Morocco/Kenya: Building Africa's Largest Wind Farm

Kenya was planning to build 365 giant wind turbines in the desert around Lake Turkana in northern Kenya (backdrop for the film The Constant Gardener (2005), creating the biggest windfarm in Africa. But it seems Morocco's  $250 million Melloussa wind farm, inaugurated by King Mohammed VI a few days ago, beat the Kenyans to it. Below, Morocco's National Office of Electricity (NEB) talking of plans back in '08 to develop renewable energies -- 25 billion dirhams to be invested over a period of five years.



And it is also worth noting,  as this report from MoroccoBoard reminds us, that "Morocco is the only North African country without oil" thus the added motivation "... to reduce its dependence on imported oil and coal, by generating energy from renewables."

It's kind of inspiring picturing Ralph Fiennes, in the final scene from Constant Gardner below, walking through the future desert around Lake Turkana, but now populated by thousands of wind mills. And maybe William Kamkwamba even passes by and says, "hi."

Africa: T'Challa, Cont'd

Just saw the first 2 episodes of Marvel's animated series, The Black Panther, on Itunes -- voiced by Djimon Hounsou (Africa's James Earl Jones :-). New trailer - here.

Here's why, aside from the incredible cast, I thought the character and the series are freakin' important. Here's what the good folks over at S&A thought of it. Wouldn't judge it by the previews though, not to mention the Condoleezza-esque character running the U.S war room was priceless. Ha, ha... she might as well be Amanda Waller. For those out there without Itunes, thanks to readers, you can catch the first 2 episodes--b4 some copyright holder takes them down :-)--after the jump. Enjoy:

Mali/United States: Fashion. Textiles. Cotton Subsidies

For those who haven't caught Amanda Martinez' short doc at HautefashionAfrica, it is an interesting look at African high-end fashion centers and the rural textile supply. Going into it, you will recall that second hand clothing dumped in African countries (especially from the U.S) helped kill African textile industries, which couldn't compete and,...




...in the doc, you get the sense that African high-end designers, looking for an edge, are seeking out the continent unique textiles, in this case Bogolan produced in Mali. The rest of the doc shows how U.S. cotton subsidies have decimated the Malian cotton and textile industry.

Like with conflict minerals, Africans are more the victim of global economics than anything else. More on U.S. farm subsidies - here.

Morocco: Africa-Thelonious Monk Connection

Brooklyn native and jazz pianist Randy Weston did not only incorporate African music into his compositions but settled in Tangier, Morocco, where he operated his African Rhythms club for seven years. Below he talks to Marian McPartland on NPR about Monk and the Duke...



... about how he wanted to live in Africa. There's a bit in there about how he might have ended up in Nigeria, which he visited in '63-4, but there was the Biafra war going on. So he ended up going back to Morocco which was the last country he toured in '67.



Weston on the Africa-Thelonious Monk connection:

 My good friend, the bassist Ahmad Abdul-Malik's people were from the Sudan, and he played the oud, which has this thing of playing notes between the notes," Weston says. "I couldn't get that sound on the piano. But when I heard Thelonious Monk play, I heard this same magic on the piano; even his way of swinging had that same element."

Ghana/ United States: Wikipedia Sour Grapes - Last Country Standing/Celebrating, Cont'd

Still on American soccer fans pissed off at Ghana (here/here), looks like some of them got to Ghana's wiki entry...

...before it got locked down:

lol.

H/T: Daily Dish

South Africa: "Poverty Doesn't Care About Color", Cont'd

Kerri Macdonald at NYT's Lens discusses a longer gallery of Reuters photojournalist Finbarr O’Reilly's pictures, which highlight the plight of South Africa's poor Afrikaner populations. O'Reilly:

The story has rarely been told. But it has been on his radar since a 1994 backpacking trip through Africa, when he noticed a number of poor white South Africans begging for change at traffic lights. "I started asking around and saying, ‘What’s going on here?’" Mr. O’Reilly said over the phone from Dakar, Senegal, where he’s based. "It’s not a new phenomenon, but the numbers seem to be more apparent than they were in the past."

The pics appear to be of Afrikaners in Coronation Park, Krugersdorp. A week or so before the Terre'Blanche debacle, TimesLive cameras followed Jacob Zuma to the Afrikaner community at Bethlehem informal settlement in Pretoria West - here.

Africa: How Would Apple Approach "Frugal Design"?

Dayo Olopade is in awe of the day-to-day efficiencies the features incorporated into the Apple iphone 4G--e.g. facetime--could bring to ongoing development efforts or to the lives of small business owners in many African countries -- but evidently Apple has no strategy in place for Africa's $6 billion, by 2011, mobile phone market:

But for the vast majority of Africans, Apple effectively doesn't exist. The iTunes store's music offerings have never been available on the continent; African IP addresses are blocked. The iPhone goes for $1,000 at local retailers -- 10 times the current U.S. price for the same model, a big-enough markup that most iPhones on the continent are purchased abroad instead -- and because of limited bandwidth and apps availability, owning one is "like having a Maserati in traffic," according to Tayo Oviosu, CEO of Pagatech, a mobile banking firm in Nigeria.

