Stephen W. Smith

Stephen W. Smith teaches African Studies at Duke. The Scramble for Europe: Young Africa on Its Way to the Old Continent was published in 2019.

Diary: In Chad

Stephen W. Smith, 3 July 2014

Thirty​ years ago, disembarking at the airport in N’Djamena, I knew within moments that the calcination of desert sand produces a dust of such pungency that it wipes all previous data from the olfactory memory. Two other startling realisations in Chad: first, that a state capital of about 200,000 inhabitants could have only two paved streets and no street lights at all; second, that...

In the early 1990s, after more than four decades of stringent enforcement, South Africa ceased to be a country where races were segregated by law. Yet no one in a position of power was called to account for the relegation of millions of South Africans to derelict Bantustans, the forcible removal of hundreds of thousands of non-white urban dwellers to shanty towns and rural areas, the coercive...

From The Blog
5 December 2013

Nelson Mandela’s death, at the age of 95, comes as a relief. He should have been allowed the dignity of only dying once. In the past two years, in and out of hospital, he seldom recognised his wife Graça Machel, his former wife Winnie, his children or his old comrades from the ANC. What is more, since the end of his presidency in 1999, the 'rainbow nation' had been dying with him.

On 11 January, seemingly out of the blue, François Hollande announced that France would ‘respond to the request of the Malian president’ and send forces to its former colony to fight ‘terrorist elements coming from the north’. ‘Today, the very existence of this friendly nation is at stake,’ he declared. ‘Military operations will last for as long as required … Terrorists must know that France will always be there when it’s a matter not of its fundamental interests but the right of a population … to live in freedom and democracy.’

From The Blog
11 December 2012

The Rwanda-backed M23 rebels – M23 for 23 March 2009, when a peace deal was signed with Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila – attacked the city of Goma, in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), on 17 November, trouncing the Congolese army in less than three days. Twelve days later they withdrew. But they have not melted back into the hills of Northern Kivu from where they launched the assault. They have put a ring around Goma and are staying put until the power-sharing agreement for which they’re named is renegotiated in their favour. Meanwhile, Goma, a border town of one million people, resembles Berlin in the Cold War, an island linked to the west by an air bridge.

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