The Bright Continent

My book (which is, thankfully, on the production line) uses...

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:50:00 +0300

My book (which is, thankfully, on the production line) uses mapping as a metaphor for power. explore-blog gamely explores this territory, using the beloved US show, The West Wing.

Via Africa is a Country: Rose Chibambo, hero of Malawi’s...

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 02:39:50 +0300

Via Africa is a Country:

Rose Chibambo, hero of Malawi’s independence struggle, is on the country’s new K200 banknote. She was imprisoned by the British & gave birth while in jail. Malawi’s first female cabinet minister, she rebelled against Kamuzu Banda during the Cabinet Crisis of 1964 and was exiled in Zambia for 30 years.

TED Does Nairobi

Tue, 08 May 2012 15:05:00 +0300

This weekend, Nairobi hosted TED. The famous conferences on “technology entertainment and design” are nothing new, but only in the last five years has the informative output of these events been online for anyone to watch. More recently, ”TEDx” events threw the doors open even wider, allowing individuals and groups to host their own events and to make the TED brand local. I attended TEDxNairobi on one of my first weekends in Kenya back in 2010.

Two years later, I was one of about 25 speakers who had six minutes to share, per TED’s parlance, “an idea worth spreading.” TED showed up in Nairobi because the organizers felt that the annual conference has become overly “established.” In response, they’ve trained the searchlight outside of America, looking for ideas worth spreading from the whole world. In Africa, events have been held in Tunis, Nairobi and Johannesburg.

Here’s a shot of most of the gang (my leg is through the “D”):

I spoke about my (forthcoming) book, and the need for the world to embrace and learn from the informal networks and innovations that Africa does best. Participating really brought home TED’s awesome convening power. The crowd was electric. All of my fellow speakers were rock-stars and inspirations in diverse fields. I came away with a stack of cards and great new friends from the region. Some standouts:

Saki Mafundikwa has done the most wonderful in-depth work on Afrikan Alphabets: writing systems built in Africa. Some are centuries old.

Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu leverages the phenomenal reach of radio in Africa to help hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers in Nigeria.

Richard Turere, only 13 years old, stole the whole show with his tale of innovation to stop lions from attacking his family’s cattle near Nairobi National Park.

All the talks, including mine, will be on the web in June, I’m told. Definitely worth your time.

Part two of two Morning Edition pieces on Sino-African trade in...

Thu, 03 May 2012 09:04:42 +0300

Part two of two Morning Edition pieces on Sino-African trade in Guangzhao, China. This one profiles Nigerian traders “Nice Guy” and “Fortunado.” Listen for the sound of packing tape.

Next Stop for Foodies: Africa!

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:53:54 +0300

The WSJ is all over the future:

[T]he appetite for new world cuisines will only grow. Generation Y has an even greater appetite for ethnic novelty than baby boomers or Generation X. They’ve grown up on pad thai and baba ganoush and sushi—culinary adventure is part of their DNA. They expect to taste ever more diverse cuisines.
There is only one largely unexplored continent left—and it isn’t Antarctica.

Obviously African food is delicious. I, for one, will leap and laugh when egusi retails like risotto or tikka masala. Read the whole thing.

Afronauts.

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:34:20 +0300

Afronauts.

Crime is a Country?

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:31:16 +0300

In keeping with my untoward fixation with forms of organization other than the state, a new fact: Crime is among the top 20 largest economies in the world. And of course, criminals are hip to the distributed, decentralized new century:

“Today, most criminal organizations bear no resemblance to the hierarchical organized crime family groups of the past,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Brian Nichols said, according to a copy of his speech.

“Instead, they consist of loose and informal networks that often converge when it is convenient and engage in a diverse array of criminal activities,” Nichols, of the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, added.

Suggestion for the flag: 419!

David Brooks Doesn't Know What Ails Us

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:51:00 +0300

I like David Brooks, who is doing less frequent violence to the best real estate in journalism than, say, Dowd and Friedman, but I often add that it’s because he’s unpredictable. Sometimes this translates into inconsistency. Here is a strange column on “Sam Spade at Starbucks”:

If you attend a certain sort of conference, hang out at a certain sort of coffee shop or visit a certain sort of university, you’ve probably run into some of these wonderful young people who are doing good. Typically, they’ve spent a year studying abroad. They’ve traveled in the poorer regions of the world. Now they have devoted themselves to a purpose larger than self.