What unleashed the mobile market in Africa is the pay-as-you-go model; the guess is Iphones in Africa are like owing "Maseretis" cause carriers can't lock the vast majority of consumers into subscription deals. At any rate, whoever it is at Apple whose job it is to come up with its African mobile market strategy, I suggest he or she watch the Economist into below on designing or innovating for emerging markets:



But I must say, it would be interesting to see how Jobs and Ive would approach the whole idea of "frugal" or "humanitarian" design?

Africa: Soccer Pan-Africanism

The crew at the Daily Dish flagged this portion of Dayo Olopade's "Why Are 53 Countries Rooting for Ghana?" article at the Atlantic...:

Suddenly, pan-African solidarity appears to trump major differences in culture, history and geography. But why? In similar circumstances, would the United States (out of the running) cheer the Mexican team (out), or the South Koreans (out) root for Japan (still kicking)? The answer is probably not--and suggests that the myth of "Africa" is more seductive than even Africans want to admit.

...Which I couldn't resist bringing together with a video Africa is a Country put up last week showing another Nigerian writer talking to someone who looks like Binyavanga Wainaina rocking a frohawk about the inverse relationship between Africa's World Cup defeats and increase in pan-Africanist spirit:

Nigeria: Ikeja, Lagos, in 2059, Cont'd

Recall this Nollywood take on the Lagos of 2059? According to Bella Naija, the sci-fi flick now has a release date -- and posters. We liked the one below:

DRC: This Revolution Will Be Embedded

DRC is 50. Belgium based-Congo hip hop artist Baloji's Independence Cha-Cha (Le Jour d'Apres / Siku Ya Baadaye) seems appropriate, no?




Anyway, here he is with Orchestre de la Katuga rocking the stage at the Ancienne Belgique this year:



Recall his "Karibu ya Bintou" video which johnny-blazed the Afrique-blogosphérique ;-) (More - here) a few months back?



... below, Belgium's Moodio TV catches up with his current projects (Fr):

DRC: FP's Birthday Card

The DRC is 50 years old. FP had Joe Bavier write the birthday card. Bavier, in the sad light of activist Floribert Chebeya "assassination", sees in president Joseph Kabila...

...[t]he second coming of Mobutu should be a major cause for concern for Congo's destitute population -- not to mention the prospects of establishing lasting peace in the region. But apparently, it isn't. If the IMF goes ahead with the expected cancellation of the bulk of the country's $13.1 billion debt in the coming weeks, Kabila will get an added boost as he opens his campaign for a second and, in theory final, term. "I see Kabila winning a second election, with the West overlooking violence and fraud that does not rise to levels which would be unacceptable politically, and then settling back into the same routine of attempting quiet diplomacy while he continues to consolidate power," a former Kinshasa-based diplomat told me. "And then I expect a lot of feigned surprise when Kabila forces through changes to the constitution which enable him to stay in power beyond his second term."

For more on the Flori Chebeya "murder. Alex Engwete was all over it.

Africa: Calling Out the NGOs, Relief Agencies and Governments

The argument has already been made that Africa needs to start seeing its poverty as foreign governments when away from TV cameras and microphones see it - as an asset or resource. In the case of Somalia, Rasna Warah, writing in the Nation and citing from former peace corp volunteer Michael Maren's The Road to Hell, indicts foreign NGOs, relief agencies and governments of being complicit in the dysfunctional economics that has helped gut the country:

Maren claims that all the aid agencies in Somalia knew that relief food was being stolen, but neglected to mention this fact in their reports or during fund-raising campaigns because millions of dollars and thousands of jobs were at stake. He says that neither the US Government nor USAid officials were interested in his revelations, perhaps because, as this month's New African magazine suggests, all of the United States' food aid programmes "are designed to develop and expand commercial outlets for US commodities in world markets". Journalists, on the other hand, he writes, seemed more concerned about writing of starving children than about how aid was being used to arm militia. Maren asserts that all interventions in Somalia -- whether by NGOs, UN agencies or governments -- had the unintended impact of financing the destruction of the country. Maren, who worked as a food monitor for a USAid project in Somalia in the early 1980s, says that many farmers abandoned their land to live in camps, where the food was free and where the opportunities to sell food were greater. This severely impacted on local agricultural production.

Now, I'm sure you are asking yourself the old question, why, instead of exporting corn from Nebraska to Somalia, U.S aid money can't buy the food locally and boost the local agriculture eco system and value added chain? In case you missed these old vids, check out foreign aid expert Bill Easterly and an Al-Shabaab spokesman of all people lay it all out:

DRC: It's the Economics of It, Stupid

Pendergast and the "conflict mineral" lobby go after Apple.



... which makes sense because even though Apple is the biggest fish in the tech pond, it is still the most vulnerable because it trades in "brand" and "perception" -- things that don't go too well with rape and conflict. Also Apple's clientele of early adopters and trendsetters are also the kind of people who give 2 shits about how their tomatoes were grown or meat was grazed, and are likely to be concerned what kind of minerals go into their blackberries and iphones. UPDATE: Steve Jobs' response over at Kristof's blog.



Perhaps it's time to add a new assumption to Moore's Law and technology's S-curve -- that the sustainability of exponential rates and product life cycles associated with such predictions about tech innovation indirectly requires that there be places like the Congo. One could argue that because the tech industry needs an insatiable amount of rare minerals to fuel the exponential increases in processing speed, memory capacity and pixelation that go into electronic hardware, hence it stands to reason that if places like the Congo didn't exist, heck, we would have to invent them.

