Suchergebnisse

Almost 20 years after it took place, the Rwanda genocide of 1994, in which over 800 000 persons were slaughtered in 100 days while the world stood and watched, continues to haunt Africa. When the African Union (AU) was born, provision was made in its Constitutive Act, signed in 2000, to authorise military interventions, to prevent a Rwanda-type catastrophe ever happening again. But a decade later Africa remains unready to intervene where threats of mass killings arise, as the cases of Libya and Mali have recently shown. In 2011, after the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) had authorised the use of "all necessary force", the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) intervened militarily in Libya when there appeared to be a threat that the regime there was about to slaughter civilians in Benghazi. In 2012 France sent troops to Mali to prevent a rebel force that had committed massacres in the north advancing south to the capital, Bamako. The side-lining of Africa in the Libya and Mali crises, and the decision by the NATO countries to move from dealing with the perceived threat of civilian massacres in Libya to regime change, forced African leaders to give new thought to the idea of "African solutions for African problems". Africa should, it was said, have the capacity to intervene in conflict situations.

This essay is a preliminary attempt to compare the ways in which the liberation struggles in Namibia and South Africa have been memorialised, both in non-fiction writing about the two struggles and in monuments, memorials and museums. Such a comparison needs to be undertaken through contextualising the two struggles. Though they have some similar features, the ways they have been memorialised are strikingly different, with the armed struggle having been given much greater emphasis in Namibia than in South Africa.

Abstract
The Berlin Wall was breached as Namibia's first democratic election was being conducted. It is therefore wrong to say that the fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in Namibia's independence. That independence was on track when the Wall fell. But the fall of the Wall, and the associated collapse of the state socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, had significant consequences for the form of independence that emerged in Namibia in 1990.

This article examines aspects of the complex relationship between South Africa and the rest of Africa from the presidency of Nelson Mandela through those of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, showing how the relationship changed over time and exploring the influences that shaped South Africa's policy on and toward the continent—a policy that has largely been determined by the presidency rather than the Department of Foreign Affairs/International Relations and Co-operation. To understand the changing relationship between South Africa and the rest of the continent, it is necessary to consider, first, the history before 1994, then the dramatically altered situation that the transfer of power in South Africa brought about, Thabo Mbeki's interventionist approach to Africa in general, and Jacob Zuma's ambiguous involvement in continental affairs. The article concludes with some speculative thoughts on the role that South Africa may play on the continent in the future.