I have never felt such intimacy in sheep anatomy.
It was Tabaski (Eid). I nervously watched the slaughter, for once I use that word completely free of tongue-in-cheek. Alone at home, I listened all morning to the last bleatings of my neighbor’s black and white patched sheep. Sooner or later, its soft staccato cries were mingled with the slow, smooth sharpening of a knife. And low voices in Wolof tongues, intuitively respectful, as if timid in face of the imminent act. As if expressing the bare minimum, necessary to the task at hand. My heart was racing. Cathi came home at that point and we walked around the corner just as a couple youthful strong men were holding down the animal that was at this point no longer struggling (as cliché as that always sounds, he did seem at rest). His neck was positioned above a hole dug in the sand to contain the pool of blood that would come flowing out immediately and heavily. Impeccably dressed as ever, Old Man Papa took the knife to its furry, elongated throat, as I think I might have been holding my own. Against my expectations, it was silent, except for my rather misplaced, if murmured, “godDAMN,” forcing myself to watch because I somehow sensed it was only right to do so. In some unmarked fraction of a minute, I think, he gave up life, at which time the deed that started as a ritual commemoration turned into a mundane step in putting food on the table. What was a living animal quickly turned into flanks, haunches, loins, hinds, sides, and whatever other warm, wet organs it offered mankind.
I spent the holiday with my friend Sidate and his family. It was a day where the shade is cold but the sun is hot. While my friend slept in (in his defense, after an all-night marathon of putting final touches on Tabaski garments, a trip to the mosque, and a double slaying), I sat shivering in the shadow of a mango tree chatting with his brother Cheikh who, machete in one hand and cigarette in the other, was unhurriedly chopping the horns off a disembodied head. By the time we got into his late father’s lay-off from the national police force, he was crouched and skillfully maneuvering a smaller knife, removing the skin and then the choicest parts from the skull. It seemed a little like undressing. (He doesn’t like the job, doesn’t even like killing chickens).
I don’t know why, but what surprised me was the dispersal of the job over time and space. While the actually killing took a matter of minutes, the separation of the body, the cleansing and drying of certain parts, and the cooking of others took the remainder of the day. And spacially, what started as two contained bodies, with time, spread all over the backyard. A hole of blood here, a hole of refuse parts elsewhere, long stringy tubes salted and drying on various clotheslines, Mama cutting up legs on the porch, Combé stirring up who-can-say-what over a fire, and me watching Cheikh flaying heads in the cool, leafy shade against a blood-spattered wall. I spent the entire early afternoon in the midst of dismembered parts of all colors, but looking more or less unsurprisingly like what one would expect to come out of two sheep, and felt ok.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
The reason it’s been so long since I last wrote is that, in short, the last week and a half of my life has just been a marathon. So explains the chaotic pace that follows:
I’m writing this from Thiès, home sweet home, a little chilly, but familiar Thiès. Familiar beds, familiar rooster morning wake up calls, familiar tasting water, familiar patterns, familiar companionship. Familiar quiet. I have the windows open to let the sun pour in with all the familiar sounds from the neighborhood (though there doesn’t seem to be much variation in neighborhood sounds from one region to another, give or take a few cars and mosques). I have this feeling as though I’ve returned from a periphery so great a distance from - well I don’t know what, because I can’t really say what’s at the center of this great sphere, on whose outermost edge I've been living the last two months. But I’m back now! A little drained and readjusting.
So we had the declaration this weekend!! The long-awaited, long-prepared-for Declaration for the Abandonment of Female Genital Cutting and Child/Forced Marriage in the village of Niassène. It was so big and hectic and long and profoundly moving. Well, let me start further back than that.
Last weekend - which is actually two weekends ago for those of you who respect Time in a linear, unambiguous fashion - I went to Cap Skirring. Which is supposed to have some of the most beautiful beaches in West Africa, and certainly some of the most extraordinary I’ve ever found. A friend of a friend named Jonah was in Ziguinchor bogged down with rather too much work condensed into too short a time period, and needless to say down for a journey to the coast. We walked miles on the beach, which was just really quiet and clean and peaceful, that’s all. Big, long, sandy stretches between water and coastal forests, like neutral no-man’s lands. Not a high rise in sight, just empty horizons in either direction, and traces of vacancy-boasting hotels and campements barely visible through the green thicket. And amongst this lovely backdrop, dozens of cows! Who are just the most docile, or lazy, creatures and kind of an absurd addition to beach-going. Them and a harmless dread-headed lunatic wearing nothing but pink swim trunks on his head. We were only a kilometer or two from Guinea Bissau, which the lull of our cow-dotted paradise kept us from reaching.
So back to reality, or at least back to Ziguinchor. A couple of volunteers came down from the north in the week before the declaration, and it was just really nice having them around. It had been some long time since I last hung out with girls my own age or even people speaking a language I didn't have to think about. The office last week was buzzing like a beehive! Dozens of people coming and going, painting signs, all these preparations culminating in this high strung excitement, and I didn’t really know what to expect from the declaration. We hosted a press conference on Saturday in a neighboring village (see the video in the post below - yes, my attempts to dance like that has earned me something of a reputation in Casamance land!!!) And the next 20 hours or so were stuffed with rounds of dancing, sleeping, and plate loads of meat. Saturday night we walked down to the sight that was naturally drawing a crowd and watched dozens of women using what looked like canoe paddles fussing over mammoth vats of rice and stews.
The declaration was big, and not going to be pinned down manageably in the following words. Lots of dancing, although this time by organized dance troupes and masked dancers. But because the earth is so dry now, their movements created overhanging clouds of dark dust which was just gross and harsh to breathe in. Still feeling this dry layer of dirt coating my lungs (or else its in my head) ... A lot of singers and speakers, village notables as well as government representatives. But the part that I can’t stop thinking about is the appearance of the former cutters from 15 or so villages (though there were over 100 villages in attendance). Many very old, and at the same time sad and proud … I mean it IS this bittersweet sort of moment. Can you imagine how huge this is? These people coming together to publicly renounce something as old as marriage itself. Whose pain it entailed was simply as common and necessary as the pain of childbirth. Something that was as natural in their society as, frankly, male circumcision is in our own. (Can you imagine what it would take to eradicate male circumcision in the US? A practice which, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement affirming has insufficient health benefits to warrant its recommendation as a routine procedure … but this isn’t the right arena to get into double standards … a later post maybe) But God, these women. Who at such a late age had to find and transition to some other source of income (It is kind of counter-intuitive, losing jobs in the name of development). They were just dignified; but that doesn’t even explain it. So … it was a very big moment. That’s the only word that really does it - big! Grand.
It was really sad leaving my friends in Niassène and my coworkers in Ziguinchor. Goodbyes are so hard, when there's unspoken doubt about la prochaine fois ... but I think the overall exhaustion took the edge off of it …. I hitched a ride early, early Monday morning in a car with some other volunteers, enduring the long and bumpy journey back north, over land that two months ago had been spectacularly green, and is now so brittle and yellow. Through the Gambia, waiting forever for the ferry - only to see it arrive and unload some cars and a couple Fulani herding 50 or 60 sheep. Poor animals!!! with Tabaski (officially, Eid ah-Adha) around the corner - the holiday that entails the slaughter of millions of sheep in the commemoration of Ibrahim sacrificing only one instead of his son. Our (ok, my) nervous laughter at all the sheep strapped to the roofs of cars turned into outrage when our chauffeurs decided to buy themselves a few and tie them down right there to the suitcases. It's only the transport that bothers me. But I don't know if I can watch.
Up to date, enough.
Friday, December 7, 2007
African films, alhamdulilay!! part quatre (or something like an alternative to Blood Diamond)
Film about child soldiers in Sierra Leone created by Newton Aduaka, recognized film director and former child soldier himself (in Nigeria). trailer, in all it's chaotic, bloody, and drug-fogged reality: Ezra
Might write a little more about this later, for now I'm dashing off to a conference in Bignona. What follows is an interview with Aduaka. (I think Plan is a organization protecting children's rights, emergency aid for children, etc ... Aduaka won Plan's Special Child Right's Award as well as the United Nations Peace Promotion Prize for his film)
What prompted you into making this movie?
It was twenty years of accumulation, exploded into the screen. The film was in a major part inspired by the situation in Sierra Leone and conflicts in Ivory Coast, Chad, Mozambique Angola, and Rwanda. Children are told they are fighting one thing but they don't actually know what they are dying for. This, for me, is very tragic: people dragging children into situations they should never see or even think of.
The Plan prize to you was decided by four young people and two adults. How do you feel receiving the UN peace promotion and Plan's Prize?
I feel overwhelmed and I hope "Ezra" will help Plan and the UN institutions that awarded the film in what they are doing.
It was a difficult film for me to make because of myself being a child of war. I did not realize how much a child keeps in his subconscious when he goes through war. You live with it, it forms you. I was afraid that I would not be able to communicate.
Coming back to the film, the reaction to it is beyond my expectations. I saw that the Plan jury was young people; it means the film is really connected to people and I hope then, that people do not just see it as a film, but that they spent some time meditating on what they understand from it, because it is a film about the future of African children.
What does the grand prize, the Yennenga Stallion, mean to you?
This is a symbol to me to keep doing what I am doing. My cinema is really engaged, direct, and clear. Things are too desperate. It is time for clear speaking and not ambiguous cinema. I think that we have crossed a barrier which made us so inhuman. War brings nothing but destruction. While the background of all this is the exploitation of minerals and oil, the children who fight don't even know about it. There is nothing in war but profit for some people while the rest see their lives destroyed. To take a life, to premeditate it, is crossing the line. We have to go back to what I believe is human. It is not human to kill or make any act that causes you or anybody to kill. Either by proxy, by signing up for troops to go and kill, by signing up to ship arms into a country for children to kill are terrible things. We have to move away from that.
What is Plan doing to help children in Sierra Leone?
Children are among the most vulnerable groups in the aftermath of war. Providing support to children amputees and former child soldiers is a moral and social imperative in the recovery and rebuilding processes.
At the end of the conflict in Sierra Leone in 2001, thousands of children were released by the fighting forces. One of the major challenges these children face is successfully reintegrating into society and building a hopeful future.
Post-traumatic counseling and support
Plan's psychosocial trauma and peace education project in Sierra Leone consists of activities that include workshops, counseling sessions, peace clubs and expression activities including drama, games and sports.
Since 1999 Plan has also supported a "RapidEd" project in camps for internally displaced people in Sierra Leone, which combines therapeutic emotional healing activities and self-expression with basic literacy and numeracy education. The methodology, developed by Plan in cooperation with UNESCO, is based on experiences in other war zones and is also being used to help children in neighboring Liberia.
Might write a little more about this later, for now I'm dashing off to a conference in Bignona. What follows is an interview with Aduaka. (I think Plan is a organization protecting children's rights, emergency aid for children, etc ... Aduaka won Plan's Special Child Right's Award as well as the United Nations Peace Promotion Prize for his film)
What prompted you into making this movie?
It was twenty years of accumulation, exploded into the screen. The film was in a major part inspired by the situation in Sierra Leone and conflicts in Ivory Coast, Chad, Mozambique Angola, and Rwanda. Children are told they are fighting one thing but they don't actually know what they are dying for. This, for me, is very tragic: people dragging children into situations they should never see or even think of.
The Plan prize to you was decided by four young people and two adults. How do you feel receiving the UN peace promotion and Plan's Prize?
I feel overwhelmed and I hope "Ezra" will help Plan and the UN institutions that awarded the film in what they are doing.
It was a difficult film for me to make because of myself being a child of war. I did not realize how much a child keeps in his subconscious when he goes through war. You live with it, it forms you. I was afraid that I would not be able to communicate.
Coming back to the film, the reaction to it is beyond my expectations. I saw that the Plan jury was young people; it means the film is really connected to people and I hope then, that people do not just see it as a film, but that they spent some time meditating on what they understand from it, because it is a film about the future of African children.
What does the grand prize, the Yennenga Stallion, mean to you?
This is a symbol to me to keep doing what I am doing. My cinema is really engaged, direct, and clear. Things are too desperate. It is time for clear speaking and not ambiguous cinema. I think that we have crossed a barrier which made us so inhuman. War brings nothing but destruction. While the background of all this is the exploitation of minerals and oil, the children who fight don't even know about it. There is nothing in war but profit for some people while the rest see their lives destroyed. To take a life, to premeditate it, is crossing the line. We have to go back to what I believe is human. It is not human to kill or make any act that causes you or anybody to kill. Either by proxy, by signing up for troops to go and kill, by signing up to ship arms into a country for children to kill are terrible things. We have to move away from that.
What is Plan doing to help children in Sierra Leone?
Children are among the most vulnerable groups in the aftermath of war. Providing support to children amputees and former child soldiers is a moral and social imperative in the recovery and rebuilding processes.
At the end of the conflict in Sierra Leone in 2001, thousands of children were released by the fighting forces. One of the major challenges these children face is successfully reintegrating into society and building a hopeful future.
Post-traumatic counseling and support
Plan's psychosocial trauma and peace education project in Sierra Leone consists of activities that include workshops, counseling sessions, peace clubs and expression activities including drama, games and sports.
Since 1999 Plan has also supported a "RapidEd" project in camps for internally displaced people in Sierra Leone, which combines therapeutic emotional healing activities and self-expression with basic literacy and numeracy education. The methodology, developed by Plan in cooperation with UNESCO, is based on experiences in other war zones and is also being used to help children in neighboring Liberia.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
I intended to limit the scope of this blog to all things Africa, you'd think it were a wide enough playing field! Having said that, the following link has nothing to do with the old cradle of humanity; it nevertheless touches on a lot of topics that are gaining importance on a truly global level, some issues I've addressed in previous posts. It is a NYtimes multimedia piece - interviews with four Palestinians in Gaza. They talk about their struggles due to international sanctions, which are due, but not entirely due to Hamas's politics. One of the segments recounts the problematic mingling of religions in a place and time of increasing religious orthodoxy and fundamentalism. One talks about the schism between Gaza and West Bank Palestinians. More than one talks about looking to the west as a long-shot hope for a better future.