Ghana/ United States: Sour Grapes - Last Country Standing/Celebrating, Cont'd

Some Americans are still sour at Team USA losing to Ghana, hilarious tweets ensue:

Ok Ghana you win again. Tell you what...Double or nothing over women's tennis, basketball, hockey, war, baseball, golf, swimming, diving, oil spills, box office proceeds, internet porn sites, criminals incarcerated, women's downhill, bass fishing, NASCAR, or GDP?

Meanwhile, VOA's Ndimyake Mwakalyelye was at a Ghanaian restaurant in Virginia and cameras caught all the joy and dedications to Ghana's first president and anti-colonial fighter, Kwame Nkrumah:



Still on sour Americans, Gawker came across the guy below, who uses America's loss to Ghana as the starting "S" or point in some strained, Beckian, twisted six degrees of separation, connecting "soccer" to "Satan" to "socialism":



As one of the "non African American Negroes" he referred to, I'm speechless.

H/T: Daily Dish &Gawker

South Africa: Can't Fight the Vuvu', Cont'd

Apparently dogs don't think much of the vuvuzela either:



H/T: Daily Dish.

Africa/ United States: Got Your Goat (Meat)

From an African perspective, these videos from the Atlantic's food channel, looking at how goats are raised in the States and how to go about getting your hands on the smelly billy goat meat, were oddly interesting.

Somaliland: "Rare Haven of Stability" Doesn't Run on Qat

Blink and you'd missed it, but last Saturday's election turned all our attention on Somaliland for that mere second. Calling it the "rare haven of stability in Somalia," even NYT's Gettleman had some kind words:

Because Somaliland is not recognized as an independent country, it is very difficult for the government here to secure international loans, even though it has become a regional model for conflict resolution and democratic-institution building — buzzwords among Western donors. In many respects, Somaliland is already its own country, with its own currency, its own army and navy, its own borders and its own national identity, as evidenced by the countless Somaliland T-shirts and flags everywhere you look. Part of this stems from its distinct colonial history, having been ruled, relatively indirectly, by the British, while the rest of Somalia was colonized by the Italians, who set up a European administration. Italian colonization supplanted local elders, which might have been one reason that much of Somalia plunged into clan-driven chaos after 1991, while Somaliland succeeded in reconciling its clans. Clan is not the prevailing issue in this election. The three presidential candidates (Somaliland’s election code says only three political parties can compete, and they take turns campaigning from day to day) are from different clans or subclans. Yet, many voters do not seem to care.

IRIN asked the voters what they care about here, and their answers ranged from concerns about "qat" to rural development. While the NYT's pictures of Burao don't show you much and many reports about Somaliland fail to mention it, but one of the reasons this nothern region of Somalia-at least cities like Hageisha---have been able to run an economy in the horn of Africa to power their so called "rare haven of stability" is via investment from the diaspora and the growth of money transfer businesses facilitating remittances:



Sigh. The many stories NYT and Gettleman can't tell.

Sierra leone: Forna On Aftermath Characters

Scottish-Sierra Leonean writer Aminatta Forna talks with the BBC's Bola Mosuro about the history professor and British psychologist characters in her book, The Memory of Love. Helon Habila's review in the Guardian, however, dwells on a different character:

Others, like Agnes, end up in the lunatic asylum. Of all the stories of loss in the book, none is so harrowing as hers. She witnessed her husband's beheading by rebel soldiers, lost two daughters and, when she returns home after the war, she finds her only surviving daughter married to the soldier who beheaded her husband. They all have to live together, victim and perpetrator, and pretend it never happened. But there is no fooling the mind. Agnes periodically loses her senses and wanders away from home.

DRC: Congo at Fifty, Illustrated

I recall pointing out here how the DRC spits out as many comic book artists as it spits out the rare conflict minerals that go in your cellphone. To further the point, a very kind reader pointed us in the direction of Belgium based DRC artist Jason Kibiswa's blog, which has great pics of the presentation of the Africalia edited and Roularta published graphic novel, Congo 50, to journalists at the Centre for the Comic Strip (CBBD) in Belgium a few days ago as part of the events marking the 50th anniversary of Congo's independence.

The book follows the lives of twins, a boy and a girl, born on the day of independence and we get to follow them on Congo's turbulent journey through a cascade of 8 stories, spanning '66 to the present, executed by 8 Congolese artists: Asimba Bathy, Cara Bulaya, Jules Baïsole, Didier Kawende, Fati Kabuika, Djemba Djeis, Tshamala Tetshim, Jason Kibiswa. More on making - here.

Ghana/ United States: Last Country Standing/Celebrating, Cont'd

An American on twitter goes:

Fuck Ghana. We have a higher GDP and a lower infant mortality rate than them, so fuck 'em.

If nothing else, thank you Ghana for pissing off some Yank that freakin' much.

Digging back through the archives, the best Ghanaian response I could come up with will have to be the "This is Ghana... This is Ghana" comment recorded on the streets of Accra moments after the Ghanians won the FIFA under 20 World Cup in '09:



Now I wish someone will do a YouTube mashup of that scene in "300" and substitute Gerald Butler's "This is Sparta" with the Ghanaian screaming, "This is Ghana."

