In Mozambique "a human de-miner can take up to 2 weeks to clear a 200 square area,"reports Al Jazeera's Haru Mutasa, but "a trained rat needs just one hour to do the same job." In Tanzania, Bart Weetjens, a Belgian Buddhist monk, and his company APOPO are taking the field of vapor detection to the next level -- training rats to detect pulmonary tuberculosis. Below, Weetjen talks about how his rat crush became a social enterprise:
Kevin Anderson's review of the just concluded Maker Faire Africa held in Ghana draws one of those interesting parallels you wish you had some way of kicking your own ass for not haven noticed before:
The Maker Faire in Ghana helped combine the African and American visions of gadgetry. Conference organisers hoped to answer the question: what happens when you put the drivers of ingenious concepts from across the African continent together and add resources to the mix? The answer is instead of steampunk technology, you get bushpunk low-fi tech.
I guess it's easier to see the steampunk connection in the English version of Maker Faire. Taking the climate of a Victorian H.G Well's England and exaggerating the idea of harnessing steam power to nuclear proportions has given us the design aesthetic and alter-verse referred to as Steampunk, which has been the wellspring of a genre of speculative, revisionist, and "path not taken" fiction comprising of everything from Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to Katsuhiro Otomo's Steamboy to Mike Mignola's hilarious Adventures of Screw On Head and so much more.
While steampunk today is more or less a realm that holds our fascination because of its aesthetic possibilities and has a subculture of sorts, bushpunk sounds, to me, like so much more. In "bushpunk" we unhitch our imagination from steam power and, instead, have it revolve around a cannibalizing and re-purposing/solar and battery-powered/SMS/low-tech/low-bandwidth/velcro world which spits out of necessity things like bicycles made out of bamboo:
... furniture made out of empty plastic bottles...
So, let's say this were a Terry Gilliam movie and we could remove all the stops and let our imaginations go helter skelter, what will a Bushpunk realm look and feel like?
Note, this world won't run on an exaggerated sense of steam power. But that said, it does need a power source and upon the exaggerated credibility of that source will everything bushpunkish ensue. If one thinks of a power source as one would of humidity then it is a power source that's already there, hence necessitating a world of low-fi tech gadgets and devices which, like root hairs, are desperate to tap the power source of the sun, soil, air and what have you for that extra mobile phone or laptop charge. Thus, in Bushpunk, gadgetry makes everything take on a root hair-like quality desperate to tap everything around it for the purpose of charging the batteries of a more conventional world.
Hmm... looking back, those machines in the Matrix were on to something.
The traveling art show collective, "Imagining Mozambique", premired at the Maxalot Gallery 27 August and will run till 10 September, raising funds for ASEM, a non-profit helping children and orphans in Mozambique. Exhibition -- here.
Contributing photographers, graphic designers, illustrators and painters:
Pictures of You (The Cure) and Let's Dance (Lady GaGa) performed by The Fifth-Grade Chorus from Public School 22 on Staten Island, N.Y.
PS 22 has its share of troubled kids and poor kids. Seventy-five percent of the students qualify for free lunch, and English is a second language for many of them... Breinberg says many factors have contributed to the group's success. "I think they are good," Breinberg says. "There is something magical about their performances. I also think it is their selections. I think they sing selections that people don't expect. I try to teach them [that] there is more to music than what they hear on the radio, and to be open, so they are exploring all these different genres. And they bring their own thing to it: They have their own twist, their own sound, and when you bring something unique to the table, that catches people's interest." -- NPR
Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie are back with Aya and her friends in tales about young adult lives in 1970s Ivory Coast. The publisher's blurb calls it:
...a slice-of-life peek into African culture: complete with recipes, glossaries, and wardrobe instructions for turning one’s pagne (brightly colored fabric) into a skirt, headwrap or baby carrier. Engaging and fun, the universal stories in Aya provide a much-needed context for today’s all-too-common unfortunate and heartbreaking news stories.
Drawn and Quarterly has PDF excerpts from bk 2 "Dop City" -- here and bk 1 "Aya" -- here
NYT has a showcase-- part 1 and part 2--about the Bang Bang Club: the moniker for Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek and Joao Silva -- 4 South African photojournalists who risked their lives for the rush, pictures, and moral ambiguity it took to cover 4 crucial years (1990 - 94) in South Africa's violent transition to democracy.
Marinovich talks to the Times about the upcoming movie based on the book he wrote with Joao Silva. Journeyman has the lowdown on the original bangers.