If anything, it testifies to the increasing universality of these issues. And like I mentioned before, this issue of boundaries between countries and people is getting more and more convoluted. Ten years ago, people in Sudan identified themselves by ethnic group (the Dinka, the Hasania ... there are hundreds ...) today many will call themselves simply "Arab." Enough said for now. The link:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/weekinreview/20071118_GAZA_FEATURE/index.html
If anything, it testifies to the increasing universality of these issues. And like I mentioned before, this issue of boundaries between countries and people is getting more and more convoluted. Ten years ago, people in Sudan identified themselves by ethnic group (the Dinka, the Hasania ... there are hundreds ...) today many will call themselves simply "Arab." Enough said for now. The link:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/weekinreview/20071118_GAZA_FEATURE/index.html
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
ho ho ho
How does one properly celebrate the first night of Hanukkah in a Djola-hearted city on the periphery of a 95% Muslim country? One of the volunteers back in Thiès got a package containing a menorah and some cheap colorful candles (the Crayola crayon type, which will have to do. What can I say? I’ve got a weakness for beautiful Hanukkah candles.) So we video-conferenced. Inbal gave all the participating goyel a brief run down on the Macabees, the destroyed temple of Jerusalem, the oil that burned for eight days and eight nights, and the commemoration of that miracle through our wintery Festival of Lights. All relatively well and fine on their end of the webcam, mine was a little less conventional. We’ve had all of the regional supervisors in town for a conference - it’s fun when they’re all here - and the night before Moussa (the guard) was telling them all about my webcam. (Moussa gets a kick out of seeing my family in the computer). Looking at me and my webcam like we were something right out of the Jettsons, if they knew the Jettsons, the 5 or 6 of them fall somewhere between misunderstanding and total disbelief with the whole thing. So last night, they huddled around my laptop - Arona, Moussa, the other Moussa, Tamba, Insa, Mamadou - mesmerized as much by the camera as by Inbal’s simple ritual, her lovely prayer, the the two flickering lights. (Forget the choppy image and cheap candles and tears of laughter, it was perfect.) Arona decided to contribute a little Djola ditty of his own to the delight of the girls in Thiès.
The significance of this, to me, goes something like this. This is where technology’s carried us, you see? Cyberspace technology like this has certainly nudged a lot of things into antiquity, regrettably. It hasn’t yet eradicated a 2000-some-odd-year-old Jewish ceremony or Djola folk songs. Instead, where the two have spent millennia running down separate roads, last night, they crossed paths. Maybe it wasn’t the first time, but it was an intersection, and a Hanukkah, that won't soon be forgotten.
The significance of this, to me, goes something like this. This is where technology’s carried us, you see? Cyberspace technology like this has certainly nudged a lot of things into antiquity, regrettably. It hasn’t yet eradicated a 2000-some-odd-year-old Jewish ceremony or Djola folk songs. Instead, where the two have spent millennia running down separate roads, last night, they crossed paths. Maybe it wasn’t the first time, but it was an intersection, and a Hanukkah, that won't soon be forgotten.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
I can't believe, frankly, it's been six weeks I've been down here. It aggravates me to look back on that much time and not really be able to recall where I put it. I suppose technically I’m not traveling, I couldn’t truthfully say that. Technically I’ve been installed here in this region (for 2 months), but I can’t say I feel settled, on the contrary, I feel like I’m on the move. I still experience those hallmarks of traveling solo: exhilaration and lonesomeness. Exhilaration of discovery - of people, food, sounds, groovy little postcolonial corners, and splendid riverscape views - and the slightly less sexy joy of bumming around new markets - discretely dipping my fingers in barrels of dried beans (if it's ever possible for me to do anything discreetly ...) and hopping over rivulets of rotten vegetables and avoiding eye contact with the more aggressive vendors. And feeling also something like a ravenousness to take it all in. And lonesomeness, well, speaks for itself. When those things fade into habituation - I suppose that signals the end of one’s traveling.
Describing the process of adjustment into a foreign place, a very wise professor told me this: people don’t see you for who you are, but for who they perceive or want you to be. A lot of times - and I assume this is especially true in instances where there is a language barrier - you can find yourself more or less knowingly conforming to THAT person, at the loss of a bit of your own personality. Per Petterson brushes up against this idea in Out Stealing Horses, (and his Nordic protagonist has only moved a couple hours north): People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours […] it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.
(OK a little hardened, a little valid nonetheless. When it gets problematic is when their own feelings, opinions, and assumptions are shaped by a very different life experience and understanding of the world; then they really miss the boat.)
Describing the process of adjustment into a foreign place, a very wise professor told me this: people don’t see you for who you are, but for who they perceive or want you to be. A lot of times - and I assume this is especially true in instances where there is a language barrier - you can find yourself more or less knowingly conforming to THAT person, at the loss of a bit of your own personality. Per Petterson brushes up against this idea in Out Stealing Horses, (and his Nordic protagonist has only moved a couple hours north): People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours […] it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.
(OK a little hardened, a little valid nonetheless. When it gets problematic is when their own feelings, opinions, and assumptions are shaped by a very different life experience and understanding of the world; then they really miss the boat.)
Monday, November 19, 2007
immigration, qu'est-que ce?
A couple days ago I posted a link to a trailer for a new independent film by Idrissa Guiro, Barcelona ou la Mort (Barcelona or Death, http://docbarcelone.canalblog.com). It’s in French, but I think worth watching because the images alone are visually arresting (for me, their beauty comes from their realism - that’s so Senegal!) Although if you’ve ever been to Gorée Island, the last image hits you like a slow-motion punch to the stomach. It’s like peering out of the “door of no return” at the Maison d’Esclavage, and seeing the tides washing over the glossy black rocks below your feet. (Always a bleak reminder that few things survive the ocean the way rocks do). The trailer starts with a man recounting this visit to a jardin d’enfants, a preschool, in Senegal where he asks the kids, “Who among you wants to go to Europe?” The kids look at each other quizzically. Rephrasing the question, “Who wants to go to Spain,” all hands shoot in the air. “Why?” He asks the gathered 2 and 3 year olds before him. Finally a little one says, “pour manger.” (To eat.)
Pirogues are the long heavy boats that have made possible the livelihood of Senegalese fishermen for centuries. They are carved out of the wood of the colossal fromager trees, and they have colorful images painted on their sides, sometimes words like Baraka, Serign Touba, and Alxamduilay, which aren’t really so much magical lingo on their own so much as plain old vernacular blessings. These are the boats that fathers, sons, cousins - a handful, maybe 10 - push out on the waters in the morning and steer back into port at night, hopefully heaped with the daily catch.
On October 16, about 130 men from Senegal, Mali, Guinea-Bissau, and Gambia piled into a pirogue and quietly sped away from Ziguinchor, the sunny fishing village that took a swing at being a city and landed a little left of field, that I temporarily call home. Their destination was the Spanish Canary Islands (and ultimately, I believe Spain). First they had to reach international waters, 220 km off-coast, where travelers are immune to the menacing threat of helicopters and coastal patrols (Senegal and Morocco partner with Frontex, the border security branch of the EU). Somewhere outside of Mauritania their engine broke, and after a week of drifting, the surviving 90 or so were pulled from the sea and hospitalized in Morocco. 42 bodies are missing. To give you a sense of the numbers, since January of 2006, roughly 25,000 Africans have made similar journeys, and 3,000 have died (according to one estimate). No small number have college and post-collegiate degrees.
Immigrants from Senegal send home $630 million every year, which is 6.85 % of the GDP. And though it's a little off track, I think it's worth considering the family structure, or the idea of the family, as it exists in Africa. Families are loosely but extensively conjoined, and when these young men get in a pirouge, it’s got little to do with job satisfaction, wanderlust, or the lure of the West. It’s not their own future they’re ready to die for, but ultimately, their family’s.
How much do Americans know about the problem of clandestine immigration? My sense is that many Americans have an awareness that this goes on, shelved someplace neatly in the back of waking thought. The truth is, as I see it, it doesn’t touch us immediately enough to spark any sort of inquietude beyond a passing sympathy. In our defense, it’s not exactly all over the American news; in fact judging by the NYTimes archives, the subject barely makes it out of editorials. I think in not so many words, we tell ourselves, “that’s Europe’s problem.” How much truth is there to that idea? Many young Senegalese, particularly in the cities, say they’d rather drown en route to Europe than spend their lives looking for jobs that don’t exist. Worse yet, this is one of those things you hear so many times, it’s lost impact. How much is this America’s problem too?
This article could go in a dozen different directions. I could start highlighting the blame on the US, for its hand in keeping these economies at such a low-achieving level. I could talk about globalization and the exchange of culture (or the importation of western culture, but not entirely) that occurs as markets open across the globe, specifically in developing countries. That gives birth to a consumer culture, which ordinarily drives a work force. But then there’s massive unemployment. And then on the bigger level there’s substantial trade barriers against African goods. Outside of Senegal, Africans migrate for different reasons, persecution and war. I could talk about America’s responsibility in regards to those conflicts. But I’m neither an economist nor a historian - maybe an art historian - so I’m going to stay out of those murky waters! Obviously the answer is, a lot.
But instead of plunging into answers, I’m going to go ahead and take the other route, that is to say, put a few more of my own questions out there.
Starting with a less-than-rhetorical question: What is this notion of borders today - borders between people - at a time when they’re falling down everywhere? Economically speaking, culturally, speaking. Diplomatically, too, in some ways. While in theory, non-interventionist ideas sound nice, (America’s meddled in one too many cookie jars for its own good and everyone else's). That being said, there is no such thing as as political isolationism anymore, at least not in the way just about every American president before Wilson espoused. So where do you draw this line, between non-intervention and isolation? Where do you draw the line between economic and political intervention? (Quickest way to a government’s heart is through its pocketbook). Where should we intervene? Given that interventions are unfortunately just non-altruistic.
Ok, so, we’ve got these borders evaporating into thin air, at the same time as country borders are being reinforced and “controlled.” What’s our aversion to immigrants, us, a country founded by them? I think part of it has to do with the fear of a growing permanent underclass (We've watched France struggle with the repercussions of this). But if we’re not going to open our borders, then we could in the very least provide economic incentives for would-be immigrants to stay home. In the very most, we could pull their countries out of impoverishment.
I’m going to finish with a quote from Bono’s Foreword to Jeffrey Sach’s The End of Poverty (I know, I know, it seems almost unfairly easy, adding a little extra gravitas, a little ummph, to your speech by adding 9/11, we learned that from Rudy Guiliani. Nonetheless, point taken):
The destinies of the "haves" are intrinsically linked to the fates of the "have-nothing-at-alls." If we didn’t know this already, it became too clear on September 11, 2001. The perpetrators of 9/11 might have been wealthy Saudis, but it was in the collapsed, poverty-stricken state of Afghanistan that they found succor and sanctuary. Africa is not the front line in the war against terror, but it soon could be.
"The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty." Who said that? Not me. Not some beatnik peace group. Secretary of State Colin Powell. And when a military man starts talking like that perhaps we should listen. In tense, nervous times isn’t it cheaper - and smarter - to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them?
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
last weekend
I considered composing this in iambic pentameter but ended up opting for something a little more stream of consciousness, I'm tired and it is the 21st century, I apologize for run-ons
Where rugged could be a gross understatement, we’re zipping down sandy paths à la moto, (as romantic as it sounds for 20 minutes tops) I’m thinking about the most evocative landscapes I’ve come across in print. Thinking about Willa Cather’s Nebraska, thinking about what she might have to say about the edens I’ve found myself in lately. The Land That Photos Don’t Do Justice To and somehow seem like cheating anyways. I’d paint you a picture through words, but such is the problem, I’m at a loss for them. I’ve rummaged through my arsenal of diction and come up short. The words I want to use - like “pungency” and “frequency” - aren’t even in the right sensory ballpark. (Although I don’t know how to apply it, “spirulina” isn’t entirely far off.) I’m lead to conclude - and why not? - that the people who describe it best are the people who’ve made it their home, at one point even their religion. And in their tongue it’s simply: Sacred Bush. The greens of vegetation and rusty hue of the earth are of a saturation that only becomes slightly more believable when dusk starts to sap its vibrancy, when oncoming night threatens to make all things monochrome. (In that vein, I don’t need a mirror to know mine is the last face to disappear into the deep blackness of night). And all over is this smell, something almost metallic; it’s something that grows in Florida, and closing my eyes (barely catching my breath) I’m back in Treetops Park, in my mud-spattered uniform running the woodsy three mile path that only a hundred thousand footsteps and wrong turns taught me. This is the hour that I arrive in the village of Niassène, greeted by a human warmth and spirit on par with their surroundings. Later I’m watching a skit put on by the villagers, and in the stretches between whispered translations, I’m only vaguely paying attention to the drama unfolding on-stage and instead my sleepy, wandering mind is enjoying the rollicking audience and wondering if it couldn’t be too different from the candle-lit milieus in which the bests of Shakespeare made their 16th century debuts. If one were to substitute the Globe Theatre for a modestly square dance hall. I don’t doubt for a minute that had they not been gripped in the riotous throws of laughter they’d be hurling rotten vegetables. And during this time, three plucky little kids who couldn’t believe their stroke of luck or overcome that last trace of childhood gall stole touches at my feet. If they were surprised or disappointed by the feel of boring old flesh, they wouldn’t meet my eyes to show it. I spend the entire night in that space between the strata of asleep and awake. There's ants in the bed and I can here something scurrying all over the room, near my head, at one point I can hear it breathing. In almost delirium (I must have been leaning more towards asleep … or feverish) I was upset I couldn’t remember if mice eat people, running over and over the lines, "if you give a mouse a cookie" and couldn't remember anything further to quell my worries. (For what its worth, I spent the night in this same village once before in a clean and cozy room - guess I picked the wrong straw this time). I think I forgot to mention that all of this occurred under the most unimaginable sky. The type of sky that restores credibility to those constellation maps you see (almost mitigating the fact that its very existence relies on a sad want for electricity in these parts). The longer you stare into the dark, your eyes process more and more white stars until you can’t tell star from sky, even thought they’re virtually opposite in color. Like an ashtray spilled on dark ebony wood. That's the way it is, hey? rodents and sublimity. Two sides of a coin.
