Nearly a century of lead mining and smelting in Kabwe, Zambia has made the town one of the most toxic in the world. Photo credit: Larry C Price/The Guardian

What Recent Struggles in Gambia and Zambia Teach us About Neo-Colonialism Today

The economic exploitation of Africa which marked centuries of foreign rule has continued past the time of many of the region’s independence struggles. Though foreign rule politically and officially ended with many nations’ independence, primarily in the decades following World War II, economic colonialism has continued throughout much of the continent – particularly where natural resources are concerned.

South African Lawsuit Could Grant Rural Communities Right to Reject New Mining Projects

South Africans await judgement to be handed down in a court case that could set a sweeping precedent by empowering communities on communal land with the right to reject new mining projects. Calling the case a referendum on “the right to say no,” residents of several rural villages are asking the court to reinterpret current minerals extraction legislation to compel mining companies to gain explicit community consent prior to breaking ground on new operations. “The land is our identity. When we lose that land, we lose who we are,” Nonhle Mbuthuma, leader of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, said of the court case.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe (right) at the country's independence anniversary in 2016. From early 1983 to late 1987, the Zimbabwe National Army carried out a series of massacres of Ndebele civilians called the Gukurahundi, deriving from a Shona language term which loosely translates to "the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains". (Photo credit: Jekesai Njikizana/AFP/Getty)

The Dark Chapter of Zimbabwe’s History That Won’t Go Away

With Zimbabwe’s new President Emmerson Mnangagwa just concluding a 100-day timeline to address what he considered the country’s most pressing issues, which focused on economic revival, human rights activists have their own timeline. Survivors of the 1980s Gukurahundi atrocities, where a campaign by government soldiers claimed thousands of civilian lives, are demanding that the new president address the country’s dark past.