Africa: Humor in the Context of Black Modernity, Cont'd

Stand up comic Louis C.K has a new show premiering on FX and one of the show's promos about a girl's reasons for wanting to date older men  is hilarious and dovetails nicely into his stand up bit on the difference btw women and girls. But its his "love being white"/ Black People can't fu*%k with time machines routine (above) that will have you falling out of your chair, laughing till your sides hurt.

Hence this sort of falls under our whole series on "humor in the context of black modernity" and raises the question of how do whites get away with awkwardness of making fun of blacks and the tragedy of race without setting off sirens of the PC police? South African standup comics below continue their thoughts on the matter, suggesting it's all about the angle and finding a way to do it respectfully:

Guinea: An Election 52 Years in the Making

With Guinea-Bissua's military running that Guinea as a narco-traffiking state, saving  the other Guinea has become integral to the stability of the region. So little surprise when the chance materialized to change the course in Guinea-Conakey, the Guineans, their West African neighbours and the international community went right for the jugular. Thus a desperate move by Lt. Aboubacar “Toumba” Diakite to avoid being the fall guy of the UN investigation into the September 09 stadium massacre, produced a bullet that grazed junta leader Cap. Dadis Camara's dome and created the gap the Guinean opposition and foreign governments have been looking for to wedge in and push for polls, hence breaking Guinea's 52 year military strangle hold. Had the bullet gone a few inches to the left, who knows, tomorrow's elections might have been much further down the road.

IRIN talks to Guineans about tomorrow, and in its analysis, warns that tomorrow's election is not a test of democracy in Guinea but rather for Guinea to move into the era of post-Military rule. But instrumental to the transistion so far as been:

Interim military ruler Sékouba Konaté, who took over after Moussa Dadis Camara left Guinea following an assassination attempt in December, has been praised by Guineans and the international community for moving swiftly towards elections and sticking to his vow neither to run nor to endorse a candidate. Konaté, a long-time army general, has also been able to transform the face of the military. “He has broken up the Dadis structure more boldly than I thought he would,” Moncrieff said. “Konaté has worked to reinstate hierarchical command, whereas Dadis was about turning it on its head.” Why has Konaté been able to effect such a turnaround? “There was the shock of 28 September, which I think a lot of soldiers were appalled by,” he said. “Then there was the shooting of the president, which was a sort of watershed as well.” He said Konaté is one of the people in the Guinean military who knows well the history of Liberia and Sierra Leone. “I think he made a calculation - yes, I profit from disorder but on the other hand if this country really tips over the edge most people lose.” 

The fact that there are 24 candidates and no clear majority is smiley faces in my book, for it makes it harder for any party to rally enough punks for the post-election violence. Int. lawyer Robert Armsterdam writes in allAfrica:

Out of the 24 candidates currently running for president (not one of them a military officer), one person stands out among observers as the potential new face of West African democracy. Cellou Dalein Diallo, a World Bank economist, former prime minister, and head of one of the leading opposition parties, the Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea (UFDG), happened to be present during the September 2009 crackdown and suffered significant injuries. His leadership of the civil society movement and personal sacrifices during the difficult Camara period has conferred upon him a certain mythic status among voters. His campaign rallies have attracted more than 60,000 boisterous attendees in recent weeks leading up to voting day. No candidate currently appears to have a clear majority. Diallo faces close competition from Francois Lonceny Fall, a former prime minister and UN diplomat, Alpha Condé, who leads the largest party and was the presumed winner of a stolen election in 1993, and Sidya Toure, a respected long-time figure in Guinean politics.

If Guinea's politicians hold it together and pull through over the next couple of weeks, many in the international community suspect this will be a boon for the Obama age of pragmatic foreign policy and school of maintained engagement:

On one level, Sunday's elections are a fluke - the result of a bullet fired by a former aide at former junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, grazing his skull and putting him out of action and in temporary exile in neighbouring Burkina Faso. But on another level, they stem from a profound hunger among Guineans to put their dysfunctional past behind them and an international awareness that the country -- crucial to regional stability -- had reached tipping point. The United States, European Union, France, Japan, Spain and others have piled in with an estimated 40 million euros of funding for the election process. And Washington and Paris have discreetly but emphatically lent their weight to the regional diplomacy that has kept Dadis Camara out of the picture. Of course, such direct intervention would be unthinkable in countries which had not plumbed the depths reached by Guinea. But if things hold together in Guinea, it should bolster the arguments of those in rich world capitals who argue in favour of engagement -- whether via targeted sanctions, shuttle diplomacy or outright financial support when merited.

...and hopefully the Guinean military will be an inspiration to Niger's. And you get the feeling that return of one Guinea to the path of democracy will be the spring board to launch some aggressive engagement to save the other Guinea.

Kenya: This Revolution Will Be Embedded

Daniel Metcalfe discovering the music of Maia Von Lekow (click pic 4 her myspace samples)...



