Dan Magaziner

As Africa marks its 65th year of independence, the evolutionary framework chosen at the dawn of this era has failed; now only a revolutionary-pragmatic path can secure the continent’s future. The African Union must reimagine regional integration, prioritize human dignity, and undertake a genuine decolonization of knowledge. The year 1960 was widely celebrated as the year of Africa’s independence, with seventeen African countries gaining freedom from European rule.

In the absence of effective solutions to South Africa’s escalating economic and social crises, dangerous delusions and destructive fantasies are flourishing. Having returned to executive power, US President Donald Trump recently provided renewed vitality to the paranoia of right-wing populists while validating the perverse anxieties of white nationalists.

In 2004, I lived in Madison, Wisconsin. It was an animated time in an animated city, where the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had spurred a committed peace movement, some members of which—including me—rallied around John Kerry. He was a former combatant who had turned to the cause of peace; surely, we reasoned, voters across the country would see the wisdom of selecting him over Bush’s jingoistic militarism. They did not, resoundingly.