The African Nations Cup, CAN Angola 2010, as of now, is 10 days, 8 hours and 30 mins away. Below are some of the Portuguese promos, featuring Angolan sculptor Etona and actress Aminata Goubel:
Piers Edwards has a fascinating post on his blog about the endemic problem of the soccer tournament -- its contentious scheduling. For it does not only fall in a World Cup year but demands many of Africa's top players to leave their European sides to play for their respective countries in the heat of the European title chase:
On the face of it, it does border on the insane to stage a continental finals during the European season - even if it made little difference prior to the mass influx of Africans in the 1990s. Although it now affects some of the world's top clubs, the Confederation of African Football (Caf) still dismisses all requests to change the timing, always claiming that Africa's weather in June is too severe, whether through excessive heat or unplayable rain. But this is not the most convincing argument, especially considering that the prospect of hosting the World Cup in June 2010 sparked a bidding frenzy across the continent. Many matches at next year's finals will also be notable for the cold, but no one is saying the tournament shouldn't be held because it's the South African winter... (more)
The Beat blog gathers together other pop culture examples of "groinal aggression" popping up on blogs, no doubt inspired by Nigerian terror suspect Umar Abdulmutallab's--"more incendiary than explosive"--crotch bomb:
A "groinal aggressors" list without Cameo's Larry Blackmon just feels wrong -- incendiary even.
Sudanese people celebrate the decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague in Abyei, central Sudan, July 22, 2009.(Photo Mckulka UNMIS)/ Sudan Tribune
Sudan's parliament did not just pass the South Sudan Referendum Bill and the Abyei Referendum Bill on Tuesday, but they passed it in the original forms agreed to. BBC talks to Dr Aligu Manawa, an MP for the opposition SPLM party:
Zechariah Manyok Biar, a graduate student at Abilene Christian University, Texas, USA, wrote in the Sudan Tribune that there is no going back for South Sudan; ironically a united Sudan can only come after the South is allowed to assert its right to secede:
Political system in the North was built on the idea that some citizens in Sudan were better than others. That is the reason why some parts, South Sudan being one of these parts, were marginalized in everything. An outsider cannot believe that Juba was technically the second
political city after Khartoum in Sudan before the civil war. Juba even today is not different from villages in many parts of Northern Sudan, let alone towns that rank far below Juba in the North.
To make matters worst, Southerners were seen by Northern politicians as people who could be ruled but could never rule others.... Southerners experienced the real share of power under the CPA. This is the reason why Southerners want to experience this power for sometimes before they think about a common affection between the North and the South. But this yearning for self-rule in South Sudan has nothing to do with racial hatred. Northerners would be very welcome in South Sudan as citizens and leaders if Southerners chose secession under real freedom in 2011. There can also be a possibility of the reunification of Sudan in the future, as Dr. Luka Biong Deng once put it, if South and North Sudan stay as peaceful neighbors after 2011. The fact that Northerners like Yasir Arman are top leaders in the South now shows that Southerners are yearning for freedom, not hatred.
NCP must understand that the choice of secession of South Sudan by South Sudanese through democratic means would be better than the Unilateral Declaration of South Sudan as a different nation in 2011. It would be a wise thing for NCP to engage SPLM in fair discussions to focus on how Northern and Southern Sudan will remain as good friends after 2011 if Southerners chose secession over unity of Sudan. The victory of the people of South Sudan and the people of Abyei that we saw this week in the passing of the two controversial referendum bills will continue regardless of what the Parliament in Khartoum does. Better for the Parliament to be nice than hostile to the wish of Southerners.
The Logicomix guys, creators of Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth (Bloomsbury)... about the life of mathematican Bertrand Russell, did a cute "why we write" piece for PW - here.
David Mazzucchelli "Sounds and Pauses" exhibition at MoCCA ran through November 1, 2009 and below is his packed conversation with Dan Nadel from July 16th (video - here, but its audio sucks):
New Yorker Art’s Editor Françoise Mouly talks to Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware about storytelling and autobiography at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts as part of the the three-day festival of New French Writing back in March (wnyc.org):
Mondoweiss has pages 18 to 29 of Joe Sacco's Footnotes from Gaza in glorious detail - here.
Despite the raids and the promises to rout al-Queda, Al Jazeera's Owen Fay explains how stretched Yemeni forces are:
In the case of Nigeria, despite the unrest in the Niger-Delta South and recent sectarian violence in the North, back on the 26th Elizabeth Dickinson wrote in the FP blog:
Security analysts have been worrying about Nigeria since the Sept 11. attacks -- fearing that this about half-Muslim country of 140 million people would be a potential host to extremists. But at the end of the day, something that I've learned about Nigeria is that it takes money and connections to get things done. Just think back to the violence earlier this summer by the Boko Haram sect. The mostly-impoverished members of the group raised hell in the local context ... but that was it. Taking "jihad" international from Nigeria is still a long ways and a lot of financing off (if it is on the way at all).
Which brings me to one more point about extremism in Nigeria. Much of the religious violence that the country has seen in recent years has been less about religion and more about a country rife with corruption and wanting for institutions. When sharia law was introduced in the North earlier this decade, most analysts believe that it had more to do with a desire for the law -- any law -- to function. Since the secular government had failed for years, many sought refuge in the laws of religious fundamentalism.
Martin Scorsese was in Egypt at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to talk film with the Bibliotheca director Ismail Serageldin and over 200 film-enthusiasts, writes Ali Abdel Moshen in Almasryalyoum. Also:
As chairman of the World Cinema Foundation, Scorsese was responsible for the recent restoration of the 1969 Egyptian classic “The Mummy,” directed by Shadi Abdel Salam. The newly restored print of the film was screened at the 33rd Cairo International Film Festival last month to unanimous praise.
The Daily Nation had that lovely picture atop the news of the release of the 2009 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examination results:
The examination gains students entrance to public and private universities... Students who attain a lower mark...join other tertiary institution for non-degree courses. Candidates must take all the three compulsory subjects (English, Kiswahili, Mathematics), at least two sciences, one humanities and at least one practical or technical subject. The maximum marks a candidate can score are 500.
