Africa: What about an Aid Corruption Perception and Effectiveness Index?

Every year like clock work, Huguette Labelle drops in with T.I's 2010 ranking of the corrupt - click image to get to the spiffiest interactive graphs yet.

But what if T.I treated the aid organizations and governments of the world like countries, waves its statistical methodology wand and every 4 years releases an Aid Corruption Perception and Effectiveness Index? Aid accountability gets a brand new bag. It will be a blunt instrument no doubt, which can be refined over time, but as an index, it will ultimately funnel aid money to what works and help kill or modify what doesn't.

Over at its Poverty Matters blog, the Guardian sheds light on indexes pushing in that direction.

Africa: The Tribal Drums of Twitter

... or at least author Margareth Atwood's (who is one of the more active literary rockstars on twitter with a rabid following) way of wrapping her head around how twitter fits into the timeline of human communication:


Money quote:

So for me, anything that happens in social media is an extension of stuff we were already doing in some other way. So, it’s all human communication. And the form that most closely resembles the “tweet” is the telegram of old, which also was limited because you paid by the letter. And so short communications very rapidly sent. So all of these things, the postal service, et cetera, they’re all improvements, if you like, or modernizations of things that already existed earlier in some other form. Even African tribal drums, for instance, could send very complex messages over great distances. They were very rapid, they were very well-worked out and communications could just go like wildfire using that medium of communications. So all of this stuff is what we do now, but it’s not different in nature from what we have always done, which is communicate with one another, send messages to one another, and perform our lives. We’ve been doing that for a long time.

South Africa: The Revolution will be Embedded

Tale of Three Cities - Bittereinder. featuring Jack Parow and Tumi Molekane. Album: n Ware Verhaal (A True Story).

For the Afrikaans impaired, Running Wolf explains:

Bittereinder was formed early in 2009 when Jaco van der Merwe approached Peach van Pletzen and Louis Minnaar about his desire to start an Afrikaans rap project. A Tale of Three Cities features Afrikaans rapper Jack Parow and Tumi Molekane (lead singer of Tumi & The Volume). The song beams out streetwise references to Pretoria, Johannesburg and Cape Town. There is no doubt in my mind that this song is absolute poetry (and I’m sure residents of the 3 mentioned cities will agree). Being a Pretoria resident for the last 14 years I especially love the Pretoria segment of this song. References to Nile Crocodile, Tings ‘n Times, Burnett Street, Tuks FM and other essential Pretoria landmarks and places & things of interest conjures up memories of good times in the past and is also a reminder of how awesome the city I live in is.

Angola: "A Talent we Haven't Seen Before"

Francisco Domingo Joaquim's  jaw dropping skills.

Zambia: Postcolonial Sci-Fi

Zambia marked its independence day 2 days ago and over at the Atlantic's tech blog Alexis Madrigal digs up the story and video of a Zambian space program in 1964 spearheaded by a grade-school science teacher Edward Makuka Nkoloso. Nkoloso claimed he heads the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy and wanted 7 million pounds from UNESCO to fund his race to beat the Americans and Russians to the moon.

One of the links in Madrigal's post leads to this 1964 Time magazine article about the buzz leading up to Zambia's independence ceremonies, and mentions Nkoloso:

During the independence festivities only one noted Zambian failed to share in all the harmony. He is Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, a grade-school science teacher and the director of Zambia's National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, who claimed the goings-on interfered with his space program to beat the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the moon. Already

Africa: Tourism and Middle Class Discovery

photo: Joan Bardeletti/ Soirée dans un bar de Douala

Over at Boing last week, Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote:

Earlier this week, my mother-in-law came back from a vacation in Africa—one of those organized group safari tours where they ferry you from camp hotel to camp hotel. In the car, while I drove her and my father-in-law back from the airport, she talked a bit about the tour guides, native Africans she assumed had to be better-off than most, but not rich. And that made her realize that she'd never heard much about an African middle class before, or seen photos of

Africa: "How are we Going to Fuck the Third World Today?"

Raj Patal on why the World Bank sucks:



Money quote:

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like the World Bank is filled with evil-doers. These sort of Blofeldian villains who are sitting in leathers chairs stroking cats thinking, “How are we going to fuck the third world today?” It’s not like that. It’s sort of very well meaning people, but [they are] executing policies that are tremendously bad for developing countries.

And while we at it, Joseph Stiglitz from the '06 documentary "The Big Sellout" on why the IMF sucks:

Nigeria: @ 50, Cont'd

Recently Goodluck Johnathan and retired chief justice Alfa Belgore were going on about government structures and constitutions that are still alien and haven't been modified to recognize and include long held socio-political allegiances that still hold sway over the land.

meh.

Africa: TED Prize 2011 Winner - Photography of JR, Cont'd

 JR , of the "women are heroes" fame, discussing his photography and politics of using his unavoidable blow ups to humanize the Other:

South Africa/ Georgia: Myths that Bind

Government of former Soviet republic Georgia is offering 88 thousand hectares of cheap land to the highly skilled Afrikaner farmers in a bid to boost its economy.

