Olivia African Studies 2017

        Does anyone else remember that one time Donald Trump enacted a travel ban? While some countries have since been redacted the newest edition to the countries banned from traveling to the United States is Chad. The article explores the possible reasons for the denial of Chadians, and there are not many. The first argument involves a statement saying that "Chad has failed to 'adequately share public-safety and terrorism-related information'". This seems like a counterintuitive statement because the US has made previous statements of their excitement to "expanding the cooperation" with Chad. The article also made a point that "Chad has been one of the more effective US counter-terrorist allies in the Sub-Saharan region for several years". This reasoning seems pretty invalid because the pattern of behavior in Chad in relation to the US has not changed, the only thing that has changed is the President and in turn his interpretations of ties of l...

In an ironic twist of fate it seems the number one murderer of our dear rain forests in Africa are due to our beloved cocoa plant. We have been studying in class how the change in Africa's weather was a huge factor in the development of societies across the whole continent and how favorable soils for crops were few and far between. But it seems in the Ivory Coast as well as Ghana they have tended all of their favorable soil for the good of cocoa production and all they have gotten in return is serious amounts of deforestation and destruction to the land. Acres upon acres are cleared for the production of cocoa which are then sold off to massive corporations such as Mars and Nestle. If there is no solution found to this dramatic deforestation issue there will be no forests left in the Ivory Coast by 2030. Africa is a continent who is seems to continuously adapting from its situation in the past to the harsh problems they face in the present day as well as preparing for a positive f...

In this week's reading we took a look at how the development of a substantial food supply was an uphill battle in Africa. The poor soils left little to be desired in the sense of having a successful farming communities. Iliffe says that historically the African people adapted to their environment instead of changing their environment to fit to their needs. While the emergence of food-producing communities undoubtedly took place on the continent, we have learned little about, if any, food producing communities to exist on the island of Madagascar. In the twenty-first century Africa is a country still struggling with adequate food supply, but the children of Madagascar are not the first to come to mind when we think of the lack of food and the stability of poverty. This article was posted yesterday, and it goes into detail of the struggles the children of Madagascar face off of the mainland. While Madagascar's soil can produce a multitude of crops, the people of Malagasy are fo...