In the post-Bang Bang era, the Times' photographers carry on the tradition in their coverage of last year's xenophobic attacks. Some of the post-Bang Bangs include Alon Skuy, Tebogo Letsie, Simphiwe Nkwali, Lebohang Mashiloane, Thys Dullaart, James Oatway, Moeketsi Moticoe and Muntu Vilakazi and Halden Krog, whose photo of the necklaced Mozambican immigrant, Ernesto Nhamuave, won the CNN Mohamed Amin Photographic Award in 2009. Here Globe and Mail's Shayne Robinson follows Ernesto Nhamuave back home for his funeral in Mozambique.
In Alyssa Rosenberg's most recent thoughts about District 9 (more on the film's love arc at a later date), she briefly touches on the little dust up going on over at Spencer Ackerman and Matt Zeitlin's blogs about how Nigerians were portrayed in Neill Blomkamp's sleeper hit. The Nigerian-District 9 blow back also surfaced on Keith Adkins' blog at the Root and in this incisivepost by Nicole Stamp over at Racialicious.
As a Nigerian--that's if my name wasn't already a dead giveaway--my loudest guffaw during the movie came when, on coming across the Nigerian gang in District 9, Wikus refers to their wheel chair bound flesh-eating boss (played by Eugene Khumbanyiwa) as Obesandjo -- I wasn't able to lay my hands on District 9's production notes, but, yep, that's how imdb and wiki spell it. So, even if one were to make the case that Blomkamp was only depicting gangsters in a South African slum who just happened to be Nigerians, thatreference does more than anything to underscore his intent in making this gang not just a metonymy of Nigerians as a whole, but also a microcosm of the country and how what we call Nigeria, leader and all, like weeds, can sprout up in the heart of a Johannesburg slum and find the alien squalor a perfect fit for their character.
So I guess the question then is, was Blomkamp's depiction of Nigerians in District 9 racist? Stamp thinks so and cuts right through the smog:
But! The Nigerians have a wailing “witch doctor”. Who instructs them to eat the aliens. And they do it. Bloody, wriggling, and raw, of course. We’re told that the black prostitutes “service” the aliens sexually. ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME??! And when Wikus’ arm grows a claw, the Nigerian gang boss starts licking his chops, eager to commit cannibalism. Yup, that’s Hollywood’s Africa, isn’t it. Black Africans shown as degenerate savages who’ll have sex with non-humans and are pretty damn eager to eat people. Disgusting.
But here is the rub: if we decide to call Blomkamp's portrayal of the Nigerian gangsters racist then we must be ready to go the extra mile and label as racist a lot of Africans who have come to think of Nigerians in those same terms. To clarify, Blomkamp didn't have to go that far back into Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Jean Rouch's les maitres fous or even to a Hollywood Africa classic like John Ford's Mogambo to dig up all these notions of harvesting alien body parts or of Nigerian witches imploring gouging on aliens to gain access to their technology.
After listing some plot holes in the story proving the portrayal of the Nigerians was superfluous to the movie's construction of cause and effect, Stamp goes on to asks, "Why can’t the Nigerians just be people with logical motives like money and weapons? Why do they have to go out of their way to be ooga-booga savages?" But they do have logical motives. Actually there is a logic system at work here--if one can call it that--and the point I'm trying to make here is that District 9's Nigerian gangsters, in terms of their motivations, are drawn with a rather thick brush Blomkamp dips in the logic of a certain way of reasoning about Nigerians, and by refusing to delineate what this logic system is, or how it is fed, we are inclined to reflexively dismiss the portrayal as racist and Blomkamp's gangsters as "ooga-booga savages."
So where does the real life Blomkamp and other Africans get their contemporary ideas about Nigerians from?
Let's take Tanzanians as an example. Tanzanians infer that the demand fueling the recent spate/trail/trial of Albino killings and killers across Central Africa does not originate from Tanzania: (watch from 0:00 to 1:38)
[The practice of harvesting Albino body parts for the intent of witchcraft aimed at making someone healthy or wealthy] is a custom that has migrated from West African countries and in particular Nigeria. Here in one of Dars es Salaam's busiest streets a DVD shop is selling a hundred of copies of Nigerian films which contain many scenes of witchcraft... [Anthropologist Dr. Simeon Mesaki] 'I am 60 years old now, but previously I never heard of a deliberate killing of an Albino. But also I must point out that way back in 2001, there several incidents of skinning which allegedly was being transferred all the way through Zambia, the DRC, to Cameroon and then eventually to Nigeria, again, to be used for juju or witchcraft purposes.
No doubt Nigerians or anyone who has lived in Nigeria for sometime will listen to all that and go, "bupkis." But whether what the Tanzanians believe is true, partly true, exaggerated, false, or debatable is besides the point. The point being made is that even among fellow Africans there is already a logic system firmly in place--call it ideology if you will-- that sees Nigerians as traffickers in the occult among other things.