Monday, November 12, 2007
African films, alhamdulilay!! part trois
I thought this was a nifty once-and-for-all concerning Africa in American film. I'm not saying Blood Diamond wasn't a fantastic movie, and Leonardo's South African accent impeccable ... I'm saying he called Sierra Leone "Africa" one too many times for me. (Before falling back on an old favorite, the other title I toyed with was Africa: More Than A Country Overrun With Poverty, Famine, Draught, Desertification, Poltical Instability, Ethnic Strife, Landmines, Machetes, AIDS, Shrunken Skulls, Mr. Kurtz, Robert Mugabe, and Killer Bees)
(excerpted from Gerise Herndon's essay, "The Antenna and the Mosque: Liberatory Mass Media in Moolaadé")
Manohla Dargis (2007) confesses “tragedy fatigue” when viewing films about Africa, though not, she clarifies, “the real deal,” such as Sembène’s films, among which, she argues, “Moolaadé manages to tackle the issue of female gential mutilation and critique patriarchal Islam in one entertaining package (really). My problem,” Dargis goes on to specify, “rather, is all those films filled with suffering, struggling black Africans who, for the most part, seem to be on camera to make me feel bad.” Tired, clichéd images that fit with US mass media’s frequently recycled and undifferentiated representations of an imagined “Africa” are trotted out again with the effect of making the public feel pity for the beleaguered continent or relief at residing in the US. Popular movies from the US such as Hotel Rwanda, The Last King of Scotland or Blood Diamond, in contrast to Sembène’s creations, do not fundamentally attempt to liberate or transform; their purpose is to turn a profit. They may produce strong emotional response to an individual character’s noble action, but they do not ultimately hope to shift power relations. The most recent issue of Sight and Sound juxtaposes these films with what Dave Calhoun (2007) calls “Africa’s invisible classics.” Classics by Sembène, Djibril Diop Mambety and Cheick Oumar Sissoko are invisible both to multiplex US audiences and to many African viewers purely because of the power of the profit motive driving mammoth production studios. Hollywood and Bollywood exports have dominated screens and styles, at least until the recent abundance of Nollywood productions [out of Nigeria] available on video. But US audiences won’t find easy access to Nollywood anytime soon. Hollywood needs to give US audiences “white guides” to lead them through “black pain” (Calhoun 2007, 34) to make historical and cultural realities easily digestible in less than two hours.
Not only do popular US productions depend on white narrators for credibility: they also rely on men to tell important stories. Hollywood representations of dramatic acts of heroism have been notably masculine. Sembène, on the other hand, provides rich, multi-faceted and diverse images of women’s various means of taking, expressing and enacting power [...] Sembène’s feminism offers a stark contrast to US studios’ contemporary adventures into what might as well be the 19th century’s “heart of darkness.” Manohla Dargis (2004) notes that recent Hollywood endeavors have depicted little to dispel age-old stereotypes of the dark continent in need of light [...] This sense of immutability, that the violence and the hunger are persistent, almost eternal and natural, infects too many films about Africa."
You know, this reminds me of something I used to think was so funny. The first time I was in Senegal, we used to spend countless and not ever enough nights at this bar around the corner from the language school in Dakar. Sweet little place, thatched roof, looow orange lights, a constant 100 cigarettes burning at any given time, dibite, and these bats that would fly in and out of the surrounding trees in tune to live jazz on Friday nights. But anyways, they always had the TV on, and it was always Hotel Rwanda playing over and over and over again. Yea I know, right? beats me too. Not that the place needed a background movie to set the mood in the first place. On the other hand fairly consistent with my theory that Africa might just be the Land of the Arbitrary .....
(excerpted from Gerise Herndon's essay, "The Antenna and the Mosque: Liberatory Mass Media in Moolaadé")
Manohla Dargis (2007) confesses “tragedy fatigue” when viewing films about Africa, though not, she clarifies, “the real deal,” such as Sembène’s films, among which, she argues, “Moolaadé manages to tackle the issue of female gential mutilation and critique patriarchal Islam in one entertaining package (really). My problem,” Dargis goes on to specify, “rather, is all those films filled with suffering, struggling black Africans who, for the most part, seem to be on camera to make me feel bad.” Tired, clichéd images that fit with US mass media’s frequently recycled and undifferentiated representations of an imagined “Africa” are trotted out again with the effect of making the public feel pity for the beleaguered continent or relief at residing in the US. Popular movies from the US such as Hotel Rwanda, The Last King of Scotland or Blood Diamond, in contrast to Sembène’s creations, do not fundamentally attempt to liberate or transform; their purpose is to turn a profit. They may produce strong emotional response to an individual character’s noble action, but they do not ultimately hope to shift power relations. The most recent issue of Sight and Sound juxtaposes these films with what Dave Calhoun (2007) calls “Africa’s invisible classics.” Classics by Sembène, Djibril Diop Mambety and Cheick Oumar Sissoko are invisible both to multiplex US audiences and to many African viewers purely because of the power of the profit motive driving mammoth production studios. Hollywood and Bollywood exports have dominated screens and styles, at least until the recent abundance of Nollywood productions [out of Nigeria] available on video. But US audiences won’t find easy access to Nollywood anytime soon. Hollywood needs to give US audiences “white guides” to lead them through “black pain” (Calhoun 2007, 34) to make historical and cultural realities easily digestible in less than two hours.
Not only do popular US productions depend on white narrators for credibility: they also rely on men to tell important stories. Hollywood representations of dramatic acts of heroism have been notably masculine. Sembène, on the other hand, provides rich, multi-faceted and diverse images of women’s various means of taking, expressing and enacting power [...] Sembène’s feminism offers a stark contrast to US studios’ contemporary adventures into what might as well be the 19th century’s “heart of darkness.” Manohla Dargis (2004) notes that recent Hollywood endeavors have depicted little to dispel age-old stereotypes of the dark continent in need of light [...] This sense of immutability, that the violence and the hunger are persistent, almost eternal and natural, infects too many films about Africa."
You know, this reminds me of something I used to think was so funny. The first time I was in Senegal, we used to spend countless and not ever enough nights at this bar around the corner from the language school in Dakar. Sweet little place, thatched roof, looow orange lights, a constant 100 cigarettes burning at any given time, dibite, and these bats that would fly in and out of the surrounding trees in tune to live jazz on Friday nights. But anyways, they always had the TV on, and it was always Hotel Rwanda playing over and over and over again. Yea I know, right? beats me too. Not that the place needed a background movie to set the mood in the first place. On the other hand fairly consistent with my theory that Africa might just be the Land of the Arbitrary .....
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
This was a really thought/anger provoking article appearing in the Times this week, that's worth having a look at. Contemporary politics and King Leopold’s Legacy aside, the essence of it is this: at the end of the day, everything is relative to culture. That’s all nice and makes for a cute, diverse branch of the animal kingdom … where it starts to show its formidable consequences is in inter-species relations.
Westerners, though I can really only speak on behalf of Americans, like to think of themselves as heroic, plain and simple. This romanticism is rooted vastly and deeply in the cultural diet we’re fed as kiddies, in school and out. Our sense of purpose in the world is shaped by this idea that we’re the lucky forebears of a long line of “Greats,” that endless list of American Heroes. (Isn’t that what we call our own men and women fighting the war on terrorism?) … And our Judeo-Christian background furnishes a warm, fuzzy sense of compassion for the less fortunate. And we’ve got the wealth and ambition to step up to the challenge. So needless to say, it's the crusade of our time: fixing the world.
A task we shouldn’t balk at because the world needs a fixing. The problem is: we don’t have all the answers, and certainly not the best ones. Because we’ve got modern science and washing machines, and public education and a relatively stable democracy, doesn’t mean we’ve got ready solutions for helping a bangladesh or a burkina faso or a burma in need. And in fact, many people would tell you it's a disposition just shy of racist, this assumption that we can solve the problems in “less developed” countries by our advanced tools and the grace of our humanism. Because those problems seem so uncomplicated: spend enough money, feed a village. Adopt an orphan, and give him or her something other than a future of certain impoverishment.
A good part of Africa is barely swimming, but what it needs foremost is for its saviors to look at what lies below their own pretty reflection on the surface.
The Orphans Who Didn’t Need Saving
By LYDIA POLGREEN
November 4, 2007
DAKAR, Senegal
IN 1890, King Leopold II of Belgium wrote to one of his colonial officials and asked him to set up orphanages in the vast African territory he ruled as his personal fief, the Congo.
The only problem with his plan was that there were no orphans. The concept scarcely existed in Congo or much of the rest of Africa. This is a continent where thousands of ethnic groups and cultures across a vast and diverse landscape nevertheless share basic traditions that dictate that a child whose parents have died is the responsibility of the broader family and community.
But Leopold’s problem was quickly solved — his men kidnapped boys from their families and dispatched them to the “orphanages,” where they received a bit of catechism, some military training and, if they were lucky, baptism.
Mostly, as recounted by the historian Adam Hochschild in his book “King Leopold’s Ghost,” the boys eventually became soldiers in Leopold’s vast native army, if they did not die in the long, harsh marches to the orphanages from their villages.
For Africans, Leopold’s orphan hunt, driven by relentless greed run amok in a colony he ravaged as his personal property, is only one particularly egregious example of a series of deep, and well-remembered, historical wounds.
That record helps explain the skepticism and outrage that greeted the efforts of a French charity, whose members were arrested last week as they tried to fly 103 children from Chad to France, to go hunting for orphans in the deserts between Chad and Sudan.
From the first days of European involvement in Africa, the West has helped itself to the continent’s children — as chattel to be worked like beasts of burden, as soldiers to bear arms against their own kin, or as souls needing salvation through civilization. Sometimes, as the example in Congo illustrates, they were all three.
But the scandal involving the French charity, Zoé’s Ark, is tangled in an even more complicated web, a modern one of apparently good intentions gone awry and of the perceived exploitation of the suffering of vulnerable people, and a profound cultural misunderstanding. The charity is not a well-known group like the dozens of experienced agencies that do lifesaving work in Darfur and eastern Chad. And it was operating far outside the normal boundaries of what established aid and human rights groups consider proper. Still, its experience shows how deeply angry Africans can become when Western “helpers” violate the continent’s own traditions and sense of sovereignty.
According to its Web site, Zoé’s Ark, which was started by a former fireman in France, was motivated by a sense of urgency.
In anguished language, the organization pointed to an obvious fact — the paralysis of international diplomacy in Darfur, in western Sudan, where an ethnic and political conflict has raged for four years, killing at least 200,000 and displacing 2.5 million. The Web site went on to say that something had to be done immediately to end the suffering of the most vulnerable children.
With heart-rending descriptions of children on the brink of death from starvation, violence and disease, the group raised money from French families to fly children out and place them — temporarily, it said — in French homes.
But it turns out that none of the 103 children are orphans in the traditional Western sense — foundlings with no place to go. Almost all were living with family members in villages, relatively well fed and cared for, according to the United Nations. The bewildered children cried as foreign reporters flocked to the orphanage in Abéché, Chad, where they were being temporarily housed late last week until they could be reunited with their families.
The children said they had been coaxed away from their families with sweets and cookies, according to Reuters, and a group of women claiming to be mothers of some children told a French cable news station that they had been told the children would be taken to Abéché for schooling, but that their families would still be able to visit them.
Zoé’s Ark seems to have run into the same problem that Leopold did: In many African societies finding a true orphan is not such a simple thing.
When details of the operation became known, high French officials, United Nations officials, and indignant French citizens, newspapers and child protection agencies sounded their disapproval of Zoé’s Ark’s actions. Jo Becker, child rights advocate at Human Rights Watch in New York, said that removing a child from his or her immediate surroundings might make sense only under circumstances like immediate risk of being forced into military service or a threat of immediate harm. “We would always say,” she said, “that the best place for children is in their community and with their families.”
To be sure, orphanages are full of children in cities across Africa, especially in countries where the AIDS pandemic has shattered entire extended families. And migration to cities has frayed some family bonds.
But many African countries, despite having a surfeit of children with dead or missing parents, have laws surrounding adoption that reflect a strong unease with the concept as it is practiced in the West. As a result, relatively few African children are adopted each year, especially compared with adoptions from Asia and eastern Europe.
Even the idea of Western adoptions sometimes seems to rankle. When Madonna adopted a young boy from Malawi last year, a fierce outcry erupted over whether she had followed proper procedures and whether the boy’s father had been duped.
In largely Muslim countries like Chad and Sudan, where Islamic law governs family matters, the entire Western concept of adoption is essentially forbidden by religious edict.
The current episode has a particular sting because Europe has been writing increasingly stringent rules to keep Africans from migrating there, culminating most recently in a new French law that in some cases requires DNA testing to get visas for family members. Taking a planeload of children away in secret while thousands of Africans drown in the Atlantic seeking to migrate to Spain strikes many Africans as hypocritical. “What message is the transaction sending?” demanded an editorial in the African Executive, an online business magazine. “Will Zoé’s Ark transport the 201 million Africans facing extreme hunger to Europe? Africa must vehemently resist this humiliation. If Zoé’s Ark is serious on the African plight, let it press Europe to open its borders to African migrants, grant African professionals jobs without discrimination, drop its barriers against African goods and allow Africa to export finished products.”
