Sean Jacobs on racist police violence in the United States and South Africa

Sankara: daring to invent Africa's future

Sean Jacobs, The Guardian

Twenty-one years ago today, armed men burst into the office of Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina Faso, and murdered him and 12 of his aides in a violent coup d'état. In events that eerily paralleled those in the Congo 27 years earlier, the attackers cut up Sankara's body and buried his remains in a hastily prepared grave. The next day Sankara's deputy, Blaise Compaoré, declared himself president. Compaoré has ruled the country ever since and has both attempted to co-opt and distort Sankara's memory.

Chris Hani’s political legacy

by Sean Jacobs, Africa is a Country

The American political scientist Adolph Reed Jnr. once wrote about Malcolm X that “… he was just like the rest of us—a regular person saddled with imperfect knowledge, human frailties, and conflicting imperatives, but nonetheless trying to make sense of his very specific history, trying unsuccessfully to transcend it, and struggling to push it in a humane direction.” Like Malcolm X, Chris Hani, who was also assassinated (Hani was murdered on this day in 1993), should not be made into an ideal type or used to settle political scores in the present.

The Global Imagination of James Baldwin

Rich Blint interviewed by Sean Jacobs, Africa is a Country

In February this year a first-rate group of scholars gathered in New York City to debate the legacy of the twentieth century American writer and critic, James Baldwin (1924-1987). I missed the proceedings, titled “James Baldwin’s Global Imagination,” so I asked one of organizers, Rich Blint, about the conference’s aims, Baldwin’s ideas and politics of Baldwin as well as what he would have made of Barack Obama’s “post-racism.”