Often they are bursting with enthusiasm for some social entrepreneurship project: making a cheap water-purification system, starting a company that will empower Rwandan women by selling their crafts in boutiques around the world….

Yet one rarely hears social entrepreneurs talk about professional policing, honest courts or strict standards of behavior; it’s more uplifting to talk about microloans and sustainable agriculture.

In short, there’s only so much good you can do unless you are willing to confront corruption, venality and disorder head-on.

Leave aside his leaving aside of those who don’t “attend a certain sort of conference.” Below is an op-ed, “The Rugged Altruists,” Brooks wrote only last August, while visiting my present home in Kenya. It’s a love letter to the “service religion” in lean economies that he disdains today.

Very few nongovernmental organizations or multilateral efforts do good, many Kenyans say. They come and go, spending largely on themselves, creating dependency not growth. The government-to-government aid workers spend time at summit meetings negotiating protocols with each other.
But in odd places, away from the fashionableness, one does find people willing to embrace the perspectives and do the jobs the locals define — in businesses, where Westerners are providing advice about boring things like accounting; in hospitals where doctors, among many aggravations, try to listen to the symptoms the patients describe.

What accounts for the turnaround?

I didn’t love the first column because it glamorized charity and ignored important political and economic stories in the region. Kenyan leaders are on trial at the Hague—and running for president at once. The East African community is attempting to introduce a new, single, currency. At the time, a group on the American terror watch list was blocking food aid from Somalia. For examples. Brooks covers those things in rich nations, but once in Africa, he forgot that. This kind of amnesia comes from pity, not respect.

I don’t like this column because it feels like the same kind of lazy freelancing. Politics versus “nongovernmental organizations” is a bad binary, if only because both can be useless for social improvement. I’ve seen it. And because social entrepreneurship is often engaging market, not political or philanthropic forces, it’s a third way that can’t be lumped in with NGOs so easily. Brooks doesn’t cover this space enough to know that.

I also don’t like this column because it flattens the good reasons people all over the world have for disrespecting institutions that don’t work for them—including those in the US. Chris Hayes, one of my co-fellows at the New America Foundation, is working on a book, Twilight of the Elites, that reports on the broken civic compact in America. Between Katrina, Iraq, steroids in baseball and the financial crisis—or a day in Congress—there isn’t much rule of law or “moral realism” to be had in America either.

This is a powerful force. I’d call the trend toward social entrepreneurship—and all the transparency initiatives that have also emerged—an outgrowth of generational frustration.

Five friends of mine were arrested on Wall Street this fall—and two more moved to Cairo to cover Egypt’s revolution. Nigerians of all ages got up and marched when the government threatened fuel subsidies this winter. Nairobi is currently covered with fabulous murals calling tribalist politicians “vultures.” There is an ongoing, global conversation about institutional failure that has nothing to do with trenchcoats or “a certain sort of conference.” Brooks doesn’t cover young people enough to know that.

But if he wants to come back to Kenya, I’ve got lots of good stories for him.

Somaliland: The World's Next State?

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:04:12 +0300

Somaliland, in northwestern Somalia, is an incredible natural experiment in self-governance—the majority of its people have agreed to share a political community. This is both unusual and usual in Africa, where preexisting and sometimes baffling colonial arrangements are expected to carry the day. Like South Sudan, Somaliland is begging for something different. I don’t know if Somaliland will become a new nation, or whether it will help their development, but their attempt is deeply exciting.

My piece for the International Herald Tribune:

HARGEISA, Somalia — If a country isn’t recognized, does it make a sound? Here in Somaliland, the semi-autonomous northern part of the failed state of Somalia, I discovered that the answer is an emphatic yes.

The government in Mogadishu has virtually no influence in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, or over the territory’s 3.5 million residents. Since 1991, when the end of Said Barre’s dictatorship plunged Somalia into anarchy, Somaliland has written its own Constitution, held four peaceful elections, established a central bank that prints its own currency, built schools and universities, and created an elaborate security apparatus that has managed to keep at bay terrorist groups like the Shabab, a Wahhabi group that operates with impunity in southern Somalia.