When it comes to ideology, no one gives a shit if something is factually true, all that matters is that it connects and connects well. And this is where Nollywood and Nigerian movies come in. In Nollywood's reliance on witchcraft as content and deux ex machina , it has also played a huge role in helping connect the pieces of a whole ideological framework and system of logic which Blomkamp and other South Africans--white and black--have pulled from in grounding and writing District 9. By the way and just for the record, no one is blaming Nollywood here; jazz is their thing and they tell it well.
But it gets more complicated. For also within the same system of reasoning about Nigerians are other competing narratives. Out of South Africa, along side the idea of Nigerians as harvesters of Albino flesh for juju purposes, also emerges the idea of Nigerians as the Carringtons of Africa, as depicted in the recently concluded South African-Namibian T.V series Jacob's Cross (2007), which I've harped on about before:
In this South African/Namibian production is a story about the Abayomis, a Nigerian oil family and empire who grow sudden ties to South Africa. The depiction of Nigerians is all in line with the notion of a place where rich and powerful billionaires hold sway over the continent's energy future and all the characters (heirs, Afrikaners, gangsters, kidnappers, villagers and so on) are as multi dimensional as a soap opera format would allow. Which goes to say that when it comes to Nigeria and Nigerians the world has to deal not with a self contained pamphlet but rather with a palimpsest. Whether Nigerians like it or not, they have to face up to the fact that they now offer the world their notoriety as a hypernarrative in terms its convenience and amenability for parody, adaptation, pastich and augmentation by all types of people, according to whatever their needs may be.
Non Nigerians writing on the Nigerian palimpsest or interacting with its hypernarrative is bound to raise issues and some of those issues will be contested as we've seen on the blogosphere in case of District 9. But keeping in mind that Blomkamp is drawing ideas from a logic system about Nigerians shared by other Africans, we can now go back and take a closer look at those glaring plot holes Stamp pointed out.
First, Stamp makes the argument that Obesandjo, the gang leader, could have kidnapped Wikus for the power and didn't need to eat his metamorphosing arm. I think this argument loses sight of the fact that in the film Blomkamp also chose to depict Obesandjo as a wheelchair bound cripple. Like MNU, Obesandjo wants the power of the aliens and exploits them for whatever they have in anticipation of discovering how to use it, and in this light I nod when Matt Zeitlin, over at Whippersnapper, then asks, "isn't MNU’s weapons program really just 'voodoo' done by people in white coats?" But I digress.
So his paralysis also implies Obesandjo has a personal need, which carries a tinge of obsession as we watch the witch offer him alien flesh with the promise to make him whole again. I don't need to point out how Obesandjo's obsession to be cured and become powerful plays on some level into the pentecostal business of prosperity and healing and its appeal to Africans in particular. And no one needs three guesses to figure out which African country (NYT audio slideshow -- here) is right at the center of the Azuza street revival that has enveloped Africa and its diaspora (more on Pentecostalism in Africa).
In making Nigerians pimps running the interspecies prostitution ring in the film, I totally agree with Stamp that South Africans must have known all along that prostitutes had long been having sex with the aliens and "so they would also know that Wikus couldn’t have begun an alien transformation from alien sexual contact, since the sexual transmission of alien DNA had already been in place for 20 years of interspecies prostitution." However, one could also argue that South Africans--both white and black--for 20 years did not give a hoot about interspecies prostitution as long as it was a Nigerian business, using Nigerian prostitutes. In making that argument, though, one opens a can of worms about everybody in the film: the black South Africans in the film are not only specists then but also racists towards other black Africans; it says the Nigerians, at least, aren't specists; or maybe the Nigerians are as prejudiced towards the aliens as the South Africans are, but, even worse, the Nigerians also are the worst kind of misogynists, and so on and so on.
One may ask what logic pool Blomkamp is drawing from here? What about this fascinating LA Times' piece about Nigerian gangsters (blogged here) brought to run a prostitution ring in the Italian town of Castel Volturno, which evolves into drug running and eventually the Nigerian gangsters are fighting the Neapolitan mafia on their own turf. Taking that as an example of a strain of audaciousness Nigerians are known for, it was that same type of defiance Blomkamp visually renders in the scene in which Wikus sticks the whirring, smoking barrel of the alien gun right in Obesandjo's face and our dude in the wheelchair doesn't even flinch. Instead of breaking a sweat, he is making promises to Wikus that his metamorphosizing ass belongs to him. When you stand back for a second to take in the fact that Obesandjo is defying the South African Wikus in South Africa, one needs to applaud the dude for having, if nothing else, some massive cojones.
So, I think I have dealt with the part of Spencer Ackerman's take that the"Nigerians in District 9 act without logic and proportion and use violence and voodoo as a first recourse." But he then makes a loaded observation that, "You could tell the morality play of District 9 entirely without [the Nigerian gangsters], and so their inclusion just emphasizes the way in which white anxiety is the engine of the movie."
