Benin: "Turtle Meat is Delicious"

AFP reports on Josea Dossou-Bodjrenou's efforts to save endangered turtles in Benin.

Zimbabwe: Christiane Amanpour Versus Uncle Bob

New Zimbabwe Blogs

Everyone is commenting (here and here) that Christiane Amanpour, in her interview with Uncle Bob, was "Aman-poor." I guess what everyone wanted to see was a shoot out between Amanpour and Uncle Bob on par with BBC's Zeinab Badawi versus Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi during the April G-20 summit in London. But Badawi is from Sudan, she has an axe to grind. Amanpour doesn't. However, Amanpour did make Uncle Bob scramble with the what's the charge against Roy Bennett question:

It appears the very idea of Bennett as agriculture minister is so abominable to Uncle Bob that he must have been surprised at how unprepared he was to answer the question. Bennett however won't be cowered by the undeniable weight of colonial history, which I think is lessened for him by the ineptitude of Mugabe and Zanu-PF, which they try to hide under the guise of anti-colonial posturing:

South Africa: Gold

Striking miners want a 13 percent salary increase citing sky rocketing food prices and the fact that gold prices at an all time high of $1,000 an ounce.

CS monitor's Scott Baldauf's report  offers the mine company's spiel:

Over the past year, the price of gold has risen from $750 an ounce to more than $1,000 an ounce, but at the same time, the value of the dollar has dropped from 10 rand to 7.5 rand to the dollar. This means that in rand terms, the value of gold has not increased at all. On top of that, South African mines are more expensive to operate than elsewhere. "In South Africa, most of the gold is at very deep levels – up to 3 miles deep – where in other countries, including your own, many of the mines are much shallower," says Mr. Jammine. "The cost of producing our gold is much higher than it is abroad, so this is another reason why mining companies need to contain their costs."

Nigeria: The Diesel Generator Economy

This Day's Patrick Ugeh reports new numbers from NERC reveal Nigerian households spend about N796.4 billion to fuel their generating sets every year , which roughly equals the government's entire budget for capital expenditure in the current fiscal year.

Because of the unreliable power supply, generating sets have become the primary means of electricity while the 20% of the nation's demand that's generated by the PHCN is now regarded as backup power supply, not only by the people but also by the government, which, like everyone else, depends on petrol and diesel generators to function:

Early in the year, the Federal Government came under heavy criticism for budgeting N2 billion to buy, maintain and fuel generators this year. According to the details of the budget passed by the Senate in December 2008, the Presidency will spend N27 million to fuel its generators and N14.3 million to maintain them. Other details were: the National Assembly, fuel, N233 million; National Assembly Office -fuel- N63 million; maintenance, N57.2 million; the National Assembly White House, which houses Chambers of the Senate and the House of Representatives - N58 million for fuelling and N55 million for maintenance; the National Assembly Service Commission (NASC), fuel and maintenance - N25.8 million; and Police formations nationwide - fuel and maintenance, N110 million.

Imagine someone lying on the sidewalk, oozing out blood by the buckets from a gaping gun shot wound in the belly. But goes on subsisting in that flickering state of slow death by spending N796.4 billion a year on bandages and paper towels.

Tanzania: On the Albino Murder Trail (III)

An albino child poses at a picnic organised by the Tanzania Red Cross Society (TRCS) at the government-run school for the disabled in Kabanga, near Kigoma, Tanzania on June 5, 2009. (Reuters/Alex Wynter/IFRC/Handout/p 19)

Boston Globe's "The Big Picture" has added some pics showing how Albinos are faring in Tanzania. More "On the Albino Trail" here , here. and here.

Cameroon: Chantel Biya - "Diva Fierce"

Women heavy hitters in affairs of state and in diplomatic relations have to work hard to blend into its dirge-like atmosphere where even a pair of black boots can disrupt the somber motions of state craft. Cameroon's first lady Chantel Biya, on the other hand, works just as hard to break step and stand out even if she looks like she's hosting her own show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network while doing it. For the political stage, her style is loud and its inappropriateness is brazen, but that same brazenness and adorable cluelessness makes her a rule breaker and a fashion evil genius of sorts.

Zandile Blay pens a small appreciation in Huffington Post for the first lady and makes an argument for Chantel's "fabulosity" that even Zandile's mother doesn't buy. Leapfrogging Zandile, the New York magazine goes on to describe her as "she is like the Lady Gaga Knowles of first ladies — Lady Gowles, if you will."

But I'll do you one better. What about we describe her as the Lady Gaga Gadaffi of first ladies -- Lady Gad, if you will.

Nigeria: Metal Piercing Evil

BBC's "Africa in Pictures" for September 19 - 25 includes a pic of a hole made by one of the assassin bullets that killed Guardian Newspaper editor Bayo Ohu.

Zanzibar: Breaking the Fast

Global Post's Eamon Kircher-Allen writes "Mji Mkongwe,"a hub of Swahili culture, is a unique place to experience one of the most important festivals in Islam, marking the end of the holy month of رمضان

Uganda/ DRC: "Banana Beer Bath"

Elain Graham in Lynn Nottage’s “Banana Beer Bath,” part of “The River Crosses Rivers” series. Photo: New York Times/ Gerry Goodstein.

Lynn Nottage won a pulitzer for her play Ruined, a staging of the brutalities suffered by women caught in the ongoing conflicts in the Congo. Of Nottage's Banana Beer Bath, which is a one woman monologue, Playfixer says "it could have been an out-take from Ruined" and Rachel Saltz thinks Nottage is able to:

create[...] drama out of the simplest tools: a woman, seated on a chair, telling a story. That story, inspired by one Ms. Nottage heard in Uganda, concerns three sisters — “the beauties” — who, when rebels invade their home, hide in vats of their father’s banana beer.

