Ghanaian Writer Taiye Selasi on the "African" in "African Literature" (Jaipur Festival 2012)

Taiye Selasi, author of "The Sex Lives of African Girls" and "Ghana Must Go", talks to the Daily Beast from the Jaipur Festival about the challenges of the young African novelist and the unique connection she sees between the Indian readers & African literature.

Being Garifuna

An interesting pocket of Nigerian history in connection to the Garifuna of Central America; the Garinagu can be found in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua. According to Wiki:

Young recorded the arrival of the African descended population as commencing with a wrecked slave ship from the Bight of Biafra in 1675. The survivors, members of the Mokko people of today's Nigeria (now known as Ibibio), reached the small island of Bequia, where the Caribs brought them to Saint Vincent and ill-used them. When the Carib masters felt that the Africans were too independent in spirit, according to Young, they planned to kill all the male children. The Africans, learning of this plan revolted, killed as many Caribs as possible and withdrew to the mountains, where they joined with other runaways who had taken refuge there. From there they raided the Caribs continually until they had greatly reduced them in numbers. There are few other accounts of the island, as it was not occupied by Europeans and visitors were rare or there unofficially, hence Young's account is the only one of the century before he wrote to provide specific details of the origins of the Garifuna.

Review of 'The Ticket' : Guinness Nigeria Ad Celebrates a Resilient People, Culture

The Guardian's Chuks Nwanne reviews The Ticket, an international TV commercial by Saatchi & Saatchi - Cape Town, produced by Guinness Nigeria and shot in location within Nigeria with local talents and crew:

When the invitations to the screening of new Guinness TV commercial, The Ticket, were given out to media men, there was little or no detail on what exactly the brewery actually intends to achieve with the new advertisement. No doubt, Guinness has acquired a strong reputation of producing classical commercials that provide consumers with extraordinary experiences.From the epic, long running Michael Power campaign, through to the recent award-winning Sky (My friend Udeme is a great man), Scout (…give a man half a chance and he take it), and more recently Guinness The Match, the brand has shown some level of creativity with their advertisements.

Notwithstanding, to most journalists present at the screening held recently at the Protea Hotel, GRA, Ikeja, Lagos, this could be another invitation to celebrate foreign creative minds, especially South Africans; this has always been the case with multinationals in Nigeria when it comes to shooting commercials.From the opening scene, the commercial looked very much like the usual foreign work, except for the yellow buses in the package, which is considered a trademark of the city of Lagos. But as the tape rolls further, capturing Lagos bridges, with the usual hustling and bustling scenes typical of Lagos, the picture became clear; this is a TV commercial shot in Nigeria, with Nigerian cast and crew. At this point, the media men adjusted their sitting positions, with their eyes fixed on the screen with rapt attention.

 Read the rest - here/ Full Credits

Remaking the Modern in Cairo

Excerpt from the 2003 review of the book:

. . . The study focuses on the ways in which people have altered the visible forms and uses of the spaces allotted to them by the government when they were relocated to al-Zawiya. The book describes the “tactics” and “strategies” employed by people in efforts to realize their visions as individuals and as families. These actions are explored as negotiations with which people selectively appropriate or reinterpret the various powerful forces that condition the context in which they take place. State, global, or religious discourses are not top-down influences to be dichotomously rejected or accepted by the poor. This study challenges the idea of modernity, particularly as it is discussed in relation to Muslim societies. For Ghannam, modernity is not a Western-defined ideal to be more or less successfully emulated by “other” societies, particularly in regard to the emphasis on secularization. Rather, residents of al-Zawiya are modern in that they are both attracted to a religious identity and to the desires and expectations stimulated by globalization, and deal with both in articulating identity and producing neighborhood space - Building the Urban Landscape with the Gendered Spatial Practices of Everyday Life, review of Farha Ghannam's "Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002" by Amy Mills (Department of Geography, University of Texas at Austin) Published on H-Gender-MidEast (June, 2003).

Read the rest of the review at CairObserver.

Victorian Lagos and Modernity

The quote below about an emerging elite class of Lagosians embracing modernity under colonial rule is from Michael J. C. Echeruo's Victorian Lagos: Aspects of Nineteenth Century Lagos Life , which uses archives of the Lagos Press from that period to reconstruct patterns of life and thought in Lagos during the second half of the 19th century.

