We thought we'd mix some of South African photogZwelethu Mthethwa's photographs of interiors of migrant worker homes with the excerpt below from Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat's interview in last month's issue of Guernica:
“Haitians are born surrealists,” says Edwidge Danticat (quoting a friend). It’s a surrealism found in le quotidien. In Haiti it’s common to see a peasant sleeping in a tight space—the author and MacArthur Fellow explains—his toe on a poster of Brigitte Bardot’s eyes. Or a one-room house with Paris Match collages all over its walls. Art is at the heart of the island’s daily life and the most nuanced and powerful ambassador Haiti has.... Art will not be denied. Think of the daily functions of art in Haiti. The lottery stands. The tap tap camions. It’s all covered with beautiful art. My friend, the painter Ronald Mevs, used to say that Haitians are born surrealists. We are doing collage all the time, in daily life as well as in our art. So old oil drums become metal sculpture and old carnation milk cans become lamps, called tèt gripads, like bald-headed girls. Art is our communal dream.
More about those "one-room house[s] with Paris Match collages all over [their] walls" - here
With facebook hitting the 500,000,000 million user mark this year, Alex Trimpe's informatic reminds us that roughly adds up to 1 out of every 13 peeps on the planet use facebook. But that was before a Tunisian by the name of Mohamed Bouazizi lit himself up and gave voice to a revolution that's since inspired, spread and toppled governments in Egypt and now Libya. Comparing "last 3 months gain columns" for North America and Africa in the graph below tells the story:
IT News - Africa/ Statistics released by Socialbakers.com (image: socialbakers.com)
...As of February Facebook is now 637 million users globally... Of the 8.3 million new users in Africa, Egypt (+1,6 million new users, +43 % change), Nigeria (+1,4 million new users, +83 % change) and South Africa (+750k new users, 25% change) saw the greatest growth in the region during the last six months. Facebook is encouraging this rapid growth with interfaces in Swahili and Afrikaans, with Zulu and Hausa versions in development.
Citing the case of Kenya, the core reason for those gains and the African surge, explains Google's Dennis Gikunda, is quite practical:
"Using the Internet (in Kenya) is no longer about setting up an e-mail account. You either go to a social network or you use your website. Self-expression has become a form of entertainment where the audience is the medium." Facebook has taken off because in many ways it’s the online equivalent of multiple mobile phone calls without having to answer all those phones. It has become the connecting, “soft” glue that has given new momentum to Internet use in Kenya. A recent survey of Pasha Centres (new version telecentres in remote locations) found that 33% of respondents were using Facebook.
Former BBC correspondent Hannah Pool, adopted by an American mother and English father and growing up partly in Norway, finds out at the age of 20 that her birth father and family were still alive.
CBS and ABC Australia ran a couple of stories last yearabout American families later discovering the children they've adopted from orphanages in Ethiopia still had families.
But Hannah Pool's adoption and reunion story reminds us of Scottish poet Jackie Kay's adoption/reunion story: ... a lesbian-single mother, her birth mother Scottish, father Nigerian, adopted by a couple of Glaswegian communists "who threw the kind of parties where everybody ended up singing Cole Porter and Rabbie Burns songs" and her journey to Nigeria to meet her homophobe dad.
We've seen the app, but now it seems like Arabs and Israelis have something in common - making fun of Gadaffi:
NYT's Isabel Kershner writes on how Israeli journalist Noy Alooshe's Gadaffi's “Zenga-Zenga" Youtube video, a remix of American rapper Pitbull and T-Pain's "Hey Baby," has gone viral in the Arab world.
Within the context of communication and relationships, everything serves as content/information... In that regard, the internet in bizarre ways continues to be the flood of content people use, sample and remix to broker relationships between one another, between nations, between races, cultures, regions, enemies... strangers.
In Steven Crandell's write up on photographer Tyler Stablefield's lecture at the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, he includes the clip below of Stablefield explaining that what media, not just photography, does is reduce reality, "but in that reduction is power..."
Skim thru digibidi preview pages from Nicolas Dumontheuil's '09 graphic novels, Le Landais volant, volumes 1 and 2 (colors by Isabelle Merlet/ Futurepolis). They feature French Baron Jean-Dextre Pandarus Cadillac and his pseudo-colonial, travelogue-esque forays into modern African life in Ghana, Benin, Mali and Burkina Faso...
...Endowed with great coping skills inherited from his illustrious ancestors and an open mind taught by his father, who imperially suggested that he run the wide world, Jean-Dextre, full of goodwill, although bit naive, goes to Africa carrying the guilt of the history between Africa and Europe, fears of not yet being free of his prejudices, and, of course, blundering and falling over each well-intentioned step he takes. Goog Trans BDGest reviews for Vol 1 - here & Vol 2 - here.