... in his travel piece in the Guardian about Night life in Nairobi:

I had another gig to catch. I drained my Tusker Malt and taxied to the other side of town, past the grey business district, to the jacaranda-lined avenues of Karen (after Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa). Taxis are easy to find in Nairobi and generally safe, but they're not cheap. A tenner down, I arrived at a modest-looking entrance to one of the city's most relaxed nightspots. Talisman on Ngong Road is a loungey, woody restaurant and bar, where sun-beaten blondes sipped gin and tonics and well-to-do young Kenyans basked on low-slung sofas. Here I discovered Maia von Lekow, a twenty-something Kenyan artist, the daughter of Tanzanian jazz groover Sal Davis. A quarter Arab, a quarter Luo, and half European, Maia fuses her musical influences like a lounge chameleon. She sings in English and Swahili. "Bit of a difficult audience," she confided to me on a break. Barefoot, she soon roused them with a rendition of Peggy Lee's Fever. To Maia, the biggest problem is the lack of instruments. "Everyone's trying to write something, but it's running so fast. There are so many drummers, but no drums."

Cote d'Ivoire: This Revolution Will Be Embedded

Nalingiyo performed by Manou Gallo at a home session. Album: Lowlin. Label: Igloomondo, 2009.



Sickest bassist this side of Richard Bona.

Africa: Some of Africa's Entrants at Mr. World?

Color me stupid, a Mr. World pageant exists? Apparently the 2010 edition was held in March and Africa's, er, best leading men represented their various countries in full force. Vlogs below, and try as you may, it just can't be helped - laughter ensues:











Mr. Egypt already got skewered by the Egyptian blogosphere.

Friday

For the first anniversary of Michael Jackson's death, the folks at Couch Sessions put up the video below of Aloe Blacc and the indie band The Grand Scheme putting the blues and the feeling back in “Billie Jean”:

Friday

Film critic Chris Darke's tribute to Godard's Breathless at 50 is poetry, and makes a nice compliment to NY Times A.O Scott's video essay:

Cote d'Ivoire: Football Art

VOA talks to Ivorian art dealer Reine Osso about wooden soccer sculptures and soccer at her gallery ", The African Queen," in Johannesburg.

Friday

Sign of a Victory by R.Kelly. Album: Listen Up! Official 2010 FIFA World Cup Album.

dude as 99 lives.

South Africa: Can't Fight the Vuvu', Cont'd

Gandalf versus the vuvuzelas has garnered over 2 million views!

Nigeria/ Scotland: Poet Jackie Kay on her "Dad's Awful Poetry"

Scottish poet and novelist Jackie Kay's birth mother is the Scot while her father's Nigerian, but she was adopted by a couple of Glaswegian communists "who threw the kind of parties where everybody ended up singing Cole Porter and Rabbie Burns songs." Above, she talks about the perceived contradiction of being black and Scottish and how her mother gets asked about her daughter's tan. Here she talks on BBC's Strand about her memoir Red Dust Road and finally meeting her birth parents. Bernardine Evaristo's review in the Independent retells Kay, also a lesbian and a single mom, meeting her "dad":

...The book opens with Kay, now in her forties, waiting for the Nigerian father she has never met to turn up at a hotel in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. Yet as soon as he arrives he whisks her off to her room and spends two hours trying to convert her to Christianity amid much "clapping and foot-tapping and spinning and reciting and shouting to God Almighty". It turns out that her father, a born-again Christian and preacher, wants to cleanse her of his past sin. "I realise with fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin, me as impure, me the bastard, illegitimate." With characteristic humour, Kay quips, "He's like a bad poet who doesn't know when to quit, reading one poem after another to a comatose audience".

But she does meet one of Johnathan's sons for a beer, finding with her half-brother the recognition she sought: "I could happily sniff his ears and lick his forehead." It's also interesting to note that on meeting her birth mother in '91, now "... a divorced Mormon with Alzheimer’s, clutching plastic bag," it struck her that "both her parents had become extremely religious – and both came to meet her holding carrier bags."

South Africa: "Unorganized Organized Crime" - Flipping FIFA the Bird, Cont'd

Luke O’Brien explains in Newsweek how FIFA, through "a sweetheart deal" with a company run by Sepp Blatter's nephew, artificially jacked up hotel prices and f*#ked up the World Cup for the host country:

...Blatter, a Swiss moneyman who draws corruption allegations like a Chicago pol, oversaw several boneheaded decisions in the run-up to the tournament. Some, like selecting an abominable Shakira jingle as the theme song for a sporting event in Africa, were tasteless and inconsequential. But others, like a sweetheart ticketing and accommodation-booking contract, have frustrated both fans and local South Africans and potentially cost the host country millions that would have been spent in foreign cash. The deal in question was with a company called MATCH Services AG, which is co-owned by the company where Blatter’s nephew Philippe is CEO. MATCH reserved almost two million nights’ worth of rooms in hotels and guesthouses across South Africa in anticipation of 500,000 wealthy foreign visitors. But the company also tacked on high surcharges that helped drive up prices. A room in Johannesburg that would normally cost $100 per night was suddenly going for twice that amount or more, global recession be damned. Owners of guesthouses and B&Bs who hadn’t signed up with MATCH got even greedier. more

Back in May, CNN's Robyn Curnow talked to S.A hotelier Shingi Munyeza. He elaborated on the so called hotelers' "greed".