Their joy is the real deal. Sometimes one forgets just how serious we Africans take this whole business of education. These entrance exams are like fighting to get onboard Noah's ark.
AP talks to Nigerians in DC-Maryland about how they are dealing with a post-Abdulmutallab world. By the way, I've frequented that restuarant in the report a couple of times with friends -- they serve a mean pounded yam and ogbono.
Below, some Nigerian students stage their own version of what happened on NorthWest flight 253 - Nollywood Style. LOL:
John Orafa, a Nigerian student at Brigham Young University in Rexburg (Idaho) and who is also behind the reenactment, adds:
With the video, we like to make fun of such events, because it helps our message stay in the public consciousness. And more importantly, we wanted to tell the world that the attempted act of terrorism was the action of one deranged and misguided kid. Being a Nigerian in the US is already hard. I have come across racial and religious prejudices. People have negative ideas. It will be a lot more difficult in the next few weeks and months, I believe.
I attended a wedding this weekend, and some Americans stopped talking to me and walked away when they realised I was Nigerian. They seemed shocked and abruptly ended the exchange of pleasantries. What Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab did does not represent in any way the intention or perception of the Nigerian people towards the good people of America. We do love Americans and seek every opportunity to learn from Americans. And we love life way too much. I apologise on the behalf of all Nigerians and will be leaving for DC to express this with other Nigerian students in a few hours. But I'm a little anxious about going to an airport now..."
I should add that this blog's "super villains of the modern age" title or sub-title (borrowed from a commenter's blunt response to the depiction of Nigerians in District 9 at one of my favourite blogs) is, at least to my understanding, usually attached to posts that keep track of how Nigerians are perceived by others across various media (mostly American ads, films, television etc), and especially how various rhetorical uses of the Nigerian repute and stereotype shifts, adapts, and might even be evolving depending on who is doing the depicting and what their needs are.
In the rearview of the 23 year old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow up NorthWest flight 253, there are two aftermaths to follow: the making of Abdulmutallab the terrorist and how his attempt to strike terror plays out in terms of how Nigerians are perceived in the post-Abdulmutallab world. Hopefully the "super villains of the modern age" posts, among other things, will try to keep track of the later.
A news vendor in Ibafo, Nigeria, reads about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s alleged bomb attempt on a US passenger jet/Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images
Story's got legs. Times Online Sean O’Neill and Giles Whittell reveal:
Security sources are concerned that the picture emerging of his undergraduate years suggests that he was recruited by al-Qaeda in London. Security sources said that Islamist radicalisation was rife on university campuses, especially in London, and that college authorities had “a patchy record in facing up to the problem”. Previous anti-terrorist inquiries have uncovered evidence of extremists using political meetings and religious study circles to identify potential recruits.... He is the fourth president of a London student Islamic society to face terrorist charges in three years. One is facing a retrial on charges that he was involved in the 2006 liquid bomb plot to blow up airliners. Two others have been convicted of terrorist offences since 2007.
Information Minister Hassan al-Lozy suggested the U.S. was partly to blame for Yemen's failure to identify Abdulmutallab as a terror suspect. He told a news conference Washington never shared its suspicions about the man, who was flagged on a watchlist as a possible terrorist. "We didn't get any notice from the Americans to put this man on a list," al-Lozy said. "America should have told Yemen about this man." Al-Lozy said Abdulmutallab received a Yemeni visa to study Arabic after authorities were reassured that he had "several visas from a number of countries that we are co-operating with in the fight against terror."
He noted that Abdulmutallab had a valid visa to the United States, which he had visited in the past. "Our investigations are looking into who were the people or parties that were in touch with Umar here," al-Lozy told the AP. He noted Abdulmutallab frequented a mosque in the old city, but did not say whether there was an al-Qaida link to that mosque. The minister said Yemen was tightening controls on those seeking student visas to come to Yemen in the wake of Abdulmutallab's case. The new revelations came a day after the al-Qaida offshoot in Yemen claimed responsibility for the failed attack, saying it was meant "to avenge the American attacks on al-Qaida in Yemen."
Wasn't there a Houston connection?
(UPDATE) And back home, the Guardian reports the National Security Adviser has asked Nigeria's Gestapo/ Intelligence Agency (NIA) to explain the role it played in the "systemic failure." From the sound of the face saving query, heads will most definitely roll:
"From all indications, it seemed that your Agency had prior knowledge of a report, said to have been made by Alhaji Umar Mutallab about the tendencies of his son, Umar Farouk, towards radicalisation, which was manifested in the incident leading to his arrest in the U.S...
It is really unfortunate and sad that knowledge of such an important intelligence issue could not be brought to the attention of this office, or the weekly Intelligence Community Committee Meeting (ICCM). It was this failure that led to the unfortunate incident we are grappling with now... The report if circulated within the ICC would have alerted the Security Agencies at our Travel Control Points (TCPs) to take appropriate required action, that would have led to his arrest, before boarding the KLM flight from Nigeria, thereby pre-empting the sad incident", it added...
Failure to do so has not only led to this rather unfortunate international embarrassment to the Nigerian nation, but also depicted our country as a haven for terrorists. You are therefore to explain what led to this failure of intelligence, and the persons therein involved. Your explanation, should reach me on or before Tuesday December 29, 2009..."
Nothing better than kicking a country and its denizens while they are down, is there? So, even though its the least of Nigeria's problems at the moment, but in view of recent events, reactions to Nigeria's reaction to Neil Blomkamp's summer hit, District 9, now take on new import. In the clip below, spliced off the end of Reuters round up of film events in Africa for 2009, the Kenyan's reaction re-echo some of the thoughts I spewed back in August:
For the film geek reaction, Michael Foltz (below), from the Cinefile crew, references Dora Akunyili's announcement to ban the film in Nigeria and also raises an interesting point about all the film's characters, not just the Nigerians:
Nigeria joins the "axis of evil" and the Arab media couldn't care less. FP's Mark Lynch parses the Arab media for some hyperventilation over al-Queda ties to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's lastest efforts and finds a big "meh" -- same goes for the Afghan media. The Arabist concurs:
I don’t think there ever was much support for al-Qaeda among the Arab public, or any chance that al-Qaeda turning into a leading shaper of public opinion. That was even less likely as the Baader Meinhof gang and Red Brigades becoming leading shapers of European opinion.