But accusations of hypocrisy can cut both ways. Chad’s president for the last 17 years, Idriss Déby, abandoned his usual reticence with the international news media to deliver sound bites to the reporters who swarmed to Abéché.
He called the situation an outrage, and speculated that perhaps Zoé’s Ark planned to sell the children to pedophiles. Burnished cane in hand, he walked awkwardly among the scrawny boys and girls. It is hard to say when this former military dictator last paid so much attention to Chad’s children.
Despite the country’s burgeoning oil industry and increased foreign investment, especially from China, Chad’s 1.9 million children under the age of 5, like most of those taken by Zoé’s Ark, are among the most defenseless in the world against disease, hunger and death. One-fifth won’t make it to their fifth birthdays, according to Unicef statistics, mostly because of treatable diseases like malaria, measles and diarrhea. More than 40 percent will be stunted from hunger. Like millions of other impoverished children across Africa, they are waiting patiently for some kind of rescue.
Westerners, though I can really only speak on behalf of Americans, like to think of themselves as heroic, plain and simple. This romanticism is rooted vastly and deeply in the cultural diet we’re fed as kiddies, in school and out. Our sense of purpose in the world is shaped by this idea that we’re the lucky forebears of a long line of “Greats,” that endless list of American Heroes. (Isn’t that what we call our own men and women fighting the war on terrorism?) … And our Judeo-Christian background furnishes a warm, fuzzy sense of compassion for the less fortunate. And we’ve got the wealth and ambition to step up to the challenge. So needless to say, it's the crusade of our time: fixing the world.
A task we shouldn’t balk at because the world needs a fixing. The problem is: we don’t have all the answers, and certainly not the best ones. Because we’ve got modern science and washing machines, and public education and a relatively stable democracy, doesn’t mean we’ve got ready solutions for helping a bangladesh or a burkina faso or a burma in need. And in fact, many people would tell you it's a disposition just shy of racist, this assumption that we can solve the problems in “less developed” countries by our advanced tools and the grace of our humanism. Because those problems seem so uncomplicated: spend enough money, feed a village. Adopt an orphan, and give him or her something other than a future of certain impoverishment.
A good part of Africa is barely swimming, but what it needs foremost is for its saviors to look at what lies below their own pretty reflection on the surface.
The Orphans Who Didn’t Need Saving
By LYDIA POLGREEN
November 4, 2007
DAKAR, Senegal
IN 1890, King Leopold II of Belgium wrote to one of his colonial officials and asked him to set up orphanages in the vast African territory he ruled as his personal fief, the Congo.
The only problem with his plan was that there were no orphans. The concept scarcely existed in Congo or much of the rest of Africa. This is a continent where thousands of ethnic groups and cultures across a vast and diverse landscape nevertheless share basic traditions that dictate that a child whose parents have died is the responsibility of the broader family and community.
But Leopold’s problem was quickly solved — his men kidnapped boys from their families and dispatched them to the “orphanages,” where they received a bit of catechism, some military training and, if they were lucky, baptism.
Mostly, as recounted by the historian Adam Hochschild in his book “King Leopold’s Ghost,” the boys eventually became soldiers in Leopold’s vast native army, if they did not die in the long, harsh marches to the orphanages from their villages.
For Africans, Leopold’s orphan hunt, driven by relentless greed run amok in a colony he ravaged as his personal property, is only one particularly egregious example of a series of deep, and well-remembered, historical wounds.
That record helps explain the skepticism and outrage that greeted the efforts of a French charity, whose members were arrested last week as they tried to fly 103 children from Chad to France, to go hunting for orphans in the deserts between Chad and Sudan.
From the first days of European involvement in Africa, the West has helped itself to the continent’s children — as chattel to be worked like beasts of burden, as soldiers to bear arms against their own kin, or as souls needing salvation through civilization. Sometimes, as the example in Congo illustrates, they were all three.
But the scandal involving the French charity, Zoé’s Ark, is tangled in an even more complicated web, a modern one of apparently good intentions gone awry and of the perceived exploitation of the suffering of vulnerable people, and a profound cultural misunderstanding. The charity is not a well-known group like the dozens of experienced agencies that do lifesaving work in Darfur and eastern Chad. And it was operating far outside the normal boundaries of what established aid and human rights groups consider proper. Still, its experience shows how deeply angry Africans can become when Western “helpers” violate the continent’s own traditions and sense of sovereignty.
According to its Web site, Zoé’s Ark, which was started by a former fireman in France, was motivated by a sense of urgency.
In anguished language, the organization pointed to an obvious fact — the paralysis of international diplomacy in Darfur, in western Sudan, where an ethnic and political conflict has raged for four years, killing at least 200,000 and displacing 2.5 million. The Web site went on to say that something had to be done immediately to end the suffering of the most vulnerable children.
With heart-rending descriptions of children on the brink of death from starvation, violence and disease, the group raised money from French families to fly children out and place them — temporarily, it said — in French homes.
But it turns out that none of the 103 children are orphans in the traditional Western sense — foundlings with no place to go. Almost all were living with family members in villages, relatively well fed and cared for, according to the United Nations. The bewildered children cried as foreign reporters flocked to the orphanage in Abéché, Chad, where they were being temporarily housed late last week until they could be reunited with their families.
The children said they had been coaxed away from their families with sweets and cookies, according to Reuters, and a group of women claiming to be mothers of some children told a French cable news station that they had been told the children would be taken to Abéché for schooling, but that their families would still be able to visit them.
Zoé’s Ark seems to have run into the same problem that Leopold did: In many African societies finding a true orphan is not such a simple thing.
When details of the operation became known, high French officials, United Nations officials, and indignant French citizens, newspapers and child protection agencies sounded their disapproval of Zoé’s Ark’s actions. Jo Becker, child rights advocate at Human Rights Watch in New York, said that removing a child from his or her immediate surroundings might make sense only under circumstances like immediate risk of being forced into military service or a threat of immediate harm. “We would always say,” she said, “that the best place for children is in their community and with their families.”
To be sure, orphanages are full of children in cities across Africa, especially in countries where the AIDS pandemic has shattered entire extended families. And migration to cities has frayed some family bonds.
But many African countries, despite having a surfeit of children with dead or missing parents, have laws surrounding adoption that reflect a strong unease with the concept as it is practiced in the West. As a result, relatively few African children are adopted each year, especially compared with adoptions from Asia and eastern Europe.
Even the idea of Western adoptions sometimes seems to rankle. When Madonna adopted a young boy from Malawi last year, a fierce outcry erupted over whether she had followed proper procedures and whether the boy’s father had been duped.
In largely Muslim countries like Chad and Sudan, where Islamic law governs family matters, the entire Western concept of adoption is essentially forbidden by religious edict.
The current episode has a particular sting because Europe has been writing increasingly stringent rules to keep Africans from migrating there, culminating most recently in a new French law that in some cases requires DNA testing to get visas for family members. Taking a planeload of children away in secret while thousands of Africans drown in the Atlantic seeking to migrate to Spain strikes many Africans as hypocritical. “What message is the transaction sending?” demanded an editorial in the African Executive, an online business magazine. “Will Zoé’s Ark transport the 201 million Africans facing extreme hunger to Europe? Africa must vehemently resist this humiliation. If Zoé’s Ark is serious on the African plight, let it press Europe to open its borders to African migrants, grant African professionals jobs without discrimination, drop its barriers against African goods and allow Africa to export finished products.”
But accusations of hypocrisy can cut both ways. Chad’s president for the last 17 years, Idriss Déby, abandoned his usual reticence with the international news media to deliver sound bites to the reporters who swarmed to Abéché.
He called the situation an outrage, and speculated that perhaps Zoé’s Ark planned to sell the children to pedophiles. Burnished cane in hand, he walked awkwardly among the scrawny boys and girls. It is hard to say when this former military dictator last paid so much attention to Chad’s children.
Despite the country’s burgeoning oil industry and increased foreign investment, especially from China, Chad’s 1.9 million children under the age of 5, like most of those taken by Zoé’s Ark, are among the most defenseless in the world against disease, hunger and death. One-fifth won’t make it to their fifth birthdays, according to Unicef statistics, mostly because of treatable diseases like malaria, measles and diarrhea. More than 40 percent will be stunted from hunger. Like millions of other impoverished children across Africa, they are waiting patiently for some kind of rescue.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
November 4th is International Mitzvah Day
You really did think about how nice in theory was that Amnesty International-produced album-for-Darfur, but you couldn't quite bring yourself to purchase a cd of Avril Lavigne, Snow Patrol. (Ok granted it's not all bad, there's some Black Eyed Peas, a little Flaming Lips). Maybe you also found something infinitesimally offensive about the name "Instant Karma" in its appeal to the latent Jewish Guilt in all of us.
Luckily good things come in second-chances. This the funkiest thing in humanitarian aid, at least that I've found so far: ASAP: The Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project.
"Featuring top musicians from around the world, Calabash Music and Modiba Productions will donate all proceeds from ASAP: The Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project.
Along with benefiting the people suffering in the Darfur region of Sudan, we all hope that this project will also raise awareness about the dire situation in Darfur: by some estimates, over 400,000 people have died by dehydration, disease, and at the hands of the Janjaweed -- armed horsemen supported by the government of Sudan.
To accomplish this, Modiba has teamed up with TrueMajority, a grassroots education and advocacy group committed to social and political justice (founded by Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's). TrueMajority has already done some incredible work in Darfur, sending camera crews and attempting to bring witnesses into the United States (the US State Department refused entry). Many thanks to all the musicians on ASAP for donating their music."
very fela kuti, very hottt (takes me back to Murphy's Sundays!!)
clicks away CalabashMusic
Luckily good things come in second-chances. This the funkiest thing in humanitarian aid, at least that I've found so far: ASAP: The Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project.
"Featuring top musicians from around the world, Calabash Music and Modiba Productions will donate all proceeds from ASAP: The Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project.
Along with benefiting the people suffering in the Darfur region of Sudan, we all hope that this project will also raise awareness about the dire situation in Darfur: by some estimates, over 400,000 people have died by dehydration, disease, and at the hands of the Janjaweed -- armed horsemen supported by the government of Sudan.
To accomplish this, Modiba has teamed up with TrueMajority, a grassroots education and advocacy group committed to social and political justice (founded by Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's). TrueMajority has already done some incredible work in Darfur, sending camera crews and attempting to bring witnesses into the United States (the US State Department refused entry). Many thanks to all the musicians on ASAP for donating their music."
very fela kuti, very hottt (takes me back to Murphy's Sundays!!)
clicks away CalabashMusic
Thursday, November 1, 2007
it's also hormones
Spent the last couple days, as usual, adding to the running mental list of blog-worthy material … little things, nuanced things, things that happen right under my nose that seem funny only when considered from a distance. (I can’t say it doesn’t feel turbulent sometimes, being physically in one place - here - but mentally coming and going constantly. Being immersed, being removed.) I like to tally these things, make lists of them, savor them as just-perceptible abnormalities, with probably the same satisfaction somebody finds in his carefully curated collection of shells or books or passport stamps. (This is probably indicative of some personality type or another).
Ok just to get it out of my system: though it’s not something I had previously put much thought into, I learned recently you can drive a manual car with a prosthetic left leg. You’ve got you’re (false) leg on the clutch, and when the time comes to switch gears, you move the gearshift with your right hand, and push your clutch leg with your left hand. Sounds simple enough; the problem is the 2 seconds of panic for everyone involved while no hands are on the wheel and on-coming traffic’s just plain in God’s hands. Well anyways like most things here, it warmed my heart to once again see that in Africa, people make $#!% happen.
But these things don’t really stand up to what I learned yesterday. Someone who works for the NGO died yesterday. Nobody I had even met, and I don’t even know the cause. But, I can’t shake it. This work that I’m doing, that we’re all trying to do over here.
I feel like I’m circling around a point, but can’t find a way in.
Ok, one step back. I spent the weekend visiting three villages where we run the Community Empowerment Program, and seeing it on the ground was seeing it in the flesh. The class is like an epicenter of knowledge. And true to the metaphor, hope and initiative ripple out with the force of an earthquake. (Far beyond the borders of any one village!) People are finding their own agency to make change. What they're chasing is nothing less than their own social evolution. The improvements in these communities, in education, health care, male-female relations, economic self-sufficiency … it’s exhilarating. (Factor in dancing around a fire singing a song, the only word of which I caught was "democracy.") So between that, and the sheer vibrancy of life here … well, I suppose I tend to gloss over context. I forget about where I am; I forget about life-expectancy. I forget there aren’t ambulances here. I manage not to notice the hip bones that show a little too sharply on every dusty animal. And ultimately, I forget that people here live on closer terms with death - and while that may in some ways be healthier than our tendency to push death to the darker corners of our awareness - they do so simply because it's got more presence here. (And it's not fair. That a simple accident of latitude can determine whether you eat or not.)
Aah, sometimes you feel like you’re riding the crest of a wave, and sometimes you can barely swim. And if it was immersion you were looking for, you’ve got it. But it’s a fine fine line between immersion and in over your head.
It’s all catching up with me …. the plain truth is I’m feeling a little too distant from the people I love. Oh this will pass, and I know it’s good for me, but man, it's a tough meantime.
Ok just to get it out of my system: though it’s not something I had previously put much thought into, I learned recently you can drive a manual car with a prosthetic left leg. You’ve got you’re (false) leg on the clutch, and when the time comes to switch gears, you move the gearshift with your right hand, and push your clutch leg with your left hand. Sounds simple enough; the problem is the 2 seconds of panic for everyone involved while no hands are on the wheel and on-coming traffic’s just plain in God’s hands. Well anyways like most things here, it warmed my heart to once again see that in Africa, people make $#!% happen.