"Revolution in Cairo" - breakdown of the revolution like only PBS Frontline can. The doc's premise is that revolutions, though they now pack that twitter-facebook feel of spontaneity, are transferrable only through long preparations and well trained activists. In short, revolutions do not come out of nowhere.
Due to rights restrictions the Frontline doc is streaming only in the U.S. Go figure. Even as interesting--and probably more accurate-- is Zeinobia, over at Egyptian Chronicles,aggregation of how #Jan 25 went down.
Freelance editor Jeff Yorke just mashed together the "greatest film ever" with the music that inspired the "greatest music video ever" - Beastie Boyz' "Sabotage." We think it's so cool that the mashing of both surreptitiously draws from what you remember from the Spike Jonze video.
And speaking of movie mashups ahead of 83rd Academy Awards tomorrow, Exophrine blog this week put up a 150 famous catchphrases and movie lines going as far back as 1932! Full list of catch phrases and the movies they are from - here.
Oops! They left out Juggernaut and the Dude. But an insane list nonetheless.
Two recent music videos from Nigeria and Ghana celebrating the African woman:
(Above) African Woman - Becca. Label: EKB Records (Kiki Banson). dir. Davis Media Group. Feb, 2011. (Below) Black and Yellow (Remix) - Naija Boyz. (Black and Yellow - Wiz Khalifa. Album : Rolling Papers. Label: Atlantic, 2011). Label: African Remix. Feb, 2011.
Becca is heir to whose throne - Yvonne or Makeba? Hard to say. Naija Boyz, again and again, turn social commentary--take that National Geographic--into good times.
Adel Iskandar, author of Al-jazeera: The Story Of The Network That Is Rattling Governments And Redefining Modern Journalism, explains the origins of the broadcaster.
Reuters Africa Journal profiles U.S based Kenyan actor, Benjamin "Benji" Ochieng, aka Colonel Emanuel Okeze, the prince's bodyguard who faces off with Bruce Willis at his gruffest in Tears of the Sun (2003). Ochieng takes us through his rise from the ranks of the Hollywood extra to finally nailing a speaking part--hence the sought after union card--when the producers on the X Files were told he could speak Swahili.
The clip of Ochieng on the beach, helping Scully find the alien artifact, is from "The Sixth Extinction" episode of the X Files (part 2 of the Biogenesis story arc) from season 7. However, it seems he didn't tell the X Files producers that since their script called for a West Africa beach/coastline, ideally, nobody in that part of Africa should speak or understand Swahili :) [We've referred to that X File episode here and blogged about the other Africa-related X File episode "Teliko," Eps 3, Season 4 (1996), which deals with Albinism].
Anyway, the profile is a nice look at an African actor in Hollywood, struggling it out with everyone else.
A #Feb 23 hash tag went up calling for protests in Cameroon against the 28 year rule of Paul Biya. Ahead of yesterday's protests, the U.S embassy in Yaounde issued this. Dibussi Tande over at Scribbles from the Den posted the video below yesterday of police beating the crap out of the protesters, especially Cameroonian presidential aspirant and activist Kah Walla, even after she pleaded that it was a peaceful protest (pics - here):
Tande breaks down the video here and gives a blow by blow account of the protest and clampdown - here.
Looks like the news cycle just changed. Radio Netherlands'sounds deflated:
Usually buzzing with life the capital Yaoundé put on a quiet face yesterday. Most shops and businesses remained closed and anti-riot police were standing at every street corner. On the Boulevard du 20 mai, one of the capital’s main avenues, sympathisers of Paul Biya’s regime waited in vain for anti-Biya protesters. Opposition leaders arrested: Louis Tobie Mbida, opposition leader and the son of Cameroon’s first Prime Minister, was arrested along with four others. He was charged with attempt to overthrow the government. The five men remain in custody. Numerous other activists, arrested on similar charges, are detained in secret locations. more
Life - Muthoni The Drummer Queen. Album: The Human Condition (2009). Label: Wawesh/Penya Africa. Dir. Willie Owusu/ Big Ideas. Drop date: February 2011.
At last, above we finally have all the various ways to spell the man's name. Yesterday though Clinton Yates' over at Wa Po's Lunchline email newsletter got a reader who is an Arabic scholar to explain why there are so many variations for Ga,Qaddafi's the man's name. Apparently...
[His name] in Arabic uses a letter with a sound that has no direct translation or pronunciation in English. The third letter from the right in القذافي has a guttural sound made from the throat. It is impossible to pronounce by a native English speaker. As a result, it ends up getting pronounced as a K or Q or Qa or most regularly a G — "Guh" type sound."