Both sides even have a nice story on which to build the myth of South African-Georgian cooperation - that of a Georgian nobleman who fought on the side of Afrikaners against the British during the Boar war.

Africa: 50 Years of Theater and Music

An hour's worth of 50 years of African plays. BBC World Drama - in collaboration with the British African Theatre Company Tiata Fahodzi - presents an evening of actors perfroming from plays--Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame (Nigeria); Guillaume Oyônô-Mbia’s Three Suitors: One Husband from Cameroon; The Death of Chaka by Seydou Badian (Mali); Ousmane Sembenè’s Moolaadé (Burkina Faso/ Senegal), Wole Soyinka's A Play of Giants and The Beatification of Area Boy (Nigeria). Bola Agbaje's Gone Too Far! (Nigeria)--from across the continent from the last five decades.

Knock yourself out - Listen here.

Recently The Strand asked Songlines magazine editor, Simon Broughton, his thoughts on the Africa: 50 Years of Music: 50 Years of Independence box set compilation -- 18 CDs, 185 tracks by 183 artists, 16 hours 20 minutes of music drawn from 38 countries. He makes an interesting point that the compile is tailored more to a Western palette of African music; left to people in those 38 countries, the compilation would contain more hip hop.

Listen - here.



Zelie - Togo's Bella Bellow, killed in a car accident in '73 at the age of 27... For more historical context + linear notes to 50 post-independence years of African music, RFI's "Sounds of Independence" page with ongoing essays, YouTube videos and music clips,  is shaping out to be the ultimate resource.

South Africa: Friggin' Zef, Cont'd

On Wednesday Die Antwoord visited mainstream, appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Richard Rushfield's article over at the Daily Beast, which  looks at the phenomenon so far, isn't a bad read. It addresses the recent You-Tube ban of the original "Evil Boy" video and whether or not all this friggin' Zef is real, fake or semi fake:

The dark themes of the videos proved to be the straw that broke YouTube’s back. The video portal which has gained its following as a wide-open, unpoliced, Wild West of uploaded content, this week yanked Die Antwoord’s most recent effort off their site. The video for a rendition of the song “Evil Boy” features not only Yolandi dancing in a suit seemingly made of rats, the aforementioned copious erections and penile imagery but an 18-year-old street kid rapping about fending off homosexual advances. (“I don’t want to go to the bush with you/Don’t touch my penis/This penis is for girls.”) If nothing else, Die Antwoord’s legacy will be having defined YouTube’s limits....Die Antwoord’s fame has inspired a webful of accusations that the band’s personas are fakes. The trio, it was noted, were known to have been in previous bands in which few affectations of the white trash style were to be found. Even worse, it was whispered, in the ultimate cred-destroying rumor, they had been art students. The band’s over-the-top violence, the Zef style and the martial arts/Zen religio-babble were all a Spinal Tap-like satire of contemporary rap. In fact, they are semi-open fakes; Vi$$er and Ninja are a married couple, with children and formal education between them. When asked in a recent interview “Is it fake?” Ninja talked about creating his past personas saying, “Two seconds later you’re fucking bored and you’re on to the next. Die Antwoord was like, Oh fuck, this is the fucking one. This is the shit that is like to death do us part.” More.

Friday

l.o. freakin'. l



GoRemy's Saudis in Audis - The Falafel Album, 2010.

H/T: Jalopnik

Friday

As all our distractions become digital, this segment of the doc PressPausePlay sees corporealnesses like vinyl upgrading to art objects worth owing. James Wolcott struck a similar chord in a piece in Vanity Fair last year:

An ancillary victim of the film-library thin-down is the framed movie poster that used to grin from so many walls when I first came to New York. Duck into someone’s apartment and you might have been met with the poster for the Radio City Music Hall spectacular for Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Robert De Niro skulking through Times Square with his full-bodied scowl in Taxi Driver, or some French New Wave classic exhaling its grainy romanticism. But as more and more films are fetched from the ether, the movie poster loses its memento value, its Pop vintage. What will survive in the entertainment bunker are the definitive boxed sets jammed with extras (mini-posters, booklets, director’s cuts, bonus discs) that preserve film and TV classics in Proustian density: the “Ford at Fox” collection (corralling half of director John Ford’s output for the Fox studio spread across 21 discs—auteurist’s heaven), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Sopranos, and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Chosen Collection” (40 discs suitable for any crypt). They attest to the foundational tastes of the owner without having to be viewed in their stupefying entirety.

Nigeria: The Revolution will be Embedded

Ko Ma Roll - Mo’Cheddah. Album - ‘The Franchise Celebrity (2010)

more.

Africa/Cuba: The Making of...

