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Keywords: Africa

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Unclenching the despotic fist in Burma

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 27 November 2012
    3 Comments

    To say, as Aung San Suu Kyi did, that both the Muslim Rohingya and the Buddhist Arakanese had breached human rights laws in the current conflict is akin to saying that whites as well as blacks violated human rights in apartheid South Africa. The Australian Government, in its treatment of asylum seekers, has lost the moral legitimacy to speak up for oppressed groups such as the Rohingya.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The sinister side of African Aid

    • Ellena Savage
    • 23 November 2012
    5 Comments

    The picture disturbed me: a small child, my own age, sitting beside an infant on the stoop of a simple wooden house with a dirt floor. I cried at their hopelessness, and my helplessness. The point was to make Australian kids aware of their economic privilege. But I wonder if it also made us believe in the weakness of others. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Ethical dilemmas on safari in Africa

    • John Warhurst
    • 14 September 2012
    3 Comments

    I've just returned from a 14-day holiday in Kenya and Uganda. Everywhere you go, you are invited to help the local people in various ways, including financially and through volunteering. In the end we all react differently and in many cases spontaneously to what we see in these situations.

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  • RELIGION

    Walking the asylum seeker advocacy tightrope

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 30 August 2012
    27 Comments

    Anglican priest Michael Lapsley lost his hands to a letter bomb during his resistance to apartheid in South Africa. His story raises questions of how white South Africans responded to what was being done in their name. Many people working with asylum seekers in Australia today ask a similar question.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hope for haemorrhaging Zimbabwe

    • Chris Chatteris
    • 31 July 2012
    3 Comments

    For the international community, including Australia, it is devilishly difficult to find the most helpful stance to take with the present regime in Zimbabwe. It is naive, however, to simply assume that things will come right once Mugabe has died. The fact is that things could get worse once he is off the scene.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    International Criminal Court's African bias

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 13 July 2012
    3 Comments

    On Tuesday, the International Criminal Court sentenced Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo for his use of child soldiers. It is the first sentence handed down by an institution regarded by many as a political front. As one Congolese official noted, 'You'll never see an American pass before the ICC. All of the accused are Africans.'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Aboriginal Australians inherit racial fear

    • Brian McCoy
    • 29 May 2012
    12 Comments

    The shooting death of 17-year-old African-American Trayvon Martin brought to public attention The Talk, an oral tradition where people who have experienced racial discrimination and violence teach their young to be cautious when they are out in public. Aboriginal Australians have their own version of The Talk.

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  • MEDIA

    Bewailing Wikipedia's white male bias

    • Ellena Savage
    • 13 April 2012
    17 Comments

    Nearly 90 per cent of Wikipedia's editors are men, the majority in their 20s. This is not Wikipedia's fault: it exists in a world that is already weighted towards the white male experience. The murder in Florida of African-American teen Trayvon Martin has catalysed criticism of the effects of white male privilege.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Islamic women's sex and power

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 23 February 2012
    1 Comment

    The women begin withholding sex from their husbands in order to pressure them into bringing running water to their remote North African village. This act of self-empowerment brings hardships to both the men and the women of this patriarchal Islamic community.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rise of the urban refugee

    • David Holdcroft
    • 10 February 2012
    2 Comments

    In the last ten years the world of the refugee has rapidly shifted. The refugee camp is now the exception rather than the rule: 58 per cent of all refugees reside in urban areas, mostly in the rapidly growing slums of the cities in the global south.

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  • MEDIA

    Peter Roebuck's ordered passion for cricket

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 November 2011
    11 Comments

    As a cricket writer Roebuck appreciated that other things in life matter more than sport. But precisely because sport does not matter ultimately, he was freed to take it very seriously indeed.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Roasts and race in segregated South Africa

    • Cecile Yazbek
    • 26 October 2011
    1 Comment

    Anthony cleans gutters. Some people give him money. When he has enough he buys himself a piece of chicken. 'Where is your mother,' I wonder, 'who roasted fat chickens in our oven, and cooked giant pots of meaty bones for our dogs, her brown arms pitted with burns from our kettles?'

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