more efficacious means of tackling Mugabe’s misappropriation of funds.
The global crisis of capitalism and its impact
Dani Nabudere (2008-12-11)
Professor Nabudere, traces the causes of the financial crisis to the increasing detachment of credit from its production base. The collapse in value of credit instruments also led to a debilitating food crisis that hit Africa and the rest of the developing world particularly hard. He argues that African countries need to pay more attention to putting in place policies and mechanisms that ensure food security. He emphasizes the need for action at a local level, to overcome the global crisis.
Financial collapse, systemic crisis?
Samir Amin (2008-12-11)
Arguing that the current global financial crisis was inevitable, Samir Amin points to the global oligopolies, and the current capitalist system that has detached the value of financial transactions from their production base, as the root cause of the problem. He advocates for wresting power away from the oligopolies. He reiterates his idea of de-linking from the global system, and for a shift of control of resources and markets away from the oligopolies and into the hands of the people.
Twenty years of promoting women’s rights in Africa: What next?
Norah Matovu-Winyi (2008-12-08)
FEMNET Executive Director Norah Matovu-Winyi reflects on the successes of the last 20 years the organization has been in existence. Acknowledging the changing terrain in the struggle for women’s rights she and the increasing number of civil society groups involved, she advocates for strengthening the links to the grassroots. She argues that beyond the necessary theorizing and discussion on issues of women’s rights, there is a great need for more action and actors engaged at the grassroots level.
Comment & analysis
Waiting for democracy to fall from the sky: The Angolan elections
Rafael Marques de Morais (2008-12-17)
Analysing the background to Angola’s legislative elections at the beginning of September, Rafael Marques de Morais considers the wide voting irregularities and social inequalities that allowed José Eduardo dos Santos’s MPLA to tighten its grip on political power. Reviewing the final results of the elections, the author argues that the central challenge for the Angolan electorate is to carve out a path of genuine representation and a new vision of genuine democratic power, all the while maintaining a commitment to non-violent action.
Activists slam world's ‘grotesque indifference’ to DRC
Stephen Leahy (2008-12-17)
Reviewing the efforts of the acclaimed US playwright Eve Ensler and the former UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis to sustain international attention on the DRC crisis, Stephen Leahy highlights the centrality of women and girls’ rights in the ongoing conflict in the east of the country.
Somalia and the war on terror: The third front revisited
Matthew Blood (2008-12-17)
Exploring Somalia’s fate under the Bush administration’s war on terror, Matthew Blood argues that the US has simply taken an already brutalised people and brutalised them even more. With warlordism, criminality, and piracy ever increasing, the author ponders whether the marked anti-Western sentiment and greater radicalisation of Islamic authority in the country will lead to violent future backlash within locations in the West from disaffected Somalis.
Media freedom in Kenya: The parliamentary circus
Cenya Ciyendi (2008-12-17)
With journalists and protestors in Kenya facing brutal arrests as they challenge governmental efforts to curb media freedom, Cenya Ciyendi laments the repression of groups merely demonstrating for the right to freedom of expression. At a time when the world celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the author condemns the persistence of political self-service and the use of draconian, quasi-colonial measures to quash peaceful protest.
Respect the Kenyan constitution and mediation process
Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice (2008-12-17)
Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice (KPTJ) evaluate the state of fundamental freedoms in Kenya, and their verdict is singularly unfavourable. The full statement is a condemnation of the record of the coalition government.
Structural racism and the Obama presidency
John Powell (2008-12-18)
Emphasising that racialisation is far from simply an event, John Powell explores the history of racial segregation in the United States and the evolution of understandings around racism’s persistence and effects on day-to-day life. Just as racialisation reinvented itself in the shape of the Jim Crow laws following the end of slavery in the 19th century, today’s race-neutral approaches to issues of social and economic inequality can in reality simply compound racial disparities, Powell contends. In an Obama age, the author argues, tackling structural racialisation can only be achieved through ‘targeted universalism’: approaches and policies true to the individual circumstances that different social groups face.
From great depression to deep recession
John Samuel (2008-12-17)
In the midst of the current credit crunch and global economic downturn, John Samuel revisits the context behind the infamous 1930s great depression. The author contends that while the context behind the current financial crisis and that of the early 1930s are not identical, the high concentration of wealth within a few hands remains essentially the same.