... of AfroCubism. Producer Nick Gold's behind-the-scenes chat with Mark Coles tells what really went down at the Madrid sessions:

Tanzania: Albino Demand

Writing about the undercover investigative reporting that nabbed Tanzanian journalist Vicky Ntetema an International Women’s Media Foundation Courage Award earlier this year for her albino witch doctors expose, Roja Heydarpour writes:

She went undercover to investigate the atrocities and exposed the witch doctors, who she says are con men, charging up to $2,000 for an albino person’s leg. Because of the hefty price, peasants aren’t the ones buying the potions. Politicians who want to win elections wear large rings with albino powder hidden inside, she said. High-powered CEOs buy the potion in order to make more money. And the police are in on it, too. The Tanzanian government finally banned the practice nearly two years ago, in part due to Ntetema’s stories. They were embarrassed by their country’s now-tarnished image. But the ban was revoked last month, conveniently close to the general elections on Oct. 31, said Ntetema. The witch doctors wield enormous power in a country where more than 90 percent believe and are afraid of being bewitched, she said. So even if a politician running for office does not buy the potion, the witch doctor threatens to tell his community to withhold its votes.

Another twist to the unholy marriage between sticky traditions and capitalism. Earlier thoughts - here. But it is the Tanzanian fishermen who built the demand for the hideous luck and albino charms, according to this '09 SBS report:

Fisherman have been accused of being some of the biggest users of albino magic. Fishing requires both investment and luck - the very things that this magic is supposed to provide. Some fishermen believe that by weaving the hair of an albino into their nets or by using potions made of ground albino bones that they'll become luckier in their catch, and grow rich by pulling in full nets of fish each morning. It all amounts to a murderous get-rich-quick scheme.In the lakeside town of Mwanza, Ibrahim Chacha is one of the most successful fishermen, so there are rumours that he used albino magic to prosper. He's incensed by both the murders and the accusations. more

Africa/Europe: Constructing Otherness

The African as Other (Part I) 

Two lectures looking at various intellectual shifts in European history and their constructions of "The African as Other." Both lectures part of an ASU's Open Course Ware series titled, "Birth of the Modern: Europe and its Others".

The African as Other (Part II) 

Whole course looks at how over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries Europeans gave up one set of "others, that is, social outsiders (witches, Jews and the poor) and during the Enlightenment (18th century) replaced these with a new set of "others" (women, Africans and Asians).

Interesting distinctions made in Pt.2 between the European aristocracy and bourgeoisie in their perception of the African "Other." Makes sense; the aristocracy would mingle with the African elite and by virtue of their own social insulation would feel less vulnerable to the threat of the Other for obvious reasons. Anecdotal examples of 18th century bi-racial West African elites attending Eton and how one of the fashionable things for aristocratic ladies to do in 18th century London "was to have a little African slave boy as a page."

Africa: An Argument for all Types of Diversity...

...in American advertising:



South Africa's TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris ingenious campaign to promote the The Zimbabwean newspaper makes the cut.

A phenomenological argument for diversity - here.

H/T: KMBA

Benin: The Revolution will be Embedded

George Garzone and former student Lionel Loueke at Jazz Siena, 2009.

Sudan/South Sudan: Can't Stop This - T Minus 80 Days

Rebecca Hamilton reports at Slate on South Sudan's 23 political parties as well as civil society and faith groups getting their act together and leaving their post-referenda differences behind in a hall in Juba on Sunday night:

On Thursday evening, 75-year-old Rev. Samuel Ador took to the stage, walking stick in hand, and began jumping up and down as he launched a tirade against the political elites. "Some of you here ruling us are foreigners!" he shouted. "Your children are not here; they are getting education overseas. If war breaks out, you will lose nothing! Nothing! You will join your children and leave us here!" But by 9 on Sunday night, the politicians were ready to issue a joint communiqué confirming the reconciliation of former opponents and agreeing to form a broad-based transitional government if the referendum results in independence for the south. The communiqué states that the transitional government will be responsible for conducting a population census and holding national elections to decide who will run the new country. "If anybody has any doubt we have reconciled, that doubt must remain in this hall" said Lam Akol, a leading southern politician who made a high-profile break from the SPLM in June last year to form his own party, the SPLM-DC.

Meanwhile Sudan Tribune reports yesterday that Sudan’s defense minister Abdel-Rahim Mohamed Hussein while in Cairo was all about on delaying the referenda, citing, of course, the "Abyei excuse":

According to the reality on the ground, yes. Border issues and Abyei must be resolved within the framework of one nation because doing so in the framework of two countries open the door for foreign interference... The referendum is not a goal but a tool to consolidate and promote security and stability... This [unilateral declaration of independence] is illegal and will not be recognized by the African Union or the other [organization] because it would contradict the peace agreement and its procedures...The problem relates to less than 20 percent of the border region... [it is necessary to demarcate] the borders to prepare the ground for the referendum so there is no excuse for fighting in the future.