Though Somaliland also borders the tempestuous Gulf of Aden, virtually no pirates haunt its coast. In fact, the maximum-security prison in Hargeisa currently holds some 70 accused pirates. During the drought that thrust the Horn of Africa back into the news last year, Somaliland dodged the worst effects of famine by spending around $10 million — a combination of government, private and diaspora resources — while in the south tons of food given by foreign groups were stolen.

About 50 percent of the $43 million budget (pdf) goes to security and policing. When I left Hargeisa, the government mandated that I travel with an armed guard. Shukri Ismail, the only female on the first National Electoral Commission, told me locals tolerate such arrangements because “if you don’t live in peace, everything else is trivial.”

This has left Somaliland with an ironic disadvantage: comparative stability. Unlike Eritrea, East Timor, Kosovo and South Sudan — recent additions to the community of nations — Somaliland goes about its business mostly free of violence or political infighting. And so it gets passed up for economic opportunities, like the $9 million job-creation grant the World Bank gave South Sudan earlier this month.

Yet it needs them. The state power utility only reaches a fraction of the 1.2 million who live in Hargeisa, and the rest is provided privately at great expense. Piped water is also scarce, and secondary roads are crumbling in many places.

Poor infrastructure is one reason Saad Shire, Somaliland’s minister for planning, is bullish about formal international recognition. He says independence would remove barriers to foreign assistance, foreign loans and foreign investment. For now, “very few people will venture to invest in a country that is not recognized,” Shire told me. The country’s cash comes from a small tax-base and remittances of about $500-600 million annually from Somaliland’s diaspora.

Despite the potential benefits, foreign influence appears to be a pet peeve here. This is partly because of pride at what’s been accomplished without outside help. Ismail, currently the director of Candlelight, a prominent local NGO, said that during the drafting of the Somaliland Constitution in the early 1990s, “We were slaughtering our own goats, our own sheep, spending our own money collected penny by penny from the community.” And as Nicholas Eubank of Stanford has demonstrated, living largely without foreign aid or foreign intervention constrains resources in a way that leads to more inclusive government.

Foreign meddling hasn’t done much good for Somalia proper. More than one person in Somaliland pointed out to me that the ineffectual Transitional Federal Government was born from diplomatic whirlpools such as the 2008 Djibouti Agreement (pdf), which ceased fire between the T.F.G. and armed opposition, and the 2011 Kampala Accord (pdf), which deferred elections and extended the T.F.G.’s mandate. In response to the chaos, Kenyan, Ethiopian and Ugandan troops are fighting a war in southern Somalia, with mounting civilian casualties.

For the near future, Somaliland will be caught between disdaining foreign assistance and requiring it. A communiqué issued after a major summit meeting on Somalia in London last month “welcomed the success in some areas of Somalia in establishing local areas of stability” but made no mention of Somaliland’s campaign for independence. Countries outside of the region are loath to stretch their necks ahead of African governments or what leadership remains in Somalia itself.

This irks young people in Somaliland, who have only known the region as a fledgling state. Suleiha, a 15-year-old student I met at Abaarso Tech, Somaliland’s top-flight boarding school, told me she was disappointed in the London summit. “We went to that meeting as Somalia, and I didn’t agree. We want to be our own country. We have achieved peace. We have our own government.”

Democracy as artistry: In advance of the highly anticipated and...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:02:00 +0300

Democracy as artistry: In advance of the highly anticipated and intensely contested Kenyan presidential elections, political graffiti is going up in Nairobi. A fabulous example—depicting elected officials as vultures—is already being painted over by the Nairobi City Council.

But I’m sure there’s more where it came from.

Ten African Cities to Watch

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:50:06 +0300

The FT has a brief on ten boomtowns in Africa:

The ‘Big 5′ - cities which are broadly politically and economically-stable, and already major FDI destinations. They are:

- Accra, Ghana

- Johannesburg, South Africa

- Lagos, Nigeria

- Luanda, Angola

- Nairobi, Kenya

No major surprises here. Johannesburg is the biggest city in sub-Saharan Africa’s leading economy, and, as Frontier notes, is reaching the size of a large European city. Its nominal ‘GDP’ output is $51bn; Munich, in Germany, has a GDP of $64bn. Lagos has a smaller economy, at $40bn – but that is expected to jump when Nigeria rebases its economic statistics this year. By 2015, Frontier says, “risk-weighted business opportunities in Lagos will far outpace that of the city’s nearest competitor” (Johannesburg).