South African white anxiety, for me, means the fear of black contagion. As in the fear that blacks may turn South Africa into Zimbabwe or the works of Anton Kannenmeyar or Conrad Botes which find a way to therapeutically express the imprints of such anxieties, especially from childhood, and deal with it.
In all that I have said, it will be difficult to make the argument, especially in his depiction of Nigerians in District 9, that Blomkamp is fueled by white anxiety, if he is, indeed, drawing his tropes from the common pool of ideas about Nigerians shared by other black Africans. I mean, does his white anxiety make it easier for him to believe the worst of Nigerians? Meh, I'm sure many other Africans have no problem believing the worst of Nigerians too. Is his white anxiety using the Nigerians and aliens to make a bigger case against the ANC and expressing the fear that the rest of Tyrant/conflict prone Africa is a contagion hovering over South Africa? If so, I'm sure there are many blacks in South Africa--Nigerians included--who share the same anxiety. Or is this the kind of white anxiety the share cropper who raped his daughter in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man was talking about? Is it more like "white relief" when the worst assumptions about blacks have been confirmed? Like a "when you are nappy, whites are happy" kind of thing? Now, that I do not know.
Annalee Newitz's early review of District 9 on I09 back at Comic Con made mention of the Nigerians exploiting the aliens, and my first thoughts back then was if "Nigerians were going to be the Jew stereotype in slumspliotation flicks" from now on. Now that I've seen the film, I think one of the readers from Alyssa's blog, in making a snide comment, ends ups summing it up rather well:
Why is everyone so upset about the Nigerians? The Nigerians are there because of the Nigerian scammers. "Nigerians" (and it almost always means the scammers) are the ridiculous super-villains of the modern age. Having them there produced a chuckle in the audience. That's why they were chosen -- MN
The "super-villains of the modern age." I'll drink to that.
The Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health aims to improve performance in Africa's Health ministries, as opposed to funding specific programs.
Journalist John Donnelly and photographer Dominic Chavez have been traveling through Senegal and Sierra Leone looking inside Africa's health ministries and then going into the field to see how policy decisions are affecting the poor.
"The history of beauty is one of dissatisfaction and transformation," writes Catherine Saint Louis in the article setting up this fascinating NYT multimedia look at the struggle every black woman faces in accommodating the varying standards of what is considered beautiful hair.
From the article: "commenters on the conservative blog Free Republic attacked [11 year old Malia Obama] as unfit to represent America for stepping out unstraightened." Won't even dignify that with a sigh. A commenter on Ta-nehisi's blog post on the article sums up the zombie issue of black women and their hair in a nice little bun:
I've often said that Black women's relationships with their hair is analogous to White women's relationships with their bodies in terms of how much neuroses can be balled up in it. For me, I've had to find a way to bring my feminism into practical, real life. What I mean by that is that there are all types of politics wound up in hair and BMI, but you will drive yourself crazy if you actively think about them all of the time. That's all a preface to what I think about my hair (which is in braids) when I think of it: that between Beyonce, Elanor Holmes Norton, Oprah, and Alicia Keyes, Black women have carved out possibly the largest range of acceptable hairdos out there. Also, the open embrace of artifice allows even more play. I could have a shoulder length bob one day and braids below my shoulders the next and, while it might be remarked upon, I could get away with it way easier than, say, a White woman because there's still some expectation of "naturalness" there. It's not just a series of style choices; it's all supposed to be their hair. I might have rose colored Pollyanna glasses on here, but I'd take to burlap headsacks if I had to change my mind on this.
The shortlist for the 2009 Africa investor Index Series Awards, to be held at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on the 21st of September 2009, is here.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did mention at AGOA the resumption of the Doha talks -- from 30 November to 2 December 2009, a WTO Ministerial conference will take place in Geneva to try to do just that. Appears WTO Director General, Pascal Lamy, has been going around saying:
The best way to keep trade open is to keep opening trade, hence the need to conclude the Doha Round as soon as possible.
Michelle Pressend of Biowatch and Coordinator of the Trade Strategy Group then asks if:
...in the context of the global economic and planetary crisis, will the WTO negotiations seek the opportunity to question unbalanced trade rules or continue negotiations within the current economic paradigm that essentially perpetuates underdevelopment in developing countries?
This RFI crossroads reportreturns to Zanzibar to ask questions about the 400 dolphins that washed up the coast in 2006. Comes to the same conclusions in 2009 -- navy sonar.
A Creativity and Art's panel is asked how technology is changing storytelling in advertising.