Commenter, Jacob Lupai, laughs away the NCP's Abyei-Misserya Arabs smokescreen:

The Abyei issue is not as complicated as others would like people to believe. The NCP is hoping to use Abyei to destabilise the South. It is claiming to represent the Misseriya nomadic Arabs who are cattle herders and seasonal migrants through Abyei for pastures and water for their animals. Due to this the NCP is making a meal out of this for the Misseriya nomads to be recognised as residents of Abyei with full voting rights in the referendum. The NCP is apparently turning a blind eye to the fact that when Abyei was administratively transferred o Kordofan in the North the Misseriya were already classified as people of the North. There was no way the Misseriya could have been considered residents of Abyei at the time of transfer of Abyei from the South. The only people recognised as the legitimate residents of Abyei were the Dinka Ngok. The North may go ahead to rewrite history of Abyei after its dismal failure to make unity attractive. This will not make an iota of difference at all. The focus on the Misseriya seems to be the last resort the NCP has, assumingly, to win the war after having lost the battle on the ground when it signed the CPA.

Ghana: Archived "Ethos of Looking"

Listening to Ghana's world bank director, Ishak Diwan, apologize and explain the Ghanaian "developmental or poverty porn" images a Ghanaian journalist came across on the bank's flikr account during the bank's annual conference in DC weeks ago, makes you feel kind of sorry for the development behemoth. It gets its large hands caught in the jar with a a few lousy images when other international development organizations have gotten away with hardcore poverty porn for eons. Director Diwan does point out though that these images were not featured by the bank in anyway, rather they were old images tucked away in its archives. Which makes Scarlet Lion think the global north's default brain switch when it comes to portraying African development has been flipped and the tide of stereotypical portrayals--development or otherwise--is now turning:

Photos of starving children are no longer in vogue and fill the pages of newspapers and annual reports far less frequently than they used to. And what’s more is that there’s tons and tons of great photography being done as we speak. Archives will continue to be filled with old photos that reflect a different ethos of looking. But as photographers explore and find new ways to portray this vast continent, I’d like to think that these images really are becoming more and more a thing of the past... There will always be exceptions to this.

I think she's right about the change in tide. The poverty porn has gone from hard to soft and others are definitely new looks. Also, the fact that one of the most frequent search terms on this blog is "advertising

Central Africa: Catching Kony

Int. Crisis Group’s Central Africa Analyst Edward Dalby's quote in the AFP story on Kony and the LRA's recent sightings in South Dafur made the rounds. In the ICG podcast Dalby further explains why the Central Africa Republic's president Francois Bozize won't let the UPDF's "Operation Lightning Thunder" chase Kony through CAR - Dalby thinks Bozize wants some of the international "catch-Kony" funding for his own forces.

But recent reports seem to indicate that CAR, Uganda, Sudan and DRC are planing to share their toys and work together, so maybe Bozize just needed the political cover of a Joint Central African Force so as to let the Ugandans set up shop in his backyard to go after Kony. But at the end of day, with Kony out of Northern Ugandan, whether or not he gets past CAR's UFDR, the original problem that gave Kony and his ragtags life, according to Enough's Ledio Cakaj, still remains:

... this is a golden opportunity for the international community, especially the U.S. government, to push the Ugandan government finally take seriously the rebuilding of northern Uganda, a region traditionally ignored by the central government. Legitimate grievances such as rampant poverty and lack of education that caused rebellions (one being the LRA) more than 20 years ago remain unaddressed.

Africa: Obama's Anticolonialism, Cont'd

Even the ultra conservative Weekly Standard has no problem tearing D'Souza a new one:

Nearly everything that Obama has done as president, including the policies that D’Souza cites as proof of his inherited anticolonial ideology, would have been as eagerly pursued by President John Edwards or President John Kerry. And the points where they might differ—in the escalation of troops in Afghanistan, for example, or energetic education reform, or the push for nuclear power—mark Obama as more moderate than either of them. Come to that, many of the policies that D’Souza identifies as anticolonial were advanced by George W. Bush, who doesn’t (I’m guessing) have an anti-colonialist bone in his body. Bush began the auto bailout, approved TARP, vastly increased federal spending, expanded entitlements, pushed through a large and probably unnecessary fiscal stimulus of his own, and often chided Americans for their “addiction” to foreign oil. Trained as a young man by Jesuits, D’Souza must be familiar with the principle of Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation is always the best; if it fits the case at hand, there’s no need to go looking for more complicated theories. Yet there’s a cramp in the mind of the committed party hack, a terrible need to believe that one’s adversaries are more ominous or sinister than observable reality suggests.

Ghana: Brave Thinker

November issue of The Atlantic includes oft masked Ghanaian investigative reporter, Anas Aremeyaw Anas, on its list of 19 Brave Thinkers in 2010. Nicholas Schmidle's article explains Anas isn't just a journalist:

When I asked him about his role models, he named only one, Günter Wallraff, a German undercover reporter with more than four decades of muckraking experience. But despite his admiration for Wallraff, Anas is certain that undercover reporting is more difficult in Accra than it is in, say, Berlin or New York. “I cannot just do a story and go to sleep, when I know my country’s institutions won’t take care of it,” said Anas, who is surprisingly soft-spoken, to the point of being inaudible at times. “I cannot give the government an opportunity to say this or that is a lie. They love to hide and say, ‘Show me the evidence.’ So I show it to them. If I say, ‘This man stole the money,’ I give you the picture from the day he stole it and show what he was wearing when he stole it. And because of my legal background”—Anas finished law school in 2008 but hasn’t taken the bar exam—“I follow up to ensure there’s prosecution.”