And Salon.com has pulled clips of Gaddafi and Libyan references from the pop culture archives, starting way back from Naked Gun and Back to the Future to episodes of The Simpsons, Family Guy and SNL's parody of Gaddafi's UN speech. If you asked us, that speech doubled as its own parody.
Boing Boingflagged this public domain 1932 Max Fleisher Betty Boop cartoon in which Betty and pals, walking through some nondescript jungle are swamped by some African savages, who then bizarrely morph into Louis Armstrong's head and members of his band. But before you go WTF, you would recall that in the 30s, jazz--Rag Time to be exact--was seen by an older generation of Americans as something primitive, or as a critic back then put it - "syncopation gone mad and whose victims, in my opinion, can only be treated successfully like a dog with rabies - with a dose of lead." So a connection of African savages, Armstrong and jazz, which may seem almost surreal now, wouldn't really be out of place in a racially tinged and politically incorrect 30s.
It can be hard to imagine today, but in it's early heyday jazz was considered primitive music, invented by innately musical blacks and driven by their wild passions. Before the rise of the big band and swing dance, it was mostly considered novelty music. Here's a non-animated Armstrong living up to the image and performing in leopard skin:
My favorite thing about the Aya series is that it covers so many controversial and taboo topics...the sixth book is no different. In the book Aya continues to find a way to denounce her teacher, who forces female students to have sex with him or else he beats them and then fails them. Filled with rage, Bonaventure chases down his son Moussa, who has stolen money from him to build schools and clinics in villages, and has him imprisoned. Innocent is now in France but must deal with the difficulties of the visa process and the French embassy. Albert decides to marry an old ugly village woman in an effort to hide his homosexuality. As usual, Aya N°6 is a must read.
Below Autochenille 16 page press kit about the forthcoming feature-length 2D animation film - the film's synopsis seems to be pulled from the first volume in the series. Aya-themovie
Talking at Angouleme 2011 about her book, Akiss - Attaque de chat and immigrating to France:
At only 12 years, Marguerite Abouet must leave Ivory Coast and settled near Paris with her uncle. In Akiss - Attaque de chat, Marguerite Abouet tells part of her life as a little girl in Abidjan. My Boox met the author at the International Festival of Comics 2011 in Angouleme. There, she explains her prejudices about France before his arrival.
Angouleme 2011 interview with Akissi' artist, Mathieu Sapin:
Over at almasryalyoum a clip of superstar Egyptologist Zahi Hawass walking us through (above) the damage and current state of Egypt's antiquities and treasures. However, in a post-Mubarak Egypt, Globe and Mail's James Adam writes of the serious chinks in what used to be Hawass' teflon armor:
Until recently, Hawass seemed unassailable, much like Mubarak. “Everybody loves a star and Hawass in a way is a reality-TV star,” one observer says. Certainly at 63 he’s had his critics, who’ve labelled him, variously, a corrupt blowhard, petulant control freak, publicity hound, promoter of dubious scholarship and whimsical decision-maker. But the criticism, much of it made on condition of anonymity, never seemed to coalesce into anything substantial, not least because Hawass’s power flowed directly from Mubarak; the former president’s wife, Suzanne, was one of his best friends. If you were an archeologist who wanted to dig in, say, the Valley of the Kings, Hawass controlled all access. “You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. You don’t want to ruin the diplomatic relationships that have been set up,” is how one archeologist put it to me. But less than three weeks after Hawass made the perhaps fateful decision to formally enter the Mubarak government by accepting an invitation to become minister of antiquities (a new post), Hawass’s power and influence are being strenuously tested...
In response 2 the historic event above, Jerusalem Postreports Israel's President, Shimon Peres, telling a gathering of close to 400 editors, diplomats and opinion makers at a morning briefing in Madrid on Wednesday... :
[He]characterized the crossing of the Suez Canal by Iranian warships as "cheap provocation"....World leaders who allow themselves to be photographed with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be ashamed," Peres declared, adding that every effort should be made to prevent the Iranian president from ever again striding across the red carpet of the United Nations... As for regional upheaval, Peres said that Israel supports any effort to strengthen peace and democracy in the Middle East. Young people are seeking freedom, equality and the opportunity to live in dignity, he said. Recent events, he added, have provided a great opportunity for Israelis and Palestinians to return to the negotiating table. The differences are not as great as they appear, and can be overcome, he said.
On Libya and Qaddafi
...The president also commented on the situation in Libya, saying Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi invests more in his clothing than in his people, reported Israel Radio. Peres asked "who needs Gaddafi and what is he good for?" adding that the Libyan leader only incites acts of terrorism.
Meanwhile, commenting on Libya and Gadaffi, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose security forces crushed protests against him in 2009, seems to have suddenly developed a rare sort of selective amnesia. He said abt Qaddafi today:
(3.59pm) How can a leader subject his own people to a shower of machine-guns, tanks and bombs? How can a leader bomb his own people, and afterwards say 'I will kill anyone who says anything?'