Ghana: Last Country Standing/Celebrating

Below, one of the pics from a set Ghanaian fab photog Nana Kofi Aquah titled the "Happiest Losers Ever..." It captures Ghanaians in Accra going bonkers yesterday after the Black Stars ensured Ghana became the only African country to move on to the round of 16 at the World Cup, even though they lost their final group game to Germany:

Nana Kofi Acquah

There were six, then there was just one. Right now, it feels like Ghana is a Jedi master and the rest of Africa is princess Leah pleading into R2D2's camera, "save us Obi-Wan, you are our only hope." Speaking of Germany, France 24 also featured a report on Ghana's Boateng half brothers - one playing for Ghana, the other for Germany, making yesterday's game the first time brothers will play against each other in a World Cup match and leaving Ghanaians in Berlin conflicted about which team to root for:

Nigeria: The "Mixed Bag Deity"

Scholar Jasbir Jain prompting Wole Soyinka to read from his play, "The Road," and from one of his anthology of poems on the the 2nd day of the Jaipur Literature Festival back in January, 2010.




He touches, as always, on his affinity for the temperamental Yoruba god Ogun, a "mixed bag deity"; on Yoruba griots; and the relevance of the "road," which he breaks down to a sort of mystical nexus uniting the realm of the ancestors, the living and the unborn, while the possibility of moving across these realms is embodied in the nature of the road.

Africa: Okwui Enwezor -- "The Curator as Culture Broker"

As "African art" becomes a fixture and a new asset class in the contemporary art scene, the African art curator assumes the role of "information aggregator" and "cultural broker" in filtering Africa for Western consumption, and on the extreme shortlist of curators who fit this bill, Nigerian born Okwui Enwezor's name is right at the top. Below, Enwezor, in '05, sharing his curatorial philosophy:



Over at Zelaya Post, historian and entrepreneur Okwunodu Ogbechie scrutinizes Enwezor's impact on African art and the implications of his curatorial devotion to the idea of diaspora:

.....Enwezor's emergence as a global curator of note directed attention to Africa through exhibitions in which he argued for the relevance of contemporary African art in general. However, his curatorial practice is devoted to radical notions of contemporaneity built mainly on the idea that Diaspora Africans best represent the continent and that the postcolonial African exists as an autonomous subject whose cultural history is not relevant to our understanding of his or her own contemporaneity.....When Enwezor, the most important curator of contemporary African art, consistently locates Africa in the Diaspora, he encourages a focus on this Diaspora context as the primary location of African visual culture. The effect of such dislocation ripples across a wide range of discursive practices with devastating impact. Africa is everywhere but nowhere, essentially described in the discourse as a non-location. (Put aside for now the obvious fact that redefining the African Diaspora as Africa removes it from political and cultural consideration of its own location in global discourse)...

Ogbechie thinks a new generation of African curators in the West aping the Enwezor formula will lead to:

....new curators extend the West's control over African art discourse and the dominance of Enwezor's curatorial regime. And this is where Enwezor's work has the most negative impact: his valorization of Africa as Diaspora supports a transfer of cultural equity from African producers to Western collectors, in which the curator operates mainly as an information broker who makes African cultural resources available for appropriation. While the value of Diaspora-based "contemporary African art" is moving ever upward (think of Julie Mehretu's $5m mural commission for the Goldman Sach's headquarters in New York) [blogged - here], Africa-based contemporary African art remains virtually valueless. (There is a similar dynamic in South Africa where the works of white artists gain value while those of "township" black artists are devalued). Part of the problem in the Western devaluation of African art is the refusal to understand that Africans live in a co-equal contemporaneity with Euro-America. Young African artists live in global culture and we should be interested in figuring our how their art reflect this expanded awareness of their location in Africa (if they live and work there)....

The whole article is worth the read. Even though he doesn't want to fetishize art, from the clip you get the feeling Enwezor fetishizes global conversations via African art. Perhaps he thinks works from artists in the diaspora, in terms of the artist's location and identity, are more adept at carrying out such conversations... But then Ogbechie would argue for the other conversation via African art Enwezor is dismissing - the Glocal. Other thoughts on African contemporary art, audiences and apperception - here.

West Africa: A Single What? - Regional Integration, Contd

Culled from the Daily Trust interview June 9th, Nigeria's Central Bank Governor, Lamido Sanusi, on a single currency for the West African region or Ecowas states:

A common currency only makes sense after integration of the region. What is the trade between Nigerian and Gambia, between Nigeria and Ghana, between Nigeria and Burkina Faso? What is the purpose of the currency when we have not yet buil[t] trade flow? We don't have free movement of good[s] and capital... We need to improve our own competitiveness, we need to have our specialization, we don't have common tariff... in the last three months, not a single vessel landed in Lagos because of high tariff. The vessel goes to Cotonou and they don't pay duty. We don't even have common border and common tariff. If you go back to Europe, they have what they call European Economic Community and it is a common trade area... They first of all had a free trade zone and adopted common tariff policy. They have got to a point where the currencies were freely convertible... but you know [skipping the intermediates and going for the "end gain"] is a typical African thing. The European had the Euro, therefore let us have a currency. But the currency is the end gain But I think for it to make sense we have to look at the trade issues, the capital flow issues, the tariff issues, immigration and border issues. We have to be first of all a true economic area...

But why his the banking gov. pointing at Europe? He should direct the questioner to all the intermediate steps the EAC has taken to put in place a common market in East Africa, and they are still no where close to adopting a single currency.

