TheCable

New African Commentary, an online news publication aiming to project Africa positively to the rest of the world, is set to launch on November 16.

According to a statement signed by Okey Ndibe, a member of the publication’s editorial team, New African Commentary will be an online repository of all things African, cutting across a wide range of subject matters and will project the continent and its people accurately.

Drawing inspiration from African Commentary, an international print magazine pioneered by the late Chinua Achebe in 1989, the New African Commentary hopes to engender a new dignity and renewed optimism for people of African descent.

The statement said even though heroes of African descent including Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, and William Edward Burghardt “WEB” Du Bois, had orchestrated an “organic synergy” between Africa and its worldwide diaspora, most narratives and conversations about the continent are still largely negative.

“Africana people — the people from Africa and its diaspora — are an indispensable part of the economic, scientific and cultural eco-systems that are reshaping humanity,” the statement read.

“Indeed, they are making their presence felt in every field of human endeavor—the broad sectors of the sciences, finance, the humanities, and the social sciences – and great numbers of Africans and people of African descent, young and old, are bringing their stupendous intellect, versatility, breadth of vision and energy to the perennial renewal of our world. Nonetheless, the global mainstream media is yet to tell this story appropriately.

“Therefore, the mission of New African Commentary is to chronicle our world’s fast-moving saga from within the sensibility of people of African descent.

“Our lens may be Africana, but our purview is the entire world: one, because Africans and people of African descent are dispersed all over the world and, two, because the fortunes and misfortunes of Africa and its diaspora have salutary or negative reverberations in our globalized world.

“We envisage New African Commentary as that harvest of reliable news, insightful analysis, learned commentary, and entertaining features on everything Africana: politics, science and technology, finance and economy, arts and culture.”