The NYT audio slideshow for Ruined shows where/how Nottage got the DRC stories and how her current writing combines 2 different phrases of her life.

And while we're on plays and playwriting, I also recall this old piece by playwright Neil LaBute, where he talks about his play Wreaks and what he thinks is the often neglected art of the monologue or one-person play.

Ghana: Movie Poster Paintings from the Days of Traveling Cinemas

Bruce Campbell/ Evil Dead (II)/ dir. Sam Raimi

West L.A. gallery owner Ernie Wolfe III has collected an impressive amount of examples showcasing the unique way of advertising Hollywood and Hong Kong films in Ghana. The collection was published in Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana, Dilettante Press, March 2001. Check out the paintings here , here and here .

Roger Moore/ Spy Who Loved Me (1978)/ dir. Lewis Gilbert

The story of Ghana's roving cinema exhibition, however, goes a little something like this:

In the 1980s a group of entrepreneurs in Ghana created small-scale, mobile film-distribution empires, hitting the road with videocassettes, television monitors, portable gas-powered generators and rolled-up, hand-painted, artist-signed canvas posters. This new medium created the first opportunity for some of the best young painters in Ghana to express themselves on a public scale. In the frequent absence of an original image upon which to base the work they had been commissioned to produce, the artists inevitably created cinematic paintings that were largely interpretive and imagination-driven.

The aesthetics these Ghanian posters share with American blackspliotation, fringe spaghetti westerns or the Roger Corman /AIP look are obvious, and I guess they are all rooted in the same thing -- the low budget and its resort to presenting shock and controversy to make a buck. Hence the investment in the lurid and gory that's so lurid and awful that it's kitsch and good.

For those who prefer their painted posters make a more cerebral appeal, then what the Poles do to movie posters will blow your mind.

H/T: Drawn 

Local: Taking "The Hill"

A skater's point of view of the neighborhood.

Friday

Friday on Saturday... and a pair of kings.

King of Sorrow by Sade. Album: Lovers Rock. Sony, 2000.



King of Pain by The Police. Album: Synchronicity. Label: Interscope, 1983.

Kenya: "Weird Ways of Conveying Satire in the Name of Making Money."

Kenya's Public Service Minister, Dalmas Otieno, is pissed at the satirical puppet show XYZ for, in his words, "weird ways of conveying satire in the name of making money."



Maybe the politicians are also pissed at this new, innovative and subversive use of foreign NGO funding. Global Post's Tristan McConnell quotes Ford Foundation’s program officer Joyce Nyairo:

'XYZ' has given us an opportunity to create a new idiom and to exploit humor to get the message across, to ask fundamental questions about leadership in our country and about values, ... Nyairo explained that Mwampembwa’s impressive skills in political satire were also key to Ford Foundation’s decision to give $100,000 toward the development of 'XYZ.' A further $150,000 grant is being considered for future series.

Gambia: Words Fail

It appears Gambia's president, Yahya Jammeh, finally confessed to his ability and willingness to kill with impunity -- and we didn't even need to torture him to get him to admit it. So I guess that clears up all the doubts some might still have about what happened to Deyda Hydara.

But the other thing that caught our attention yesterday was the discovery of a local Gambian soccer team called ............

Blogging: Cuba

 CPJ

Kenya: The New Zimbabwe

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama pose for a photo during a reception at the Metropolitan Museum in New York with, H.E. Raila Amolo Odinga Prime Minister of the Republic of Kenya and his wife, Mrs. Ida Odinga on September 23, 2009. Photo/ White House

First the snub, now letters from Foggy Bottom to the following ministers--Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto, Franklin Bett, George Saitoti, John Michuki, Amos Wako (AG), Francis Muthaura, Jakoyo Midiwo and George Thuo and, of course, the justice minister Mutula wa Kilonzo--accusing them of stalling reform and threatening them with possible travel bans. And in case any of those ministers are contemplating sneaking into the States via Canada, the Canadian Government has also threatened Kenya's anti-reformers with travel bans. Canada? Meh.



Come to think of it, it really does suck to have the president of the United States sort of hail from your country. What else was Raila going to say.

Nigeria: "Super Villains of the Modern Age" Cont'd

In response to Nigeria's information minister's reactions to District 9's depiction of Nigerians, including her  unrealistic demands of the film's distributor, Neoma over at Pyoo Wata says:

Olumide at his blog, highlights a double standard that may be in existence here. While we openly condemn negative portrayals of Nigerians in the foriegn media, some of our own filmmakers, for years, have made their living off depictions of our people in similar circumstances. Nollywood, though it is slowly changing, could have credited its foundations to rubbishing the image of its own people.

And Alyssa Rosenberg gives the information minister a quick intro to public relations 101:

Not going to lie, the Nigerian government's decision to try to shut down screenings of District 9 and to demand that sections of the movie that portray Nigerians be edited, seems like foolishness to me. First off, remedial public relations: complaining about something draws attention to it. So unless it's something that needs actual correction, either because people believe it, or because it's ubiquitous, leave it be. And second, if you're a state, complaining about art makes you look like an amateur. Have a sense of humor about it. Offer the prawns refuge in Nigeria and claim the movie is just South African propaganda. Whatever you do, don't act like problems with Nigeria's image are the fault of a South African filmmaker and a single movie.

Ouch.

Nigeria: This Revolution Will Be YouTubed

Skentele Skontolo by Lagbaja. Album: Africano...The Mother Of Groove. Label: Blue Pie Productions, 2005.



The art of tying the gele

Libya: Speaking of that Crazy Uncle...

We've kept him locked up in the basement all these years for a very good reason.

