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Bridging a continent: North Africa and the Horn

In 1986 Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui called for a metaphorical bridge across the Red Sea that would reintegrate Africa with Arabia several million years after a natural cataclysm had torn the Arabian Peninsula from the rest of Africa. He noted that, just as in the view of continental pan-Africanists, the Sahara desert is a sea of communication linking states below the Sahara with their neighbours above the desert, so the Red Sea could become a similar bridge.

'Exporting peace' to the Great Lakes?

How are South Africa's efforts to "export" democracy to African countries in the Great Lakes region faring? In December last year, an important milestone was reached in the peace process in the Democratic Republic of the Congo when Joseph Kabila was sworn in as the first democratically elected president of the country in more than 40 years.

Tarrying on HIV defers dream of an African renaissance

South Africa's peaceful democratic transition confounds Afro-pessimistic views that the continent is doomed. Yet the "Rainbow Nation" is still struggling to come to terms with the HIV/Aids epidemic -- a crisis with long-term consequences for its political economy and the sustainability of Africa's states and societies.

Neo-colonialism or development?

Described as "one of the biggest economic phenomena of the last decade", the astonishing speed at which South Africa has become the largest investor in the rest of Africa has eclipsed even the recent surge in interest from non-African investors such as China. Following a gradual increase on the continent after 1994, investment opportunities have taken off in the past five years.

Can SA resist playing bully in its backyard?

South Africa's most critical challenge in its regional relations since the advent of democracy in 1994 has been how to engage its neighbours in ways that are different from hegemonic bullying, while still providing robust leadership among its peers. Can the country continue to avoid the kind of unilateral interventionism that could give regional states the impression that South Africa is acting like the proverbial bull in a China shop?

The AU, Nepad and Mbeki's 'progressive African agenda'

South Africa's attempts in the past eight years to help craft the African "progressive" public policy landscape are closely identified with the "African Agenda", or African renaissance -- the progressive Africanist policies of President Thabo Mbeki and his continental allies.

Bringing the people back in

Africa's ever-recurring armed conflicts and civil wars and the new waves of globalisation in the post-Cold War era have accentuated the marginalisation of a continent so severely that it is now at the periphery of the periphery of the world. The failure to deconstruct and reconstruct Africa's inherited colonial economy has exacerbated centuries-old dependence and dispossession.

From Rhodes to Mbeki

The greatest imperialist of the 19th century, Cecil Rhodes, had a dream to establish dominion over Africa from the Cape to Cairo. Rhodes's heirs -- the racist governments in Pretoria -- historically saw Africa as an area of penetration, exploitation and destabilisation. This was the Africa of "labour reserves" from which hundreds of thousands of Southern African migrants ventured to South Africa.