world

by Kwame Anthony Appiah Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense and waterboarding was approved — in fact, invented — by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation…

Finally, I made it to Kemet! Ehh … wait, I mean Egypt … I guess? It’s hard to accept that only remnants and distant memories of Kemet, the ancient civilization now called the Arab Republic of Egypt, remain. (The original people called their country Kemet, a word literally meaning “nation of the black people.”) Participating…

Last month I traveled to Egypt as a member of the pioneering ASA Restoration Project to volunteer in the South Asasif Conservation (SAC) Project. Since 2006, the SAC Project has been excavating three 25th Dynasty (eighth to seventh centuries B.C.) tombs (see my tomb video tour) of Kushite nobles in Luxor, Egypt. This dynasty reunified…

For opponents of an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero, the word Sharia symbolizes the threat of Islam. Marchers rallying against the center depicted the word in dripping red script, as if drenched in blood. Newt Gingrich has lectured about the problem of “creeping Sharia.” Blogs such as Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugs allege a…

Practitioners of Vodou (or voodoo) gathered in Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Prospect Park Saturday evening to celebrate the anniversary of Bwa Kayiman, a ceremony credited with launching Haiti’s 1791 slave revolt. The devil was not invited. The history of the Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caïman, in French) ceremony is shrouded in mystery, but it’s generally agreed that on…

The letter signed by 60 African Americans about the state of racism in Cuba, which ended decades of silence on Cuba’s racial policies, was the first shot. Naturally, certain sectors of the foreign press, representing interests that had always been racist, tried to take advantage of the situation. A good number of intellectuals on the…

It has been nearly two months since a 30-year-old black poultry plant worker was shot by a white co-worker, his corpse strung to the back of a pickup truck and dragged for 11 miles like so much detritus in a small central-South Carolina town. While the killing of Anthony Hill evoked strong memories of the…

After almost five decades of Marxist revolution, the official romantic idea was that, with the elimination of certain onerous economic and social practices that promoted racial discrimination, the last vestiges of racism would be vanquished. Given the usual silence with which Cuban governmental institutions deal with the thornier issues in Cuban society — as might…

by Robert Moeller I feel fortunate that I can say that I was present at the inception of U.S. Africa Command (Africom), the U.S. military headquarters that oversees and coordinates U.S. military activities in Africa. Starting with just a handful of people sitting around a table nearly four years ago, we built an organization dedicated…

Read part I of Wole Soyinka’s piece here. Fascination with the slave trade as part of my own history, right from elementary school, was as routine as that generation’s immersion in — for example — local mythology. The most notorious part of this human misadventure, unarguably the transatlantic slave trade, was the stuff on which…