But these things don’t really stand up to what I learned yesterday. Someone who works for the NGO died yesterday. Nobody I had even met, and I don’t even know the cause. But, I can’t shake it. This work that I’m doing, that we’re all trying to do over here.
I feel like I’m circling around a point, but can’t find a way in.
Ok, one step back. I spent the weekend visiting three villages where we run the Community Empowerment Program, and seeing it on the ground was seeing it in the flesh. The class is like an epicenter of knowledge. And true to the metaphor, hope and initiative ripple out with the force of an earthquake. (Far beyond the borders of any one village!) People are finding their own agency to make change. What they're chasing is nothing less than their own social evolution. The improvements in these communities, in education, health care, male-female relations, economic self-sufficiency … it’s exhilarating. (Factor in dancing around a fire singing a song, the only word of which I caught was "democracy.") So between that, and the sheer vibrancy of life here … well, I suppose I tend to gloss over context. I forget about where I am; I forget about life-expectancy. I forget there aren’t ambulances here. I manage not to notice the hip bones that show a little too sharply on every dusty animal. And ultimately, I forget that people here live on closer terms with death - and while that may in some ways be healthier than our tendency to push death to the darker corners of our awareness - they do so simply because it's got more presence here. (And it's not fair. That a simple accident of latitude can determine whether you eat or not.)
Aah, sometimes you feel like you’re riding the crest of a wave, and sometimes you can barely swim. And if it was immersion you were looking for, you’ve got it. But it’s a fine fine line between immersion and in over your head.
It’s all catching up with me …. the plain truth is I’m feeling a little too distant from the people I love. Oh this will pass, and I know it’s good for me, but man, it's a tough meantime.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
point Z
So much has happened in the last five days, and I can’t figure out where to begin this one, so for a momentary lack of creativity (and a bit of exhaustion) I guess I’ll go at this chronologically. I went to Dakar this weekend, needing to connect with a handful of people and a city I won’t see for a couple months. I went to a market I’d never been to before, but was as charmingly hot, dusty, and noisy as ever. A real If You Can’t Find It, You Don’t Need It kind of place. The vendors sell mostly used and some new clothing - heaps of it that are shipped from the West. It’s quite unlike most other Dakar markets, which are typically nebulous, for lack of a better word. Just stall after stall after stall and sometimes not even stalls along really labyrinthine paths that lead you to no where except into other pockets of small-time commerce, clustered around no real center at all. (Prokaryotic-like actually does it some justice, if you don’t mind getting biological about it; and by prokaryotic I mean, as you can imagine, all the cell junk sans nucleus). It never fails to strike me as something miraculous, that when I finally reach the outskirts of it all, there’s always a taxi driver who know where in God’s name we are. But the market I was at this weekend was, to my surprise and slight dismay, linear. Bought jeans with some blingin sparklies on the behind to wear clubbing! Intermittently through the next 24 hours I went to a quiet beach and an outrageously expensive Thai restaurant, danced till 4 in the am at a jivey bumping club, got hassled by greedy, underpaid cops for not having “papers,” (for the record, I had mine!), met some gentlemanly gars riding tandem on a moto who kindly bought us a bottle of water and paid half the bribe money, had the most deliciously hearty breakfast, the kind I’m still thinking about, and made it home to Thiès not only in one piece, but with a full belly and fond memories. Traveled back via sept-place, which is an ingeniously efficient form of carpooling amounting to something like a station-wagon carrying seven people plus driver quite uncomfortably but for very little cost, and if lucky, comes with a cute Moroccan man who will sing suras all the way. Made it home to find our quaint little jungle bungalow had been landscaped to smithereens (people have no respect for shade) and my room ankle-deep in water (reservoir issues).
And that was only the beginning of the journey! Yesterday I sadly left some amazing girls in Thiès and commenced my biggest adventure yet, which will have me working in the Ziguinchor region for the next two months. I’ve been traveling with the NGO’s computer technician and some other people I still find quite lovely despite being squished in a mini but air-conditioned pick-up with them for the greater part of the last 2 days. We spent the night at the regional office in Kaolack, having tea and chatting under an immense and quiet sky. Took our time getting on the road this morning, a road full of potholes (where it was paved) - so full of potholes in fact, the speed bumps seemed redundant - but nonetheless, a road which would carry us through The Gambia (a rough looking place) and ultimately to point Z - Ziguinchor.
So here I am in my new digs, which I’m quickly falling in love with, as I feared. The name Ziguinchor (which Europeans pronounce Zee-guin-shore, and locals something more like Zigi-chor) is derived from Portuguese, meaning "to sit and cry"; many captives were taken from this area during the age of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When you ask people what’s Ziguinchor like? People invariably tell you: “green.” And green it is! So green you’d imagine the grass would glow in the dark. Such a contrast from the dustier north I came from, whose landscape is persistently turning to shades of gray. The town reminds me of a rusty Key West (maybe because of the uncomfortably long-and-slow getting here, maybe the mangroves). It is situated on a river, and the smell of salt and fish gives away the economy. Unlike the rest of Senegal, the dominant ethnic group and language is not Wolof, but instead Djola and Mandinka. In reality, the people here speak at least 3 different languages fluently. Djola society is traditionally unhierarchical, and while I’m still learning what exactly that means in terms of social structures, one principle thing it implies is they’ve been somewhat resistant to foreign authority imposed in their homeland in the past. (Fortunately, conflicts are almost unheard of today).
The people at the regional office gave me a warm welcome, an invitation to live at so-and-so’s house, and a watermelon. So that brings me to the present tense! What’s a girl to do in a new African city, but test the water? Literally, to make sure it doesn’t give her dysentery or something similarly awful in the middle of the night. If you’re wondering, it’s got a funny taste which could be either chlorine or something more insidious, but as of now I’m feeling good. Really good.
And that was only the beginning of the journey! Yesterday I sadly left some amazing girls in Thiès and commenced my biggest adventure yet, which will have me working in the Ziguinchor region for the next two months. I’ve been traveling with the NGO’s computer technician and some other people I still find quite lovely despite being squished in a mini but air-conditioned pick-up with them for the greater part of the last 2 days. We spent the night at the regional office in Kaolack, having tea and chatting under an immense and quiet sky. Took our time getting on the road this morning, a road full of potholes (where it was paved) - so full of potholes in fact, the speed bumps seemed redundant - but nonetheless, a road which would carry us through The Gambia (a rough looking place) and ultimately to point Z - Ziguinchor.
So here I am in my new digs, which I’m quickly falling in love with, as I feared. The name Ziguinchor (which Europeans pronounce Zee-guin-shore, and locals something more like Zigi-chor) is derived from Portuguese, meaning "to sit and cry"; many captives were taken from this area during the age of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When you ask people what’s Ziguinchor like? People invariably tell you: “green.” And green it is! So green you’d imagine the grass would glow in the dark. Such a contrast from the dustier north I came from, whose landscape is persistently turning to shades of gray. The town reminds me of a rusty Key West (maybe because of the uncomfortably long-and-slow getting here, maybe the mangroves). It is situated on a river, and the smell of salt and fish gives away the economy. Unlike the rest of Senegal, the dominant ethnic group and language is not Wolof, but instead Djola and Mandinka. In reality, the people here speak at least 3 different languages fluently. Djola society is traditionally unhierarchical, and while I’m still learning what exactly that means in terms of social structures, one principle thing it implies is they’ve been somewhat resistant to foreign authority imposed in their homeland in the past. (Fortunately, conflicts are almost unheard of today).
The people at the regional office gave me a warm welcome, an invitation to live at so-and-so’s house, and a watermelon. So that brings me to the present tense! What’s a girl to do in a new African city, but test the water? Literally, to make sure it doesn’t give her dysentery or something similarly awful in the middle of the night. If you’re wondering, it’s got a funny taste which could be either chlorine or something more insidious, but as of now I’m feeling good. Really good.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Article on Informal Education from www.irinnews.org (publication of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs)
SENEGAL: New efforts underway to educate in local languages
DAKAR, 14 September 2007 (IRIN) - With formal education systems crumbling in much of sub-Saharan Africa, educationalists are looking more to informal systems of education taught in local languages.
"Every child and adult should be able to learn in their own language, especially in the face of staggering failure rates from the French education system," said Sonja Diallo, director of Associates in Research and Education for Development (ARED), a non-profit group based in Senegal that promotes learning in African languages.
She points out that it takes about 300 hours to make a student literate and learn basic maths skills in their own languages, whereas reaching grade six in the formal system takes a total of 7,000 hours.
The type of education that people get in their own languages is also more practical. “People here have found the confidence and skills to keep accounts and organise themselves,” said Ousmane Mamadou Ba, who went through a non-formal education programme in the northern Senegalese town of Podor and now teaches in his native language of Pulaar subjects ranging from animal health to AIDS awareness.
“We've been able to improve farming in the area by teaching farmers how to get the most from their crops. And newly literate local leaders are encouraging our youth to educate themselves about Pulaar culture,” he said. “People have become really interested in reading and learning about themselves."
ARED has produced over 150 fiction and non-fiction books in Pulaar and five other Senegalese languages.
Learning in local languages has gained new impetus and was one of the issues discussed in a meeting organised by UNESCO earlier in September in Bamako to promote global literacy.
The formal system
For Diallo, who presented a paper at the conference, "[Families] sending children to formal schools is a bit like playing lottery with their lives."
"In rural areas families scrape and save to send their kids to school, knowing quite well that they probably won't make it past the sixth grade," she said. A staggering 75 percent of children fail the seventh grade entrance exam and are forced out of the system, she said.
Learning in a foreign language is a big part of the problem, she said. "What we must understand is how incredibly difficult it is for most Senegalese students to succeed in the formal system. A great number of them enter primary school not speaking the language of instruction," Diallo said.
"They are destined to fail from the start," she said.
Moreover, with massive unemployment in formal sector jobs in Africa the formal education system is teaching students skills that are not uthey need to further their lives. "It’s great for those who will make it to formal sector or urban jobs,” educationalist Molly Melching, director of Tostan, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) supporting non-formal education in West Africa, told IRIN, “but for those returning to rural communities they are left with skills they may never use."
Alternatives
Proponents of non-formal education are not calling for the formal education system to be replaced, but for people to be given other options. "Non-formal education is not concretely opposed to the French formal system," Diallo said.
“Instead, it provides an alternative for people who have very little chance of succeeding in a top-down system.”
The alternatives should be designed and structured by local communities, to meet local needs, the proponents say. The education programmes start with literacy in local languages and basic maths skills, and then cover human rights, gender equality, health as well as agricultural issues.
"Communities choose subjects that apply to their lives," Diallo said.
While the programmes do not lead to a degree or certificate, advocates of the system say they are crucial to community driven development.
"It gives them the tools to drive their own development, which is entirely more sustainable than any development initiative imposed from the outside," Melching said.
'Faire-Faire'
In Senegal the government has had a plan in place for more than a decade to revitalise the country's education system through the use of national languages and promoting local cultures.
The plan, called 'Faire-Faire' (make happen), is intended to provide community driven education outside of formal schools. It is an idea that has spread to other countries in Francophone Africa, including Burkina Faso, Niger, Mauritania and Mali.
Fary Ka, a former adviser to the Minister of Literacy in Senegal who now works as a consultant and researcher on non-formal education, has called the programme "an alternative to the failed mirage of formal education which creates civil servants, elites and intellectuals".
Yet of the 18.9 percent of the US$3 billion Senegalese state budget that goes to education only 1 percent of that is directed towards non-formal education programmes.
"It's amazing that more money is not directed towards these programmes," says Diallo. “Non-formal education plays such an essential role in levelling the playing field in Africa.”
DAKAR, 14 September 2007 (IRIN) - With formal education systems crumbling in much of sub-Saharan Africa, educationalists are looking more to informal systems of education taught in local languages.
"Every child and adult should be able to learn in their own language, especially in the face of staggering failure rates from the French education system," said Sonja Diallo, director of Associates in Research and Education for Development (ARED), a non-profit group based in Senegal that promotes learning in African languages.
She points out that it takes about 300 hours to make a student literate and learn basic maths skills in their own languages, whereas reaching grade six in the formal system takes a total of 7,000 hours.
The type of education that people get in their own languages is also more practical. “People here have found the confidence and skills to keep accounts and organise themselves,” said Ousmane Mamadou Ba, who went through a non-formal education programme in the northern Senegalese town of Podor and now teaches in his native language of Pulaar subjects ranging from animal health to AIDS awareness.
“We've been able to improve farming in the area by teaching farmers how to get the most from their crops. And newly literate local leaders are encouraging our youth to educate themselves about Pulaar culture,” he said. “People have become really interested in reading and learning about themselves."
ARED has produced over 150 fiction and non-fiction books in Pulaar and five other Senegalese languages.
Learning in local languages has gained new impetus and was one of the issues discussed in a meeting organised by UNESCO earlier in September in Bamako to promote global literacy.
The formal system
For Diallo, who presented a paper at the conference, "[Families] sending children to formal schools is a bit like playing lottery with their lives."
"In rural areas families scrape and save to send their kids to school, knowing quite well that they probably won't make it past the sixth grade," she said. A staggering 75 percent of children fail the seventh grade entrance exam and are forced out of the system, she said.
Learning in a foreign language is a big part of the problem, she said. "What we must understand is how incredibly difficult it is for most Senegalese students to succeed in the formal system. A great number of them enter primary school not speaking the language of instruction," Diallo said.
"They are destined to fail from the start," she said.
Moreover, with massive unemployment in formal sector jobs in Africa the formal education system is teaching students skills that are not uthey need to further their lives. "It’s great for those who will make it to formal sector or urban jobs,” educationalist Molly Melching, director of Tostan, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) supporting non-formal education in West Africa, told IRIN, “but for those returning to rural communities they are left with skills they may never use."