Zambia/ South Africa: New Writing, Contd

BBC continues interviews with Caine Prize finalists: Namwali Serpell ...



...and Alex Smith.

South Africa: Marketing to a Black Post-Apartheid World

A fascinating Aljazeera Witness report that uses the "Soweto Beach Party" to look at how savvy entrepreneurs are making a business out of re-calibrating white investment dollars and marketing its products to the needs of black demand in post-apartheid Soweto. After watching the 2 minds behind the Soweto beach party at work, their reported "uncanny" understanding of the post-apartheid market place reminds me of the guys from this old Ford ad:

North Africa: The Sahara is the New Resource

Reuters reports that the EU subsidized Desertec consortium--consisting of 12 European companies (ABB, ABENGOA Solar, Cevital, Deutsche Bank, E.ON, HSH Nordbank, MAN Solar Millennium, Munich Re, M+W Zander, RWE, SCHOTT Solar, SIEMENS) in an effort to harvest solar energy from North Africa and cable electricity undersea to Europe--can become operational in 5 years.

With sound bytes like "the big red square (above) represents the total surface needed to provide the world's electricity supply" or "if just one percent of the Saharan Desert were covered in concentrating solar panels it would create enough energy to power the entire world" or "within 6 hrs deserts receive more energy from the sun than humankind consumes within a year," you get the feeling that the Sahara desert is now the new big deal. But the sound bytes, in terms of PR, are also trying to get ahead of all the neo-colonialism comparisons--here's one--that will be made. Below, Siemmens already put out their own clip:

Cote d'Ivoire: Drogbas Watching Drogba

The Ivorians have been sent packing. But meet the Drogbas:

Africa: Oliver Twists with Lots of Natural Resources

An interesting ABN Digital report on how African countries want more for their natural resources from foreign companies and the options available to them:



VOA's Mike Sterns explains how Nigeria's new Petroleum Industry Bill intends to split up NNPC into a number of companies partly as a way of deriving more from foreign oil companies:

Kenya: Silence of the Lambs

As another serial killer strikes and gets apprehended. Over at kumekucha blog, Chris's earlier concerns about the prior apprehended killer and his motives come back to haunt us:

But for me what was most disturbing by far was the chilling confession of the motive behind the whole grisly affair. Onyancha said that he had been recruited into a cult by a former female teacher of his in high school and had been told that he would be an extremely wealthy man when he reached the target of killing 100 people. Those who are aware of the level of poverty in Kenya can appreciate how rapidly any such recruiter would have been able to recruit serial killers with such a promise. The bottom line is that even as Kenyans call for Onyacha to be locked up and the key thrown as far away as possible, the truth is that there are many more ruthless serial killers out there. It appears that even as the rich worry about criminals who will kill them for their car or ATM card, now it seems that the poor too have reason to worry about a new breed of criminal who will kill them for their blood...

Again I'm reminded of Mumbi Ngugi's quote about the "...unholy marriage between capitalism--where you want to get very rich--and tradition. So you borrow from your traditions and your cultural beliefs, you mix it up with the greed to get rich, to get powerful, and then you basically have an unholy mess." Only this time, this particular unholy mess of capitalism mixed with the worst of tradition is not victimizing albinos, lesbians, children or women... Its turned its sights on a larger category of marginalization - the poor.

East Africa: Swahili Comics Research

A Paper on Early Swahili Comics by Rose Marie Beck

Rose Marie Beck's 1999 article, Comic in Swahili or Swahili Comic, looks at some of the things Swahili comic strips can do in the East African context that other media cannot, and at themes such as the "trickster as urban survivor" rooted in local trickster Hare stories, but with character types drawing allusions to Andy Capp and the work Reg Smythe. Jigal Beez' paper, Stupid Hares and Margarine: Early Swahili Comics, in spite of the fact that many of the Swahili strips weren't preserved, manages to record the history of the medium and is included in Cartooning in Africa, edt. John A. Lent, May 2008, Hampton Press. It draws from archival material from the MacMillian Library, Nairobi and the East African Collection at the University of Dars es Salaam, Tanzania.
Chapter on Swahili Comic History by Jigal Beez

Zimbabwe: This Revolution Will Be Embedded

American violist and violinist Nokuthula Ngwenyama is of Zimbabwean-Japanese descent (website). Said to be "one of the foremost instrumentalists of her generation," she recalls that early her musical aspiration met with some resistance -- "... my father, a Ndebele man from Zimbabwe, discouraged me from the start. 'Why are you playing this white man's music?', he would ask. He didn't understand that this kind of music spoke to me in a way not affected by race."



Naoumoff's Viola Sonata performed by Emile Naoumoff and Nokuthula Ngwenyama, Live performance in Bloomington Indiana January 24 2010.



Johann Sebastian Bach's Prelude from Partita No. 3 performed by Nokuthula Ngwenyama.

And also check out author Thomas Chatterton Williams' (used his NPR talk here) pretty cool response to a critique of his work, touching on flawed distinctions and categorizations made between "black" and "white" art "or why so many black folk fail to lay claim to the entirety of our Western tradition which spans from Plato to Coltrane, Balzac to Baldwin." 

