Okello Oculi

In his latest work ‘The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960 – 2010’, Professor Crawford Young has, with habitual lucid simplicity of text, encyclopaedic gaze and insightfully nuanced analysis, joined in the flowering of celebrations of golden jubilees of Uhuru that blo

France, as a country exhausted by German colonial rule during the 1938-1945 war, still dreamed of a world in which there was ‘permanent exclusion of self-government of the African territories’ she exploited as occupied lands. The 1944 Declaration made from Brazzaville in Congo said so.

June 3, 2012 brought much grief in the awareness of Nigerians about India. An Indian- owned aircraft carrying 153 passengers and crew fell from the sky, only eleven kilometres from the runway.

It is interesting to see a new post-Cold War wrath against Africa accepting a gift of a building from a China that is on the rampage across Africa digging roads, laying railway lines, building bridges, hauling copper out of Zambia, hunting for oil in Sudan, Uganda, Angola and the Niger Delta and

On Sunday, 20 Match 2011, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) broadcast the first of ten one-hour documentaries made by Ms. Debrah Ogazuma, winner of the 1991 edition of the Union of National Radio and Television Organisations of Africa (URTNA) ‘Nelson Mandela Prize for Television Drama’.

The United Nations secretary general Mr Ban Ki-moon is a strange type of democrat. Speaking to the press at Addis Ababa outside the meeting of the African Union he spoke thus: ‘I am concerned that differences of opinion are now surfacing among the African Union.

Lumumba as the hero depicted by the legendary poet from Martinique, Aimé Césaire, was a beer salesman whose chant for customers instinctively made Belgian colonial police panic, fearful of a subterranean text and force in his eloquence, the energy of his words uttered like the staccato of a machi

‘All roads lead to China’, Alan Paton may be chuckling from a place that Professor Ali Mazrui calls ‘After Africa’.

The New Partnership for Africa’s Development, NEPAD, came to Abuja (to arouse talk and promote inter-African trade) from 23-30 October 2010. The talking part was at a ‘NEPAD Forum’ held in Congress Hall of the Transcorp Hilton Hotel.

What is the connection between a riot by passengers of an Ethiopian Airlines flight at Bangkok airport and Aba, a town in south eastern Nigeria? That was a question I met on a trip from Bandung in Indonesia to Addis Ababa.