Financing investigative journalism:

The demand for Anas’s services soon outstripped his capacity at the newspaper. Some of the requests he received for investigations didn’t quite qualify as journalism. So last year Anas created a private investigative agency called Tiger Eye. He rents an unmarked space across town on the top floor of a four-story building where a handful of his newspaper’s best reporters work alongside several Tiger Eye employees. It’s difficult to know where one operation ends and the other begins. But they’re all part of Anas’s investigative fiefdom. The work space is divided into two sections: a war room of sorts, with a bank of computers against one wall and a wide table in the middle where the team hammers out strategy; and Anas’s office, decorated with framed awards, oversize checks (including one for $11,700 for Journalist of the Year), and snapshots of himself in disguise. Anas appeared uneasy when I asked him about Tiger Eye, partly because he realizes that its commercial aspect puts him in ethically dangerous territory. Yet it also constitutes a major source of the budget he relies on for long-term newspaper assignments. During the two weeks I spent with him in January, Anas fielded calls from the BBC and 60 Minutes, as well as private security companies, asking if he could conduct investigations for them. All offered generous compensation.

Mozambique: Leveraging "Free"

Erik Charas on Verdade, the free newspaper model, Ipad reviews for rural Mozambicans and dreams. Which takes us back to Wired's Chris Anderson '08 article about the economics of free:

But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn't mean that someone, somewhere, isn't making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they're distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash. The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You're probably experiencing it right now. It's the basis of virtually all media. In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is "free to air," and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don't charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They're not selling papers and magazines to readers, they're selling readers to advertisers. It's a three-way market. In a sense, what the Web represents is the extension of the media business model to industries of all sorts. This is not simply the notion that advertising will pay for everything. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, "value-added" subscriptions, and direct ecommerce. Now an entire ecosystem of Web companies is growing up around the same set of models.

Ghana: Another Boateng Close Up

Can't wait to see this one - Ozwald Boateng, youngest tailor and first black designer to open a shop in the Savile Row area, gets another documentary close up. S & A have the details. More about the documentary here.

Nigeria/ Zimbabwe: Screw Piracy. Nollywood Going Regional

Nollywood producer/financier George Okeke on working with the Zimbabwean tourism industry:

"We may have made losses with our previous project, which has been pirated even beyond our borders but I can assure you that we are not about to quit." These pirates are only giving us strength to continue building the film industry in Zimbabwe. "We are not in the movie business just for the money, we have also fallen in love with the local film industry and we want to see it grow," said Okeke. "Last time we ended up doing a rushed job but this time around we will go according to plan. "We want to make sure that we market the top Zimbabwean tourist destinations using these films," he said. Okeke says the Nigerians will make up just a small percentage of the cast of the two movies that he intends to shoot around Zimbabwe. "About 90 percent of the cast will be Zimbabweans and these are Zimbabwean stories that will just be spiced up with a few popular Nigerian faces and some Nigerian experts at making movies.

He seems to be taking both tracks - "piracy as a marketing expense" + "rais[ing] money by selling equity in [his] films". Ethan Zuckerman, who has been all over the Nollywood piracy problem of late, explains:

In India, some scholars refer to piracy as “a marketing expense”, as the sale of pirated films may encourage other viewers to go see the films in theatres. It’s harder to make this case in Nigeria, where over 90% of revenue comes from the actual sale of DVDs and VCDs and there’s virtually no revenue from screenings. In our discussions at Berkman, a core idea emerged – piracy is a response to poor distribution networks. One of our participants explained that capital is so scarce within the Nigerian film industry that distributors usually produce 50,000 copies of a film in a first run – all they can afford – and hope to issue a second run using revenues from the first run. But the audience for Nollywood films is massive: one participant tells us that the least successful films sell 30,000 copies. So when a film is a hit, it’s quickly pirated. The pirate copies aren’t necessarily cheaper than the legitimate copies – often, they sell at a similar price and they’re chosen simply because they are the only copies available. Filmmakers know they’re going to need to recover costs by selling

Benin: Among a Crate Digger's Favorites

African crate digger and Analog Africa label founder, Samy Ben Redjeb, lists his favorite all time joints over at Mondomix. On the list are:

Ou c´est lui ou c´est moi by Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou Analog Africa

Ziwere - Oliver Mtukudzi by Analog Africa

Samy also features in the brilliant "Scramble for Vinyl" article over at Africa is a Country posted a while back, which takes visiting DJ/crate diggers to task for concentrating "too much on those forms of music that fit nicely into the story that they, the DJs, want to tell about the music to the detriment of  "larger genres in Africa like Soukous, Highlife, or Benga."

