Tank versus protest placard…

According to the novelist Helon Habila, editor of Granta’s forthcoming Book of African Short Stories, to put together a collection representing every African language, people and nation is impossible. Instead, Habila has compiled Granta’s new collection to showcase what he sees as a ‘new generation’ of emerging African short story writers.

The end of the world is nigh!

From the man who walked on water...

Kenya to the rescue?

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Jermain Ostiana argues that bringing Curaçaoan abolitionist leader Tula to the silver screen should be done by local producers, not the world’s mainstream film industry.

NATO is agreed that Gaddafi must go, but...

A sign of cordial relations between Rwanda and Uganda?

Fellowships and residences play a crucial role in nurturing the talent of budding writers. But although Africa is full of creative and highly innovative individuals, it lacks avenues to support them. The ‘plain truth’, says Mildred K. Barya, ‘is that we need them so we have to create them.’

Stressing the need to turn the publishing sector and the concept of freedom of speech on their head, Jared Sacks discusses the ideas behind ‘No Land! No House! No Vote!’, a book produced by the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers in South Africa. With the group seeking support to bring their story and struggle to the wider world, readers are invited to make donations at:

On the occasion of the 49th anniversary of Jamaica’s independence, Caribbean Political Economy as reproduced Bert Tucker’s lyrical account of Jamaica’s political climate and cultural ferment in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mr. Tucker, now Ambassador for Foreign Trade and Head of International Cooperation in the Government of Belize, was a student on the Mona Campus of the UWI at the time. As Caribbean Political Economy notes, the reflection was written on the occasion of Jamaica's 38th Anniversary of Independence on 6 August 2000, but has the same freshness and resonance now as it did then.

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The Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers – the authors of

Chuma Nwokolo revisits a childhood library and is shocked at its deterioration. 'It is great to have a completed central bank project and a new airport, but how about a time frame for a public library?'

Graffiti is suddenly all over Cairo - on schools, on telephone exchange boxes, on empty walls and corrugated fencing around building sites, reports the New Yorker magazine. 'Daubs of slogans, finely rendered panoramas of Tahrir Square, and, increasingly, the kind of biting satire and subversion...' There's a great gallery of the graffiti at the top of this article, with 25 scrollable images.

African countries could advise Greece on its economic woes…

The British medical journal, The Lancet, has published a study that shows the Aids virus has mutated into strains resistant to ARTs used around Africa. The study published on 28 July, was funded by the Dutch Foreign Ministry, and aimed to assess the prevalence of primary resistance in six African countries after anti-retroviral treatments (ARTs) were introduced and whether wider use of ARTs in the region is associated with rising prevalence of drug resistance in areas south of the Sahara, as has been widely suspected in some circles.

While millions in East Africa are caught in the cobweb of a devastating drought that has spread its tentacles across Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, the government in Addis Ababa is snatching some of Ethiopia's most productive farmland from local tribes and leasing it to foreign companies to grow and export food. A Survival International investigation has uncovered shocking evidence that vast blocks of fertile land in the Omo River area in south west Ethiopia are being leased out to Malaysian, Italian and Korean companies. Vast stretches of land are also being cleared for huge state-run plantations producing export crops, even though 90,000 tribal people in the area depend on the land to survive.

In a review of Rasna Warah’s 'Red Soil and Roasted Maize: Selected Essays and Articles on Contemporary Kenya', Oby Obyerodhyambo praises a hard-hitting collection of commentaries from the Daily Nation columnist.