Panel includes Mike Hoefflinger, director of monetization product marketing, Facebook; Ben Palmer, co-founder, CEO, The Barbarian Group; Allesandra Lariu, SVP, digital group creative director, McCann Erickson; John Mayo-Smith, EVP, chief technology officer, R/GA; Kevin Slavin, managing director and co-founder, Area/Code and Creativity editor Teressa Iezzi.
The whole chicken and egg conundrum about which comes first, story or cool technology, reminds me of the whole collaboration between John Gaeta and the Warchowski brothers from back in the day.
According to VOA and ThisDay, ECOWAS (The Economic Community of West African States) has scheduled an emergency summit for September 5th to discuss the recent coup d' etat staged by President Tandja to hold on to power indefinitely in Niger. WTF? Where was this communique just three weeks ago:
The communiqué noted that "it is incontrovertible and beyond doubt that ECOWAS and the international community are effectively faced with a constitutional illegality which is now a fait accompli and which poses a veritable dilemma." The council noted that ECOWAS is faced with the choice of restoring constitutionality to Niger. But doing so without "further inflaming tensions in Niger" made this option delicate... On the other hand,the statement said that the events in Niger challenge the very foundations of key AU and ECOWAS norms and standards, adding that doing nothing about it could set a trend that would erode gains attained in the democratisation of the region in the last 20 years.
Talk about making lots of noise trying to close the barn doors long after the horses have bolted. Sometimes I wonder if the pan-Africanist argument is right. That organizations created in response to a need or a problem will, through their actions or inaction, end up perpetuating the very need or problem they were created to solve; simply put, how do you solve the very problem that gives you cause to exist. What were these guys doing 3 weeks ago?
Will Tandja even listen to coup plotters and fellow constitution amenders sit in judgement over him? I mean for Christ sakes, isn't the Gambia's Yahya Jammeh a member of ECOWAS?
Nikolaj Nielsen writes in Pambazuka about the UN Mission for the Referendum in the Western Sahara (MINURSO). Created in 1991, Minurso's mandate is to oversee a referendum for the self-determination of the Sahrawi and to keep the peace between Morocco and the Polisario in Western Sahara.
The article pinpoints France's role in the bigger picture and political deadlock that's left Minurso's hands tied:
On 28 April, Amnesty International sent a letter to the UN Security Council calling on members to include a human rights monitoring component in Minurso's mandate. Two days later, that request was denied. One can only speculate as to why. Permanent Security Council member France has long been an advocate of Morocco’s autonomy plan and their commercial and political interests in the kingdom far outweigh any human rights mandate. French banks Credit Agricole and Société Général dot the city's main boulevards Hassan II and Mohammed V. Then two years ago France blocked the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from publishing the following in a report on the conflict: The right to self-determination for the people of Western Sahara must be ensured and implemented without any further delay. According to Reuters, France did not offer any immediate comment when questioned.
Fashion and media moguls Dr. Precious Moloi-Motsepe (AFI) and Nduka Obaigbena (ThisDay/Arise Magazine) at the Arise Africa Fashion Week, Cape Town, which ends today. Runway, parties, and behind the scenes pictures -- here.
... for G4's Blair Butler "Fresh Ink" review of Joshua Dysart's "Unknown Soldier: Haunted House," which breaks in at number 4 in the list of top 5 graphic novels you should be reading.
French filmmaker Claire Denis returns to Cameroon, the site of her first film Chocolat(1988), for her new film White Materials which will be screening at TIFF in September. According to the TIFF program the story is about French nationals caught in the middle of a civil war in Cameroon, hence the label “white material”:
With this threat of impending disaster as a backdrop, Denis uses her significant skill to tell the story of Maria (Isabelle Huppert), manager of the Café Vial plantation, who fights desperately to keep her life and business together. With her ex-husband at her side and her son violently propelled into the action, Maria must draw on all her resources to survive. At the same time, a legendary black hero, the Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé), also finds that his world has been turned upside down. Inevitably, the two are fated to meet.
The same Isaach Bankole--recently in Jim Jarmusch's Limits of Control--was also in Denis' Chocolat--which, by the way, was actually a slang from the 50s meaning "to be cheated"--and played the wise, noble, intelligent house "boy" (servant), serving his colonial master in French ruled Cameroon and suffering the indignities of his status in silence. Yet, even in this silence, over the course of the story he reserves a special place for his master's little girl, which makes the scene where he takes out his frustrations on his little friend, in my opinion, one of the most powerful examples of, or scenes in, postcolonial cinema.
While this bootleg is still up, skip ahead to 1:47 - 3:38 for that scene.
Skin is the story of Sandra Laing (Journeyman has the goods on the original story), a dark-skinned child born to white parents during South Africa's apartheid era. Sophie Okonedo plays the object of struggle as her white parents try to have her re-classified in order to provide her with a formal education in a "whites-only" school.