Meanwhile, in an interview with Rasheed el-Enany, professor of modern Arabic literature at UK's University of Exeter and author of a highly acclaimed biography of Naguib Mahfouz, Al-Masry Al-Youm asks him about the state of contemporary Arabic literature to which he highlights the following irony:
It’s also the fact that the Middle East, with its multitude of problems, is generating much international interest … It’s ironic that something like terrorism and Islamophobia are good in terms of generating interest in the Arab world, including literature and translation, along with the academic study of Arabic language, literature and history.
For instance, student recruitment to Arabic and Islamic studies after the 9/11 and 7/7 [in the UK] attacks has increased tremendously. At the beginning of this century, we were getting about 15 students every year for Arabic and Islamic studies. Now we get about 40 students every year at my own university, but it’s indicative of similar trends operating across the board.
Fingers crossed, perhaps Nigeria will "suffer" the same ironic upside.
The question is: if American companies like Google, Pfizer, Intel, Yahoo, DuPont, eBay and Procter & Gamble are all former start-ups founded by immigrants, why on earth isn't the United States making it easier for a new generation of immigrants, upon graduating from American institutions or from other institutions abroad, to stay here and create new companies and the new jobs America so desperately needs?
Paul Kedrosky, an investor and a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, and Brad Feld, a start-up venture capitalist/managing director at Foundry Group, in their recent WSJ op-ed are fast-tracking the idea of the "Start-Up" visa and are proposing the U.S starts giving out "Start-Up" visas because the immigration policy as it is now amounts to:
Immigrants have not only founded big, well-known companies. Yet we don't seem to care. We send recent, foreign-born university science and engineering graduates back to their own countries after their student visas expire—unless these creative sorts are willing to spend some of the most entrepreneurial years of their lives working in a big company under an H-1B visa after they finish their studies. For those who studied elsewhere, but who nonetheless want to bring their job-creating ideas here, American policies treat them—the job-creating, trouble-making innovators that they are—as a cross between deadbeats and queue-jumpers. Why can't they wait in line like everyone else to get a visa in five years or so? What's their hurry?
Their hurry is Joseph Schumpeter's hurry: They want to hustle out and disrupt markets when the opportunity arises. In the 21st century those opportunities don't wait for our interminable, employment-based visa programs. As a result rather than saying "Come and create jobs here" we, in effect, tell them to shove off. Come back when you have a few million in sales— at which point they will be rooted elsewhere and creating jobs somewhere else. That needs to end now. Immigrants who come here to create companies create jobs. We need the jobs.
To fix this:
One good idea to make this process easier is to create a new visa for entrepreneurs, something that is increasingly being called by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and angel investors a "start-up visa." It might work like this: If immigrant entrepreneurs want to start a company in the U.S. and are able to raise a moderate amount of money (perhaps as little as $125,000) from an accredited U.S.-based venture capital firm or qualified U.S.-based angel investors, we should let them start a company here. It could be a couple of founders with an idea—that's it. We would give visas to the founders and welcome them in to our country.
In the BH session below they discuss the pros and cons of the idea:
This NYT piece about Chinese attitudes on race referenced mixed race "Go Oriental Angel" contestant, Lou Jing. The piece got some very interesting comments, especially pertaining to Chinese-African racial relations, which I stashed here. CNN recently put up this piece about Lou Jing:
From this morning's WaPo, where reporters Philip Rucker and Julie Tate have been going through 300 online postings under the name "farouk1986" (a combination of Abdulmutallab's middle name and birth year), we basically learn that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was an old testament kid stuck in a new testament world:
In his January 2005 posting about his loneliness, Farouk1986 wrote about the tension between his desires and his religious duty of "lowering the gaze" in the presence of women. "The Prophet(S) advised young men to fast if they can't get married but it has not been helping me much and I seriously don't want to wait for years before I get married," he wrote. At 18, he added, he had not started searching for prospective partners because of social norms such as having "a degree, a job, a house, etc. before getting married." But, he said, "my parents I know could help me financially should I get married, even though I think they are also not going to be in favour of early marriage." He also wrote of his "dilemma between liberalism and extremism" as a Muslim. "The Prophet (S) said religion is easy and anyone who tries to overburden themselves will find it hard and will not be able to continue," he wrote in 2005. "So anytime I relax, I deviate sometimes and then when I strive hard, I get tired of what I am doing i.e. memorising the quran, etc. How should one put the balance right?"
NTV's Richard Chacha spoke (below) to John Andruga Duku, the government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) head of mission in Kenya, about the modification made to the CPA bill underpinning the referendum vote in 2011 that will determine Southern Sudan's independence.
The NCP in saying northerners who claim ancestry in the South would register and vote wherever they are in northern Sudan or abroad reverses the SPLM’s position that those northerners who claim to qualify to have been southerners should move to the South for verification and confirmation by their respective local chiefs before they could qualify to register and vote within the South.
The Southern Sudan referendum law has been returned to the National Assembly and is expected to be passed on [today] in its original text as earlier agreed upon by the two parties.
Duku qualifies the modification move as "tantamount to rigging" the race even before the horse is out of the gate. He also compares the move to how Morocco was able to inflate the number of Moroccans in Western Sahara in anticipation of the referendum vote in 1992. How crucial this stage of the deliberations over identification and eligibility is, can be better grasped by looking back at a simple version of what happened in the case of Western Sahara's referendum:
The peace plan provided for a transition period, leading to a referendum in January 1992. Western Saharans would choose between independence and integration with Morocco... A key sticking point was an "identification process", to decide who was eligible to vote. Identification was to be based on a census carried out by Spain in 1973. Polisario wanted to rule out Moroccans who settled in Western Sahara after the Green March. In May 1996 the UN suspended the identification process and recalled most Minurso civilian staff. Military personnel stayed to oversee the truce. Initial attempts to revive the process foundered over Morocco's worries that a referendum would not serve its interests.
Development economic gurus Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, Esther Duflo of M.I.T and Dean Karlan of Yale give their take on micro lending on Nicholas Kristof NYT blog:
The effect on businesses is not dramatic but some clearly benefit. In the Philippines, male-owned businesses increase profits, although female-owned businesses do not. In India, borrowers who already own a business buy assets for their business. One borrower out of eight starts a business they would not have started otherwise. Others buy durables for their homes.