H/T: Africlassical

Morocco: Play That Video Game Again, Sam

Christophe Le Bec writes in Jeune Afrique about video game developer Ubisoft's Casablanca studio, which has worked on the Prince of Persia games for the PS2 since 2005:

While most big productions seen at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) will come from American or Japanese studios, Africa is also represented through the Moroccan studio of the Ubisoft group, the only one of its kind on the continent, with a new game designed and developed in Casablanca - the ninth fully realized in the economic capital - and for a portable console... Gallemand Frederick, Studio General Manager, explains Ubisoft's interest in having a foothold in Morocco: "The country has good engineering schools, a skilled labor cheap, it is close geographically and culturally of France, but it is mostly the largest pool of players from North Africa, which is essential to recruit staff. In the absence of a Moroccan school dedicated to its business, Ubisoft itself forms generalist staff in curriculum and bet on their passion as motor learning..."(Google Translation)

Nigeria/ Egypt/ Ghana: Old Oil Spills. New Oil Spills

A reader noticed NYT's Adam Nossiter was finally parachuted into the Niger Delta's 50 year old on going collection of oil spills. Nossiter shakes his head:

The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless. The Niger Delta region contains fragile wetlands.... Perhaps no place on earth has been as battered by oil, experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the mangroves was finally shut after flowing for two months: now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world once teeming with shrimp and crab.

And in Egypt, Zenoibia at Egyptian Chronicles parses through the recent report of oil leaks and spills at Hurghada, a sea side resort on Egypt's Red Sea Coast, and asks:

I followed the newspapers coverage and I noticed that there was an important piece of detail that was forgotten : Who or which company is or companies are responsible for this leak in the first place !?? Which company is our BP !!??

Meanwhile, Ghana's yet to officially begin oil production, but already...

Africa/Brazil/Australia: More Soccer Ads

A sweet look at the "missing 'H' in GHANA" PR campaign designed by the Football Federation of Australia to get Australians to attend an international friendly match between the Socceroos and the Ghanaian national side in Australia back in May.

The fake Ghana fan club spelling out "G," "A," "N," and "A" hit the streets in Sydney in need of someone with a "H" on his or her chest to complete GHANA and they soon became a hit in the down under and an internet meme beyond:



Below, SBS, the Australian broadcasting network, three minute commercial celebrates the cultural, linguistic diversity, and fans of the game. To differentiate their ad from the slew of fast paced visuals out there--or a particular African wildlife ad from their fellow country men--they claim to have gone for "the human approach, telling the reals stories of the game’s real-life supporters from each of the 32 qualifying teams." And they did not rush it either:



And this Coca Cola ad from Brazil visualizes the FIFA cup having to pass through the border of some despotic regime, perhaps tinged with a little communist detail for capitalism and globalization to poke fun at:



H/T: The Inspiration Room

Africa: 1950s Disney and the Medicine Man

Roving Bandit flags this  Mickey Mouse mini comic from1951, a promotional collaboration between Walt Disney and General Mills, which has Mikey Mouse and Goofy testing out the effects of a psychoactive drug they then proceed to sell to Africans.

Whole comic here, but as Erowid site notes, some historical context is needed here:

During the 1950s, at the height of the post-World War II expansion of U.S. suburban modernization, a number of stimulant and sedative drugs were widely used and were promoted in the mainstream press. At the time, many were available over the counter without a prescription. The inclusion of clear, positive drug references in mainstream children's literature and film seems both archaic and surprising given the taboos around psychoactive drugs in place in the 21st century.

Fredric Wertham whistles in his grave.

Africa: Yunus on Microcredit and Gender

Muhammed Yunus clearing up a common misconception about why micro credit lending concentrates more on women than men. Money lent to women has more social impact.

Algeria: Bouteflika's Anti-Corruption Czar Problem, Cont'd

Though president Abdelaziz Bouteflika new $286 billion public investment program announced back in May was followed 4 days later by a cabinet reshuffle meant to clear the path for his 5 year plan, everyone knows Algerian Energy Minister and close pal, Chakib Khelil, who was replaced in the shake up had more to do with the ongoing battle between Bouteflika and his anti-corruption czar Tewfik Mediene in charge of the Département du Renseignement et de la Securité (DDS). So much so that when it comes to the Chinese construction companies and corruption, Africa Confidential reported back in March (blogged here) that they don't have so much a Bouteflika problem as they do a Mediene problem, and the problem is getting worse:

The DRS's new investigations into the railway projects have important implications for Chinese companies. The Agence Nationale d'Etudes et de Suivi de la Réalisation des Investissements Ferroviaires (Anesrif), which is charged with awarding contracts for Algeria's massive $80-bn. rail improvement programme, cancelled two of CRCC's contracts after a DRS probe. CRCC, with Algerian state-owned company Infrafer, was provisionally awarded the contract for a railway line linking Relizane, Tiaret and Tissemsilt in July 2009, at a cost of $1.2 bn. On 7 May, Algiers announced that the contract had instead been given to a consortium of Spanish construction company FCC Construcción and Algeria's ETRHB Haddad. A week later, CRCC lost a second contract. This contract, to link the towns of Tiaret and Saida, was worth $870 million... The latest setback for Chinese construction companies came in May when the Algiers government made objections to the award of contracts to Sinohydro in 2009. This would jeopardise Sinohydro's contracts for the building of a new city at Boughezoul.