Friday

Long Hot Summer by Reflection Eternal (Talib Kweli & DJ Hi-tek). Album: Revolutions per Minute/ Warner, 2010 - Dir. Joslyn Rose Lyons

Friday

He is talking about how to replicat nature's modularity and swappability in gadgetry in order to make them open, hackable, exponentially swappable and endlessly reusable.

How bushpunk is that?

Kenya: Spirit of Bushpunk

Someone's weekends and six months worth of research on the internet led to his own Spirit of St. Louis:



Afrigadget has links to other aviation bushpunks. The bushpunk aspect of this?  Internet enabling open source access, recycle and cannibalization definitely top the list. Whether the guy's plane flies or not, it's clear open source is at the foundation of bushpunk and the plane feels like a first step in Humblemanufacture advocate Dominic Muren's old thoughts about bushpunk:

Stop imagining these Bushpunk innovators as dark-skinned people in faraway deserts. Now imagine instead that they are perpetually unemployed people in Detroit or Philadelphia; Imagine they are old guard hippies who have given up fossil fuels in Seattle or San Fransisco; Imagine that they are self sufficient ranchers in Colorado, Idaho, or Iowa. Take away the bush, and you've still got a valid need. No matter where we are, we are realizing that we want (even need) the function of high technology, but cannot afford to pay the costs, particularly in terms of fossil fuel use, or excessive energy consumption of any kind. We need the root-hair technologies, accessible on a local or regional level, that can afford us these functions. This is what Humblefacture aims to do for manufacturing: Not to send us back to hand craft for the sake of increasing labor, but to empower more people to seize the reins of their situation, whether they are at the top of the pyramid, or the bottom. The humble in Humblefacture makes it malleable: it is the "punk" waiting to be defined as Bush, Bio, Steam, or Cyber by the situation and people who adopt it.

Apart from open access, the internet further empowers future bushpunks who will help innovate the way through that chasm between the needs of hi tech gadgets and a low-fi world by helping connect innovators and factories in the new scaled down landscape of manufacture:

Nigeria: The Revolution will be Embedded

Be my man by Asa.  naive records, 2010. Teaser - here.


H/T: dj mighty mike

Africa/ United States: "Demographics is Destiny" - Black in America

A riveting conversation on race and Black underachievement in America btw American Prospect's Adam Serwer, who comes down on the side of social systemics and the need of some government intervention, and Penn Law' Amy Wax, who sits in the Bill Cosby chair and says, "it's also the culture, stupid." Excerpt above tackles representation and what Wax argues is the tendency of the media to avoid tackling the hard black questions, but she then looses points for having written a book on this but never never saw the TV event - CNN's Black in America 1 & 2. Below, she makes a strong case against determinism:



Like someone once said, "being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet."

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

Pee
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmore...

The lovable Cartman, singing about minorities, makes the countdown.

Friday

Palestinian rapper, Shadia Mansour, rips mics to bits.

Dang!!!

Uganda: The Making Of...

The NTV Uganda behind the scenes feature and this African Screen's interview with the director, Caroline Kamya, give a glimpse into filmmaking in Uganda.

Africa: Size Matters - "Big Block of Cheese Day," Cont'd

Boing commenters swap thoughts about this "true size of Africa" map - original here. Someone though points out the obvious: why are we even comparing a continent to a bunch of countries?

But the whole exercise is not just an "Africa is a country" problem. Rather, the fact that a map of Africa can fit in all those other maps just doesn't vibe with what the standard school maps tell us about continent sizes, which predicates size distortions that go back to the original 1569 Mercator Projection. Wiki: "while [the Mercator's] linear scale is constant in all directions around any point preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (which makes the projection conformal)," the map also "distorts the size and shape of large objects, as the scale increases from the Equator to the poles, where it becomes infinite."

The best illustration of the distortions can be found in episode 16, season 2, of the West Wing. In the episode the "Africa is not the size of country" problem and an alternative to the Mercator projection are explained when some nerdy cartographers are granted audience by the White House on "a block of cheese day". Description and transcript of the scene - here.

Africa: Kunta Kinte 9000

The latest episode of the Cleveland Show spots an "awesome" idea for an Alex Haley's Roots sequel. Subtitle - "reparations."



Catch the Rampage Jackson Kunta Kinte 9000 excerpt while it's still up - here.

Africa: Melinda Gates on the Ubiquity of Coca Cola and why Human Development Needs to Take a Cue

You can almost hear free market libertarians smiling. Some other developers would actually like to hook up a development supply mainline directly into the coca cola blood vein:



Humanitarian design details.