However, there is no evidence that microcredit has any effect on health, education, or women’s empowerment, at least right now, eighteen months after they got the loans. On the other hand, there is also no evidence that people are behaving irresponsibly. Indeed in India we have evidence of people giving up some of the little daily pleasures of life (like tea, snacks, betel leaves and tobacco), to pay for bigger things that they could not previously afford (carts for their business, televisions for their homes).
Yale PhD student Michael J. Anderson's dissertation is on the films of Howard Hawks and he pens in the current issue of Senses of Cinema [the awesome site is under reconstruction], what one could call the cinematic arc of the Hollywood Safari film genre [e.g. films like King Solomon’s Mines (1950), The African Queen (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), Mogambo (1953) and so on], arguing for how Hawks's came up with a unique and practical solution to the genre's endemic problem.
Frank Ukadike argued in his classic text Black African Cinema that because the simultaneous invention of the motion picture in Europe and America coincided with the height of imperialism and colonization, the "dominant image of Africa on Western screens was that of condescension and paternalism" -- and I'll add to that package the deep seated "fear of Africa" images Safari films played a huge role propagating.
I think Hollywood still revisits them from time to time, sometimes draped over with a romantic gauze as in Sydney Pollack's breathtaking Out of Africa (1985) [a favorite] or the true return to form in the Ghost and the Darkness (1996). Check out the trailer for Hawk's Hatari (1962) and I could swear Spielberg lifted shots from it for Jurassic Park (1993) -- that's how awesome the film is:
From what I recall from Ukadike and Diawara, the Safari film genre was predated by the Safari travelogue of which an early example was Theodore Roosevelt in Africa (1909). If the dream that inspires the safari picture is "to show real bodies in real African settings in real danger," then Roosevelt, who was born a sickly kid and later on in life relished the political image of himself as the charging rough rider, milked Africa for all the proximity to self inflicted danger one could get.
At any rate, those silent travelogue footage--i.e. Congorilla (1932) or I Married Adventure (1940)--I guess played like the newsreels shown before the actual film started and so I can see where Anderson is coming from when he says "the aesthetic problems that are endemic to safari film namely is:
...finding solutions for the difficulties presented by the form-defining presence of both documentary and non-documentary footage. To be sure, this inherent coexistence of ontologically distinct materials complicates both the narrative structures of these pictures, and also their respective visual appearances.
Anderson's paper then sets out to laud Howard Hawks for engineering the cinematic fix to this:
In Hatari!, however, Hawks has found new bases to integrate the action footage of the safari and the abutting narratives, thus reducing the form’s inhibiting seam. To put it another way, Hatari! more fully constructs the world (the diegesis) that all safari pictures struggle to shape... Hatari!, in short, introduces a form modelled on the experience of these shoots themselves, and, as such, a narrative structure that resolves the safari picture’s traditional disunity of documentary and fiction materials. That is, Hawks succeeds in minimizing this disunity by making a single document of the work and relaxation of a group of African animal catchers. All is Hawks’ brand of vacation filmmaking, be it the safaris, the drinking and singing, or even the coupling of the actors. Hawks’ picture lacks the hybridity of other safari pictures, as it is itself a document of its making.
In Johnathan Dee's recent review of J. M. Coetzee metabiographical novel, Summertime, he points to how earlier books like "Dusklands," "Waiting for the Barbarians" or "Disgrace" all contained important, offstage characters named Coetzee, thus, Coetzee is no stranger to the "impulse to metafictionalize himself."
But you've got to give it up for a man who is not only unsparing in his own self critique but can spin his own self denigration into silk:
"There was an air of seediness about him," says Julia, a married therapist who initiates an affair with the 30-ish Coetzee more or less out of revenge against her unfaithful husband, "an air of failure... In his lovemaking I now think there was an autistic quality."
Princeton University's Peter Singer and NYU Bill Easterly, he of the "White Man's Burden" fame, talk about International Aid and giving to development NGOs.
My version of Peter Singer's "drowning child" metaphor would be this:
Imagine you were walking across the park and you see a factory that shoots out children, like from out of a circus cannon, into the pond where they go on to drown; in other words, a "child drowning " factory and pond. So you look around and ask where are the parents or babysitters--or in this case, leaders--and what allows for such a system? On getting no answers, do you jump in the pond and try and save as many children as you can or do you take an axe to the factory and try to dismantle it? But there are costs to both. Jumping in the pond to save as many children as you can will ruin your Salvatore Ferragamo loafers on the one hand, and on the other hand it might end up creating a system of aid dependency not to mention tiring you out from the Sisyphean nature of jumping in that pond over and over again. Taking an axe to system will certainly require some sort of political or military intervention, which will, if you are a leader of some kind, cost you votes at home. Or you could also empower the people economically so they can forge an alternate economic reality and take the axe to the "child drowning" factory themselves.
"Fuck..." or its equivalent in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba or any of Nigeria's several other languages and dialects was without a doubt the thought that raced through the minds of Nigerians in the diaspora and at home the exact moment the whole world grasped who Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was -- and, for all Nigerians, following closely on the heels of that thought I bet was, "Shit, terrorism? Nigerian, please. As though we didn't have enough problems already."
Roey Rosenblith, who was on board and sat in seat 38J, recalled Abdulmutallab's fellow passengers--i.e. the potential victims he was about to render into pieces of the giant jigsaw crime scene puzzle NTSB agents would have been sorting out for months--at first couldn't accept Abdulmutallab was a terrorist and instead found it easier to believe he was a mad man who mistook Dec 25th for July 4th and somehow managed to smuggle his belated firecrackers on board the plane. Their going with the mad man scenario as they waited for the FBI agents at the airport wasn't because they were naive, dense, or liberals. Rather it was because they, like the collective Nigerian psyche on Saturday, could see the burden of the emerging plausibility. For the passengers it had to do with the realization that after security checks that bordered on mind reading, a mind entertaining plans to kill them all managed to get on board a plane, while for Nigerians everywhere it was the plausibility that this single minded individual did not only hail from their problem plagued acreage of the planet but that Nigerians now had a new avatar and with it a new upgrade and a whole new set of problems.