Kenya: Cloudy With A Chance Of A Full Battery Charge

AFP - in English 

H/T: Subsaharska

Music: "Kind of Blue" -- Kind of "Wasn't a Big Thing"

Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," released in 1959, was officially 50 years old last month. Below, CNN talks to the only surviving member of that sextet, drummer Jimmy Cobb. Like with Dylan on June 15, 1965, Cobb says as they all filed in on March 2, 1959, of course, no one thought that they were about to record the greatest album in the history of recorded music.


The doc below came out with the September 30, 2008 release of the three-disc box set 50th Anniversary Collector's Edition:



I've always thought there are albums you get and there are those albums that get you. "Kind of Blue" belongs to the later.

Namibia/ Equatorial Guinea: The Chinese Option

Bringing together two pieces here. First, the Sharon LaFraniere and John Grobler NYT piece which looks at Chinese dealings with Namibia and how China uses billions of dollars in foreign aid to court the developing world and then--surprise, surprise--arm twists them into no-bid contracts with Chinese companies. None of the commenters missed the American slant to the article and its thinly veiled hypocrisy:

Clearly, given that China Africa Trade has gone from near [...] 0 to more than $100b in a few short years, it would be plain naive not to expect some noise and Namibia is but one example... Sometimes, one senses the debate is ratcheted a great deal higher because of a dislike of having Competition in what was previously one's backyard and domain.

And the Chinese threat to American hegemony in Africa takes on new dimensions in oil rich Equatorial Guinea. President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo knows questions about corruption and where the oil revenue go are totally off the table since he can now play East versus West for Equatorial Guinea's vast oil reserves. As this PBS film/doc investigation into the 2004 internationally financed coup to unseat Obiang makes clear, he now feels justified to be pissed at the United States, who, according to the documentary, knew about the coup but didn't warn him. And to China goes the spoils on that one too.

The PBS doc also hints at the weight America's oil future carries in congress when it comes to legislating against African dictators. So, looking again at this Aljazeera report on the squander of oil riches in next door Congo Brazzaville, one begins to understand where Denis Sassou-Nguesso gets the audacious balls to lobby hard in Washington for legislature to put an end to the thorn in his corrupt side -- vulture funds.

Mali: Timbuktu -- Manuscript City

This article by Vivienne Salt for Time and this report  by Amos Robert for SBS dateline chart the conservation efforts to save Timbuktu's ancient books and manuscripts, many of which go back to the 14th and 16th centuries.

As the local historian in the Robert's report points out, the manuscripts open a window into "a more tolerant Islam" and a time when an Africa city was the world's leading intellectual hub. Salt adds:

Timbuktu used to be a hectic crossroads where gold traders heading north met herders and salt merchants trekking south across the desert. The city's lucrative trade fueled Mali's empires as well as a rich ethnic blend of black Africans and Mediterranean people, and an intellectual ferment with dozens of Koranic schools. Refugees from the Inquisition in Spain brought their libraries with them, and soon began writing and buying more books. Timbuktu's literary output was enormous, and included works covering the history of Africa and southern Europe, religion, mathematics, medicine and law. There were manuscripts detailing the movement of the stars, possible cures for malaria and remedies for menstrual pain.

Library of Congress' digital exhibit - here.

Cameroon: Claire Denis' "White Material" -- Film Review

TIFF is over. Michael Koresky pens a review of Claire Denis' new film for IndieWire (blogged here). Like her first film Chocolat (1988), Denis' White Material also stars Isaach de Bankole and is also set in Cameroon.

Zimbabwe: The Zambezi Express

Photo/ Creative Africa Network 

And Africa's re-definition of musical theater continues. Producer Gerry Cottle, director Wayne Fowkes and the Zimbabwean dance group Siyaya dance up a storm in the Zambezi Express currently showing at London's Riverside Studios :

From the Times Online review:

What an unexpected treat this show is. The story is a simple-minded but amiable pile of nonsense about a youth from a township near Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, whose dreams of becoming a world-class footballer take him to South Africa, the tough big city and, eventually, success. The material is presented through song and dance and a smattering of usually broadly delivered dialogue. Essentially it’s a low-budget musical-comedy with thin links to Billy Elliot and Carlos Acosta’s Tocororo -- more

Frost interviews the cast and producer of the "happiest show on earth":

Nigeria: Onion-ed

It's an old one, but still worth a chuckle or two.



Perfect complement to another Onion classic.

Ghana: The Lady King

Peggielene Bartels is a secretary at the Ghanian embassy in Washington, DC, drives a '92 honda to work, and is the king--not queen--of Otuam, a town of 7,000 residents and an hour's drive from Accra. Washington Post's Paul Schwartzman explains :

The town elders had performed a ritual to choose his successor, praying and pouring schnapps on the ground and waiting for steam to rise as they announced the names of 25 relatives. The steam would signify which name the ancestors had blessed as the new king. Bartels, the caller said, was Otuam's new Nana, with power to resolve disputes, appoint elders and manage more than 1,000 acres of family-owned land.

"Oh, please don't play games with me," Bartels replied, reminding the caller that she was a woman, making her more fit for the title of queen. The caller replied that the kingship was the post that was open."Things are changing," she recalls him saying; women can now hold many more positions, even king. "You have to accept it.'"

Perhaps she can get some king in absentia tips from another commuting king.

Libya/ United Kingdom: Yvonne Fletcher

First the release of al-Megrahi, then they slam Fletcher's memory, plus plans to shake Gaddafi's hand at the UN get together this week... Just how much is this oil deal Britain made with Libya worth? Like Hitchens made clear, British voters just can't wait to send Brown and labor packing.

Nigeria: Ain't Misbehavin'

This Day's Chiwe Ochu reports that there are 57 Nigerians facing the death penalty in China and Indonesia and many more languishing in prisons in countries without death rows.

