History

On Western analysts and the Mali Conflict, April 2012

An excerpt from a letter written in 2012. “Two histories are now being written, each a litany of crimes and humiliations suffered, neither accepted as even having occurred by the other. …if privileged western analysts — however innocently — repeat propaganda of one side as ‘the background’ to this conflict, they help determine the outcome.”

Death and Career in the “Dark” Sahara: The Sad Fate of Jeremy Keenan

Lonely at the top

People who don’t know much about northern Mali would be very poorly served by reading Keenan’s increasingly odd writing. Keenan used to be a scholar of some note. But his increasingly unhinged supposition that their hidden hands are behind all that is bad in the west-central Saharan region is simply unsupportable. Why it remains unchallenged is the mystery.

A Cairo Revolution

Marching in Imbaba, Cairo, originally uploaded by RamyRaoof. One overlooked media revelations from the Arab Revolutions of 2011 is the amount of material released with reusable copyright. Ramy Raoof in Cairo is releasing his work with a CC Attribution license,…

Historian death match!

The Guardian had provided blow by blow coverage of the recent hatefest between two British historians of Russia, Orlando Figes and Robert Service. Figes, once touted as the “angry young man” for historians, is more accurately the spoiled brat. A…

Mr. Françafrique 1973

This one image sums up the — still — late Omar Bongo Ondimba better than any words could. If you want to see where the postcolonials learned their tricks, look to their models. Omar Bongo (née Albert-Bernard Bongo) was French…

Gaza: death for land

Adding to the “everything the press tells you is a lie” file, here a a couple of articles of the (literally) criminal attacks on civilians in Gaza. First, despite the byline, this article on the “siege on Gaza” was written…