In commemoration of Yoweri Museveni winning a 4th term after 25 years in office, we thought we should post the hit "You Want Another Rap"- the Animated Version:
But in terms of tone, the Baobab blog nails its summary of last week's Ugandan presidential election:
The streets in Kampala today were peaceful; bored even after Uganda's general election on February 18th. Just as Baobab predicted (though hardly the work of an oracle), President Yoweri Museveni won at a canter. His main opposition rival, Kizza Besigye, protested the results. Even that had a sense of ritual about it. Mr Besigye has now lost three times to Mr Museveni. He has neither the funds, the message, nor the popularity to trump "M7". According to the official tally, Mr Museveni won with 68% of the vote, with Mr Besigye trailing on 26%. For the president, the result was an improvement on the 57% he scored in 2006. And it came without the thuggish treatment of the opposition that made a mockery of that election. With a measly voter turnout, Mr Museveni appeared not to need ghost voters....
I recall writing my thesis on intersections between the graphic novel and postcolonial writing back in '04 or '05 and citing stuff from Jefferey Brown's bookon the then defunct DC comicsMilestone imprint -- a '90s line of comic books created and edited by McDuffie et al. featuring, let's say, a more diverse makeup of characters than you'd normally find in the DC universe. It was around that time I went on a nostalgia bender and went searching for all those Milestone issues of Shadow Cabinet (written by Dwayne McDuffie and drawn by John Paul Leon) I wasn't able to lay my hands on in the '90s. You didn't have to be a black comic book fan back in the '90s to grasp just how important some of those Milestone books were even to those of us outside the United States. Just seeing the cover of McDuffie's Static and some of the other Milestone books hanging on the wall of Will and Carlton's poolhouse pad every week on syndicated episodes of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air was a trip for some us.
Control - Spoek Mathambo. [Cover of Joy Division's 'She's Lost Control']. Album: Mshini Wam. dir. photographer Pieter Hugo and cinematographer Michael Cleary. BBE, 2011.
We thought this short doc on Nigerian women pioneers and their brand of feminism by the photographer Joel Benson should hook up with this Sokari Eskine essay posted over at Nigerians Talk - both short doc and essay were in commemoration of Nigeria's 50th anniversary last October. Excerpt:
My understanding of African / Nigerian feminism lies somewhere between indigeious feminisms which have always existed in the sense that Nigerian women have always fought against local oppressive conditions as well as more recently colonialism; and contemporary feminism which is relatively new and although it has its foundations in Europe, Africa / Nigeria has developed it’s own contemporary indigenous feminisms which struggle against fundamentalist and oppressive conditions such as female genital mutilation, forced marriages, widowhood rites, same sex relationships and so on. The point is that feminism is not just about women, its about creating a new form of social relationships based on equality, mutual respect and justice. So instead I am going to focus on some of the Nigerian women (some may identify as feminists, some may not) who have taken action towards achieving justice and social, economic, environmental and political change. Women who I consider to be progressive and who have challenged and resisted oppressive conditions and or laws by taking action either individually or collectively. The women here largely remain nameless but their actions have not been forgotten. They have much to teach us with their courage and tenacity. I hope that those who read the piece can add to it and possibly we can begin the discussion around what we mean by ‘Nigerian FeminismS”. The list of women is not definitive – it is my list and I invite readers to share the names of their role models and heroines.... (more)
Below, Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam Gaddaf's rambling but readable 2007 PhD thesis from London Sch of Economics (via The Arabist) just moved to the top of the interwebs' ready to go viral bestseller list. Excerpt below from the tail-end of the abstract:
...The thesis explains and adopts three philosophical foundations in support of the argument. The first is liberal individualism; the thesis argues that there are strong motivations for free individuals to seek fair terms of cooperation within the necessary constraints of being members of a global society. Drawing on the works of David Hume, John Rawls and Ned McClennen, it elaborates significant self-interested and moral motives that prompt individuals to seek cooperation on fair terms if they expect others to do so. Secondly, it supports a theory of global justice, rejecting the limits of Rawls’s view of international justice based on what he calls ‘peoples’ rather than persons. Thirdly, the thesis adopts and applies David Held’s eight cosmopolitan principles to support the concept and specific structures of ‘Collective Management’.