Nigeria/Japan: Pick your Transcultural Current

Nigerians into sumo or Japanese bassists flowing in Lingala in the Congo:



Russian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (1930-1990) on transculture:

Each culture is valuable in itself. People should be allowed to live within their cultures... The defense of autonomous customs sometimes proves to be a denial of the right to freedom and to another world. It seems as if a decision were made for me: “you live in such an original way, that it is quite cultural to live as you do, so go on and live this way.” But did anyone ask me personally? . . . Perhaps I am suffocating within the fully autonomous customs of my complex and developed culture? . . . [It is the right to live beyond one's culture, on the borders of cultures, to take] a step transcending one’s own surrounding, native culture and milieu not for the sake of anythng else. Not for the sake of any other culture, but for the sake of nothing. Trancendence into nothing. Generally speaking, such an act is truly living, pulsating center of the entire human universe. . . . This is a primordial metaphysical act.

Nigeria: New Nollywood Operas

Soapy



Musical

Zimbabwe/Nigeria: Chimanye and Sagoe

VOA and CNN profile designers Joyce Chimanye and Deola Sagoe. The premise seems to ask, who designs/ who buys design in the developing world?



Within this context Matthew 26:11 makes a good definition for design:

For ye have the poor always with you [make sure you differentiate yourselves from them]...

Africa: The Revolution will be Embedded

Kanye drops another CRS [West, Fiasco, Pharrell] track.



Lupe explains.

Egypt/ Niger: The Magic Goat

Egyptians are still talking about the pharoahs' (FIFA ranking: 9) 1 - 0 loss to Niger (FIFA ranking: 154), the goat on the pitch and suspicions of black magic. But if the goat really has game losing powers, Egyptian Chronicles wonders if the animal could be put to better use:

In fact I do not know why we do not get that goat and make it walk around the NDP HQ and Gamal Mubarak’s house !!?

Africa: T'Challa, Cont'd

When comparing the Black Panther "welcome to wakanda" preview (above) from the soon to debut New Avengers animated series to the Reginald Hudlin/ Denys Cowan Black Panther BET series, the wise folks over at blacksuperherofan and shadow & act seem to be caught in a saturday morning cartoon time warp. C'mon guys. Motion comics and pitiful distribution aside, the BET series still kicked ass. Even if just for its stilted speeches and wishful pan-Africanist politics :-)

Africa/ United States: "What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?" Cont'd

Everyone commended the C-SPAN anchor above for keeping his professional cool when he came face-to-voice with the 90 year old lady caller with a pet peeve: ungrateful, bellyaching, colored folks, who never said thank you for what "we" have done for them.

The old lady might as well be referring to that Monty Python classic where the "anticolonialist" Jews ask themselves, "what their Roman colonizers ever did for them?":



I see the old lady's point about all our ungrateful asses. But it seems to me that the once disenfranchised, colonized, or enslaved will forever be ungrateful to, and will always bellyache against, the colonizing/civilizing force no matter how benevolent it may be. For them to do anything less will be sub-human.

Africa/ Haiti: Edwidge Danticat on Writing Dictators, Cont'd

Uwem Akpan, Edwidge Danticat, and Dave Eggers at last week's New Yorker gab fest.

Like Danticat, Junot Diaz had some thoughts a while back on writing "[tyrannical] hidden histories."

Egypt/ Morocco/ France: Mourchidat, Cab Drivers and Niqabitches

No trend or feminism per se. Just people refusing contradictions between being female, Muslim, modern and free.



Egypt: A few weeks ago, the BBC posted something about the first women cab drivers in Cairo to break into the male dominated ranks. However, in the older Metropolis report the Egyptian woman cabbie said she began working as a taxi driver 28 years ago?



France: The Arabist flags the Telegraph & Rue 89 write ups on the ingenious protest by 2 French students (one of them Muslim) of the government's banning of the burka in public. A discussion over at Muslimah Media Watch:

Nicole:...I don’t think the Niqabitch experiment is about Islam or Muslim women per se. Rather, a false dichotomy of their look highlights two things. First, the burqa debate is really just about who owns women’s bodies, whether these women are covered up or not, and for that Niqabitch is spot on. Second, the fact that Niqabitches are walking around in protest makes it “okay” by some French people in a way a burqa worn for religious reasons would not be ok, which is exactly what happened in the YouTube video when the cop wanted to take a picture of the duo.

Safiyyah: When I watched the video of the two women for the first time, I was delighted, and loved their juxtaposition of “baring it all” vs. “covering it all up.” It highlighted, in a most jarring way, the ridiculous nature of wanting to “free” women, by negating freedom of choice. In my opinion, it holds a deeper message, portraying the de-humanization of women and how by wearing very little or too much, women are defined as sexual beings first. The video has an edge about it; it’s bold. That one of the women is a Muslim adds to the interest of this story. A Muslim woman taking action to protest a full-face veil ban by not only wearing one, but exposing some skin as well, speaks of choice, and of Muslim women who are empowered to make daring statements.

Morocco: Back in '07, Morocco, not turning back on the promises of moudawana, began graduating the Mourchidat - the first women in any Muslim country who can perform the functions of a male Imam in a mosque, except lead prayer.

BBC's Zaiba Malik explores more of  "the social revolution" - here.

Libya: Sharia . ly

Are you following the whole Libya domain registry versus the offensive to sharia law face of the URL shortening site - Vb.ly?

