coup

Guinea has been in the news lately because of a military coup which took place two weeks ago. When I saw the breaking news on Al Jazeera about that daring event, I remembered a popular 1960s Ghanaian highlife tune by ET Mensah whose lyrics extol Ghana, Guinea, and Mali as “the nucleus of the great union” namely, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) founded in 1963, and the African Union founded in 1999.

Brazenly taking advantage of a sustained mass uprising against the government, the Sudanese Army struck and removed the long tserving General al-Bashir from power. Al-Bashir was placed first under house arrest and then moved to prison. The coup followed four incredible months of relentless mass demonstration all over Sudan. Nothing quite like this had been seen in Africa before. 

Fully two years before General Idi Amin’s coup there were signs in the country that a coup or something like that could happen here. Growing tensions between the central government and the ancient kingdom of Buganda which formed a large chunk of the country, had recently come to push and shove and Buganda had lost what was obviously only the first round

On Thursday he picks his American degree. In a week or two he will be back in Africa. The excitement of seeing his parents, his sister, his two brothers, the anticipation was almost more than he could bear.Once in Africa, they will launch a new magazine of culture, politics, and the arts. Black Horizon, they decided to call it. Launch date was set for November 22^nd, just months away

On 7 January 2019, an attempted coup to topple the ailing Ali Bongo as president of Gabon, failed. That the coup attempt occurred was not a surprise, given the conditions in Gabon. Here is a sickly and absentee president, ruling over the undeclared 50-year old monarchy. While throughout the country, appalling poverty make life a misery for the majority, as a tiny corrupt elite wallows in opulence

We had grown up under the awful Emergency of the 1950s, reading colonial pamphlets printed in red ink, showing rows of Mau Mau fighters being publicly hanged on high posts. The Lari massacre and the subsequent government reprisals took place within walking distance from our village