Meanwhile, the father who took power at the age of 27 still suffers the disconnection and other side effects of ruling a country for 41 years:
Armament: Guns: 2× 30 mm (1.18 in) DEFA 553 cannons with 150 rounds per gun/ Hardpoints: 1 centreline pylon, four underwing and two wingtip pylons with a capacity of 6,300 kg (13,900 lb) (practical maximum load 4,000 kg (8,800 lb)) and provisions to carry combinations of:/ Rockets: 8× Matra rocket pods with 18× SNEB 68 mm rockets each/ Bombs: various/ Other: reconnaissance pods or Drop tanks/ Missiles: 2× AIM-9 Sidewinders OR Matra R550 Magics on wingtip pylons, 2× Super 530Fs underwing, 1× AM-39 Exocets anti-ship missile, 2× AS-30L laser guided missiles.
Above Part 2 of 4 of a discussion between author Teju Cole and Random House editor David Ebershoff on how the novel Open City came to be. Reading/discussion held at Center for Fiction (at the Mercantile Library), 17 East 47th St, New York, NY.
The part below from the James Woods' New Yorker review sums it up:
Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake.
It's february but Taylor Antrim over at the Daily Beast is calling this "the best bebut of 2011".
The New Yorker's 28 paged extract of the book - here.
A group of teenagers from Nairobi won the $8000 Passion Pictures Best Film and Artists Project Earth Youth Visions award as part of the 1 min to Save the World contest, which challenged young filmmakers to create a one-minute video about climate change. Their winning "Me and My Bike" video below:
More and more analysis pours forth-- or stories like techcrunch's recent translation of an Arabic newspaper report of an Egyptian man naming his new born girl "facebook"-- about the larger role social networks played in the Egyptian revolution. While the no-revolution-comes-via-social networks pundits like the Evgeny Morozovs have recalibrated or fine tuned their arguments and the Malcolm Gladwells haven't issued anymore ill timed rants (more here and here), we are still sticking to our social media, Fukuyama and "struggle for recognition" thesis, even as the new media hard data pouring in from Egypt continues to enthrall.
Alexis Madrigal breaks down the graph above from ShareThis, that company that makes those little icons under every post you read, which tracked hour-by-hour sharing via e-mail, Twitter and Facebook on day 18 of the egyptian revolution (February 11):
What's interesting here is that the lines don't look as much like each other as you might think. While the Twitter and Facebook shares have the same rough shape, the details are interesting. Twitter sharing is much spikier, possibly driven by subevents in the overall narrative. And during the key hour in which Mubarak resigned, Twitter and Facebook sharing came very close to intersecting. Turning to the Facebook graph, you realize how big a beast the site really is. Its pattern conforms roughly to U.S. web traffic as a whole, peaking around 1:00 p.m.
That part about Twitter being "much spikier, possibly driven by subevents in the overall narrative" can actually be seen in realtime in an amazing visualization from Andre Padisson over at the Gephi blog, where he/she explains connecting, via a web server, the Gephi Graph Streaming plugin to the Twitter Streaming API, allowing the plugin to show twitter users as nodes and their retweets as links over the hour of February 11 when Mubarak stepped down. Watch:
With new findings giving more credence to multiregional theory of human evolution--i.e. a gradualism theory that says evolution takes place over wide areas under natural selection and whenever there is a new feature that's an advantage it spreads among the species, an alternative to the homo erectus coming out of Africa with evolutionary advantages that helped it replace other species--above, science blogger Razib Khan talks to an early skeptic of the humans came "out of Africa" hypothesis, University of Michigan paleoanthropologist Milford Wolpoff. Below is a clip from Nova's "Last Human Standing" documentary, based on the "Out of Africa" theory and provides some more backstory and illustration of the homo erectus migration out of Africa to other parts of the world:
A view from the exhibition JapanCongo curated by Carsten Höller from the collection of Jean Pigozzi at Magasin, Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, February 6 on April 24, 2011.
Though it contains works from all over the continent, as the wall above attests, the exhibit contains a lot of paintings from DRC painter, Chéri Samba [from here we can see on that wall Lutte contre l'insalubrité (1998) and the Little Kadogo (2004) which features on the masthead of Congo Siasa's blog].
The Pigozzi collection (Caacart) has been known for twenty years as one of the worldʼs foremost collections of contemporary African art Below, excerpt from. WSJ on Pigozzi and Chéri Samba:
The 59-year-old collector buys art the way he invests in businesses, seeking overlooked parts of the market. Over 22 years, he's amassed one of the largest personal collections of African art. One favorite is Chéri Samba, a Congolese painter whose colorful canvases often include nudes, self-portraits and scenes of social inequality punctuated by blurbs of text. A Samba work sold last May for $98,500, a record for the artist at auction; when Mr. Pigozzi began collecting the artist's paintings, he recalls spending about $10,000.