With the Nigerian penchant for misbehaving around the globe, Nigeria's Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Joe Keshi, gives us a glimpse into the consular nightmare his department confronts 24/7.

Morocco/ Algeria: An Arms Race

"A Moroccan About the World Around Him" writes :

It is worth noting that, with $5.4 billion worth of arms contracts, Morocco is the third top-buyer of military hardware and weaponry in the developing world in 2008, surpassed only by United Arab Emirates, with $9.7 billion in arms deals, and Saudi Arabia, with $8.7 billion. The United States holds 70.1 percent of the arms market; its arms sales in 2008 totaled $29.6 billion. Russia comes in a far second with $3.3 billion. Considering that Morocco and Algeria are embroiled in a diplomatic dispute over “Western Sahara,” analysts are voicing serious concerns that the two countries are gearing up for an arms race that will upset the delicate status quo balance of the increasingly bifurcated Maghreb.

What Tom Parry should have written here was, "for the U.S., the benefits of staying friendly with a customer who, in 2008 alone, spent $5.4 billion buying U.S. military hardware, far outweigh the humanitarian kudos or democratic ideals gained from crossing that customer by supporting the sovereignty of its colony - Western Sahara." Come to think of it, if the U.S. suddenly develops a conscience over Western Sahara, Morocco can argue, "where do you think I get all the natural resources to pay for these arms shopping sprees?"

But Obama is in fact crossing Morocco on Western Sahara. Perhaps he thinks with the Russians and Italians already selling to Algeria, the Moroccans are invested too deep in a U.S. platform to go elsewhere. Again, it's more evidence to a teabagger that Obama is indeed a socialist; I mean isn't it against the laws of capitalism to want to piss off a $5.4 billion customer?

Nigeria: "Super Villains of the Modern Age," Cont'd

First this, now this. Can't blame Nigeria's Information Minister Dora Akunyili for trying to save her job. She can at least tell her boss that she registered a complaint. This whole Nigeria-District 9 meme has been interesting to say the least.

H/T: Io9

Nigeria: On Friday Oprah Picked...

... Uwem Akpan's "Say You Are One of Them" (blogged here) for her book club. Uwem, according to the New Yorker, will be the first African writer to make the pick and the magazine rightly reminds everyone that they were the first to publish the work of the Nigerian Jesuit priest in the U.S. in their 2005 fiction issue.

EW has the first post-announcement interview - here .

I always picture Akpan's young narrator and her big sister as the xters in this  short film about condoms directed by Rogerio Manjate (Mozambique).

South Africa: Jane Taylor on Sincerity

In this May 13, 2009 lecture at New School, New York, Jane Taylor  talks about her work on the semiotics and aesthetics of sincerity and arenas meant to evaluate the sincerity of the perpetrators of past atrocities. She problematizes our belief in a Judeo-Christian protestant embodiment of authenticity and the forensics of truth, conversion or redemption associated with its expressiveness of sincerity.

She argues we embrace arenas like the International Criminal Court (ICC) or South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC) as evaluations of sincerity that are natural and exempt from the rich history and iconography of protestant sincerity in which they are rooted in.



And protestant sincerity, like any other kind of sincerity I would imagine, is not natural; rather its transparency is a performance and it is a performance from a certain cultural specificity that has become  normative.

Thus David Smith's article which seems to suggest an impasse in post-apartheid racial reconciliation and  quotes a cynic as saying in South africa "the whites are pretending it didn't happen; the blacks are pretending to forgive," might be overlooking the very nature of sincerity.

In light of Taylor's lecture, I'm drawn to her thoughts on the confession of apartheid era policeman Dirk Coetzee, during the TRC period in South Africa:

The demands of sincerity places us in a double bind. In the first instance, consciousness must hold inside itself and to itself a fine knowledge of what is a right and true response. At the same time we must be able to gauge what will make our responses appropriate to others. We must have on the surface of our skin, a culturally nuanced performance of that right response... The burden here is of a self who must both renounce and contradictorily retain a prior set of behaviors in order to integrate across a temporal and epistemic rupture.

If we agree that South Africans--both white and black--are indeed caught in a contradiction of retaining a sense of who they are across a "temporal and epistemic rupture," then what Smith's cynic refers to as "pretending" might be a reductive way of looking a racial tension that's indeed palpable, but may also be indicative of what it takes to balance the construction of a social narrative needed to bridge the rupture, provide continuity and, even more important, coherence, against a thirst for remorse/absolution which threatens the earlier.

Like with post-genocide Rwanda, both the perpetrators and victims have also had to deal with protecting the continuity of their social narrative across the temporal and epistemic rupture caused by the genocide while at the same time grasping at concepts of absolution that hold the danger of revisiting the rupture and jeopardizing that continuity. As Christine Stansell points out in her review of Hartzfeld writings on Rwanda, one could get himself killed for endangering the narrative of continuity:

In fact, prisoners were more likely to see themselves as dispensers of justice and forgiveness--taking back wives who had been unfaithful, ousting wrongful occupants of their fields--than as criminals in search of absolution. To be sure, the responses varied: some explicitly rejected remorse, but one hapless man ended up dead because he insisted on talking too much, compulsively confessing to anyone who would listen. He produced too much truth, too many revelations, for the community to bear. Others expressed contrition strategically, always in public, so as to build up credibility with the authorities. They never appealed in private to victims’ families.

Sequential Art/Comics: Locas II

Xamie Hernandez second omnibus collection of the adventures of Maggie, Hopey and friends has hit shelves. Fantagraphics has a 24 page PDF excerpt (2.5 MB) containing Table of Contents and the entire first chapter.



Probably no one can touch the sheer dynamism of what Alex Toth or Milton Caniff were able to do with black and white with regard to sequential art. However, no one can touch the pleasure derived just from absorbing Jamie's line work. Just looking at it makes me happy for no particular reason.