Alternatives
Proponents of non-formal education are not calling for the formal education system to be replaced, but for people to be given other options. "Non-formal education is not concretely opposed to the French formal system," Diallo said.
“Instead, it provides an alternative for people who have very little chance of succeeding in a top-down system.”
The alternatives should be designed and structured by local communities, to meet local needs, the proponents say. The education programmes start with literacy in local languages and basic maths skills, and then cover human rights, gender equality, health as well as agricultural issues.
"Communities choose subjects that apply to their lives," Diallo said.
While the programmes do not lead to a degree or certificate, advocates of the system say they are crucial to community driven development.
"It gives them the tools to drive their own development, which is entirely more sustainable than any development initiative imposed from the outside," Melching said.
'Faire-Faire'
In Senegal the government has had a plan in place for more than a decade to revitalise the country's education system through the use of national languages and promoting local cultures.
The plan, called 'Faire-Faire' (make happen), is intended to provide community driven education outside of formal schools. It is an idea that has spread to other countries in Francophone Africa, including Burkina Faso, Niger, Mauritania and Mali.
Fary Ka, a former adviser to the Minister of Literacy in Senegal who now works as a consultant and researcher on non-formal education, has called the programme "an alternative to the failed mirage of formal education which creates civil servants, elites and intellectuals".
Yet of the 18.9 percent of the US$3 billion Senegalese state budget that goes to education only 1 percent of that is directed towards non-formal education programmes.
"It's amazing that more money is not directed towards these programmes," says Diallo. “Non-formal education plays such an essential role in levelling the playing field in Africa.”
Monday, October 15, 2007
A weekend of plenty; and if by plenty you mean: plenty of boubous, plenty of rain, plenty of slaughtered animal carcasses along the route nationale, (plenty of letting down your guard), as well as plenty of family, plenty of warmth, and generosity, and group snoozing, it makes for a kind of weird weekend. Well, only weird in the sense that you get so caught up in the fever of a holiday that’s quite foreign to you to begin with. And quite anticlimactic. Nothing gets done in the week before Korité, except Korité, but at the end of it all, most everyone seemed a little too worn out to make much of it. Stormy weather also always has a way of making the world feel a little unsettled; it’s the depression in air pressure that gives the atmosphere that nervous kind of edge. According to the calendar, we’re right at the tail end of the rainy season, l’hivernage, but it seems like the sky itself has got another, lingering, idea in mind.
Our water’s been cut out for two days now (although it came back for just long enough for me to shower under a pathetic trickle of water; let me self-pity for a second, it's my blog). Last night Cathi and I - ever industrious and giddy - were able to fill up some buckets of water at a neighbor’s house, and carry them back on our heads … did we ever turn a few heads! Sometimes I feel like toubabs (white people) are just purely comical to Africans. I suppose it’s very common for foreigners to come here and, at least once in a while, feel way less self-sufficient than they'd like to be. (AH! water water halleluja … I'm stealing away for a moment to wash vegetables while the glorious flow lasts).
Before I returned with this big bowl of carrots and avocados and tomatoes, and beans … (for one reason or another I’ve been living on white bread and rice for a few days. I can’t help but feel a deep gratification in saying, the bakers are on strike) I think I was going to make some point about how darn funny we are - sunburned and miscommunicating - navigating our way through a society that’s not terribly open-minded and but has nonetheless a sense of humor. Often at our expense … you’d laugh too. (One of my girlfriends, Leah, - gallant in her stabs at Gambian Wolof - somehow misconstrued “are you married?” with “do you pleasure your wife?” ) It’s humbling, a little.
But before I get too far off the topic of water … I want to make a point to say that it is so, so, so, so precious. You think about these things when you go without. And while we can bear the loss for a couple days, while our dishes pile up in the sink, while we can’t sufficiently wash vegetables, while we empty bottles of sanitizer on our hands in lieu of soap and water - for just a few days - we never the less get a glimpse of the aggravation of a problem that is very grave and growing in magnitude. There are close to 2 billion people who live without access to safe drinking water, right now, who live in a state of what the UN calls a “moderate to sever water crisis.” (I was curious, had to google it when the power came back on, haha). Oh man, the luxuries we don’t even think about. Who ever thinks about water as a luxury, let alone a human right?
Our water’s been cut out for two days now (although it came back for just long enough for me to shower under a pathetic trickle of water; let me self-pity for a second, it's my blog). Last night Cathi and I - ever industrious and giddy - were able to fill up some buckets of water at a neighbor’s house, and carry them back on our heads … did we ever turn a few heads! Sometimes I feel like toubabs (white people) are just purely comical to Africans. I suppose it’s very common for foreigners to come here and, at least once in a while, feel way less self-sufficient than they'd like to be. (AH! water water halleluja … I'm stealing away for a moment to wash vegetables while the glorious flow lasts).
Before I returned with this big bowl of carrots and avocados and tomatoes, and beans … (for one reason or another I’ve been living on white bread and rice for a few days. I can’t help but feel a deep gratification in saying, the bakers are on strike) I think I was going to make some point about how darn funny we are - sunburned and miscommunicating - navigating our way through a society that’s not terribly open-minded and but has nonetheless a sense of humor. Often at our expense … you’d laugh too. (One of my girlfriends, Leah, - gallant in her stabs at Gambian Wolof - somehow misconstrued “are you married?” with “do you pleasure your wife?” ) It’s humbling, a little.
But before I get too far off the topic of water … I want to make a point to say that it is so, so, so, so precious. You think about these things when you go without. And while we can bear the loss for a couple days, while our dishes pile up in the sink, while we can’t sufficiently wash vegetables, while we empty bottles of sanitizer on our hands in lieu of soap and water - for just a few days - we never the less get a glimpse of the aggravation of a problem that is very grave and growing in magnitude. There are close to 2 billion people who live without access to safe drinking water, right now, who live in a state of what the UN calls a “moderate to sever water crisis.” (I was curious, had to google it when the power came back on, haha). Oh man, the luxuries we don’t even think about. Who ever thinks about water as a luxury, let alone a human right?
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Woke up today feeling something you could call a cool draft in our house, imagine that. I had about a half hour to relish it, naïvely, deludedly, thinking the times are a-changing, before 8:30 descended on West Africa and with it the familiar old dry, heavy heat - merely trapped in the morning rush hour drag - arrived promptly, all ruffled and overcompensating, not a minute too soon. Everyday must be one closer to cooling off, right? Or have I been living in New England too long!
But nonetheless, things feel like they’re changing. You can usually trust it when you feel it, in the breeze, in your bones … (wherever you so feel change.) This weekend marks the end of Ramadan. Feels like a ball rolling downhill, but instead of gaining momentum, it’s gotten drowsy under the weight of inertia. It’s so straining, it feels like its its got to come to an end or else. I find myself thinking about religion constantly here, way more than the last time I was here, way more than ever. There seem to be a lot of questions I can’t seem to get off my mind, mostly about the roots of religions, our evolutionary inclination to spirituality (and why it's quite maladaptive to our venerable old species)(but all of this isn't about spirituality per se), about social conformity, about long outdated approaches to understanding the world and beyond, about incompatibility … about other things I don’t want to discuss here for fear of stepping on toes; I’ve even stepped on my own toes this time. What I used to find very beautiful and worthy about the world religions has been trumped recently by a negativity I can't seem to shake off.
But nonetheless, things feel like they’re changing. You can usually trust it when you feel it, in the breeze, in your bones … (wherever you so feel change.) This weekend marks the end of Ramadan. Feels like a ball rolling downhill, but instead of gaining momentum, it’s gotten drowsy under the weight of inertia. It’s so straining, it feels like its its got to come to an end or else. I find myself thinking about religion constantly here, way more than the last time I was here, way more than ever. There seem to be a lot of questions I can’t seem to get off my mind, mostly about the roots of religions, our evolutionary inclination to spirituality (and why it's quite maladaptive to our venerable old species)(but all of this isn't about spirituality per se), about social conformity, about long outdated approaches to understanding the world and beyond, about incompatibility … about other things I don’t want to discuss here for fear of stepping on toes; I’ve even stepped on my own toes this time. What I used to find very beautiful and worthy about the world religions has been trumped recently by a negativity I can't seem to shake off.
Friday, October 5, 2007
rambling, nuff said
Call it what you will - Friday, vendredi, ajumaa, or if you’re Australian, likely a heavy drinkin bloke, and so inclined, POETS-day (Piss Off Early Tomorrow’s Saturday) - the general t.g.i.f.afternoon sense of unbridled, unencumbered, damn satisfying freedom is a universal one. (On a side note, if you happen to conflate all of your known languages on a regular basis, rest assured you’re not alone.)
A long week, I guess more tiring than tumultuous in hindsight. (And electrifying! No, literally. Don’t worry, I’m ok. A little shaken up though.) Sometimes things aren’t as uncomplicated as we want to tell other people they are. Sometimes you feel very comfortable in your own skin (again, literally), but things happen that really knock your self-confidence down a notch. I’ve begun Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, which is not as gripping as I had imagined, but for what it's worth, a really eloquent inquiry into the nature of human isolation, and pilgrimage, and well truthfully, God. And the humbling effect on the man out of his element, in the arms of unbroken landscapes. (I sure miss the old Mass North Shore and the South Shore! the unassuming façades of the New England coast.) I found this quote by Thoreau from Walden especially moving:
No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted … The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We can easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality … The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
(by the way, Blogger operates differently on Macs, and for some reason, I cannot italicize anything. I will try to get on a different computer and fix that. my apologies, of course you probably don't mind)
I suppose a part of what he’s saying is, at the end of the day we sometimes just cannot name the things we’re seeking, nor the things we’ve found. A couple months ago a friend gave me a collection of writings by R. W. Emerson, all in a similar vein. In light of everything at the time, it might have been the most thoughtful present I have ever received (and if you ever read this, that is true, and thank you). I think like man’s relationship to the land and to people, these ideas fade and reappear and morph with age. Sometimes we hunger for the salty, muddy earth more than at other times.
I’m so ready for the next leg of work here, which entails moving out to the regional bases. I should be spending a good amount of time (well, the remainder of my trip … if all goes as planned) in each of 5 regional offices: Matam in the sahelian north; Tambacounda the biggest, barest region of Senegal; Kolda in the “Haute Casamance”; humid and green and coastal Ziguinchor in the “Basse Casamance”; and finally, old landlocked Kaolack not far outside of homebase (not necessarily in that order). I'm aching to make it out to Mali too ... if possible. Thiès is really lovely, but I get this ambiguous feeling here that makes me restless. Maybe it’s events, maybe it's just because I know I’ll be on the move soon.
[A pizza and a bottle or two of red wine later - shared with Cameroonian and Benenois bioengineers and enjoyed all around - what you are reading tonight is, of course, a running document!]
So where was I? Retreating into the great emptiness of l’Afrique d’Ouest? Soon, insh’Allah. I will try add more to this post over the weekend, I suppose it's got a sort of weak, lack of focus.
A long week, I guess more tiring than tumultuous in hindsight. (And electrifying! No, literally. Don’t worry, I’m ok. A little shaken up though.) Sometimes things aren’t as uncomplicated as we want to tell other people they are. Sometimes you feel very comfortable in your own skin (again, literally), but things happen that really knock your self-confidence down a notch. I’ve begun Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, which is not as gripping as I had imagined, but for what it's worth, a really eloquent inquiry into the nature of human isolation, and pilgrimage, and well truthfully, God. And the humbling effect on the man out of his element, in the arms of unbroken landscapes. (I sure miss the old Mass North Shore and the South Shore! the unassuming façades of the New England coast.) I found this quote by Thoreau from Walden especially moving:
No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted … The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We can easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality … The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
(by the way, Blogger operates differently on Macs, and for some reason, I cannot italicize anything. I will try to get on a different computer and fix that. my apologies, of course you probably don't mind)
I suppose a part of what he’s saying is, at the end of the day we sometimes just cannot name the things we’re seeking, nor the things we’ve found. A couple months ago a friend gave me a collection of writings by R. W. Emerson, all in a similar vein. In light of everything at the time, it might have been the most thoughtful present I have ever received (and if you ever read this, that is true, and thank you). I think like man’s relationship to the land and to people, these ideas fade and reappear and morph with age. Sometimes we hunger for the salty, muddy earth more than at other times.
I’m so ready for the next leg of work here, which entails moving out to the regional bases. I should be spending a good amount of time (well, the remainder of my trip … if all goes as planned) in each of 5 regional offices: Matam in the sahelian north; Tambacounda the biggest, barest region of Senegal; Kolda in the “Haute Casamance”; humid and green and coastal Ziguinchor in the “Basse Casamance”; and finally, old landlocked Kaolack not far outside of homebase (not necessarily in that order). I'm aching to make it out to Mali too ... if possible. Thiès is really lovely, but I get this ambiguous feeling here that makes me restless. Maybe it’s events, maybe it's just because I know I’ll be on the move soon.
[A pizza and a bottle or two of red wine later - shared with Cameroonian and Benenois bioengineers and enjoyed all around - what you are reading tonight is, of course, a running document!]
So where was I? Retreating into the great emptiness of l’Afrique d’Ouest? Soon, insh’Allah. I will try add more to this post over the weekend, I suppose it's got a sort of weak, lack of focus.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Monday, October 1, 2007
governance in Africa
The Ibrahim Index of African Governance is a new, comprehensive ranking of sub-Saharan African nations according to governance quality. It has been created in recognition of the need for a more comprehensive, objective and quantifiable method of measuring governance quality in sub-Saharan Africa. The Index assesses national progress in five key areas, which together constitute a holistic definition of good governance.
Safety and Security
Rule of Law, Transparency and Corruption
Participation and Human Rights
Sustainable Economic Development
Human Development
http://www.moibrahimfoundation.org/the-index.asp
Saturday, September 29, 2007
laisse les bon temps roll
What I tend to forget is that things here happen at a pace all their own, and no amount of huffing and puffing’s gonna push forward that old African clock.