These Lagosians were usually very conversant with events in Europe and America, especially with the progress and consequences of the American Civil War. They maintained close contact with friends and other descendants of rescued slaves on the West African coast. They had high hopes for themselves and for the Africa they were going to help civilize. They felt deep obligations to the hinterland, and yet considered the civilizing influence of British power sufficiently beneficial to justify the gradual control which Britain was gaining over Yorubaloand. They wanted good education for their children to be "refined," and so they frequently sent them to England. These children had to be in the smart circles of Lagos, so thay went into the right professions--law, medicine and the Arts. Educated Lagosians wanted to associate themselves with the usual recreations of a sophisticated Europe, and so went to the Races, to Fancy Dress balls, to the Gymkhana games, and to cricket. In the evenings, they went for "brisk walks" or for "short rides." On such ocassions, (as an advertisement reminded them), they called first on "their friend, the hairdresser. Everything will be done to your taste and profit and you will come again PRO BONO PUBLICO." (page 30)

The picture of Broad Street, Lagos, from 1951, comes from the diary of Margaret Jefferies, "A Trip to Nigeria, (1951)". The growing independence of the Lagos elite during this period and the change in the colonial equation from Britain as colonizer to Britain as source of the tools for modernization is captured  in the voice of Augustus Engmannin, A West African, narrating the 1950 British documentary, Here is the Gold Coast, about the modernization of Ghana. 

Neoliberal Fuel Subsidy Removers

Above (4:00 in), Nigeria's CBN governor, Lamido Sanusi, making the frank--many will say unfair--neoliberal argument for the removal of the country's fuel subsidy on the BBC Africa Today podcast a few days ago (David Harvey's 'neoliberalism and the city' lecture springs to mind about now). If neoliberals weren't so smug by how right they are, this necessary enterprise could be phrased in over time, with each phrase marking the end and start off of the infrastructure projects the government keeps talking about. An addendum to that interview will be the alleged Sanusi email below that's been making the rounds:

Subject: Fwd: Biggest Expose - by CBN Gov.

You establish a company for importing 20,000MT of PMS and the PPPRA says this is at a landed cost of N145 for example per litre. So u know that for every litre in that vessel you will get at least N85 as subsidy. Now you have a number of "possibilities":

1. You can off load 5,000 MT and bribe customs and other officials to sign papers confirming u offloaded 20k MT. Then do the same across the chain with a paper trail showing you delivered 20k MT to a tank farm, and maybe even that u transported it to Maiduguri entitling you to a share of the price equalization fund. Maybe for N20-N30 per litre u bribe all those who sign the papers. The 15k MT you take to Benin or Ghana or Cameroun and sell at market price thus makin an additional "profit" of N55/ltr on 15,000MT!

2. You can just forge documents and have them stamped without bringing in anything and collect the subsidy-PPPRA pays based on DOCUMENTS.

3. You can bring in the fuel, load on tankers, sell some at N65N some at N80 some at N100 some across the land borders.

You can do all this and no one can catch it or prove it because somebody was paid to sign off on docs. And with a high enough margin there is too much temptation to be resisted and firepower for bribing officials.

When I spoke to the house of reps I told them why I was suspecting fraud. It starts from PPPRA "allocations" based on "capacity". You will find a company like Mobil with capacity for say 60,000 MT and a relatively unknown name with a capacity of say 90,000 MT. Red alert number 1.

Although PPPRA is supposed to give license only to marketers with a national distribution network you see names of companies where you have never seen a filling station in their name.

I was a chief risk officer in UBA and in FBN for many years approving loans so I know the name of every big player in every industry that nigerian banks lend to as these are among the biggest banks in the country. I see names on the list I don't recognise either from portfolios. I looked at our industry studies over the years. Red alert number 2.

I studied the papers presented to PPPRA in a short period in 2010 (I won't tell you how I got them!). And I was surprised that on some days over 10 vessels are said to have discharged cargo in lagos on the same day-clearly the same officers stamping and "verifying" that the vessels were SEEN. Is it really realistic that on the same day 13-15 vessels can discharge in Lagos? Red alert number 3.

Why was I interested in fuel marketing. Because the two sectors that led to the near collapse of the banking industry were capital markets and oil marketing. I am not giving any confidential info out as AMCON MD has already disclosed publicly that two companies alone-zenon and AP-owned by the same businessman owed the nigerian banking industry N220b. And we all saw the amount of subsidy paid to those companies published by BusinessDay.

