UK Prime Minister David Cameron may want to get his own house in order before lecturing African leaders…

How do you plead Mr Mubarak?

In a review of Afyare Abdi Elmi’s ‘Understanding the Somalia Conflagration’, Farah Abdulsamed praises ‘a book which is well-written, inventive and amazingly readable’.

‘One of the most depressing things about being from an African country, and I suspect it is the same for being from any post-colonial society, is the need to seek validation abroad or by Western standards. You can be the best writer ever, but if a bunch of white guys in academies don't see it, you're not.’

What does a 'clean slate' mean for South Sudan, wonders Gado.

As Christine Lagarde takes charge at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Gado ponders whether policies will be consensual.

What does the future look like?

Set the cost of the Fifa World Cup against South Africa’s development needs, and ‘you can't but conclude that we didn't need it, nor could we afford it. So why did we go all out to host such an unnecessary event?’ asks Andile Mngxitama.

In this interview with , Pius Adesanmi speaks about the role of academia, politics, aid, football and his new book, ‘You are Not a Country, Africa’, the inaugural winner of the Penguin Prize for African Writing.

Femi Ojo-Ade’s study of Césaire’s four plays is ‘a celebration of black consciousness’, writes Peter Wuteh Vakunta in a review of Ojo-Ade’s 'Aimé Césaire’s African Theater: Of Poets, Prophets and Politicians'.

Nothing will stop Uganda's president...

There are still a few escape routes open...

A fresh start for the new IMF boss?

There was an ‘undeniable optimism’ and sense of hope at this year’s ZIFF, writes Kari Dahlgren, as the creativity and dialogue the film festival sparked provide a source of ‘unity and strength to both imagine and bring forth global social and economic justice.’

Nigerian born writer Ikhide R. Ikheloa made it a point to ‘diss’ the shortlisted stories for the 2011 Caine Prize, says Emmanuel Iduma, but ‘there are deeper concerns than the sweeping conclusions he makes in his short essays’, for example, whose story are we supposed to write, how real can we be about Africa, and does the story of the real Africa belong to only one person?

A policeman was arrested for using Zimbabwean President Mugabe's private toilet at a trade fair last month.

Following the so called 'Arab spring', and in the midst of the ‘acampadas’, organised mass mobilisations through social networks in many Spanish cities, the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) in collaboration with IPS Inter Press Service News Agency launched the book 'Politics, Networks and Technologies in Communications for Development', a tour through the different visions of new technologies and their contribution to information in general and more concretely, to communication for development. The book has contributions from experts who analyse challenges faced by journalism and communication for development, in front of the revolution of new technologies.

Since 2002, the Government of Tanzania has been implementing the Primary Education Development Programme (PEDP) with two specific aims: making education more accessible and improving its quality. While significant success has been made in extending access, improving quality remains a challenge, says a May 2011 brief from Uwazi monitoring. 'This brief is the second in a series about the quality of public schools in Dar es Salaam. The results show that many public schools in Dar es Salaam lack proper playgrounds and face debilitating sanitary conditions.'

Jalaa Writers’ Collective was created in 2009 by ten Nigeria-based writers who came together in an effort to tackle the book production and distribution challenges of the local publishing industry. The business model of Jalaa is based on the premise that there exists 'a gap between professional, traditionally published books that sell in the thousands and amateurish subsidy and self-published books that sell in the hundreds'. As such, the collective aims to engage the weaknesses of the industry by pooling the talent, resources and experience of its members in a systematic and profit-oriented manner.

In a review of Omar Barghouti’s 'Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions', Estelle Cooch praises the author’s profiling of the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement, mixing of the analytical with the anecdotal and emphasis on Palestinian agency.