Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi is trying to shore up his flagging political influence in Africa after being eclipsed recently by South African president Thabo Mbeki. November was an active month for Gaddafi, who accused the West last week of trying to take Sudan's oil wealth by stealth. He urged Khartoum to reject efforts to have a United Nations-led peacekeeping force stationed in Darfur to halt three years of violence that has killed tens of thousands.

Gadaffi's closest African ally, Zimbabwe's cantankerous President Robert Mugabe is still batting onward after a bloody 26-year reign. Mugabe is trying to break his international isolation by seeking new allies in Muslim countries and Asia, in a new political strategy he euphemistically calls "look-East". Mugabe hopes this will shore up his flagging political profile. In Iran, Mugabe sought out an equally colorful figure, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who duly promised to support Zimbabwe against "a few bully nations". Mugabe has been energetically wooing China. He has opened up Zimbabwe to Chinese business and frequently boasts that China is his regime's biggest cheerleader.

Indeed, China's president Hu Jintao's star is shining brightly on the continent. Right now, he is certainly the most influential non-African in the continent's politics. Another Asian trying to make inroads into African politics is the incoming UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, who is trying hard to show that he cares about the continent. He has been frantically meeting with African leaders and making certain to sounds the right tones. Africans have been worried that after having two successive Africanists in charge at the UN, now the continent would fall off the global radar when the former South Korean civil servant takes charge next year.

In Nigeria, president Olusegun Obasanjo, for years one of Mbeki's most reliable allies in his quest to convince other African leaders to base their rule on a new regime of good economic and political governance and respect for human rights, appears now to be a lame-duck president at home and mostly marginal in continental politics. His presidential term expires next year. His initial bid to stay on for a third term -- after years of helping Mbeki persuade other African leaders not to do so -- has damage his standing in Nigeria. The 69-year old Obasanjo hogged the headlines this week after he enrolled as a student at a university in the nation's capital, Abuja, in anticipation of retirement next year.

In spite of a range of political challenges at home and on the continent, Mbeki still appears to be the leading African politician. At home, his former deputy, Jacob Zuma, whom Mbeki fired after Zuma's advisor deputy was found guilty of corruption, is staking an early claim to replace him in 2009 and is trying hard to make inroads into the Mbeki's support base. Mbeki is increasingly making way in both domestic and African politics for his protege, current deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, in the same way former South African President Nelson Mandela eased Mbeki's road to the presidency.

Mandela, once a dominant figure on the African scene, now in retirement, deliberately keeps a low political profile. His contemporary, the other anti-apartheid icon, Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, also in retirement, is still maintaining a challenging, high political profile. He was appointed this week to head a UN fact-finding mission to the Gaza. Tutu has remained in the news, reprimanding Mugabe for overstaying as president, asking Zuma to withdraw from the race for the leadership of the ruling Africa National Congress because of the cloud of allegations of impropriety hanging over his head, and forcefully reminding South Africans that the huge wealth gap in the country between rich and poor threatens to derail the country's hard-fought democracy.