It’s the ‘Next 5′ – large cities with rapidly expanding economies, but serious business climate deficiencies – that offer some of the biggest potential rewards – provided multinationals can stomach the risks. They are:

- Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

- Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

- Ibadan, Nigeria

- Kinshasa, Congo-DRC

- Mombasa, Kenya

I’ve been to all these cities, save Luanda and Kinshasa*. I’m heartened to see Ibadan—where my parents went to college, and where they have a house—on the list. Africa’s second cities (like Mombasa, for example) are still among some of the fastest growing in the world. Any global businessperson would be delighted to have the young human capital, intense entrepreneurialism and increasing spending power present in these cities and the mainstage metropolises. So get on it—I daresay in ten years you’ll be too late.

*soon!

The Kony Kerfuffle

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:27:09 +0300

In a new piece for the Latitude blog, I wrote about the explosive and controversial documentary video featuring Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. I’m anti.

DJIBOUTI — The only person I’ve ever met who was in the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) is a Ugandan man named Francis. He was abducted by the group sometime in the late 1990s, when he was a teenager, and forced to march from central Uganda to what is now South Sudan. During a firefight with the Ugandan national army, Francis escaped with his best friend. They had never spoken aloud. The L.R.A. enforced silence on marches.

The older Francis is a soldier again. But he isn’t in Uganda. He’s in Iraq. Like many well-trained local fighters, he’s gone to fill the vacuum left after the United States military fled its war of choice.

I met Francis only once, last summer, in passing, but “Kony 2012” made me remember his story. The viral video by the American nonprofit Invisible Children showcases Joseph Kony, the madman at the helm of the L.R.A. who has been indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. The video calls for his arrest this year and for public pressure on the U.S. military to stay in the hunt. Thanks to it, some 50 million viewers, mostly non-Ugandans who understood nothing of Kony, now have the knowledge to despise him as much as a generation of Northern Ugandan families.

Except that hardly anyone in Uganda is talking about him. I spent most of February in Kampala and environs, and there Kony was a whisper on nobody’s lips. Even since the United States sent 100 Special Forces (pdf) to Central Africa in the fall to assist in the chase, both he, and the L.R.A., remain far from a mainstream concern.

Ordinary Ugandans are worrying about other things. The government needs a strategy for assessing its capital needs by sector. Should Uganda build an oil refinery or forgo the profits and send crude to Kenya for processing? And if it’s Ugandan children in peril you’re looking for, there are those suffering from “nodding disease” — an unusual neurological disease that’s killed hundreds of children in the very region Kony once terrorized.

In an earlier post I wrote about the Ugandan government’s gay-bashing as a smokescreen for other issues facing this society, especially governmental corruption. The Kony video is a similar distraction.

In Kampala last month, I met Hadijah Nankanja, the local director of Women of Kireka, a collective of women touched by Kony’s marauding violence. This was my second encounter with the group, which makes and sells jewelry made from paper beads, pooling savings among the women. Last March, I had spent an afternoon with 20-some artisans, happy to have income-generating activity to banish thoughts of past terror. A few women have since splintered off looking for more lucrative work.

Hadijah and I tried to come up with a way forward. Food production? Without refrigeration, distribution would be a problem. Tailoring? The investment in sewing machines was too great. Hair salons? The market appeared saturated. And so forth. We didn’t come up with a concrete plan, but opening a small restaurant seemed to be the front-running proposition.

Our informal brainstorming session took about the same time as does watching “Kony 2012.” I dare suggest that time spent marshaling such reserves of imagination, communion and capital to support jobs for displaced victims is far more helpful than this sort of advocacy. The kinds of problems Hadijah is trying to understand and solve are less sexy than the horror stories trailing behind Kony. But they are the nut worth cracking.

Unfortunately, the mundane march of progress in poor countries is what “awareness” campaigns often miss. And when, as in this case, success is determined by action from outside the region, cries of a new imperialism should be taken seriously. Few international NGOs working in Africa define success properly — as putting themselves out of business. Invisible Children seems no better.

Let’s not amplify and reproduce another narrative of Africa in crisis when Ugandans themselves are moving on.

Other takes I loved are here, here and here—read them all. I can’t say I support Invisible Children, but the episode has been instructive for someone like myself—working on image rehab for Africa, and as a storyteller myself.

Hi! Do you do speaking engagements or lectures?