Overall gist from Techcrunch - here. Atlantic Wire args everything else -  here. Owners Metcalf and VB's side of the story  here & here.

Mali: Myth and Tombouctou

The Today Show went slumming for the "lost-ness" of Timbuktu.

Egypt: Crackdown

Ahead of Gamal's installation, crackdowns on the press and, from the look of Zeinobia's list, all kinds of dissent as well.

Brazil/ Africa: Chasing Cerrados

Back in August, the Economist put up a kick ass article on how Brazil's Agricultural Research Corporation/ Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (EMBRAPA)--the world’s leading tropical-research institution--turned the cerrado--Brazil's once upon a time nutrient poor back lands--green. In the article, one of the things EMBRAPA did to achieve that was:

Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. That meant parts of the cerrado could be turned into pasture, making possible the enormous expansion of Brazil’s beef herd. Thirty years ago it took Brazil four years to raise a bull for slaughter. Now the average time is 18-20 months.

Below, EMBRAPA's Jose Bellini from EMBRAPA's Accra office, introducing Brazil-Africa agriculture cooperation in technology development and capacity building at at a CGIAR meeting in Addis Ababa, back in August.



The Economist then asks...can "...the miracle of the cerrado be exported, especially to Africa, where the good intentions of outsiders have so often shriveled and died?" In response, it clarifies the difference btw a systemic versus magic-bullet approach to the problem:

Brazil’s agricultural miracle did not happen through a simple technological fix. No magic bullet accounts for it—not even the tropical soyabean, which comes closest. Rather, Embrapa’s was a “system approach”, as its scientists call it: all the interventions worked together. Improving the soil and the new tropical soyabeans were both needed for farming the cerrado; the two together also made possible the changes in farm techniques which have boosted yields further. Systems are much harder to export than a simple fix. “We went to the US and brought back the whole package [of cutting-edge agriculture in the 1970s],” says Dr Crestana. “That didn’t work and it took us 30 years to create our own. Perhaps Africans will come to Brazil and take back the package from us. Africa is changing. Perhaps it won’t take them so long. We’ll see.” If we see anything like what happened in Brazil itself, feeding the world in 2050 will not look like the uphill struggle it appears to be now.

Sustainable agricultural development talks a lot about empowering the small farmer. In the case of Brazil, a commenter observed:

Brazil knows that small farmers cannot manage the challenges of credit, technology and marketing. In the northeast the new generation of irrigation projects is experimenting with a model of reverse concessions, with the primary weight in the bidding process going to ways in which the "anchor enterprise" incorporates small farmers in the productive chain in about 30% of the area being concessioned. This is another creative way Brazilian agriculture is attempting to charter new territory.

Africa: A Long Way from Flying Boats to Senegal

Above, a 1941 flight itinerary for a Boeing 314 Flying Boat aircraft flying Pan am's first scheduled commercial service from New York to Senegal with intermediate stops in Bermuda, the Azores and Lisbon. Total travel time exceeded 60 hours.

Former Pan am employee Jimmy Eichelgruen reminisces over at cranky flyer blog about Africa and improvements commercial air travel.

South Africa: Friggin' Zef, Cont'd

Die Antwoord's Evil Boy featuring Wanga and Diplo.

Die Antwoord introduces Bjork to Freud. And if the video and its subtilted Afrikaans lyrics don't drop your jaw, this Zef poster over at Generation Bass will. According to Xeni over at Boing, the video is really about the fear of ritual circumcision. Go figure.

Africa: Rubens' Blackness

Baroque painters used color to amp up intensity and immediacy that gave those Biblical scenes an ideal-like, robust sensuality the Catholic church craved. Hence the Baroque's attention to textures and skin color, and this interesting look at Ruben's (1577 – 1640) attention to capturing African skin tones. Both clips reference 2008 "Black is Beautiful" Dutch exhibit.

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

Continuing our series of posts on the tragic but intermittently funny bone of racial history. Kendal wants his hilarious recollection of a school field trip to a cotton field (above), which has since gone viral, taken off the interwebs. We wish him luck. Commenting on "Kendal on Sharecropping," C*Notes blog gives us some insight into humor in the context of black modernity:

It's sad that you could tell a story like this, and have it be 100% accurate-- no hyperbole required. Fortunately, many of us have learned to develop a sense of humor about these things that could otherwise be very scarring and painful. We have to. There's no way we could function if we carried a chip on our shoulder every time this type of shit happens. I think that's why many of these "we want our country back" White Folks that seem to be flocking to the tea party are having nervous breakdowns after the 2008 Presidential Election. It's a fear of a retribution that does not exist.

Africa: The Revolution will be Embedded

old music documentaries worth another look:



Red Bull Music Academy's Lusofonia, A (R)evolução (2006) - looks at contributions of Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique and other musical cultures to Lusophony. Full doc.



Pump up the Volume (2001) - this clip looks back at the black & Gay origins of house music in 80s Chicago.