Really enjoying the peace and quiet of Thiès. At night I fall asleep to an orchestra of mosquitoes and grasshoppers buzzing and clicking and then wake up to roosters crowing and other birds a-chatting. And somewhere in between a call to prayer.
Really enjoying this big old house I’m living in with all the other volunteers. It’s very open and sunny and kind of an oasis of its own, all cloaked in heavy green flora. So it follows, I can’t imagine what it will look like in the dry season. It hasn’t rained much but when it does, it’s that purposeful, no-games, all-business type of rain I love and respect (as compared to the all day, all gray ninny-picking rains of New England) barreling through with unreserved determination to turn the city of Thiès into a raging and unnavigable Venice! In under 10 minutes.
So the house is really grand. There are hundreds of books here, left behind by people who’ve passed through here, on every topic, in many languages. And old pictures of the executive director with her family, her friends, politicians, and villagers. In one from a long time ago, she’s got her hair all piled up like Jane Fonda and she is crouched next to an almost mass-less veiled woman, against a chipped blue wall, with yards of clean white sand in front of them. And there’s this strange, private exchange between them. Nothing like a good old relic to uncover, you know.
On the other hand, I can see how this house can get a little isolating, sharing it with so many other Americans. I’ve had a really great time getting to know everyone - each so different but I guess driven here by some similar will - but I do wish I were surrounded by less English. (If that’s my complaint, which it is, I suppose I’m lucky, which I am.) What I do like is this tight little community of women we've got here. (I'm reading The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou for crying out loud.) I share a room with an Irish girl named Màire, we fell asleep giggling about everything under the sun including mildly racy text messages from Senegalese men, knowing truly there's something that gets lost in translation ....
I began a project designing brochures for the NGO, on its current activities within each region of Senegal, so hopefully I’ll soon get to visit some of the regional offices to get a sense of how they’re operating, what they’re getting done, et cetera et cetera et cetera.
Really enjoying the peace and quiet of Thiès. At night I fall asleep to an orchestra of mosquitoes and grasshoppers buzzing and clicking and then wake up to roosters crowing and other birds a-chatting. And somewhere in between a call to prayer.
Really enjoying this big old house I’m living in with all the other volunteers. It’s very open and sunny and kind of an oasis of its own, all cloaked in heavy green flora. So it follows, I can’t imagine what it will look like in the dry season. It hasn’t rained much but when it does, it’s that purposeful, no-games, all-business type of rain I love and respect (as compared to the all day, all gray ninny-picking rains of New England) barreling through with unreserved determination to turn the city of Thiès into a raging and unnavigable Venice! In under 10 minutes.
So the house is really grand. There are hundreds of books here, left behind by people who’ve passed through here, on every topic, in many languages. And old pictures of the executive director with her family, her friends, politicians, and villagers. In one from a long time ago, she’s got her hair all piled up like Jane Fonda and she is crouched next to an almost mass-less veiled woman, against a chipped blue wall, with yards of clean white sand in front of them. And there’s this strange, private exchange between them. Nothing like a good old relic to uncover, you know.
On the other hand, I can see how this house can get a little isolating, sharing it with so many other Americans. I’ve had a really great time getting to know everyone - each so different but I guess driven here by some similar will - but I do wish I were surrounded by less English. (If that’s my complaint, which it is, I suppose I’m lucky, which I am.) What I do like is this tight little community of women we've got here. (I'm reading The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou for crying out loud.) I share a room with an Irish girl named Màire, we fell asleep giggling about everything under the sun including mildly racy text messages from Senegalese men, knowing truly there's something that gets lost in translation ....
I began a project designing brochures for the NGO, on its current activities within each region of Senegal, so hopefully I’ll soon get to visit some of the regional offices to get a sense of how they’re operating, what they’re getting done, et cetera et cetera et cetera.
Friday, September 28, 2007
immigration test
Federal immigration authorities redesigned the 100-question test that's a part of the process of becoming a naturalized American citizen. Granted it's been a few years since I've gotten reacquainted with our dear old Constitution, but I think my chances of naturalizing today would be slim! Test yourself:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/Ten_Questions.pdf
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/Ten_Questions.pdf
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
time to start freaking out
The Center for Global Development has issued an extensive body of research on the effects of global warming on agricultural productivity. Long-term effects are scary. Developing countries, especially those around the equator where temperatures have already reached or surpassed the threshold for crop tolerance, face sad consequences. India's productivity may drop 30-40% by 2080, Sudan 56%, Senegal 52%. Southern areas of China and the US may see a reduction in yields of about 25-35%. (the full report can be found at: http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/14425).
We get a little programmed to disregard the troubling but pretty mundane forecasts like "increasing draught and heat waves," (it's like most statistics, they just fail to carry much of a punch). But late summer at sea level between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, without AC ... it's a ugly prospect. (That's most of Central and South America, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, hot tamales!)
We get a little programmed to disregard the troubling but pretty mundane forecasts like "increasing draught and heat waves," (it's like most statistics, they just fail to carry much of a punch). But late summer at sea level between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, without AC ... it's a ugly prospect. (That's most of Central and South America, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, hot tamales!)
Monday, September 24, 2007
Photo Griots
"In January 2005, the Visual Griots inaugural workshop engaged 22 dynamic sixth graders from Mali in an exploration of the powerful “voice” of photography. An expert team of Malian and U.S. photographers guided the students through camera basics to use their new-found skill to honor the people and traditions of their village. Students took ownership of the project and created a body of work that demystifies the African village and brings forth the important elements of their lives."
The following link is a slideshow of work by Malian youth participating in the Academy for Educational Development program; wow!! really beautiful vision and quality:
http://www.aed.org/visualgriots/exhibit/index.htm
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Au Senegal! How little credit we give to memory of the senses. Our sense of smell is, supposedly, that most strongly connected to memory - how true this is. I had forgotten the faint smells escaping the women’s kitchens and the incense that wafts from their bedrooms, the dusty, wooly goats, the way the breeze off the ocean is clogged with diesel fumes, and after the rains, the wet earth smell mixes with whatever else mingles in the sandy roads. It would be a lie to say I didn’t panic, somewhere between Madrid and Dakar, surrounded by so many incomprehensible tongues, and it was the first time I asked myself, what am I doing??? (I saw the magnificent Sahara from the sky for the first time! It looks not like sand, but like very rocky terrain, where giant boulder-like formations cast strange dark shadows, breaking up an otherwise desolate and monochromatic landscape. This is what I caught from quick glances over a leathery old man in the window seat.) Whatever nervousness I had was calmed on the ground. It was good to be back, at least I can say, it smelled the same. Our taxi moved down the long airport road at about a mile an hour, penetrating hundreds of men, women, and children dressed in long white garments, going to or coming from their masjid (we were in a largely Lyon area; Lyon is a sect of Sufism). Kind of surreal, then again, a lot of things have been seeming like that ....
It’s weird when you spend some time, six weeks, in a place, and you get into a little groove, and coming back, you think you’ll fall right back into place, but you don’t. It’s a funny feeling being somewhere so familiar and foreign at the same time. That’s why it was great to see my host family. We were all so happy! Lots of shrieking and laughing over photos. Well truth be told, my brothers didn’t really pay me much attention, nothing new there. It was terribly sad leaving them last summer because of course I didn’t know when I would see them again. I arrived during Ramadan which is a really interesting time to be here, observing everything. Everyone seems a little tired, it’s so straining on the mind and the body (and unfortunately many people who fast are already poorly nourished), but it is also very rewarding spiritually. Fasting would be hard to do on your own; I think it would not feel as special if you didn’t have a family to break fast with every night. In Senegal, there is a funny balance within the society where people are very, very pious Muslims, but religion is at the same time relaxed. Or else, religion is not so disconnected from life-as-usual as it is in America ...... well but that’s a whole other story ...
The people at work are wonderful, and I’ve had a good time getting to know some other volunteers. Everyone has an endless amount of stories to share, also opinions, ideas, friends, food... Right now I am living and working in Yoff, a little on the outskirts of Dakar. This weekend I should be moving to Thies, where the main Tostan office is located. I’m ready to jump into work, but things in Senegal operate at a different pace; as they say waiting is like the national pastime. Nonetheless I will be sad to leave this dear, wacky city with its rooftop reggae, its funny mishmash of keur coiffures, sidewalk marabouts, junky animated car rapides .....
In the meantime I’ve been trying to get Wolof - something I regretfully didn’t do so much of last year. I think the idea of comprehending something so obscure in the span of six weeks seemed a next to impossible, but now all I want to do is hear it and decipher it. Ndank ndank ... slowly but surely.
It’s weird when you spend some time, six weeks, in a place, and you get into a little groove, and coming back, you think you’ll fall right back into place, but you don’t. It’s a funny feeling being somewhere so familiar and foreign at the same time. That’s why it was great to see my host family. We were all so happy! Lots of shrieking and laughing over photos. Well truth be told, my brothers didn’t really pay me much attention, nothing new there. It was terribly sad leaving them last summer because of course I didn’t know when I would see them again. I arrived during Ramadan which is a really interesting time to be here, observing everything. Everyone seems a little tired, it’s so straining on the mind and the body (and unfortunately many people who fast are already poorly nourished), but it is also very rewarding spiritually. Fasting would be hard to do on your own; I think it would not feel as special if you didn’t have a family to break fast with every night. In Senegal, there is a funny balance within the society where people are very, very pious Muslims, but religion is at the same time relaxed. Or else, religion is not so disconnected from life-as-usual as it is in America ...... well but that’s a whole other story ...
The people at work are wonderful, and I’ve had a good time getting to know some other volunteers. Everyone has an endless amount of stories to share, also opinions, ideas, friends, food... Right now I am living and working in Yoff, a little on the outskirts of Dakar. This weekend I should be moving to Thies, where the main Tostan office is located. I’m ready to jump into work, but things in Senegal operate at a different pace; as they say waiting is like the national pastime. Nonetheless I will be sad to leave this dear, wacky city with its rooftop reggae, its funny mishmash of keur coiffures, sidewalk marabouts, junky animated car rapides .....
In the meantime I’ve been trying to get Wolof - something I regretfully didn’t do so much of last year. I think the idea of comprehending something so obscure in the span of six weeks seemed a next to impossible, but now all I want to do is hear it and decipher it. Ndank ndank ... slowly but surely.
Friday, September 14, 2007
some days you can't help but feel very blessed
Off for Senegal, land of sunshine, sabars, yassa poulet, teranga-aplenty (world-class hospitality). Miami via Madrid and a hop, skip, and jump down to Dakar. I fell asleep last night reading The Missing Piece by Shel Silverstein, realizing truth and beauty in as little words as possible, thinking about the nature of dreams and journeys and fulfillment. And feeling very grateful for all the friends and family and animals I've met along the way who have shown me humor and wisdom.
I'll write more, an ocean and a couple days from now......
I'll write more, an ocean and a couple days from now......
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Is African Art History?
(excerpt from essay by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie and John Peffer, co-editors of Critical Interventions)
The question of value is topical because the generic undervaluing of African arts, cultures, and knowledge systems contributes directly to the minimal support given to its discourses by institutional funders and publishers. Critical Interventions engages the current crisis in academic publishing by offering a novel platform for advanced writing on African art. Publishing on African art is increasingly characterized by the production of patron-oriented picture books and generic anthologies, while fewer research-oriented or critically minded essays of substantial length have appeared in academic journals. Major academic presses now decline to publish intensive studies of African art unless printing costs are independently subsidized or they appeal to a popular audience such as the market for books related to African Diaspora issues. The deserving attention focused on Diaspora contexts is commendable, but unfortunately it seems to provide an additional basis for the marginalization of continental Africa. Funding for doctoral and post-doctoral work in African art has also diminished and, increasingly, only a small number of individuals working on “safe” topics, or well-established scholars are granted the opportunity to continue substantive fieldwork or to see their research into print. This climate of reduced publishing and funding opportunities curtails in-depth original and independent scholarship on African art from all eras. The situation truncates the aspirations of those anticipating a career in the field, and it jeopardizes the tenure prospects of younger scholars. The result is paradoxical: at the exact moment that the field is poised to become more fully art historical it is also threatened with extinction.
Critical Interventions promises to be "the principal site of discursive engagement for the field
of African art history in this century." You have to formally subscribe to read most articles but the site's worth a look, http://www.aachron.com/editions/critical_interventions/ci_index.html
The question of value is topical because the generic undervaluing of African arts, cultures, and knowledge systems contributes directly to the minimal support given to its discourses by institutional funders and publishers. Critical Interventions engages the current crisis in academic publishing by offering a novel platform for advanced writing on African art. Publishing on African art is increasingly characterized by the production of patron-oriented picture books and generic anthologies, while fewer research-oriented or critically minded essays of substantial length have appeared in academic journals. Major academic presses now decline to publish intensive studies of African art unless printing costs are independently subsidized or they appeal to a popular audience such as the market for books related to African Diaspora issues. The deserving attention focused on Diaspora contexts is commendable, but unfortunately it seems to provide an additional basis for the marginalization of continental Africa. Funding for doctoral and post-doctoral work in African art has also diminished and, increasingly, only a small number of individuals working on “safe” topics, or well-established scholars are granted the opportunity to continue substantive fieldwork or to see their research into print. This climate of reduced publishing and funding opportunities curtails in-depth original and independent scholarship on African art from all eras. The situation truncates the aspirations of those anticipating a career in the field, and it jeopardizes the tenure prospects of younger scholars. The result is paradoxical: at the exact moment that the field is poised to become more fully art historical it is also threatened with extinction.
