Stephen W. Smith

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...

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​ 1969, three years into the Cultural Revolution, China was not only poorer than most African countries but suffering from a massive famine. Mao Zedong and his colleagues decided to import vast quantities of wheat as a way to address the food crisis and, more radically, to change the staple of their 800 million countrymen: wheat has a higher nutritional value than rice. That year, a...

The​ South African president, Jacob Zuma, has notified the United Nations of his country’s decision to leave the International Criminal Court in The Hague and is encouraging other African countries to follow suit. No one should be surprised. African doubts about the ICC have been growing ever since a sitting president, Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, was indicted by the court for war...