As parents, we transmit the qualities—and myths—of our leaders through the stories we tell our children. Think George Washington and his cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln and his Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King and his “I Have A Dream” speech, delivered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.
Read MoreOf all the rightly deserved accolades heaped on Nelson Mandela with his passing, perhaps the most important have to do with his humanity, his ubuntu, as it is called in Zulu. On its own it was rather remarkable; when compared with current leaders everywhere who routinely put political expediency and professional longevity ahead of the greater good, Mandela’s humanity was nothing short of stunning.
Read MoreFor reasons personal and professional, I’ve been away from the blog for a while now, during which several important events occurred. I’ll try to address them in upcoming posts.
The first, and perhaps most important, was Charles Taylor’s sentencing in the Hague to fifty years in prison for his role in atrocities committed in Sierra Leone during its civil war in the 1990s.
Read MoreReading the reams of articles about the child sex-abuse scandal at Penn State, I’m reminded of various dictators around the world I’ve covered/known. I’m thinking of those who started out as saviours in their respective countries and did much good–only to succumb to the seduction of power and their own vanity, clinging to their offices in ways that undid their legacies.
Read MoreIn the face of the much-deserved media coverage of the “Arab Spring” uprisings, it was gratifying to see the Nobel Peace Prize committee acknowledge a sadly under-reported, but no less bloody nor intractable, arena of conflict: Africa. The Nobel committee awarded the prize earlier this month to Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee and to Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female head-of-state. They shared the award with Tawakul Karman of Yemen, a pro-democracy campaigner.
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