After languishing for a while without a distributor, word at Women and Hollywood has it that E.W. confirms Skin will open stateside on October 19th after what seems like pulling teeth to get a distributor for its July 24th opening in the U.K. According to The Independent, the director, Anthony Fabian, (Skin is his first feature)thinks his film was turned down by every British distributor apart from ICA because:
It’s the distributors’ perception that there’s no audience, that it’s the audience’s racism... it’s still a pervasive attitude. Distributors say that’s what the stats say. I was shocked. We’ve won awards and we’re still sitting here trying to persuade people... [There is a] lack of vision and confidence for failing to create roles that didn’t fit comfortable stereotypes of black culture.
But then some commenters are saying the story isn't well told. Point taken. But since when did mediocre content stop a distributor from cooking up a marketing campaign to coax audiences' butts into theater seats?
This has less to do with Fabian's skills as a filmmaker and more to do with the subject matter, which distributors are right to assume will attract a particular mix of demograhpics--mostly white folks--and that fragile mix is just too small and fickle to place a bet on. I absolutely agree.
Let's face it, black cinema's fate is tied to the economic pull of a black upper and middle social class, whose children will, in time, dispose of the kind of surplus income that demands Hollywood retools the blockbuster to soothe their egos, and whose parents, on date night, will like to see stories that aren't about race per se, but rather are provocative, well told stories that do a damn good job of weaving the black experience back into the larger fabric of America.
That said, one of the commenters is right -- Skin needs to be released through Harpo.
The rats scatter as the Farida Waziri and Lamido Sanusi tag team continues to kick down bank doors and take down the names of the richest Nigerians. This paragraph from Reuters is a few days old but freakin' sweet:
The names listed as directors and shareholders in some of the defaulting companies reads like a roll-call of the great and the good of Nigeria's corporate aristocracy. It includes two of the country's best known tycoons, Aliko Dangote and Femi Otedola -- the only Nigerians on the latest Forbes billionaires list, worth $2.5 billion and $1.2 billion respectively
A wiff of the stink was in that African Report story which made waves back in June/July. But looking back at what they wrote even they had no clue just how deep the septic tank went.
Vanity Fair has a photo essay on Libya's Colonel Gaddafi's life in couture -- or more like haute couture. Henry Porter and Annabel Davidson write:
Drawing upon the influences of Lacroix, Liberace, Phil Spector (for hair), Snoopy, and Idi Amin, Libya’s leader—now in his 60s—is simply the most unabashed dresser on the world stage. We pay homage to a sartorial genius of our time.
I would think the same goes for all cultures. But what if, hypothetically, she competes against the men and breaks the record. Will the men, simply based on her androgyny, accuse her of being a woman and will the IAAF subject her to a gender test? It would be interesting to see how that scenario plays out.
The editor of AfricaFocus is still shaking his head at how Cape Verde, apart from a speech and presser posted by Foggy Bottom, was practically a dead news zone on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 7 nations in 11 days rock Africa tour:
When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose Cape Verde as her last stop on her 7-country African tour, I was hoping to find some analysis on-line of the unique history and position of Cape Verde that I could share with readers. Surely someone would be commenting on-line on the long history of Cape Verdean immigration to the United States, or on the significance of Cape Verdean liberation leader Amilcar Cabral for Pan-African thought on both sides of the Atlantic. But apart from brief pro-forma tributes to the country's multi-party democracy and economic stability, I could find almost nothing in recent on-line reports to pass on to AfricaFocus readers.
He is right. One of the few pictures which surfaced from the stop over showed up on Huff Post and, apparently, the only reason they found it news worthy had more to do with an head band issue.
Secretary of State with Cape Verde's Prime Minister Jose Maria/ Huffington Post
The editors at Africafocus went on and compiled an online resource on the tiny archipelago.
The CPJ reports that the Ethiopian government is trying to force Kenya's private broadcaster, Nation Television (NTV), to drop a four-part exclusive report on separatist rebels, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), who "allegedly" are fighting for greater autonomy for the Oromos, the largest ethnic group in the south of the vast Horn of Africa nation -- all the NTV videos are here.
Zenawi's government, whose leaders were once guerilla fighters allied with the OLF, is saying that by "airing the program confirmed suspicion of a larger conspiracy by NTV to “speak for these terrorist elements in our sub-region, leading us to question NTV’s covert or overt political agenda”. Whatever.
A reader sees the report as:
...a mere publicity stunt by NTV, trying to imitate Al-Jazeera. OLF is a bankrupt organization whose leaders are divided as well as disillusioned, that is a fact one can search on the wide web. NTV just wanted to make a name for itself. It should have reported about OLF years ago when it was alive and kicking if the media group was that genuine. NTV must first deal with Kenya's own internal problems before it meddles with neighbor's affairs. We know how f-ed up most things are in Kenya as it is in Ethiopia. So why not report that one first. Obviously, crossing a border is more appealing/newsworthy and generates unimagined publicity.