Apart from the obvious email scam jokes or that the father's warnings to the U.S. embassy may have been misconstrued as such, so far everyone is looking for their own silver lining here.
Prior to this incident, his father, having become concerned about his disappearance and stoppage ofcommunication while schooling abroad, reported the matter to the Nigerian security agencies about two months ago, and to some foreign security agencies about a month and a half ago, then sought their assistance to find and return him home -- We provided them with all the information required of us to enable them do this. We were hopeful that they would find and return him home. It was while we were waiting for the outcome of their investigation that we arose to the shocking news of that day. The disappearance and cessation of communication which got his mother and father concerned to report to the security agencies are completely out of character and a very recent development, as before then, from very early childhood, Farouk, to the best of parental monitoring, had never shown any attitude, conduct or association that would give concern. As soon as concern arose, very recently, his parents, reported it and sought help -- Statementfrom the Mutallab Family.
Thoughts from around the Nigerian blogosphere:
Reuben Abati sees the buck stopping with the father:
Mutallab, a former Federal Minister and bank chief, and father of the terrorist with Yemeni connections, has been quoted as saying that Mutallab, the son, is a problem child and that months ago, he had reported him to the US authorities. He is also said to be in Abuja assisting the Nigerian security agencies. Mutallab, the father, deserves our sympathies. This is at a private level, the story of his own failure and a lesson to all parents.
Nigerian Curiorsity sees itas a call for Nigerians to call their leaders to task:
Despite the growing facts that continue to be revealed about this story, some Nigerians continue to argue amongst themselves that Abdulmutallab is not really Nigerian, because no Nigerian wants to die. Others assert that no Nigerian is interested in waiting for his 72 virgins in Allah's heaven. Regardless of these theories, the reality is that Abdulmutallab is in fact a Nigerian, and he did detonate an incendiary device on an airplane carrying 278 people...
But, most importantly, it is Nigerians themselves who must overwhelmingly state that the "buck stops here" - with each individual. Abdulmutallab and other radical Nigerian Muslims are a product of a society that fuels rage and dissatisfaction. It just so happened that this instrument of terror was a rich child, which is understandable because a less connected or wealthy Nigerian would have been unable to get the travel documents necessary to attempt such an act. But, Boko Haram is a clear and recent reminder of what poverty, lack of adequate education or options ( both not a factor in Abdulmutallab's case), brainwashing and Islamic radicalization, and rich northern elites financing such endeavors can accomplish in little time.
Sugabelly 2.0 finds a silver lining -- for some Nigerians at least:
Rejoice!!!For the terror suspect is NOT Igbo
..... or Yoruba for that matter...
Olayinka Oyegbile, at Next, tables other Nigeria-al-Qaeda or extremist red flags:
In The Guardian on August 5, 2004, a front-page report linked an e-mail address, which was allegedly used by the Al-Qaeda group to Nigeria. In the report, which has not been denied, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was recently arrested in Pakistan, allegedly linked a particular e-mail address used by the group to Nigeria. As is customary with such shadowy groups, such addresses are used once or not frequently to prevent detection.
Reports have often claimed that terrorist operatives have been moving around the northern part of Nigeria. The Guardian report quoted a CNN and Fox News report which in turn quoted an American official as saying "United States forces said Khan told interrogators that Al-Qaeda uses websites and e-mail addresses in Turkey, Nigeria and tribal areas of Pakistan to pass messages among themselves." This is not the first time that Nigeria has been mentioned in reports that Al-Qaeda suspects have passed through the borders of the country. The Daily Independent reported in 2002 that an Al-Qaeda operative had lodged in a hotel in Kano.
Seye Abimbola over at Nigerians Talk, lists altercations between Northerners or Muslims in the deep South/Yoruba heartland and concludes:
Mild as these incidents were, what they show is that for these to happen in the liberal south, at the very bastion of southwestern Nigeria liberalism, you can imagine what possibly goes on in the north where some states already practice the Islamic Sharia legal system.
I don’t think that Umar did what he is alleged to have done simply because he is from a rich, privileged family or from northern Nigeria. He simply had good access to radicalising influences, or is it the other way round? There are thousands of Nigerians, I’m sure, who would go the same way if only they had the same kind of access Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had, and we should not be oblivious of this important fact as we discuss
this unfortunate incident.
People are party to ideology/religion in order to be part of something larger than their own bodies. A lot has been said about Abdulmutallab, and I won’t pretend to know exactly what his particular aims were. But I do not share the media’s inclination to morph terrorists into monsters that carry Qur’ans. They’re human. That is all. And the way to defeat them, in Nigeria or abroad, is to do what they do not – render them human, and defeat them as human.
Neeoma sees a connection between Islam's mandated giving of alms and the ready army of "child beggars" the practice tends create in Nigeria's Muslim North:
While Abdulmutallab defies this stereotype, it has been well-established that a reduction in poverty may not necessarily correlate to a decrease in terrorist tendencies. A significant portion of international jihadist participants tend to be more well-educated and wealthier in comparison to the general population. Additionally, the educated and wealthy are more likely to view international terrorist attacks as “justified.” In response to NigerianCuriosity’s latest post, I argued the proliferation of child beggars in Nigeria could serve as a breeding ground for future conflicts and by extension, acts of terrorism. While this may hold true for local acts of terrorism within Nigeria’s borders, international attacks, such as that of December 25th, warrants a new paradigm.
Minster of Justice Garba Lompo announced the arrest warrants would be activated for former President Mahamane Ousmane, former Prime Minister Hama Amadou and Mahamadou Issoufou, the leader of the main opposition party. "From this day onwards all those people having warrants against them will be arrested if they come to Niger," said Mr Lompo. The BBC's Idy Baraou, in Niamey, says few people expect the crisis talks to go any further.
Niger went ahead with boycotted local elections on Sunday despite increasing international isolation of President Mamadou Tandja over his move to extend his rule over the Saharan uranium-producer... "These elections are the latest step undertaken by the illegal and illegitimate rule of Tandja," the CFDR grouping of opposition parties and trade unions said in a statement urging voters to boycott the municipal vote.
