The year 2021 ended with the loss of some prominent people, one of whom was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a significant figure in the struggle against apartheid, who passed on December 26. A note like this will not do justice to his remarkable life. Suffice it to say that he will remain an excellent role model of humility and moral courage.
By Ramnik Shah, retired English solicitor, legal expert on immigration and author of Empire's Child: My Writings 1967-2017
In his trademark three-piece suit, a rose on his lapel, a watch strapped to his waistcoat, Sir Charles Njonjo, a man of the ruling Kikuyu ethnicity, cut the image of a colonial Englishman. It was an image he loved and assiduously cultivated. Sir Charles Njonjo wasn’t really Sir Charles. He wasn’t knighted by the Queen of England though he could have been. But what else to call this man who was so English and so pro-European and had little respect for his fellow Kenyans. Although he was Attorney General, he cared little for constitutional niceties.
By Aklog Birara, PhD, retired Senior Advisor to the World Bank
Africa is full of promises. It has immense untapped natural resources and a growing human capital base estimated at one billion three hundred million Africans, mostly young. Its potential is constrained by poor governance, corruption, and massive illicit outflow of capital, tribal conflicts, and terrorism. Conflict ridden and war-torn Ethiopia represents Africa’s promises and pitfalls.
By Jonathan Power, weekly columnist on foreign affairs
Perhaps the biggest single misthink in Western history is best understood by standing in the town square of Bethlehem, allowing one’s gaze to pass over the roof top of the Church that covers the stable where Jesus was supposedly born, and let one’s eye drift into the blue sky beyond and thinking: how on earth could it be that the Christians, whose belief in the divine center around Jesus’ crucifixion carried out by Roman soldiers
The woman was strikingly pretty and in a tight-fitting denim skirt. Some of the passengers gawked at her when she was boarding the bus at the Bus Park. She was thirty something, about five and a half feet tall, and about fifty-five kilograms or one hundred twenty pounds. She was in an aisle seat, on the left-hand side of the bus, four rows in front of me on the opposite side from where I was sitting.