Reporting News and opinions
From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was not at all uncommon for West African children and babies to be fostered via newspapers and childcare journals. The above advert was placed by a Nigerian mother looking for someone to care for her three-month-old.
A "leaked" report has revealed that members of the governing body of London's Square Mile were "instrumental" in England's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.
If you are an African policymaker/technocrat/leader who has been following the World Bank’s development advice for the last say 30 years, this finding would shock you.
Scotland has a parliament, a flag, a football team that loses with tremendous dignity, and roughly the population of Lagos’s Ikeja Local Government Area. The Yoruba nation and I use the word advisedly has an empire’s worth of history, a written and oral constitutional tradition running from Ile-Ife through the Oyo Mesi and the Alaafin’s checks and balances, a diaspora spanning three continents, and something in the region of forty million native speakers. One of these is routinely described in the Financial Times as a nation debating its constitutional future. The other is routinely described, by the same publication, as a tribe engaged in an ethnic dispute. I invite the reader to spot the empirical difference. I have been looking for thirty years and have found only prejudice wearing a monocle.
Donald Trump wanted Greenland. Not in the quiet, diplomatic, “let’s explore strategic interests over aquavit and polite nods” manner that grown-up nations occasionally attempt. No. He wanted it the way a toddler wants the biggest toy in the shop window: loudly, immediately, and with zero regard for the fact that it already belongs to someone else.
