Social media has contributed to some of the largest political events of the last couple of years. It aided the Arab Spring, has been a constant thorn in the side of the Chinese authorities, has given Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad slight cause for concern, and it helped to organise the less-constructive London riots. The latest social media innovation is KONY 2012 by the advocacy group “Invisible Children.” The campaign, which went viral this week, is aimed at stopping Joseph Kony, the Ugandan-born leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The immediate relevance of this campaign has nothing to do with the issue itself, but with the response that it has received. My own knee-jerk reaction when I noticed that a …

The institutions of the United Nations are slaves to the objectives of Western powers, and these powers are determined to make Africa an appendage to the West. Or so Thabo Mbeki claims. Mbeki, the former president of South Africa and the founding chairperson of the African Union, made these comments in a recent speech deploring what he termed the ‘re-colonisation’ of Africa. Mbeki went on to suggest that recent armed interventions in Africa were representative of the West’s willingness to exploit the universal principles of democracy, human rights and good governance to further their material interests. Re-colonisation is an idea that by now suffers from severe intellectual fatigue. The harshness of Mbeki’s terms of reference is reminiscent of the ramblings …