CBN governor, Lamido Sanusi, schools the IMF below. But first, excerpts from the recent IMF's article IV consult with Nigeria:
...inflation has been stuck in the low double digits for the past two years and foreign reserves have been falling as the Central Bank of Nigeria has focused on maintaining exchange rate stability and low interest rates. The fiscal stimulus intensified in 2010, notwithstanding the already solid growth performance and high inflation. After rising by 10 percent in 2009, consolidated public spending increased by 37 percent in 2010. The non-oil primary deficit has increased by 5 percentage points to 32 percent of non-oil GDP. Despite world oil prices well in excess of the budget benchmark price, the government spent all current oil revenues and drew on savings in the Excess Crude Account, at a time when stabilization called for a rebuilding of buffers. Despite high inflation, the CBN reduced the rate on its standing deposit facility. In response to pressure on the currency, the CBN sold reserves rather than raise interest rate or let the exchange rate depreciate. The CBN recently raised interest rates, but short-term real interest rates remain negative....Directors considered the central bank’s recent increase in policy rates appropriate. Further monetary tightening may be needed should inflation pressures continue. Directors took note of the staff’s assessment of an overvaluation of the naira, and stressed that greater exchange rate flexibility would prevent one-way bets in the foreign exchange market and cushion external shocks. Directors expressed concerns about potentially conflicting objectives of monetary policy...
Those suggestion that the Naira is overvalued and the country is need for some monetary tightening raised some fuss. CBN governor pushes back, and hard, against devaluation and cites the IMF's insinuation about inflation and CBN's delay in raising interest rates loses sight of the fact that the country needed liquidity in the banks pending the outcome of things being done to resolve the country's banking crisis:
One of the more interesting videos to come out of the just concluded CPAC annual meeting shows a white supremacist by the name of Jamie Kelso arguing with some young conservatives about the urgent need to keep their white lineages pure. From what I can make of his argument, his whole premise ties the "purity" of white lineages to an idea of white essentialism, which he feels must be maintained to preserve white exceptionalism, which he is equating to "American exceptionalism." Sit back and enjoy:
To make his case, he cites how conservative African cultures also are when it comes to interracial mixing and ends up totally misreading what that sort of conservatism is all about. Those African parents, extended families and communities are not about racial purity or preserving genetic endowments. Rather they are about cultural compatibility and resource allocation - i.e. hard pressed African communities trying to make sure its future generation directs the maximum amount of its time and resources their way rather than to another culture. Go figure. But what's glaring is how he cherry picks and takes out of context any conflict in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa to make a point. Fascinating stuff.
Christophe-Ngalle Edimo and Simon-Pierre Mbumbo's 2009 graphic novel, Malamine, un africain à Paris (Éditions Les Enfants Rouges) was featured in the L'Express piece about comics tackling immigration in France.
Words without Borders just put up a 13 page preview of Edward Gauvin's English translation .
The well-intentioned aid idea of sending tee-shirts to Africa (new or used) is a full fledged zombie; a very dumb humanitarian aid idea human development bloggers shoot down time and time again, only to see it brought back to life somewhere else looking for more well-intentioned flesh to feast upon.
The latest saga involves mega NGO World Vision, because it may soon be getting a truck load of preprinted “Pittsburgh Steelers 2011 Super Bowl Champion” t-shirts (Packers, you suck) as a donation from the NFL, which then gets shipped as aid to Africa, expanding Africa's already humongous second-hand clothes markets and further deflating what's left of the continent's already depressed textile industries. This time round, the economics of tee-shirts-to-Africa aid got a write up on NYT's Freakanomics blog. Yale Dev Economist Dean Karlan gets to the core:
I think World Vision might have a better defense. They could argue that critics of the annual t-shirt migration (or at least all the critics I’ve heard) are thinking about the wrong counterfactual. The choice is not between (a) doing nothing — which, critics infer, would leave Africans to produce and sell 100,000 new t-shirts — and (b) shipping 100,000 t-shirts to Africa. Rather, the choice is between (a) selling the t-shirts in the U.S. as rags (or novelty souvenirs for delusional Steelers fans) and then sending to Africa the proceeds plus the money that would have been spent on shipping, or (b) shipping 100,000 t-shirts to Africa. In other words, the NFL surely isn’t going to pay local producers to make 100,000 t-shirts after the Super Bowl. That option is not on the table. So in the end, the t-shirt migration has one pro and two cons, and we have no real data to tell us what to do. The pro: some people in Africa get some t-shirts, and hopefully those people extract some value from the t-shirts (either by wearing them or by selling them). The first con: market prices for t-shirts may go lower in Africa, and this adversely affects some. The second con: there may simply be a better way, such as selling the t-shirts in the US and sending the profits, as in (a) above.
Aid Matters posted World Vision's reply to bloggers' questions yesterday.