Tanzania: This Revolution Will Be YouTubed

Bongo Flava by Mzungu Kichaa, featuring Professor Jay. Album: Tuko Pamoja. Label: Caravan Records, 2009.



I gather "Mzungu Kichaa" in Swahili means the "Crazy White Man". Kichaa hails from Denmark and he is one of the pioneers of African Bongo Flava. Check out the rest of his bio.

Uganda: Women Rally Drivers

AlJazeera features three Ugandan women rally drivers--Leila Manyaja (the blick bullet), Susan Muwonje (Superwoman) and Rose Lwakataka (The Flying Chic)-- in their quest to compete and win the Pearl of Africa Uganda Rally.



The problems facing women rally car drivers overlaps the problems of perception with something more fundamental. No one comes out hitting anything into the bleachers first time at bat; a little talent or loads of it, you only get better by doing and doing a lot, which brings to the table a financial imperative that puts a lot of women at a disadvantage. Sarah Cromptom makes the same case in response to another age old question: why there are so few women film directors?

Money is at the very root of women's problems in establishing careers as directors...These are the kind of financial calculations that are stifling the voices of women directors. In the early days of Hollywood, women could propel pictures to success as directors and stars - and men didn't hesitate to back them. If we want a truly healthy, interesting, multi-faceted movie industry, we will just have to rediscover that confidence.

But the kind of confidence it takes to back someone while you lose money doing it, I think, will always, thanks to the sheer weight of historical precedent, tend to favor men and hence sets the bar much higher for women.

Liberia: "The Fish Makes it Funky"

The latest in NYT's "One in 8 Million" series, which are audio slideshows chronicling the heroic and quirky in the lives of everyday New Yorkers, is a story about Liberian cooking.

The lady featured is a Liberian emigre, Mrs. Smith, and according to Emily Weinstein:

Having immigrated from Liberia in 1969, [she] worked for years in mental health for the state. Her husband, who was from South Carolina and died in 1986, loved her traditional Liberian recipes. So did their friends, and in the mid-1990s, one asked if he could pay her to cook for him weekly. Soon, neighbors and friends were calling, asking if they could come by and eat in her kitchen or take meals home. She also catered weddings, graduations and other parties. She charges $15 to $20 a meal, and sends most of her profits to a Liberian elementary school.

Liberia: Contagious Images of Women Enforcing the Law

The UN Security Council reported on Tuesday that it will be extending the mandate for another year of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Liberia (UNMIL).

What makes the extension of this particular deployment of peacekeepers such good news to observers lies in the rather unique nature of the peacekeepers themselves -- a hundred and twenty five of them are Indian police women, specifically asked for by Liberia's president Ellen Sirleaf Johnson. Hoping to bring an end to the culture of rape which reached its zenith during the war and is yet to abate, the president sees the use of police women as a way of exposing Liberian girls and women to images of women enforcing the law amd meting out punishment.

Guess what? CNN's Farai Sevenzo reports that not only do these Indian police women kick butt, but Liberian women are joining the police force in droves:



UN photog Christopher Herwig has a ton of images.

Nigeria: Welcoming Okonkwo to Brown

 Achebe/ bio

Brown University's media relations office has up a video of the "rock stars" of their acclaimed Africana Studies department--Tricia Rose (Black Noise), George Lamming (In the Castle of My Skin), Ama Ata Aidoo (Our Sister Killjoy) and John Edgar Wideman (The Cattle Killing)--all sharing their thoughts on Chinua Achebe's move from Bard College to Brown University as the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and professor of Africana studies.

Uganda: President M7's Comments on the Role of Kings

Elaborating on the recent unrest stemming from differences between Kampala and Mengo, president Museveni questions the idea of "political kings":

The king is not elected and if he wields political power, how will he account if he makes mistakes? Political leaders can be voted out, what about the king?

But since he has ruled Uganda for 23 years and can't be voted out, doesn't that, technically, make him a political king? Having failed at preventing colonization, traditional rulers, according to Museveni, should now spend the ample time on their hands preventing homosexuality:

traditional leaders should play roles like preventing kith and kin from inter-marrying, protecting the youth from drug abuse and homosexuality. He said it was the reason he revived kingdoms so as to retain culture which was compatible with the modern times, 'but not to revive ancient undemocratic governance.' He said kings failed to protect the sovereignty of Africa. 'Colonisation was a vote of no confidence on them. Modern Africa must transcend tribal organisation and mentality.'

Museveni added that the Government would soon bring a law to guard against the use of kingdoms by agencies with illegitimate motives. Accordingly, traditional leaders will be required to declare certain gifts in order to guard Uganda’s sovereignty from foreign interests that fund them. 'Failure to do so will attract a penalty.'

Yep. This was all about Libya.

Africa: Still on Bushpunk (Pt.3)

9

This NYT slideshow analyzes the post-apocalyptic trash heap world of Shane Acker's 9 (2009) (trailer)and Acker does refer to its characters as "Stitchpunk."

original short

Whatever the suffix--cyber, bush, diesel, steam--the main thread running through all these punk realms is that  theme of cannibalization, re-purposing and hybrid forms. It is a very postcolonial theme.

Western Sahara: The Bottom Line

Tom Parry nutshells it:

It's an issue no rich G8 government gets too involved in because, from their perspective, the benefits of staying friendly with Morocco far outweigh the humanitarian kudos of supporting such a marginal African nation.

So there has been little feedback on the latest plea to highlight the 35-year stand-off at the UN.

South Africa: Huntley Just Sold Canada a Boatload of Broken Sprinklers, Cont'd

CNN asks if white South African Brandon Huntley's case for asylum in Canada, citing attacks from black South Africans, was rooted in oppression or opportunism?