Apparently, our terror suspect is an Arsenal fan. This Day's Imam Imam reports from Funtua, Katsina, Nigeria:
Abdulfarouk Umar Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian at the centre of a failed attempt to bomb an airliner, is just like the guy next door - a basketball player and a football fan.
His favourite club is the Arsenal Football Club of England. A former domestic staff of the Mutallabs, Basiru Hamza, described Farouk as a jovial person who takes much interest in his books. "He is religious and holds strong views on many things.
He likes basketball and his favorite soccer club is Arsenal FC. Later in life, when he became very religious, he started talking less and less about sports. One topic he always talks about is international politics. He holds strong views about United States and Israel. "The last time I saw him was four years ago in Kaduna, but I am really surprised to hear that he wanted to blow up a plane. I know he used to be religious, but I never imagined he would have the nerves to kill someone.
On behalf of those who waited till the DVD hit shelves, blogger Akin shares his thoughts on District 9:
The inability of Nigerians to suffer a modicum of self-deprecation or a joke at our expense just made the whole thing ridiculous, the Minister of Information’s intervention with the banning of the film in Nigeria was a publicity coup for Sony. In the end, there is a part of the Nigerian psyche depicted which was as truthful and it was bitter to accept, there are people who would do anything to attain power, even supernatural power and if aliens would provide that means, there would purveyors of snake-oil remedies that promise such powers.
Sadly, the DVD I watched was bought in Nigeria, whilst the packaging looked like an original product with all the trimmings, it was the first time I could not watch a supposedly internationally released DVD on my system without glitches that jumped scenes, skewed conversation and even froze on my computer. I would hate to think Nigerians had also bootlegged a DVD that portrayed them in bad light – Now, that would not be funny at all.
Feels like the least of Nigerians' problems right now.
Trinity College's James Hughes and IO9 editor Annalee Newitiz discuss the age old question that always rears its head in cultural analysis: do you go Adorno and Horkheimer and simply assume it is a "Culture Industry" and we are the willing pawns of "mass deception" or is the "culture industry" and their texts the pawns being moved by the hands of cultural trends and zeitgeists, even if you go all Ronald Barthes on the artist/author ass?
I wouldn't even separate "culture industry" from "society" in trying to do analysis and always like to think of the culture industry as the ideological as well as speculative arm of any society; in any capitalist framework the culture industry and its practitioners help us, on behalf of mass understanding, deepen ideological entrenchment or help us find new uses for tropes and stereotypes. But most importantly they also help society innovate its way out of the problems caused by the earlier forms of mass cognition by enabling art and the artist, according to McLuhan, become the society's diviner and prophet:
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
UNESCO is expanding a scheme that aims to slow the brain drain of African and Arab researchers by giving them access to global scientific networks and computing power.
The 'Brain Gain Initiative', set up in partnership with computer firm Hewlett-Packard, enables researchers to collaborate with experts around the world through grid and cloud computing and so boost loyalty to the local science and technology effort.
...making it easier to perform data/compute intensive analyses that requires employing different parallel runtimes to implement such applications--i.e. Maryam Kontagora's work--on the continent.
We finally get the longer version of this Reuters report for the African Journal. Marie Lora digs into why, according to America's national Census Bureau, close to 44% of Africans living in the US have a college degree, compared to 23% of the US population, making them the community with the highest rate of academic achievement in the States:
Same goes for the Ivy Leagues in this2004 NYT article:
Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement of minority students at 28 selective colleges and universities (including theirs, as well as Yale, Columbia, Duke and the University of California at Berkeley), found that 41 percent of the black students identified themselves as immigrants, as children of immigrants or as mixed race.
For those willing to use these numbers to make their case that there's something wrong with the fundamentals of Affirmative Action or with native Blacks, the article offers some added context:
Mary C. Waters, the chairman of the sociology department at Harvard, who has studied West Indian immigrants, says they are initially more successful than many African-Americans for a number of reasons. Since they come from majority-black countries, they are less psychologically handicapped by the stigma of race. In addition, many arrive with higher levels of education and professional experience. And at first, they encounter less discrimination.
"You need a philosophical discussion about what are the aims of affirmative action,'' Professor Waters said. "If it's about getting black faces at Harvard, then you're doing fine. If it's about making up for 200 to 500 years of slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you're not doing well. And if it's about having diversity that includes African-Americans from the South or from inner-city high schools, then you're not doing well, either."
Ta-Nehisi agrees with Waters and the guy in the report:
I think anyone with any serious knowledge of how immigration works, understands the problem with comparing self-selecting group to a native mass. Indeed, if you follow through ... you'll note that immigrant blacks aren't just doing better in these areas than native-born blacks, they're doing better than whites also
Oops, btw, Nigerians, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, lead the way amongst Africans studying in the U.S:
In 2008 there were 35,654 Africans studying in the United States. They made up 5.7 percent of all foreign students in the U.S. Among black African nations, Nigeria in 2007-08 sent the most students to American colleges and universities. In 2007-08, 6,222 Nigerians were studying here. Nigerian enrollments are up by more than one third over the past five years. Kenya ranked second, sending 5,838 students to the United States.
Speaking at the 3rd Lawful Rebellion Conference, London, 31st October 2009, U.K based lawyer and author of the recently published The Law, the Lawyers and the Lawless, Dele Ogun, brings some of Nigeria's experiences to bear on elections in places of "strategic interest" to the envagelicals of democracy.
...elections in places of strategic interest, like Afghanistan, are spelt with the "S" at the beginning - "selection." First you identify the winner in your own strategic interest. Then you organize somethinng that can pass off as an election in order to legitimize the chosen one. We know it because this is what happens in elections in Nigeria all the time; the winner is chosen and then the parade is organized -- Dele Ogun
Mduduzi Leon Ntuli, born in 1982 on August 31 in a small town called Witbank in Mpumalanga, South Africa, is the brains behind Mdu comics and Mdu Animation. Rest of his bio here.
Genndy Tartakovsky meets Jamie Hewlett meets Ed, Edd and Eddy
Africa Unchained yesterday pointed to research by Caroline Freund and Nadia Rocha. They argue that delays in inland transport are the most crucial factor restricting Sub-Saharan Africa's trade and policy makers’ focus on foreign trade policy and further decrease in trade tarrifs may be misguided.