In the prior post in this serieswe learnt that AGOA is set to expire soon and some African textile industries are being warned to diversify their products and aim for other markets now. The excerpt below from TiA's post on the second-hand clothing economy further affirms why Africa's local markets are a dead end:
... if you box up your old t-shirts and take them to Goodwill, you may actually be inadvertently undermining the development of clothing production facilities in Africa. Why? Because with a huge supply of cheap apparel that is ready for sale, there's no need to build factories to produce more. These are not insignificant effects; Frazer finds that "Used-clothing imports are found to have a negative impact on apparel production inAfrica, explaining roughly 40% of the decline in production and 50% of the decline in employment over the period 1981–2000." In other words, clothing imports result in job loss for people who could probably otherwise lift themselves out of poverty. Frazer is dealing with used clothing, of course, but there's little reason to think that new clothing would be any different, especially since World Vision will be distributing it for free. In fact, free clothing donations undermine the secondhand clothing markets that provide what employment does exist in the sector.
That said, this '09 NTV report indicates African governments, perhaps looking for short cuts to lowering unemployment, may actually want to make it easier for importers to bring in second-hand clothing:
Over at Method is Madness, Saratu flags an old Nigerian beer ad, which uses of Victor Uwaifo's "Joromi" to suck you down awesome memory lane. She finds this ad an exception to other beer ads strangely and naively oblivious to the fact that there more women beer drinkers. By the way, Nigeria's beer boozers, kindergartners compared to their Eastern bloc counterparts, still mark their turf on the Economist's gone viral global alcohol consumption chart.
Speaking of men, gender bias and old ads, 10 and 5 recently flagged a funny South African ad:
Going through the list of films participating in the New Directors/New Films Film Festival, the S & A crew spot the Ghanaian entrant, The Destiny Of Lesser Animals, written by Yao Bunu Nunoo, directed by Deron Albright, partly financed with his 2008 Fullbright Fellowship to teach at NFTI, Ghana. An article about how the film was made in Ghana - here.
The film is said to have been "originally conceived as an homage" to a film we love to death - Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog ('1949). You will see the cop's bag get snatched in the trailer above. But instead of losing his police issued revolver, inspector Boniface Koomsin (played by Yao Bunu Nunoo) who is trying to return to America loses his counterfeit passport/visa. Kurosawa's film was the odyssey of an idealistic rookie cop and the hard nosed veteran investigator into the struggling underbelly of a post-WWII Japan, which gets flipped in this adaptation to the African deportee embarking on an odyssey through modern Ghana joining forces with a veteran investigator (Chief Inspector Oscar Darko played by Fred Amugi), who is optimistic about the future of the country.
The short doc below is a walk through (cue to 3.13) other adaptations based on the films of Kurosawa. Hoping Nunoo and Albright's get added to the list:
Click the pic below for editor Emma Dawson's illuminating talk with The Strand about her traveling into the thick of contemporary Africa with an open mind and off the beaten path to source new African writing for a series...
She talks about coming across writing trends and short stories that suggest if not the beginnings of genres at least a preoccupation with, for example, crime writing and Noir in Nigeria (which brings to our minds the series of Pacesetters books for teens popular in the '80s or the more recent Treachery in the Yard by Adimchinma Ibe) or sci-fi writing in Yaounde (...and won't it be interesting if aspects of African sci-fi became synonymous with Cameroon, considering Paul Biya has ruled the country for35 years plus the sci-fi ground work already laid down in the work of Jean-Pierre Bekolo with Quartier Mozart (1992) and Les Saignantes (2005). Judging the 2010 BBC Radio Africa Playwriting Competition, Wole Soyinka also spoke about spotting some sci-fi plays.
More important, Dawson spots in the writing coming out of the contemporary Africa thicket the interesting absence of stories towing narratives about HIV/AIDS; rather the stories freely explore other African issues and concerns.
South African-based, Nigerian-born author and publisher Moky Makura would agree. Describing her Nollybooks line of romance books or "chick lit" for teenage girls, she points to the zero mention in the books of HIV/AIDS or the other heavy negative issues synonymous with the continent. She argues that there are other things going on:
Last month's BBC Focus on African "chick-lit" publishing - here. Also, 2006 Caine prize winner E.C. Osundu 03/02/2011 talk with the Strand about short story writing - here.
Above clip is from With Wings And Roots, a feature-length documentary (still in production/ trailer) about six children of immigrants from diverse backgrounds, striving in their American and German homelands to expand their definitions of belonging.
The young lady at the opening, explaining that after answering "New York" to the initial "where are you from?" only prompts the extra "...but where are you from, from?", which in a de ja vu sorta way reminds us of another New Yorker, the author James Baldwin, who tells a "...but where are you from, from?" anecdote at the opening of Horace Ové's "Baldwin's Nigger" (below) - a recording of Baldwin's famous 1968 talk in London:
A recent CNN report (bloggedhere) checked out Canadian Tal Dehtiar and his "made in Africa" footwear line, Oliberte. The report looked at how Dentiar, rather than pack his bags for the "sweat shops" and other market efficiencies of China, was determined to find ways to endure the added labor costs in of manufacturing in Africa and remain competitive making quality shoes for the high-end American retail market.