That's a rhetorical question, right?

Awww...

Wish Tom Hanks could walk out of the dugout and yell to the dad: there's no crying in baseball.

Egypt/ Nigeria: No Opera Halls and No Dance Companies, Still...

Pushing the limits of expression in a conservative society, members of Egypt's first independent visual arts studio partake in a workshop introducing them to postmodern dance.


Concert pianist, teacher and wife of a former Russian ambassador, Maria Asseva, and her students talk about what it's like studying and dreaming of performing classical music in Nigeria.

Uganda: Flips, Ollies and Grinds in Kampala -- Gnarly!

 Uganda Skateboard Union

Another report by AFP on what appears to be the beginnings of the first skateboard park in Uganda. The kids built it. The boards were donated by an American pro, add the youtube videos and dreams of turning pro and rest is pure inspiration.

"The Board Operator"

Since then, the Tony Hawk Foundation and the rest of the world has heard about the Uganda Skateboard Union. Check the rest of the dream out on their blog.

Africa: Investing in Whiteness (Pt. 2)

This AFP report on the skin whitening  trend among African women in Paris makes a nice addendum to the CNN story about the growing hunger for such products in India.

Rwanda: Writings About a Post-Genocide Society

In TNR, Professor of History at the University of Chicago, Christine Stansell, reviews Jean Hatzfeld's writings on post-genocide Rwanda, which was faced with problems of re-integration and reconciliation on an unprecedented scale.

Unlike postwar Europe wherein the survivors emigrated to the United States and Israel, leaving non-Jewish Germans to come to terms with their past on their own or in Cambodia where there has been no national reckoning, Rwanda was faced with the demographic problem "of reconstituting a nation out of a vast Hutu majority and a tiny Tutsi remnant [...] compounded by the brutal fact that the violence of 1994 was produced by a mass mobilization, and was carried out by an army but also by civilians and a volunteer militia."

Upon the return of the perpetrators from prison, Stansell highlights the picture Hatzfeld paints of the complex nature of post genocidal shame and denial:

Hatzfeld heard the same complaint from Tutsis over and over: “Not one prisoner came asking for forgiveness.” The killers were incurious about how their victims were faring, and oblivious to what the genocide had wrought, except as it affected their own problems with abandoned fields and wives with babies. “They are afraid to have a conversation,” Claudine adds, “so if someone goes near them--quick, they blurt out a bonjour to ward off a handshake, behaving like angels but turning away from any gesture of closeness with us.” In fact, prisoners were more likely to see themselves as dispensers of justice and forgiveness--taking back wives who had been unfaithful, ousting wrongful occupants of their fields--than as criminals in search of absolution. To be sure, the responses varied: some explicitly rejected remorse, but one hapless man ended up dead because he insisted on talking too much, compulsively confessing to anyone who would listen. He produced too much truth, too many revelations, for the community to bear. Others expressed contrition strategically, always in public, so as to build up credibility with the authorities. They never appealed in private to victims’ families.

South Africa: SABC

It is a British pastime to complain about the BBC and the same goes for South Africans, observes The Guardian's David Smith, when it comes to the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), which is 65 million pounds in debt.

Zapiro/ Z News

Smith narrates the hunger strike of T.V director Michael Lee in his effort to draw people's attention to the problem plaguing the SABC.

Media/ Journalism: It's A Bird. No, It's A Plane. It's Google

Ed Stein's cartoon in the last issue of The Rocky Mountain News 
newspaper on Friday, February 27, 2009. The paper had been in 

existence since 1859.

This Newspaper Association of America request for information document, in essence, details how Google will go about saving journalism by using its size, tools and brand to come up with a payment platform that will help online publishers monetize digital content.

The Atlantic's Niraj Chokshi believes a micropayment model no longer sounds ludicrous now that Google's involved:

The reason the plan has a chance at succeeding where other similar efforts, such as Journalism Online , might fail is twofold: scale and ease-of-use. Journalists often lament having ever offered free content online. They argue that it's too late to start now, because, if the competition doesn't start charging -- and users don't take the initial leap by creating an account with you -- you risk losing your readers altogether. 

Enter Google. The search giant is probably the only company that has the reach to introduce a new product on an all-Internet scale. According to various Web statistic-gatherers, Google owns 16 of the top 50 visited sites and accounts for almost ten percent of Internet traffic (check back for a post I've got in the works on this).

... Many users will undoubtedly stick with free publications, but if Google can create a low barrier to reading paid content on the web that you can't find anywhere else for free, you could expect a pay-to-read model picking up steam, and cash.

I've said it before and will say it again: a micropayment model must now be made to work. If everyone from the New York Times to Timbuktu Picayune develops and gets on the same shared-itunes like distribution platform, fueled by a painless entry price per article and an easy and seamless credit system, readers (worldwide) will click to pay for content. But it will only work if all the newspapers get on board together, no holdouts.

Nigeria: And MTV's Music Video "Remix" of the Year Award Goes to...

I'm sure everyone has seen the video below. But thanks to Sunday night's shenanigans and to Beyoncé winning Music Video of the year for her "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)," directed by Jake Nava, its time to dig up and dust off its Nigerian remix by the Naija Boyz -- enjoy:

"... the true African is a swagger jacker" - lol

Somalia/ Ethiopia: Invasion of the Glue Sniffers

IRIN reports that the capital of secessionist Somaliland, Hargesia, is seeing increases in  immigrant children who cross the border from Ethiopia's Oromo region to beg for alms in its streets. Hargesia is a popular transit point in the region for those seeking to travel further to Puntland or Yemen.