The USAID and West Africa Trade Hub presentation, below, on "The Sahel Supply Chain" gives Freund and Rocha an open and shut case.
Then, according to the IRTG report(blogged - here), there is also that issue of police check points and bribery.
David Smith's travel piece (blogged here) on Antananarivo talked about the jamming together of achitectures and influences without rhyme or reason,Stephen Greenwood, who is currenty photographing and blogging about Antananarivo, focuses on the French influence:
In Antananarivo, the French colonial influence is everywhere: spired churches sit atop the city's prominent hills. Pretty jacaranda trees line Lake Anosy, which wraps around a war memorial statue in the center of the water. A large defunct train station sits negelected at the end of a wide boulevard. The sign below the grand clock spells the city's old French name: "Tananarive". Horse-drawn carriages and 1960's Renault and Citroën taxis jam the stone-covered roads, with crackling radios blaring out a french news broadcast. In this sense, Antananarivo feels like a fractured, soiled apparition of Paris.
USAID has up the 9th IRTG (Improved Roads and Transport Governance) report (PDF) put together in conjuction with the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEOMA) and Ecowas. The IRTG monitors trends in road harassment on the Tema-Ouagadougou, Ouagadougou-Bamako, Lomé-Ouagadougou and Bamako-Dakar corridors with the aim of eliminating the barriers, delays and bribes, which affect drivers along major interstate trade routes in West Africa. Its conclusion:
Generally speaking, the Police (greatest bribe takers) have the most negative impact on the corridors as far as extorting bribes from drivers is concerned, and the same could be said for the Gendarmerie. The Customs service in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali and Togo should copy Senegal’s example: The Senegalese Customs service operates just one checkpoint on the Bamako-Dakar corridor. As for the agents purporting to collect penalties from drivers for overloading their vehicles, the data this quarter shows the problem abating except along the Ouagadougou-Bamako and Bamako-Dakar corridors where the value of bribes these agents collected represented 25% and 19%, respectively, of the total bribes collected on these corridors. This return to normal should be followed by the effective enforcement of UEMOA’s axle-load rules.
Al Jazeera's Yvonne Ndege reports from Lagos on how anticipation of a deregulated market, broken down--...sabotaged...cough...--refineries and the maze of rent seekers create a "false impression of scarcity" during one of the busiest seasons of the year.
And, btw, we are now told even his cabinet ministers have no access to him and (UPDATE) info minister Dora--Mrs. Rebranding--Akunyili just said:
Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at State Philip Crowley takes a question on Guinea at 38.43 mins in and uses the opp to get out Foggy Bottom's talking points about the thorougness of the UN/Campore report. An interesting question about Morocco granting Guinea's wounded junta leader Dadis Camara asylum also came up. And, yeah, there was that poor attempt by Crowley at 3.39 mins in to inject a little holiday humor into a State Department Daily Press Briefing -- impossible, and, btw, is just me or does the press corps at State always look pissed, like they would rather be at the White House or anywhere but? Below, US. Amb 2 UN Susan Rice had more to say on Guinea:
In response to President Tandja's refusal to relinquish his mandate, the United States is suspending its non-humanitarian assistance to the Government of Niger. The Secretary of State has imposed travel restrictions on certain members of the Government of Niger, as well as other individuals who support policies or actions that undermine Niger's return to constitutional rule. We continue to extend our support and friendship to the people of Niger, and look forward to resuming all forms of assistance following Niger's return to constitutional rule.
Recently discovered this NPR piece from '06. Seattle based filmmaker Celia Beasley packed it all up and moved to Madagascar. In this heart warming radio piece on NPR she talks about succumbing to expensive Western styled supermarkets in order to avoid the bewildering, though much cheaper, world of the open air market. But what she found most intimidating about the Malagasy markets was the art of haggling. Listen:
After surveying my fiance's Malagasy co-workers and got an approximate price for a kilo of bananas--1,600 ariary, about 80 cents. I marched up to the closest produce stand and asked for a kilo of bananas... Three thousand ariary. 'That's the foreigner price,' I said, and you know what she did? She nodded. (laughter) 'I want the Malagasy price,' I said... Huh? She'd given me the Malagasy price all right in Malagasy. I realized then that bargaining isn't just about getting the lowest price. It's about having a human interaction. She was telling me that I have to earn the Malagasy price, and just like that, we'd established a relationship. Sure, I can shop only at supermarkets where I know I'll get the same price as everyone else, but there's nothing challenging or human about that.
fyi: I think everyone, even Africans, start out as Westerners when it comes to haggling. It is a 3 part art: it's an ethical as well as social instinct (human interaction), a type of general knowledge (of foods, prices and seasons) and a skill (negotiation). But contrary to what Celia thought, traders in African cities will readily tell you that Westerners, once they've gotten the hang of haggling, turn into cutthroat hagglers.
I think it's because, being foreign, you always think you are being had (and most of the time you are) and also because if you don't speak the lanuage you are prevented from partaking in the full range of human interaction that will properly earn you the deserving low price. So foreigners tend to go with the third part and approach the haggle as tough negotiators, quoting a ridiculously low price, sticking to their guns, bumming the trader out until he or she gives in or refuses to continue with the back and forth.
First the Ecowas' dismissal of August's referendum and the call for Tandja to step down yesterday, then came the strikes...
I'm still sticking to the "smell the uranium" post from yesterday, but, dang!, Ecowas telling Tandja yesterday that "henceforth your government is illegal" is truly "unprecedented." Of course, Tandja's predictable response.
Above, BBC talks to South Africa Institute for Security Studies researcher Isiaka Sware about yesterday's pronouncement. In the interview he explains why in contrast to international sanctions against Zimbabwe this freeze out of Tandja carries more bite (Niger belongs to a West Africa bloc where, probably, by the end of 2010 every West African will be carrying a passport with an Ecowas seal) and also confirms that:
This is the first time ever in Africa that a sitting president has been considered as such by an intergovernmental organization; the first time also in Africa that a member state has been suspended on issues of governance...
