The Sahara Still Remembers…a Haunted Past Versus Africa’s Nuclear Future 

It is almost inconceivable and rather far-fetched to associate Africa with  nuclear proliferation, yet ahead of the forthcoming International Day against Nuclear Tests observed annually on the 29th of August, it is imperative to not only commemorate the history of the continent’s brush with nuclear tests, whose effects have ironically recently surfaced on a higher magnitude in another continent, but also to formulate feasible strategies for the continent to tap into and harness nuclear power as a viable option to meeting the gaping energy deficits to drive industrialization and economic transformation.   Africa’s dark colonial past comes calling back with the recent occurrence of massive clouds of radioactive dust making a return on French soil, emanating from the Sahara Desert where nuclear colonial heirlooms buried decades ago continue to be unearthed by the day. The event stirs up a cauldron of repressed haunting memories that best remain buried in history books; as the deleterious effects of what happened in Algeria, meted out by its colonial master, France, continue to reverberate to this day.   Over half a century later, the Sahara still evokes the atrocities committed in gusts of seasonal winds full of radiation that have been blowing back nuclear relics to the perpetrator, in form of radioactive dust and particles as if cleansing