Amy Niang

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The most salient outcome of the presidential elections in Senegal is a heightened, irreversible sense of empowerment; the notion that ordinary people constitute the first and most important institution in a democracy.

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The NATO military campaign in Libya is a pointed example of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, Amy Niang argues. It is a travesty of international law, whose goal is conquest of economic resources.

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If the US really believes in democracy, how can it support Abdoulaye Wade’s plans to have his son succeed him as Senegal’s president, asks Amy Niang.

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Senegal and other African countries are the victims of state power that has become ‘over-centralised, personalised and trivialises the institutional safeguards that are supposed to keep it in check’, writes Amy Niang. Niang explores the available avenues for reversing this restraint on civil society’s political agency, and suggests it is the diaspora that has the potential to offer new perspectives and become an ‘incubator of political revolution’.

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As the Senegalese president’s ‘Monument of the African Renaissance’ nears completion, the 164-foot statue in Dakar demonstrates Abdoulaye Wade’s need ‘to imprint his legacy on a continent that hasn’t fully captured the extent of his genius’, writes Amy Niang. The monument ‘sparked debate in Senegal and internationally, not least because of the colossal financial, political and aesthetic scandal it has proved to be,’ says Niang. But its construction also symbolises the failure of opposition, c...read more

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Politics under Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade has come to represent a depressingly familiar picture of elite dominance and broad social inequality, writes Amy Niang. With no clear succession plan in place and the state's legitimacy continuing to erode, the absence of an institutionalised effort to achieve stability in the political system remains a salient obstacle to democratic change, argues Niang.

Graduate student Amy Niang meets well known history professor Joseph Ki-Zerbo at his home in Burkina Faso.

There is an incommensurable gap between the old and younger generation of Africans. We - African youth - have grown up, been made to believe that anything ‘traditional’ or ‘old’ is necessarily retrograde, often ‘unreliable.’

Young Africans, especially children of the Diaspora, do not have the advantage of communicating with their past, a handicap that inhibits a corrective ...read more