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:54:00 +0300

Alas, I am in the midst of drafting the book manuscript, and so don’t have any bandwidth for speaking. But there will be a book tour! No details yet, but contact my agent at howard@rossyoon.com.

The BBC has published a user-generated slideshow called...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:13:00 +0300

The BBC has published a user-generated slideshow called “African Time.” Reminding me of a similar photo and mixed-media installation at Life House in Lagos.

Don't Crimp My Ride

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:18:00 +0300

A new post for the IHT’s “Latitude” blog.

Click through for the dope slideshow…

NAIROBI — What if the New York City subway disappeared tomorrow? This is the situation facing Kenyan commuters. The government has proposed a law to phase out the vans used by privately run transportation services in favor of smaller taxis and larger buses. And the operators of those classic 14-seaters, the matatus, are threatening a massive general strike across the country next week.

The attempt at regulation looks like sour grapes from a state that was too late to the transportation game. And abolishing the matatu system, a network both comprehensive and affordable, would hurt the Kenyan commuter-consumer. Here, as across much of the continent, matatus are the primary means of conveyance for millions of Africans with minimal income.

Matatus are both notoriously reckless and completely indispensable. The word “ma tatu” — “for three” in Swahili and referring to shillings — comes from the price it cost to travel Kenya’s roads in the 1950s. The minibuses log hundreds of miles per day, along informally agreed-upon routes, on no set schedule and for negotiable fares. In Uganda, they’re also called “matatus”; in Nigeria, they’re “danfos”; in Tanzania, “dala-dalas.”

On pocked roads and in traffic jams, the best that can be said of matatus is that they work. In the right frame of mind, however, they are charming. Many have flamboyant décors: loud paint and prayer beads, louder reggae music, even backseat television screens. “Follow us on Twitter,” read one in Nairobi.

In some Kenyan towns, the official state-run buses roll by like staid battleships; in most, there is no centralized system for moving people. Matatus fill the gap. Few hard statistics exist on the scope of the sector, but 10 years ago there were 24,000 matatus in Kenya. The industry has boomed since then: matatu owners and their allies claim that today 500,000 jobs are directly or indirectly associated with the massive private endeavor.

Most Kenyans regard matatus as an imperative public service and a showcase for local culture. “The experience is the African roller coaster — you have fear, you have hope, you have joy,” said Tim Rimbui, a producer for Ma3, an Afro-pop band inspired by the mishmash of conversations in matatus. “It is exhilarating.” Ephraim Maina, a member of Parliament, says of the proposed phase-out: “It is like saying that by the end of this month, everybody should stop breathing.” He may sound hyperbolic, but he is right.

Yet other Kenyan legislators, specifically the Kenyan minister of transport, Amos Kimunya, wants them gone. He contends they are unsafe and a public nuisance. Matatus do consistently operate beyond the law. They careen off road, hugging the shoulder and powering past stalled cars. Their drivers have perfected the rolling stop: passengers hop on or off while the van is still in motion. Of course, there are no seatbelts.

The self-regulating sector has come back at the government swinging, promising in a statement last month “the mother of all strikes” and “a case study for generations to come.” I shudder to think what that would look like. Actually, we already know: Kenya got a brief preview in 2010, when a two-day strike to protest harassment by opportunistic police forced commuters to walk to work. The government buckled. Plans for this proposed phase-out should be abandoned. Hulking megabuses are too large for city traffic, and their fare is nearly twice as much as the matatus’. The closest affordable option to the vans — motorbike taxis — is less efficient, more dangerous and, in Kenya, already outlawed.

The safety concerns that ostensibly motivated the proposed law can be handled with more effective infrastructure: wider, better roads and pedestrian barriers to prevent the wild sidewalk-driving the matatus are known for.

What’s more, buses are just far less forgiving. Last week, I waited to ride to downtown Nairobi from the residential neighborhood of Kilimani on the number 46 transit route. Because I wasn’t at an official stop, a hulking Kenya Bus Service vehicle blew by me, its driver shrugging at my unsanctioned flag-down.

Bringing up his rear, however, was a matatu. And that driver was happy to throw open his sliding door.

"This model does not question the causes of poverty, either general or spe- cific, for the people it..."