Critical Interventions promises to be "the principal site of discursive engagement for the field
of African art history in this century." You have to formally subscribe to read most articles but the site's worth a look, http://www.aachron.com/editions/critical_interventions/ci_index.html
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
halleluja
Quilts of Gee's Bend in Fort Lauderdale ... and they're even more fabulous all together, in real life (the postage stamp doesn't quite do them justice)
African films, alhamdulilay!! part deux
"This Is Nollywood tells the story of the Nigerian film industry—a revolution enabling Africans with few resources to tell African stories to African audiences. Despite all odds, Nigerian directors produce between 500 and 1,000 movies a year. The disks sell wildly all over the continent—Nollywood actors have become stars from Ghana to Zambia."
With a digital camera, two lights, and $20,000, Bond Emeruwa set out to document the Nigerian film industry in just 9 days. Digitalization of the industry has made it infinitely more accessible to aspiring African directors. African storytelling in new clothes.
trailer @ http://www.thisisnollywood.com/trailer.htm
This is Nollywood premieres in you guessed it Boston! Presented by the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University, Thursday, Sept. 13 at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. All proceeds benefit Nollywood Workshops, an initiative dedicated to providing training for filmmakers in Nigeria. http://www.brattlefilm.org/brattlefilm/index.html
With a digital camera, two lights, and $20,000, Bond Emeruwa set out to document the Nigerian film industry in just 9 days. Digitalization of the industry has made it infinitely more accessible to aspiring African directors. African storytelling in new clothes.
trailer @ http://www.thisisnollywood.com/trailer.htm
This is Nollywood premieres in you guessed it Boston! Presented by the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University, Thursday, Sept. 13 at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. All proceeds benefit Nollywood Workshops, an initiative dedicated to providing training for filmmakers in Nigeria. http://www.brattlefilm.org/brattlefilm/index.html
Friday, September 7, 2007
Annual Rates of Global Migration
3% of the world's people were living outside their country of birth in 2005. What's really remarkable is the part, "Money Sent Home as a Share of GDP"
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/world/20070622_CAPEVERDE_GRAPHIC.html
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/world/20070622_CAPEVERDE_GRAPHIC.html
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
in this day and age ...
Nicolas Sarkozy - France’s newly elected and rather right-wing President - already garnered little favor amongst Africans. As Jacques Chirac’s Minister of the Interior, he took a pretty virulent stance against immigration (particularly of Arabs and Africans). He also invited a little resentment for his role in sparking the riots in Paris’s minority-dominated suburbs in 2005 and for his general - if alleged - affiliation with the racist extreme-right. And yet on his late July tour through sub-Saharan Africa, thousands lent him an open ear. Some might have been surprised by his nominations of two African-French officials to government, but I think many were drawn by some sort of curiosity as to whether or not - as the authoritative face of France - he was ready to publicly recognize the multiracial character of French society.
It seems, however, Sarkozy poured a little salt on the wound. Speaking to the youth of Senegal as well as its intellectual elite at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop, he committed what the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe calls an act of “violation by language.”
We’ve all experienced that moment of insult, when our favorite politicians drop the bomb, say something that so offends our intellect and sense of justice and reason (after seven years, we should be used to it). I think that’s a little how Sarkozy’s audience felt when he suggested Africans were a people continuously on the periphery, without history, and prisoner of their own spirit who could survive and navigate the future only by assimilating to certain European aspects of civilization. I encourage you to skim through Mbembe’s response in the “Le Messager” (which I'm kind of paraphrasing in the remainder of this): http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?menu=affiche_article&no=6816. If your up to it Sarkozy's speech in French: http://cdfafrique.afrikblog.com/archives/2007/07/31/5774862.html. (Senegalese Boubacar Boris Diop also wrote a response I have not yet read).
Mbembe claims that the intellectual framework underlying France’s policy towards Africa dates back to a late 19th century, obsolete philosophy and discourse. This was the era of the colonial ethnographers, those pseudo-scientists who conceived of Africans as sharing a “primitive” or worse, “pre-logical mentality.” This was the era of Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, of Leo Frobenius's “African vitalism,” of societies “deeply plunged into the night of childhood.” (Senegalese poet-president Senghor was criticized for glamorizing this image in his work). This was the era of colonial exhibitions, human zoos, and primitive art that Picasso so adored. That can’t possibly carry over to our own era. We should not even have writers like Mbembe spending another minute of their time on these issues. I think the need to retire this “Other” business to the history books is well overdue. And yet here comes the President of France with a whopper that was plucked almost word for word from Hegel‘s passages on Africa. (Hegel died in 1831).
What stings the most, to Mbembe, is the way Sarkozy and other French elites continually characterize the African Man in opposition to the Modern Man. In some twisted effort to legitimize the crime of colonization (of which Sarkozy is not the first Frenchman to be guilty), to recast it as something more benevolent in the lens of history, there arises this need create a fixed characterization of the colonized as something "oppositional," or "less than..." And this happens in spite of generation after generation of scholars across the globe who claim that identity is (#1) invented and (#2) constantly changing. ("Fixed identity is the source of cultural death," as he says.)
But Mbembe, in few words, reveals the true failure of Sarkozy’s speech, the weakness of his ideology. To Mbembe, the future of Africans in the former French colonies does NOT depend on France. (Despite the millions in aid, much of which mysteriously fails to trickle down). “After half a century of formal decolonization,” he writes, “the younger generations have learn that there is little to expect from France…” And finally, overall, in conclusion, a la fin, “France simply lacks the moral credit that would allow it to speak with certitude and authority.”
It seems, however, Sarkozy poured a little salt on the wound. Speaking to the youth of Senegal as well as its intellectual elite at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop, he committed what the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe calls an act of “violation by language.”
We’ve all experienced that moment of insult, when our favorite politicians drop the bomb, say something that so offends our intellect and sense of justice and reason (after seven years, we should be used to it). I think that’s a little how Sarkozy’s audience felt when he suggested Africans were a people continuously on the periphery, without history, and prisoner of their own spirit who could survive and navigate the future only by assimilating to certain European aspects of civilization. I encourage you to skim through Mbembe’s response in the “Le Messager” (which I'm kind of paraphrasing in the remainder of this): http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?menu=affiche_article&no=6816. If your up to it Sarkozy's speech in French: http://cdfafrique.afrikblog.com/archives/2007/07/31/5774862.html. (Senegalese Boubacar Boris Diop also wrote a response I have not yet read).
Mbembe claims that the intellectual framework underlying France’s policy towards Africa dates back to a late 19th century, obsolete philosophy and discourse. This was the era of the colonial ethnographers, those pseudo-scientists who conceived of Africans as sharing a “primitive” or worse, “pre-logical mentality.” This was the era of Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, of Leo Frobenius's “African vitalism,” of societies “deeply plunged into the night of childhood.” (Senegalese poet-president Senghor was criticized for glamorizing this image in his work). This was the era of colonial exhibitions, human zoos, and primitive art that Picasso so adored. That can’t possibly carry over to our own era. We should not even have writers like Mbembe spending another minute of their time on these issues. I think the need to retire this “Other” business to the history books is well overdue. And yet here comes the President of France with a whopper that was plucked almost word for word from Hegel‘s passages on Africa. (Hegel died in 1831).
What stings the most, to Mbembe, is the way Sarkozy and other French elites continually characterize the African Man in opposition to the Modern Man. In some twisted effort to legitimize the crime of colonization (of which Sarkozy is not the first Frenchman to be guilty), to recast it as something more benevolent in the lens of history, there arises this need create a fixed characterization of the colonized as something "oppositional," or "less than..." And this happens in spite of generation after generation of scholars across the globe who claim that identity is (#1) invented and (#2) constantly changing. ("Fixed identity is the source of cultural death," as he says.)
But Mbembe, in few words, reveals the true failure of Sarkozy’s speech, the weakness of his ideology. To Mbembe, the future of Africans in the former French colonies does NOT depend on France. (Despite the millions in aid, much of which mysteriously fails to trickle down). “After half a century of formal decolonization,” he writes, “the younger generations have learn that there is little to expect from France…” And finally, overall, in conclusion, a la fin, “France simply lacks the moral credit that would allow it to speak with certitude and authority.”
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
African films, alhamdulilay!!
This is a really special chance to see some films by Ousmane Sembene, one of the most brilliant storytellers, artists, and activists of the 20th century. They're all really good and loaded with dark humor, satire, subversion, and some pretty raw commentary on religion, neocolonialism, the ineptitude of and corruption within third world bureaucracies, even female circumcision. (They're juicy) Faat Kiné is great, all about changing roles of women in Senegalese urban society. So bummed out I'm missing this :(
PS, Brookline booksmith also has a couple African cinematic gems downstairs .... You can also find Sembene films at the BU Krasker film library.
Where: Harvard Film Archives, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St. Cambridge
When: September 7th - 10th
Tell me more!!: 617 495-4700 or http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/general_info.html
"Ousmane Sembene – In Memoriam
A former bricklayer and soldier turned trade union organizer, Ousmane Sembene is widely recognized today as one of the most prolific African writers and film makers. But Sembene’s significance moves beyond the question of his productivity. He is celebrated today throughout Africa and around the world as the first African creative artist with a “virginal faith” in the redemptive and galvanizing power of art and as a filmmaker who used the barrel of the camera to restore the African self-image.
The recipient of many honors throughout his career, Ousmane Sembene, who died in June at 84, will leave his mark on world cultural history as one of the most talented storytellers of his time and as a rare and solitary African revolutionary who understood the political nature of narratives, their power in shaping our past, our present, and our future. He devoted his life to giving voice to a voiceless continent through the production of narratives countering dominant, hegemonic discourses (political and religious) of the African Islamic and postcolonial elite. Sembene wrote books and made films not for profit but for man’s sake because he believes man is culture." -- Samba Gadjigo, Professor of French, Mount Holyoke College
PS, Brookline booksmith also has a couple African cinematic gems downstairs .... You can also find Sembene films at the BU Krasker film library.
Where: Harvard Film Archives, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St. Cambridge
When: September 7th - 10th
Tell me more!!: 617 495-4700 or http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/general_info.html
"Ousmane Sembene – In Memoriam
A former bricklayer and soldier turned trade union organizer, Ousmane Sembene is widely recognized today as one of the most prolific African writers and film makers. But Sembene’s significance moves beyond the question of his productivity. He is celebrated today throughout Africa and around the world as the first African creative artist with a “virginal faith” in the redemptive and galvanizing power of art and as a filmmaker who used the barrel of the camera to restore the African self-image.
The recipient of many honors throughout his career, Ousmane Sembene, who died in June at 84, will leave his mark on world cultural history as one of the most talented storytellers of his time and as a rare and solitary African revolutionary who understood the political nature of narratives, their power in shaping our past, our present, and our future. He devoted his life to giving voice to a voiceless continent through the production of narratives countering dominant, hegemonic discourses (political and religious) of the African Islamic and postcolonial elite. Sembene wrote books and made films not for profit but for man’s sake because he believes man is culture." -- Samba Gadjigo, Professor of French, Mount Holyoke College
Monday, August 27, 2007
Tune Your World .... Fair Trade Music
Only once in a while do I come across something on the Internet that leaves me stunned, empowered, eager to learn and to act, warm and fuzzy on the inside ... Based right in our Boston backyard, Calabash is a GLOBAL MUSIC EMPORIUM (and also music producer), offering the widest collection of the world's most talented but hard-to-find musicians, as well as free downloads, radio streams, videos, etc. But here's the icing: Calabash supports a fair trade/equal exchange with artists, who directly receive 50% of sales profits (typically, musicians earn about 8%-12% in standard music industry contracts). They also own the copyright to their music and receive other opportunities to self-market and self-promote. (Calabash produces digital-only releases, so new projects are brought to the market at a fraction of the cost of producing a CD).
The gist of the calabash campaign: We're a nation recognized for our good works around the world no? One survey found that Americans think the federal government spends about 10 to 15 percent of its budget on foreign aid ... in reality, we spend less than 1%, the lowest of any industrialized nation. (This was a survey conducted by the Program for International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. If you're interested, you can read about this, and a lot of other topics concerning Americans opinions on our government, our foreign policy, our world image, etc. at: http://www.americans-world.org/digest/overview/us_role/usrole_summary.cfm) Calabash says they have a better idea, if every American bought 10 songs by African artists, we could double the amount of aid we are sending to Africa!
"At least 50% (in some cases 100%) ... will go to African Artists, or an African relief NGO and stay in Africa. With this money, musicians will be able to buy new instruments, recording or performing equipment, complete their education, or put a new roof on their house. Together we can create a thriving music economy in places where the music industry has never worked very well. We are starting in Africa and we will be moving to other parts of the world as our work progresses."
Or if you're just looking for some new funky afro-sounds (or Middle Eastern, Asian, South American, European, etc.) look no further. http://calabashmusic.com/
The gist of the calabash campaign: We're a nation recognized for our good works around the world no? One survey found that Americans think the federal government spends about 10 to 15 percent of its budget on foreign aid ... in reality, we spend less than 1%, the lowest of any industrialized nation. (This was a survey conducted by the Program for International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. If you're interested, you can read about this, and a lot of other topics concerning Americans opinions on our government, our foreign policy, our world image, etc. at: http://www.americans-world.org/digest/overview/us_role/usrole_summary.cfm) Calabash says they have a better idea, if every American bought 10 songs by African artists, we could double the amount of aid we are sending to Africa!
"At least 50% (in some cases 100%) ... will go to African Artists, or an African relief NGO and stay in Africa. With this money, musicians will be able to buy new instruments, recording or performing equipment, complete their education, or put a new roof on their house. Together we can create a thriving music economy in places where the music industry has never worked very well. We are starting in Africa and we will be moving to other parts of the world as our work progresses."
Or if you're just looking for some new funky afro-sounds (or Middle Eastern, Asian, South American, European, etc.) look no further. http://calabashmusic.com/
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