Calm has followed chaos in Mozambique. Whether it is going to last we don’t know. But the more salient question is whether or not food shortages across the world are going to lead to similar uprisings. Much of the worst of the global economic crisis has actually missed Africa, in part, at least, because of the nature of that crisis (housing bubbles and buying risky financial assets does not tend to dominate the smaller-scale economies of most of Africa) and in part because when you’re at the bottom rung of the economic ladder there is not far to drop.

A significant hike in the price of bread and other commodities led to mass protests in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, which in turn led to trigger-happy police opening fire on crowds of people. The official stance of the state appears to be the the protests were illegal, which in addition to being absurd in and of itself, seems like a pretty thin reed upon which to hang justification for firing on even rowdy unarmed civilians.

Yeah, about the end of the South African public sector strike? Not so fast.

It is exceedingly rare for an event in Africa to be met with near-universal acclaim. But the approval of Kenya’s new constitution seems to qualify.

Kenyans are celebrating the news, in which they played a part by their participation in the referendum to approve the constitution. President Mwai Kibaki, who shares some of the blame for the 2007-2008 post-election fiasco, has hailed the new constitution and its official introduction. Media reports have talked about “a nation reborn” and even normally skeptical analysts are gushing about “history in the making.” Kenyan optimism is skyrocketing, and even tourism numbers are poised to break records.

Of course a caveat is still probably necessary: The new constitution marks the beginning of a new phase, not the end, of a long struggle for state building. But there is no question that the ebullient mood is a good sign that Kenyans want to get on with the business of moving forward.

It looks like the major public sector strike in South Africa might be coming to an end. The government has upped its offer and the unions seem set to accept.

There is a prisoner’s dilemma element of every labor action, of course, but at the end of nearly every one across the globe not ended by force the same question always seems to emerge: Why couldn’t they have reached this compromise from the outset? Of course neither side was willing to do so earlier because in their mind there was so much more to be gained or so much less to be given. Now as both sides claim victory and play nice we can start the clock until the next time . . .

Last week the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights long-awaited mapping report on the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo leaked. In it Rwanda is implicated in a range of horrible crimes, the most grimly ironic being genocide. Texas in Africa (welcome back!) has a fantastic response.

In the United States Ronald Reagan used to be referred to as “The Teflon President” because no matter what befell his administration or what mistakes he made or what failures he had, nothing seemed to stick. It appears that South African President Jacob Zuma has his own non-stick sheen. Despite myriad personal controversies and political scandals, Zuma’s popularity ratings have rebounded.

I suppose there are multiple explanations, all of which contribute to the larger truth. Zuma has always had the populist touch, and like Reagan, people simply like him. South Africans are inclined to support the ANC, and as a result, to support its leader (you could ask Thabo Mbeki about that one, although I suspect that Mbeki would have won re-election to a third term had he been given the opportunity, such being the strength of the ANC brand.) People have a hard time discerning where Zuma’s failings are political and where they are personal — for many his failings actually humanize him. And maybe Zuma is getting a bit of a World Cup bounce. Whatever the reason, Zuma seems to be the new Teflon President.

Stories that have accumulated on my desk over the last few days with commentary as apt:

Increasingly ANC Youth League (ANC-YL) president Julius Malema finds himself in President Jacob Zuma’s bad graces. And this, of course, is shorthand for the increasingly tendentious relationship between the ANC and the Youth League. This is yet another of the fissures in the ANC coalition the resolution of which will be central to South Africa’s political future.  The ANC-YL might bear the party’s name, but its political temperament is more in line with the leftists of the Tripartite alliance, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). If those two decide to leave the governing coalition, don’t be surprised if the Youth League flees with them.

Finally, Thomas Friedman uses the Mandela/Invictus analogy to make a not-at-all-original point about leadership in the Muslim world.

Chris Blattman asks an interesting question: Where have all the African revolutionaries gone? he provides many useful possible explanations. I think part of the answer might lie in the fact that in Africa revolutionaries have always been perceived as being aligned against outside forces, most notably the colonial powers. Those outside forces are pretty much gone, and the end of the Cold War eliminated Africa as a proxy field for global superpower competition, and so “revolutionary” activity tends today to fall to rebels who themselves are not always all that sympathetic, especially when placed next to their anti-imperialist predecessors.

Terrible news from South African rugby circles. Blue Bulls prop Jacobus Stefanus “Bees” Roux has been charged with murder for beating a Tshwane metro police officer to death early on Friday morning.

Depressing AIDS denialist story of the week: Prince Mangaliso Dlamini, a controversial high-profile cousin of Swaziland’s King Mswati III, announced that he is “not scared of AIDS, claimed that greedy pharmaceutical companies were withholding a cure for HIV/Aids in order to maximize their profits from anti-retroviral drugs, and dismissed abstinence, monogamy, and circumcision for curbing the spread of HIV/Aids. According to UN estimates Swaziland has the highest HIV/Aids infection rates in the world, with just over one in four adult Swazis living with the disease.

It’s hard to argue with the lead of this New York Times article by Jeffrey Gettelman (about whose work I have been fairly lukewarm over the years, largely because it is oftentimes so shoddy, so credit where credit’s due): “Somali insurgents disguised in government military uniforms stormed a Mogadishu hotel on Tuesday and killed at least 30 people, including 6 lawmakers, laying bare how vulnerable Somalia’s government is, even in an area it claims to control.”

The possibility of the ANC government cracking down on the media and the concerns over the implications of the Protection of Information Bill (2010) and the possible establishment of a “media tribunal” (the tribunal and the act are not the same thing) continue to vex observers both in in and outside of South Africa. See commentary from The Independent (UK), Constitutionally Speaking, Book Southern Africa, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times.

Public sympathy for the increasingly nasty ongoing public sector strike is starting to lose the sympathy and support of the general populace if it has not done so already. Even in labor-friendly South Africa, where the union movement was a central component of the anti-Apartheid struggle and are a central component of the governing coalition, the general public is going to frown upon strikes that appear to endanger public safety or that seem indifferent to the general welfare. The striking workers are likely to reach a favorable resolution to this strike in the near future, but if they learn the wrong lessons from these strikes they may find that the next time around public sentiment could be tenuous from the outset.