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:36:30 +0300

“This model does not question the causes of poverty, either general or spe- cific, for the people it is meant to help. It does not pay attention to what people are doing for themselves or ask what they need. It is founded on a story that treats people as if they were just part of a natural landscape washed ashore by forces that aid agencies do not participate in or have any control over. It offers solutions, often expensive and technological, and therefore measurable, that inevitably cannot be sustained or make any genuine long term change in the lives of poor people around the world.
—“Mr. Kristof, I Presume?””

- Thorough critique of Nicholas Kristof’s “Starfish Parable” in Transition Issue 107.

The Plane Truth

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:31:27 +0300

I wrote a story for The Atlantic, on Dakar’s new airport and “The Hidden Costs of Africa’s Air Travel Boom.” In short, it’s magnificent that I have improved choices as I hop from Kampala, Uganda (from where I write this) and Nairobi, Kenya (where I live). But the abundance of new airlines, airports and routes—and the accompanying ease in travel—comes with a downside…

Blaise Diagne International Airport (BDIA) is part of an exploding trend on the continent: air travel. Taking flight seems an elegant solution to a prominent African problem. The lamentable road infrastructure across many countries slows the formation of trade distribution networks, restricts movement for ordinary people, and subjects road-dependent economies to price shocks when the cost of fuel spikes. What’s more, tens of thousands of annual road accidents amount to a ruthless theft of African lives. …

It’s perfectly sensible for landlocked, overlooked and less populous African nations to reach for the skies. It follows the trajectory of more developed countries; Norway, for example, jump-started its economic growth once new shipping routes lowered barriers to exporting the average person’s goods.

But the rush to take flight may be ignoring more democratic transportation infrastructure. In the short term, planes simply do not create enough popular opportunity. Doctors, lawyers, businesspeople - they can export their services by airplane. Farmers and miners cannot. It’s no easy feat to fly cement, lumber, oil, medicine, or large harvests. For these and other development necessities, you need good roads, good rails and good networks of people. The craze for air travel may erode all three. While airlines grease the wheels of the briefcase set, it’s up to local government to ensure that these shiny new planes don’t enable the elite at the expense of the average citizen.

Read the whole thing! Photo by me.

A Different Map of the Global Economy

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:08:00 +0300

The development sector hobby of ranking nations is pronounced. Metrics are almost beside the point; these empirical orderings of countries as “free” or “not free”, “fragile” or “stable” drive policy decision-making and affect investments on the ground. And usually, Africa does poorly. But what if the goalposts were moved—or on a different field entirely? I write for CNN:

[E]conomists Ricardo Hausmann and César Hidalgo, researchers at the Harvard Center for Economic Development, have produced…[a] newAtlas of Economic Complexity. In their global ranking of GDP growth to 2020, Uganda comes out number one.

That’s a head scratcher. How could a tiny, land-locked African nation, best known for Idi Amin, lead a list predicting economic growth? There’s more: Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Senegal, Malawi, and Zambia round out the top ten. Hausmann and Hidalgo project that these countries will grow faster than most others in the world, including emerging market favorites Turkey, Brazil, and China. In fact, thirteen of the top thirty countries for growth are in sub-Saharan Africa. Sweden, France and Japan rank 100, 101, and 102.

Do read the whole thing at CNN.com.

Dakar, New Year's Eve

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:39:42 +0300

I have spent an excellent week in Senegal, traveling its northwest coast, and exploring the new airport that will open later this year.

More on that in due time. I thought it worth posting my photographs from New Year’s Eve. A friend, surgeon and professor at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop was kind enough to take me out for the evening, at the fancy Hotel des Almadies. At midnight, at the western tip of Dakar (and of the African landmass), fireworks were launched into the wind. The pictures are what happened next.

12:00

12:02

12:10

12:30

Incroyable. Happy new year!

10 Positive Africa Stories of 2011

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:00:00 +0300

At the New Yorker, Alexis Okeowo’s got a list:

1. Africa is experiencing an economic boom.

2. South Sudan gained its independence.

3. Ugandans staged Walk to Work protests

4. Two Liberian women won the Nobel Peace Prize.

5. Cell phones continue to change how Africans live.

6. South African democracy took a turn for the interesting.

7. African innovation was celebrated for a third year at Maker Faire Africa.

8. The U.S. announced a new push for gay rights abroad.

9. (Some) progress in Somalia.

10. Botswana as a global leader in fighting corruption.

The only thing more certain than the exciting potential of the region is that there will be more lists! What would you add?