You get the feeling that like with Koffi and ICC versus Kenya, Ecowas, perhaps, sees in Niger the opportunity to do 2 things: 1) break an embarassing cycle and 2) set a precedent. But then whether Tandja has the balls to give Ecowas the finger or not depends on 3 things: Uranium, France and China. Hopefully, Ecowas wields a bigger stick.
A charitable interpretation says that Graham, in his discussion of Medicaid, is citing his states' black population because we tend to be disproportionately poor. But this would be like discussing Medicare by citing your state's sweater-knitting population because they tend to be disproportionately old. It's probably much worse--most sweater-knitters may well be on Medicare, but most black people aren't actually poor or on Medicaid. And so what your left with, again charitably, is a kind of mental laziness, and weak, mealy-mouthed, factually wrong conflation of black people and the poor.
A lot of bourgeois Negroes, like myself, spend too much time being offended by this kind of conflation. In fact the people who should be offended are the white people Lindsay Graham represents. The charitable interpretation rest on the invisibility of white suffering. It rests on the erasure of Clay County. It rests on the notion that the white poor are not merely the white poor, but white trash. It's a formula that straps the anchor of stereotyped black America, to much larger population of white Americans and then drops them in the Mississippi. It's a con that asks large swaths of white folks to suffer poverty in shame and silence.
In response to Republican senator Linday Graham, arguing that in the face of a large population of poor and unemployed there will be an unbearable strain on states if medicaid was expanded to cover more people, and in making his case, he quotes the number of black people in his state of South Carolina. Thus, in making such an equation, he does not only use blackness as a stand-in for poverty and unemployment, he also makes it its sole signifier.
...includes--you guessed right--"An Elegy for Easterly," which, according to John Freeman, contains:
Gappah's wry, corrugated-metal prose debut covers the spectrum of life in Zimbabwe today through the daily dramas of jealous wives, children hankering from a bauble from abroad, and snooty emigrants who have come home to Africa after years in the U.S. Gappah is an earthy, evocative stylist, with a startling range of storytelling styles... A writer who can strike bone this solidly can tell us just about anything.
"In 1946 when Marty was four, he asked his mother to take him to King Vidor's Western epic Duel in the Sun. The film was condemned by the church. Once the church made its decision, the decree was printed in the church newspaper to warn all good Catholics to stay away. The movie contained sin. If Catholics disobeyed, they would be committing a sin that would count against their souls. Many Catholics went to see the condemned film anyway. Duel in the Sun--nicknamed 'Lust in the Dust' had a sexy poster image of handsome Gregory Peck and a sultry Jennifer Jones.
Marty let the movie affect his senses and emotions. Dimitri Tiomkin's orchestral score made Marty feel he was watching a horror movie and he became frightened. At the end two people so in love that they had to kill each other. Marty couldn't look up at the screen; the picture entered the forbidden zone of real emotion beyond religion of societal law. The sensitive boy understood the feelings projected on the screen and it over-whelmed him. Catherine, in textbook Italian-American mother tradition, saw Marty averting his eyes and yelled, 'Look at it; you took me here to see it, now watch it'" -- from Martin Scorsese: a biography By Vincent LoBrutto
Martin Scorsese' has a much better version of his first encounter with January Jones in My Personal Journey through American Movies. Jones played a mixed race temptress to Peck's cast against type wild one. With the film's horror music and the whole color technicolor scheme back then, you'd think Jones was painted into each frame of the film by Delacroix. Oh, and it also had Butterfly McQueen. Jennifer Jones - RIP.
This "racist web cam" clip has already johnny blazed the "internets," but just in case I finally split my sides from laughing so hard, I wanted the culprit within reach. Apparently, HP managed to invent a web cam that can pan and keep track of a user's face -- only white faces though:
For those who thought this was a joke or a hoax, CS Monitorthinks not and adds that this should sound a note of caution to companies innovating a new generation of highly interactive machines and software:
Now, a new range of game controllers and input devices completely does away with buttons, remotes, and control sticks. Microsoft's "Natal," tentatively slated for release in late 2010, uses just a series of cameras and sensors to capture a user's movements and translate them into onscreen actions. Natal could be a firecracker or a flop, but in light of HP's very public webcam episode, its designers should make sure that Natal works with people of all skin colors, wearing whatever they like.
Above is a montage cut together from last year's Rwanda Film Festival. Piotr A. Cieplak writes in Senses of Cinema about this year's fest, which rolled through the country from the 12th to 28th of June:
Local film directors agree that the culture of filmmaking in modern Rwanda took off after the genocide. Foreign TV crews, filmmakers and journalists started arriving in unprecedented numbers. And even though on many occasions they got their stories wrong and ended up with little more than a collection of stereotypes, they left two important things behind: a nucleus of people trained and interested in film production, and an awareness that if Rwandans did not tell their stories, then someone else would...
The rural screenings and the Kigali part of Hillywood differed so much that it almost felt like two separate festivals. The three main venues in the capital were upmarket cafes and restaurants with the audience dominated by expatriates, NGO workers and a few middle-class Rwandans. The fourth spot, Kigali’s lively working-class district of Nyamirambo, had a different feel. But the attendance was not impressive.
This is one of the biggest problems the Rwandan film industry faces: the absence of a paying audience. The reasons for this are manifold, ranging from lack of disposable (and on many occasions, any) income and the fact that paid-for entertainment is still a relatively new concept. Kabera says: “in Kigali, we are still building a cinema culture. It’s a part of a long-term plan.”
Cieplak notes that Chaplin was a hit at this year’s touring festival and describes what sounds like the Rwandan version of the Benshi narrating/translating the intertitles to Kinyarwanda:
The programmers included extracts from Modern Times and The Kid, and both had the audience rolling on the floor in spasms of laughter. The enjoyment was aided by a radio DJ Cyril Ndegeya, who narrated the images and translated the intertitles in Kinyarwanda, creating a peculiar and hilarious freestyle polemic with the silent images. There was, indeed, something magical about watching Chaplin wave his little walking-stick on a huge inflatable screen on a moonlit Rwandan hill.
Everyone hasheard of "cool runnings" Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong who will compete in the Vancouver Games next year. He has some interesting things to say about Africa's need to marry sports to education:
