January 2011
15 posts
4 tags
6 tags
Diamonds in the Rough
In Nigeria, the criminal code for fraudulent financial activity is 419. Those three digits don’t quite do justice to the hundreds upon thousands of elaborate, often hilarious internet-based capers that have rendered The Nigerian Prince among the most loathed and feared presences in our contemporary wired culture. This 2006 New Yorker story offers a glimpse at how the scammers affect American...
10 tags
“How long can a situation last in which Kenyans — and South Africans, Ugandans,...”
– Not long. This valuable, thorough TIME article explains precisely why the world needs to stop, look, and take a page (or several) from the African playbook.
7 tags
Off the Grid
The Wall Street Journal has been publishing an exciting series of articles under the rubric of “Africa Rising.” I enjoyed this recent dispatch from Will Connors, the paper’s correspondent in Nigeria. (I had the added pleasure of meeting Will for a drink or two in Lagos.) His story focuses on the scramble for used cars among Nigerians with places to go and more disposable income than they’ve...
5 tags
8 tags
"The King is the Enemy"
I’m in Nairobi, Kenya and very happy about it. It’s January, breezy, dry and hot, and there is so much to do and to look at. Though my winds would seem to be blowing west to east, I can’t help looking back to the countries from whence I came.
This weekend, Chinua Achebe—MVP of World Literature syllabi—took to the New York Times Magazine (the one American thing that I miss). The editorial...
4 tags
Beggars Can Be Choosers
South Africa has decided it is going to engage in “development work” “up north” (as some South Africans call the rest of the continent). Says one minister:
“We’re recipients of development assistance, and we’re anxious that that status be preserved. At the same time … we’re in the African continent and in that context we occupy a relatively privileged...
3 tags
The Other African Gold →
“While Africa’s resource wealth continues to lure bulk of foreign investment, the rise of a new consumer class is beginning to shift the balance.” —Wall Street Journal
4 tags
Border Control
As if reading my mind on nationalism and borders, and writing about South Sudan, Jeffrey Gettleman broaches the idea that the state in Africa can be beside the point.
In hindsight, it is clear that the old boundaries often hurt prospects for state building.…maybe Africa is moving toward an understanding that smaller units can be better — that the Pandora’s box should have been cracked...
3 tags
7 tags
Zero Sums
Two things to keep in mind:
“Africa’s advantage in current upheavals is its weak attachment to the status quo.”
—“Full Circle,” Keith Hart
“America will never again experience the global dominance it enjoyed in the 17 years between the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 and the financial crisis of 2008.”
—“American Decline,”...
3 tags
6 tags
Pan Africa?
As Howard French points out in A Continent for the Taking, reportage from his time as West Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, the sanctity of borders has been pretty well accepted in Africa. For decades, Africans have agreed to be bound by political lines, however inauthentic or troublesome. New African countries (Eritrea, for example) are often pried from thousands of cold, dead hands.
...
3 tags
8 tags
Giving it Up
I’m in Accra, Ghana, for this week, catching up with TIME’s “Person of the Year” issue (starring Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, which picked up 7 million additional users in Africa in 2010).
Inside, the magazine tabulated the amount of money raised in the wake of two recent humanitarian crises. The world donated $996.72 per person affected by the Haitian earthquake on January 12th of...