The other motivation to stay and manufacture in African countries is AGOA - a tariff-preference program that allows African made goods to get into the U.S import duty-free. Above, CNN's Robyn Curnow looks at the AGOA-enabled Taiwanese founded denim industry in Lesotho.
Above, classic tweet from last Friday moments after Mubarak stepped down. With its clampdown backfiring, abolishing Fridays may be too late for Gaddafi's 41 year-old regime. RFI:
The arrest of a lawyer and human rights activist in Benghazi sparked a protest, which turned into clashes with the police on Tuesday.
Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has always argued that the major problem facing the developing world is how to convert its "dead capital"-- i.e. the poor entreprenuers whose economic activity, estimated at US$ 10 trillion worldwide, flow outside the legal system as undocumented activity thus inassessible data, which prevents them from leveraging their capital inside the legal system and from engaging in the kind of wealth creation activities such as access to credit, the issue of shares, the mortgage of property, and a host of other economic activities that drive a modern market economies.
... Keith Breckenridge looks at Ghana's adoption of the world’s first biometric banking system--basically a void card enabled by the cardholder's fingerprint--to draw a larger proportion of the population into the banking economy, raise the levels of local capitalization by drawing a much larger portion of the issued money supply into bank accounts, create a national instrument and measure of capital accumulation "in the face of a host of established informal and transnational practices that make a mockery of the post-colonial state’s ability to influence and tax the economy." He argues that besides all of implementation road bumps, the scheme might actually succeed. Excerpt:
There is certainly much that seems strange about the Ghanaian e-Zwich project. It is difficult to believe that a country that had no meaningful credit card system, no reliable electricity supply, or even street addresses will be the first to implement a biometric payment infrastructure. Yet in an important sense it is the absence of a preexisting system of payments that makes it possible for Ghana to move its entire banking sector on to Net1’s biometric standard. As that company’s Brenda Stewart observed, ‘Ghana has been able to take up the world-first initiative because it has no Visa or MasterCard infrastructure in place’ (du Toit 2008). In this, at least, the idea of leapfrogging (which recurs almost continuously in African discussions of biometrics) has a kind of power. The new smartcard and cellular networking and biometric technologies will, I think, equip African states with new tools to capture and order the economic activity that has long sought to escape central power, but the outcome of this struggle is clearly a long way off.
Afrique en lignegathers the political fallout from Anas recent expose (above) of the corruption riddled Ghanaian customs and ports authority - an expose so spot on that, below, we have the Ghanaian president visit to the customs offices to deliver a cringe inducing sermon in hopes of extricating his administration from the mess :
Before everyone ditches Egypt and Tunisia for Algeria and Iran, over at Commentary Max Boot underlines for terrorist organizations the take home lesson so far:
The success of protesters in Tunisia and Egypt is especially striking because both regimes — along with all the other governments in the Middle East — have been in the cross-hairs of al-Qaeda and their Islamist fellow travelers. Osama bin Laden and his ilk have been using suicide bombers and assassins for many years to try to topple dictatorships across the region. Time after time, they have failed — in Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. All those regimes have proved able to repress violent extremists (admittedly, in the case of Iraq, with considerable American help). In Egypt, Mubarak survived the massacres of tourists in the 1990s carried out by Islamist groups. He did not survive peaceful rallies in the heart of his own capital.There is a lesson here for those not too fanatical or deluded to learn it. Put down the bomb, the sniper rifle, whatever weapon you have, and grab a placard, go on Twitter, organize a rally. True, many peaceful protests have been repressed too, as we have seen most recently in Iran; but they offer a much surer road to regime change than does blowing up innocent people.
And for the seduced, NYT's Roger Cohen sees these uprisings and revolutions fundamentally as Arabs re-discovering their self worth, which he thinks further depletes the terrorism's talent pool:
Previously I think in Egypt, Egyptians felt that after 30 years under Mubarak they just had to suffer whatever the regime did. This I feel could have a transformative effect on the Arab world. Because what's the effect of powerlessness; when you think you can't do anything as an individual? One is, you see conspiracies everywhere and the Arab world has been full of these conspiracies that either America, Israel or somebody was controlling their lives, and that in the end os very negative. Now you will have people who believe they can do things. Another difference is if you feel your life is worth nothing you are more likely to find an appeal in fanatical movements that say, hey, come to us; subsume your identity into this utopian, destructive, often suicidal beliefs for life to have some value.