A reader takes the other view:
The Meles regime in Ethiopia is one of the brutal dictators of the world today. Anyone with a little common sense can easily imagine how the dictator is abusing and jailing and silencing journalists in Ethiopia by simply looking at its behavior to try to silence Kenya's media. In Ethiopia today there is no free press and no one would dare to speak their mind freely. It is an absolute dictatorship. Ethiopia today has become a police state under a brutal dictatorship with no private internet service, no private radio, no private TV, no independent media etc. We have to expose the Meles regime for what it is! One of the worst dictatorships found on the planet today! GO NTV!
Stumbled upon the South African MNET soap Jacob's Cross last week, and I'm hooked. Produced and written by Zaheer Bhyat along with Paul S. Rowlston, Roger Smith and Brian Tilley, this sumptuously lit and well written series about the Abayomis, a Nigerian oil family and empire who grow sudden ties to South Africa when the chief Abayomi takes ill and decides to hand over the reins of his empire to Jacob, whose South African mother, Thembi, is a famous Makeba-esque jazz singer he once had an affair with.
It's shot in South Africa and Namibia with, I'm guessing, Namibia standing in place of Nigeria and lots of establishing footage of Lagos thrown in for good measure. Yes, it's a soap but you have to check under the hood because this soap moves like a Law & Order episode, and does it without title cards to boot. The scene construction, editing style, camera movement all add up to a storytelling efficiency that's totally--for lack of a more exclamatory phrase-- off the chain: characters slide in and out; no door knocking in this; scenes end at cliffs; when the camera shows off the sumptuous set and lighting it also uses the same movement for some kind of reveal; nothing is wasted here, even the split screens speed things along, shaving at least 5 to 7 secs off establishing shots, especially those cutting between South Africa and Nigeria.
3 seasons in all and season 3 ended in January -- mnet has a lot more clips here. All in all, not shabby. Not shabby at all.
President Truman with top leaders of the Marshall Plan (left to right: Secretary of State George C. Marshall, head of the Economic Cooperation Administration Paul G. Hoffman, and the special representative to the countries participating in the Marshall Plan, Averell Harriman), November 29, 1948/ Photo: American Gov
In the latest in its "Think Again" series, Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School--yes, same one from that youtube video-- writes about a Marshall Plan for Africa:
The Marshall Plan was fundamentally different from the aid that Africa has received over the past four decades. The Marshall Plan made loans to European businesses, which repaid them to their local governments, which in turn used that revenue for commercial infrastructure -- ports, roads, railways -- to serve those same businesses. Aid to Africa has instead funded government and NGO development projects, without any involvement of the local business sector. The Marshall Plan worked. Aid to Africa has not. An African Marshall Plan is long, long overdue.
He then gives frank and ballsy answers to what he anticipates critics will say. The most controversial part of the piece is his notion that colonialism was actually good for Africa:
Under colonial rule, they say, foreign governments and businesses exploited Africa and left it poor. Pro-business policies, they worry, would lead to a new colonialism, with foreign companies exploiting Africa anew. This argument flies in the race of reality. First, Africa was poor before colonialism, and for many countries, colonialism may well have made Africa richer. There were some exceptions, such as the Belgian Congo in the early 20th century, where forced labor for rubber extraction made the people poorer. But overall, Africans in 1960 were healthier, lived longer, and had higher incomes than Africans in 1900.
Ghanaian economist George Ayittey calls the colonial era the "golden age of peasant prosperity" in Africa, when the vast mass of rural Africans joined the world economy for the first time. By 1960, this was even true in the Belgian Congo. The hospitals, ports, schools, railways, and roads of Africa date from the colonial era. Certainly Europeans benefited unfairly from colonialism, but for Africans the result was still an improvement over their former poverty.
What has not made Africans richer, however, are their countries' own governments, which have cut off that prosperity in favor of government and NGO assistance and foreign investment that benefits only the elite. Enabling the majority of Africa's population to access and participate in strong local businesses, through a Marshall Plan, would be a welcome breath of fresh air -- not to mention a good revenue stream for the common man and woman.
Sounds like libertarian-tough love and that's why one has to love libertarians, but in small doses of course. For a libertarian, God is the free market and the tough love of getting sentiment, government and other inefficiencies out of the way to let the free market solve any and all of life's problems is the equivalent of worshiping God. Nothing like a libertarian coming along to wipe away the emotion and the smudged glass of ethical obligations we can't afford, so that the liberal within us can see straight.
