Thomas Jing
At The Slave House in Goree in Senegal, the large portal that opens onto the ocean was once said to be The Door of No Return to black people taken from Africa as slaves. This fortress that used to be a warehouse for slaves for about five centuries has now become a place of pilgrimage. Hundreds of thousands of black people have shuffled through the gloom of its dank corridors and stared with teary eyes and bleeding hearts at the corroding chains and shackles that secured their ancestors as they awaited shipment.
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As for Biya, he at least makes no pretensions of borrowing a leaf from Ahidjo's balanced development program. He simply hides behind the facade of "national unity" to perpetuate a similar practice of ethnic and regional favoritism. When he single-handedly and arbitrarily abolished the United Republic of Cameroon, national unity was used by some quarters to justify this action. And yet it has now become standard practice for his tribesmen, who have confiscated the nation for themselves and are exposing it to the worst economic rape, to throw non-natives out of their own region.
In Ahidjo’s native North Cameroon, children were compelled to go to school and all kinds of incentives and inducements were provided, from free books and uniforms to attractive scholarships. It was far easier for a Northerner to join the military, a formidable lever of power, than members of other regions; special entrances, often made simpler to suit northern whims, were reserved for people of this region to gain easy access into most of the professional schools.
Swathed in richly embroidered kente, a calm and confident demeanor, Charles Ghankay Taylor conjures up the image of a king. This regal appearance is a mask, for behind it lies a thug, a thief, a liar, an actor and much more.
once told me. The friend not being Ghanaian, in which case his remark would have been dismissed as an outburst of chauvinism, it is surprising that the declaration did not really set my mind working at the time. Then in 1997, Kofi Annan became the new UN Secretary-General, after a fierce diplomatic battle between the US and Boutros Ghali led to the ouster of the Egyptian. What my friend had told me about a decade earlier instantly came back to mind and I found myself involved in a mental journey to Ghana. I have only read about this country, so it was quite natural for my ruminations to commence at the UN. After all, was it not Mr. Annan who started it all? 
In 1960, when the Ivory Coast became independent from French colonial rule, Felix Houphouet-Boigny and his Parti Democratique de Cote d’Ivoire (PDCI) were swept to power in a general euphoria. However, as Martin Meredith has noted in his book The Fate of Africa, “the changes that occurred were largely ceremonial.” Most of the new leaders, especially those in French-speaking Africa, were more interested in “accumulating positions of power, wealth and status…than in transforming society.” According to him, “no one illustrated this sense of continuity, or the benefits derived from it, better than Houphouet-Boigny.” As far back as 1951, he had given signal of the neo-colonial era he was about to inaugurate.
center of this declaration, stand two great kings: Shaka (1816-1828), the founder of the Zulu nation, and his nephew, Cetewayo (1872-1884).
In the popular lore, Algeria is an Arab country. This is a fallacy, for it is not. At least not like Saudi Arabia. If this fallacy were designed to unite the country around a common language and culture, it has often backfired. An extract from “Dossier” published in The Estimate exposes this falsehood. “After Boumedienne’s death in 1978, the pressure for Arabization continued. In 1979, students at the University of Algiers, backed by Islamists, pressed for a reduction of the use of French. New Arabization measures were introduced. 
From such an illustrious past, the swath of land that lies between Yaoundé in Cameroon and Kampala in Uganda has degenerated into a rookery of some of history’s greediest and most notorious political scoundrels. From Bokassa, whose obsession with Napoleon led him to empty the treasury of his impoverished nation to crown himself emperor, to Macias Nguema, who initiated a reign of terror that almost left him with no subjects to govern; and from Mobutu, the very epitome of greed and recklessness in governance in contemporary Africa, to Alphonse Kayibanda, whose policies laid the groundwork for the Rwandan genocide.
“Me and my clan against my country; me and my brother against my clan; and me against my brother.” This Somali saying pretty much sums up the mindset responsible for the state of anarchy and disintegration that has beset Somalia in recent years. In May 1991, the northern part of the country declared its independence as Somaliland. This secession was followed in 1998 by another in the north east that led to the creation of Puntland.
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