The migrant children end up joining the ranks of Somalia's local street children most of whom have been forced on to the streets by drought and insecurity within Somaliland and further south, in Somalia. As a result, many of the kids confessed to sniffing glue as a meansto cope with the rough living.

Chad/ Dafur/ Sudan: "Three Points" is Streaming on Hulu

The doc is about Houston Rocket guard--exciting player who can't make it out of the first round of the NBA playoffs--Tracy McGrady, who joins John Prendergast in Dafur to familiarize himself with genocide taking place in the region. He is then taken on a poverty safari or what one could call an extreme mix of celebrity awe, commodification and development porn. Like McGrady remarked in the doc, "you all are pimpin' me out."



The trip has led to T-Mac starting his own humanitarian project, the T-Mac Alliance, changing his jersey number to 3 to highlight his 3 Point Dafur project and his $75,000 donation to Dafur amongst other things.

Africa: Still on Bushpunk (Pt. II)

"Steampunk Fashion" blog stumbled on my post on Bushpunk and pointed me to its fascinating scrapbook dedicated to a vein of Steampunk that draws on Afro-Victorian hybridity and from all kinds of local syncretism, wherein one can see the colonizer's forms being adapted and re-purposed by the colonized for their own purposes. Just goes to show that the aesthetic possibilities for Bushpunk run deep. I think Trobriand Cricket, which has been labeled "an ingenious response to colonialism," will make a good--though non Steampunk--example of something very Bushpunk.

Conceptually, if Bushpunk is going to be a genre that does its fictional speculation within the parameters of a low-tech, low-wattage, energy conserving, SMS, battery-charging African rusticity, perhaps the presiding model for its low wattage potential should then be the human brain. Talking about the brain's low-wattage efficiency, Jonah Lehrer over at Frontal Complex writes :

This computational efficiency is the single most astonishing fact of the mammalian brain. Here you are, reading these words, daydreaming about lunch, processing the richness of reality, thinking about tomorrow, and your brain requires less energy than a low wattage lightbulb. Evolution is an impressive engineer.

One way to think about this efficiency is to compare the performance of Deep Blue, that IBM chess supercomputer, to its human opponents. While Deep Blue is capable of analyzing over 200 million possible chess moves per second - it wins through sheer computational force - chess grandmasters like Gary Kasparov can only consciously evaluate about five moves per second. From the perspective of processing speed, humans are at a severe disadvantage. We're an Atari surrounded by X-Box 36.

However:

When the machine is operating at full speed it's a fire hazard, and requires specialized heat-dissipating equipment to keep it cool. Meanwhile, people like Kasparov barely break a sweat.

Update: Ha, ha. Bushpunk will have to join the queue. After steampunk, cyberpunk, dieselpunk, it appears the new punk a la mode is Stitchpunk. I09 digs up its origins.

Behind the Scenes

Gosh, I wasn't aware that Elmo made it crystal clear in 2007 that if you stepped to, he can and will fuckin' cut you:



And in other behind the scenes developments, like that Diablo Cody screed that bitch-slapped the entire blogosphere back at the height of Juno-slagging, Oscar nominated screenwriter for the History of Violence, Josh Olson, in response to a daunting amount of requests from friends to read their screenplays, penned his own screed in the Village Voice titled I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script.

Update: More behind the scenes screeds. This one from the crew that worked on Transformers, trying to curry favor with their director no doubt by telling us something we all know already.

Gambia: World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report: 2009-2010

In the recently released World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report: 2009-2010, Gambia moves up in the rankings to #81 ahead of Ukraine (82), Algerian (83) and Argentina (85). And in Sub-Saharan Africa, The Gambia is ahead of Senegal (92), Kenya (98), Nigeria (99) and Ghana (114).

Okay, taken the global recession caused a decrease in Russian demand for export production from CIS countries across the board, explains Ukraine drop 10 places in the rankings. But, still, Gambia's score card makes you go, whoa, hold up Jammeh! wtf!

Under "Undue Influence"--i.e. "Judicial independence" and "favoritism in decisions of government officials"--Gambia gets an A!!! Do people at the WEF read the news? But wait, maybe president Jammeh stays out of the economics of Gambia and only asserts his influence when it comes to jailing journalists .

When it comes to indices like "number of procedures it takes to start a business" and "time it takes to start a business" the WEF report however does jive with the recently released World Bank-IFC Doing Business report, which tracks regulatory reforms aimed at improving the ease of doing business, cited "no major [business] reform was recorded" in Gambia. 

Africa/ South Africa: Slums Unplugged

Between 1990 and 2000, slum areas within African cities grew at a rate of 4.53, whilst the overall growth rate of the cities themselves were 4.58% in the same period. In other words, "almost all of the growth that will unfold in African cities take the form of slum growth."

A growing call among urban geographers is the need to shift from research that wholly uses such slums as evidence of the failure of government policies or modernization in Africa, but to begin "theorizing African urbanism from the perspective of ordinary people who live in these slum conditions."

In his paper African Cities: Grasping the Unknowable , University of Cape Town's Edgar Pieterse writes:

Tonight I want to put it to you that a big part of the problem has been the tendency to try and “fix” the negative social and environmental externalities of urbanization. Why? Well, if our automatic response is one of moral outrage about the suffering of the poor, we tend to loose sight of the very people we try to help and [how] their innately complex and diverse “lifeworlds” must figure into problem-solving research. 

Moreover, developmentalist obsessions tend to focus on the poor and allow the rich and wealthy classes to go about their routine reproduction of urban space outside the analytical attention of scholars, or when they do come into the frame, they are caricatured as rational market actors or exploitative class agents. We need to find ways in which we can clarify the knowledge agenda that will be able to articulate macro trend data and perspectives with insights about the novelty of contemporary urban life as it comes into being at this late capitalist moment when Africa remains an afterthought, an invisible placemat for larger power struggles, and the globalized allegory for failed modernisation.

In Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Politics of Space: Fanonian Practices in Post-apartheid South Africa, Nigel C. Gibson writes in Pambazuka:

In 'The Wretched' Fanon argues that the oppressed is literally pressed from all sides and is only able to find freedom of movement in dreams of muscular prowess. Colonialism is also an experience of spatial confinement, of restraint and prohibition, a narrow world of poverty, oppression and subjugation... In other words, since social relations are manifested in space, one Fanonian test of post-apartheid society is to what extent South Africa has been spatially reorganised. On this score, it is quite clear that 'deracialisation' of the city has been an essentially 'bourgeois' phenomenon with full membership and rights now accessed by money and consequentially with urban policy – under the guise of providing 'housing' – geared mainly toward the removal of the poor from urban areas.

While land and housing are essential elements to the struggle for a decolonised society, they [ The Abahlali baseMjondolo (Zulu for people who live in shacks) -- the largest autonomous grassroots organisation in South Africa] understand that the struggle is ultimately about building spaces that recognise the humanity of all... In short, the shackdwellers are voicing their right to live in the city, challenging the idea of citizenship and insisting on an active democratic polity. 

In this sense, these organised shackdwellers are expressing a new kind of inclusive politics from the ground up, one which appears local and reformist, such as providing services to settlements, but which is also radical and national.... Such a radical change of consciousness, where 'the last would be first and the first last' (quoted in Fanon 1968 37), would encourage a shift in the 'geography of reason' from the elitist and technical discussion of service delivery – mediated 'between those who decide on behalf of "private" interests and those who decide on behalf of higher institutions and power' (Lefebvre 2003, 157) – to people’s needs mediated by the minds of those who were so recently reified as dirty, uneducated, poor, violent, criminal, not fully human and named the damned of the earth. This double movement – the de-commodification of the city and 'the new rights of the citizen, tied in to the demands of everyday life' (Lefebvre 2006, 250) – would amount to a de-fetishisation of the city, a shift away from the Northern-focused elite discourse of creating 'world-class' citadels in South Africa.

At the end of the day, I guess it boils down to how slums are these unplugged phenomena that really are  the living embodiments of the prudent, necessitated and commonsensical solutions to the life problems of millions of people. But instead of trying to force African cities into modern frameworks that seek to eradicate slums or dislocate its denizens into newly built project-wastelands outside city limits, the question is now flipped into how, upon realizing the untapped wealth and potential of slums, do you plug them back into the modern order and capitalist engine. The end result being the engine (government and private sectors) will, in addition to social welfare and amenities, be incentivized to go into slums and them work for African cities.

Uganda: Museveni's Paranoia -- The Standoff

I want us to talk as mature people but the King refused to pick up his phone. My reaction to these issues (leading to bloody riots) is to ring the king and we sort them out as mature people. But he could not pick or return my calls for the last two years... His Highness could not pick calls from the President of Uganda who led the struggle for democracy and restore traditional leaders... The one whose leg you treat uses it to kick you -- President Yoweri Museveni

Before the riots ensued, the official police statement was since the Banyala, one of the minority kingdoms in Kayunga (which includes Bugerere an official part of Buganda) where king or kabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II of the Buganda kingdom was planing to visit, did not ask for police security and were opposed to his visit, they, as in the police, could not allow the Kabaka or his Katikkiro to go there out of concern their safety.

Yeah, right.

You don't spend over 20 years in power like Museveni has without developing a healthy life preserving paranoia. Apparently, there is also the theory, reported by PANA, that Museveni thinks the Bungada and Toro kingdoms are getting too cosy with the Libyans, who might be channeling funds to them to be used in a campaign agaisnt the ruling party. Thus, Kampala is in containment mode.

Friday

I Don't Know by Lisa Hannigan. Album: Sea Sew. Label: ATO Records, 2008.



...the Irish pub version is definitely more "Hannigan" than the official version.

Africa/ India: Investing in Whiteness

...public policy and private prejudice have created a "possessive investment in whiteness" that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society. I use the term "possessive investment" both literally and figuratively. Whiteness has a cash value: it accounts for the advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, thought he unequal educations allocate to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to relatives and friends of those who have profited most from present and past discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. I argue that white Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power, and opportunity. This whiteness is, of course, a delusion, a scientific and cultural fiction that like all racial identities has no valid foundation in biology or anthropology. Whiteness is, however, a social fact, an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige and opportunity -- George Lipsitz -- Preface to "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness," Temple University Press, 1998

Before recalling Lipsitz's preface, my thoughts had gone to what Malcom Gladwell wrote at the end of Outliers. About how, in the 1700s, a white plantation owner in Jamaica made a female slave his mistress. An act that saved her and her offspring from the experience suffered by other slaves and he went on to explain how absolution by whiteness not only rendered a privilege but also a privileged mindset, which translated, via his grandmother, into the rare sorts of opportunities afforded his mother and the standard of life that has passed on certain opportunities to him. Thus, he notes that success "is not exceptional or mysterious," but "grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky." 

So in India it appears some web of advantages rest in whiteness or in being of a lighter shade. Therefore it's only natural to conclude that, like Lipsitz's title suggests, some have  made a possessive investment in that advantage. Now, others, using some "help," are trying to tap into the same advantage. I could so use this argument to finally justify getting those breast implants.

 
In a world of limited resources, anything--from ethnicity to weight--that can be used to exclude others counts as an advantage. Some are born into whatever gives them their, fair or unfair, advantages and others have had to earn it. But at the end of the day, whatever your advantage, when rubber hits asphalt, you will wield it, enjoy it and no matter your tan, you will wage war to protect it.

H/T: Africa is a Country