That said, the important theme I find coagulating within Hubbard's piece is the idea that Africa is caught in a bottleneck. From Mauritania to Nigeria to Zimbabwe, a class of power brokers form the bridge between the shadow (corruption, oil bunkering ...) and official economies (banking, transportation...) in countries where the production capacity to expand the wealth base does not exist, or isn't up to levels it ought to be in proportion to population. Therefore, to maintain their place within a limited and restricted food chain, the same power brokers fuel a system that, in order to protect their interests and wealth, gives them shadow access to very limited pool of means that's simply a bitch to expand. In other words, African systems are dysfunctional because they have to be. To keep a dysfunctional system going it needs to be unaccountable, thus it seeks a tyrant at the helm, and if the person at the helm isn't ready to rewrite the constitution to get rid of term limits and stay in power, the power brokers will go to the army and find someone who can.
To counter that class of power brokers, Hubbard's advocating for the creation of a new and very large social class of small-medium businesses and business owners -- too large to be created through the shadow accessed, restricted food chain economies most African countries have. This new social class, in advancing their own interests and creating conditions amiable to those interests, will be the ones tasked with innovating the business solutions to their countries' problems. For example, power generation? With enough businesses clamoring for power, it's not totally ridiculous to see a situation where business communities will band together to seek bank loans and foreign assistance to spring for their own gas turbine electricity plants, bypassing the government and the national grid if they have to. And you can bet your ass that they will go to any lengths to maintain their facilities and protect their investment against vandals and saboteurs.
Hubbard's point, in other words, is, to solve Africa's myriad of problems, solutions have to be sustainable and sustainable solutions have to be home grown and home grown solutions come from an incentivised--not sure if that's a word--business climate, and to create this business climate he is advocating something on the scale of a Marshall Plan. The problem though is how to make the process of creating this new and large social business class an immediate incentive for the power brokers presently clogging up the food chain. A commenter also posed this problem:
First, in addition to its political aim, the Marshall Plan was a reconstruction (not a construction) plan, which implies the pre-existence of knowledge and human capital require to re-build the devastated Europe. After the WW2 Europe was devastated, but its entrepreneurs/local business class, which built and maintained its prewar infrastructure/institutions, were still able to re-build their economies. Africa has been poor for decades or centuries and has yet to develop an adequate human capital able to absorb huge inflows of Marshall Plan type.
Glenda--Scarlett Lion--Gordon's audio slideshow goes behind the scenes of the making of a music video in Sierra Leone and hints at the capital's vibrant local scene plus a young generation of Sierra Leoneans doing their best with what they have. Some of Vida's videos -- here.
Mubarak's son, 42 year old Gamal, is trying to be the new face of the government in reaching out to the new face and mobilizer of the country's angry youth -- it's blogging community. As this journeyman doc about 2006 blogger inspired protests proves, unlike their more dissident parents, this new generation of Egyptian youths aren't revolutionaries in any keen sense of the word, rather they are just pissed at their leaders and their lack of imagination.
With its own very active blogging community, the April 6th strikes (which had a facebook component) and what's been happening in Iran, the Egyptian government has every reason to be afraid.
FP has the goods on Gamal and Egypt's spy chief Omar Suleiman, both possible heirs to the throne.
Kevin Anderson's review of the just concluded Maker Faire Africa held in Ghana draws one of those interesting parallels you wish you had some way of kicking your own ass for not haven noticed before:
Fuzzy Colours by Wajdi Cherif. Album: Fuzzy Colours -- Special Guest: Manu Codjia. Label: Wech Records, 2009. Personnel: Wajdi Cherif (piano); Manu Codjia (guitar); Yves Eouzon (drums); Sévrine Eouzan (sax); Claude Matringe (bass).
Photo: Ali Sultan/AP
Fashion and media moguls Dr. Precious Moloi-Motsepe (AFI) and Nduka Obaigbena (ThisDay/Arise Magazine) at the Arise Africa Fashion Week, Cape Town, which ends today. Runway, parties, and behind the scenes pictures -- here.
Skin is the story of Sandra Laing (Journeyman has the goods on the original story), a dark-skinned child born to white parents during South Africa's apartheid era. Sophie Okonedo plays the object of struggle as her white parents try to have her re-classified in order to provide her with a formal education in a "whites-only" school.
Malibu by Hole. Album: Celebrity Skin. Fontana Geffen, 1998.
Hlomla Dandala as Jacob Makhubu/ Abayomi (TVSA)
President Truman with top leaders of the Marshall Plan (left to right: Secretary of State George C. Marshall, head of the Economic Cooperation Administration Paul G. Hoffman, and the special representative to the countries participating in the Marshall Plan, Averell Harriman), November 29, 1948/ Photo: American Gov
Amiyo by Naima. Album: Reviens. Label: Section Zouk, 2004.
