A new spirit of pan-Africanism guided the continent’s response to the pandemic. Led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the African Union provided multilateral coordination and worked with external partners to obtain support, while the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention organized the pandemic responses of national public health agencies. The pandemic showed the risks of continued reliance on foreign donors for resources such as vaccines, but the collective response demonstrated that the AU has become a strong institution capable of addressing regional and global challenges.

Densely populated informal housing has mushroomed in formerly segregated South African townships, attracting migrants who survive on the edges of the economy, excluded from basic services. In the pandemic, they have been even more vulnerable, unable to practice social distancing and forced to continue with marginal work such as scavenging to eke out a living. Drawing on interviews with residents of a Johannesburg settlement, the authors emphasize how urban space structures inequalities in every aspect of everyday life, requiring a new approach to city planning and governance with a focus on justice.

Exploding in October 2020 and reverberating internationally, protests against police brutality under the hashtag #EndSARS exposed enduring patterns and emergent trends in Nigerian politics and society. This article examines various elements of the protests to advance hypotheses about the culture of social media, the weakening of old forms of solidarity, and the rise of a new generation of activists steeped in new rules and technologies of civic engagement. #EndSARS marks the possible ascent of an inorganic civil society with profound implications for Nigerian democracy.

For a time, Tanzania enjoyed a reputation for mostly free elections and public debate. But after President John Magufuli was elected in 2015, he introduced measures to stifle the media and tilt the electoral playing field in favor of the longtime ruling party. The turn toward authoritarianism is not due to any one personality or stereotypical “mad dictator,” however (notwithstanding Magufuli’s pandemic denialism, which may have cost him his life). It is part of the legacy of the early postcolonial period and the revered founding president, Julius Nyerere, who set the foundations of one-party rule and wielded the rhetoric of economic nationalism.

The African Continental Free Trade Agreement, launched on January 1, 2021, will be Africa’s most ambitious united endeavor to assert financial oversight over the extractive resources sector—if it is fully implemented. The United States can act as a supportive partner, but what matters most is change from within Africa itself to finally realize pan-African visions of economic sovereignty.

A new book explores how a community in southern Africa has turned to genetic testing to advance a claim to Jewish ancestry. The reviewer puts the episode in the broader context of diverse Jewish groups across the continent for whom religion is a matter of practice, not just identity.

Excerpts from Current History essays published in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like other African nations, Sierra Leone seemed to avoid the worst pandemic scenarios. Its previous experience with Ebola may have led to improved preparedness in the health system. But the government has once again reverted to a militarized response, and elites returning from international travel may pose a risk of spreading the coronavirus. The author also reflects on the challenges of tracking the situation from afar, in the midst of a global crisis, and critically assesses Western media coverage of African public health issues.

The two-decade effort by the United States and its NATO allies to build a modern liberal state in Afghanistan envisioned electoral democracy replacing village councils and other forms of customary authority. But citizens still rely on these community-based bodies to resolve disputes, provide small-scale public goods and services, and broker relations with local government. Customary institutions may also provide protection against predatory government officials. Although the international community has largely overlooked customary authority, US and NATO military forces eventually recognized their importance. Throughout history, Afghan rulers have regarded customary authorities as threats to their power, and they have been largely excluded from ongoing peace talks among the United States, the Afghan government, and the Taliban.

The economic impact of COVID-19 has been much harder on those at the bottom of the caste ladder in India, reflecting the persistence of a system of social stigmatization that many Indians believe is a thing of the past. Untouchability has been outlawed since 1947, and an affirmative action program has lowered some barriers for stigmatized caste groups. But during the pandemic, members of lower castes suffered heavier job losses due to their higher representation in precarious daily wage jobs and their lower levels of education. Lower caste families are less able to help their children with remote learning, which threatens to worsen labor market inequality in India. But Dalits, at the bottom of the caste ladder, have recently.

The Pakistani Constitution promises “free and compulsory” education for all, but 20 million children are not in school. Many who are enrolled receive poor-quality education: surveys show Pakistani students ranking among the lowest achievers in the world. This has led families in all but the lowest income groups to seek private alternatives for their children, weakening the constituency for improved public schools. Under Prime Minister Imran Khan, the government has pushed for a Single National Curriculum. Critics contend that it will not address lack of access or the poor quality of education, but that it could lead to restrictions on school choice, provincial autonomy, and linguistic diversity, while imposing a narrow vision of national identity.

Communities of landless Hindus and Muslims in the Sundarbans, a mangrove-forested river delta sprawling across the Bangladesh–India border, have common class-based grievances and concerns for the imperiled ecosystem that transcend their religious differences. Their shared beliefs and practices include veneration of the same Muslim saint, Bonbibi (the Lady of the Forest), who is regarded as a protector of the forest and the landless poor who depend on it to eke out a livelihood. Their ecumenical practices reflect religious ideals shaped by the complex, delicate ecosystem that sustains them. This tradition is not a muddled synthesis of Islam and Hinduism; it is rooted in the history of settlement in the region.

For centuries, malaria kept European colonial interests away from the Maldive islands, leaving the remote Indian Ocean island chain on a distinct and largely self-governed trajectory. Successful mosquito eradication in the twentieth century paved the way for development. The COVID-19 pandemic posed a new challenge to the economy, which is now heavily dependent on tourism. But resorts were able to reopen relatively quickly, since they are mostly set up on islands apart from those inhabited by local communities. The nation also has proved adept at finding ways to make tourism compatible with Muslim traditions, though imported harder-line Islamic ideology has raised tensions in recent years. Now the islanders must manage their entanglements with rival regional powers, as China and India compete to provide infrastructure.

After a deadly June 2020 clash between Chinese and Indian troops on the contested border in the Himalayas, both sides eventually agreed to pull back their forces from the immediate vicinity of the border. But neither country made any notable concessions, and tensions remained high as a series of skirmishes continued. With authoritarian nationalists in charge in Beijing and New Delhi, backed by public opinion, compromise has proved hard to reach.

A new book explores a premodern idea of the Indian subcontinent as a home for members of all religious traditions: the vision of Hindustan developed by the seventeenth-century historian Firishta, a Persian-speaking Muslim. His perspective was neglected and distorted by colonial-era historians who contributed to a Hindu-centric idea of India.

Governments in Europe responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by expanding their welfare systems to protect health, jobs, and incomes. The varied initiatives embody the principle of solidarity and demonstrate how welfare programs serve as a form of collective insurance against risk. But the twin health and economic crises also exposed gaps in coverage for many, including migrants and gig economy workers. Fiscal austerity, enforced by the European Union, has long constrained efforts to close those gaps.

In contrast with their halting response to the global financial crisis a decade ago, European policymakers acted quickly to mitigate the economic damage from the COVID-19 pandemic. They eased the way for governments to run deficits and increase their debt loads. In a breakthrough, the European Union agreed to a plan for common borrowing for a pandemic recovery fund. Although controversial in some countries, common debt would make it easier to address inequities among member states. But the plan was nearly derailed by objections from Poland and Hungary to a provision that would withhold funds from member states that violate the rule of law and other democratic norms, raising doubts about how transformative the borrowing precedent would prove to be.

Some 10-15 million members of the Roma minority live in Europe; an estimated 6 million are citizens of the European Union. It was not until the 1990s that European Union institutions began treating Roma as an ethnic minority deserving of human rights protections. Concerns about mass migration of Roma from Eastern European countries where they face severe discrimination was one of the reasons the EU included protections for Roma among the conditions that candidate countries had to meet to qualify for consideration in its most recent rounds of enlargement. Those EU efforts have overlooked similar discrimination and neglect in western member states.