So money had been taken, subsidy had been collected but loans were not repaid, and we couldn't see the money either as product in tank farms or in fuel stations or credit sales. So I became obsessed with trying to understand how that industry operated and the more I saw the more I hated it and I started the war against subsidies.

It is actually better to do a direct cash payout or add a line item to salaries called petroleum support or transport allowance capped at say N300b p/a than to keep paying it. It goes to pay middle men, rent-seekers and corrupt officers and there is no amount of preaching that will stop this fraud so long as the policy is so badly defined.

Everytime oil price goes up and everytime the naira is devalued and everytime the quantity of imports increases the "subsidy" and thus the "rent" increases and there is more gravy to go round. So every year we "import" more and more and deplete our reserves, and the government borrows more and more to pay for subsidy and the beneficiaries are a smal group of marketers, govt officials and neighbouring countries which get fuel without losing forex! And while a person who applies intelligence can see what is happening you can't prove it in a court of law. If the man says he sighted the vessel and it was 20kMT you have to accept it. It was a year ago!

So for two years I have been convinced that this thing is a scam and that it cannot be stopped because the entire controls have been compromised. NNPC sells domestic crude, Pays whatever subsidy PPPRA says and then gives the balance after JVC to the federation account. And while Fani Kayode is right to speak up, the truth is that it was Obasanjo who first subverted the process by allowing NNPC to make the deductions before paying into federation account. Because once money goes into that account it is to be shared among 3 tiers of government so strictly speaking the deductions have always been unconstitutional as the FG was paying subsidy on behalf of itself and state and LGs without their approval.

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi - CBN Governor

Crowdfund these Kickstarter Projects

Meklit Hadero, an Ethiopian-American singer-songwriter, and Mina, an Egyptian ethnomusicologist created:

the Nile Project. Loosely based on the Silk Road Project, the Nile Project is a multicultural musical platform that will bring together hip-hop and traditional musicians living in the Nile countries (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Egypt) to play and record music, to tour down the river and its source lakes on a boat made of recycled water bottles, and to share an experience that will connect the peoples of the river.

Meklit and Mina realized that though East Africa's Nile cultures have shared millenia of history, today they do not know very much about each other. They decided to start this musical project so that the people of the river could get to know their neighbors through a mutual sharing of stories, sound, music, mythology, and culture. More.

And while you are at Kickstarter, throw some love at another worthy project: The Radio Tanzania Archives - an effort to digitize and preserve more than 100,000 hours of post-independence music and material sitting idle and all but forgotten on deteriorating reel-to-reel tapes at the headquarters for the Tanzanian Broadcasting Corporation in Dar es Salaam. More.

Zimbabwe: Graphic Design - AKA R!OT

From Nico Colombant: profile of graphic design artist South Africa-based and Bulawayo Zimbabwe native Sindiso Nyoni aka R!OT.

Mounir Fatmi's (Updated) ‘The Lost Springs'

About Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi's ‘The Lost Springs’:

...minimal, elegant and poetic installation comprises of the twenty two flags of the states that make up The Arab League, seen at half-mast. Leaning up against the wall, tucked underneath the Tunisian and Egyptian [and Libyan] flags, like ersatz flag-poles, are two brooms that refer to the uprisings that led to the falls of, respectively, President Ben Ali in Tunisia and President Mubarak in Egypt [and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya]. This subtle yet powerful work is inspired by the incendiary protests that have sprung up against neo patriarchal power across North Africa and the Arab world.... more

Modern Architecture in Tanzania

An excerpt from Dutch architect and film maker Jord den Hollander's 2009 documentary on Anthony B. Almeida and modern architecture in Tanzania...

From synopsis:

In 1950 architect Anthony B. Almeida was one of the first to introduce modern architecture in Tanzania. At that time architectural modernism was the preferred expression of the intended colonial welfare state. After Independence in 1961 Nyerere’s African socialism used the same architectural style to convey the hope and strength of the new African nation. Following Almeida and some of his colleagues, the film questions what is left of the dreams and ideals of this first generation. It searches for new definitions of happiness in booming African cities like today’s Dar es Salaam. The film documents the everlasting human pursuit of modernity, not only in architecture but also in contemporary urban life.