"Sharon Stone in Abuja"-The Art of Nollywood

CNN reports:

Artist Talk with Zina Saro-Wiwa, Moderated by Claudia Calirman from Location One on Vimeo.
A group of artists is bringing Nigerian movie making to a new audience with a New York exhibition paying tribute to the "Nollywood" film industry.The exhibition is called "Sharon Stone in Abuja," after a 2003 Nollywood film, and is taking place at Location One gallery in the Soho district of New York.Its creator, Zina Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian-British artist and filmmaker, said: "Sharon Stone in Abuja pays homage to Nollywood. It looks at Nollywood narrative conventions and explores African emotional landscape."

More here

Related articles

• That Screwy, Ballyhooey Nollywood (reason.com)
• Nigeria's burgeoning film industry (economist.com)

Nwaubani, Ngugi and the Nobel

Molara Wood's riposte to Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s "dont award another African a Nobel piece":

...it’s baffling that, nearly 25 years after Nigeria bagged her own Nobel through Soyinka, a Nigerian writer saw nothing wrong in suggesting that a Kenyan should not get the prize. Ngugi, Soyinka and Achebe have since the 60s formed the great tripod of the humanising literature of Black Africa. Soyinka has his Nobel, Man International Booker winner Achebe has been celebrated to the heavens for ‘Things Fall Apart’, and suddenly it’s a Nobel for Ngugi that will spell the death of African writing?
Nwaubani’s argument is deeply flawed; and it is regrettable that someone with a platform like the New York Times to postulate about Africa, chose to use her new-found international voice in this manner. The author of ‘I Do Not Come To You By Chance’ must realise that it will not be by chance that her argument will play into Western prejudices about Africa and African writing. ‘Oh, let’s not give another African a Nobel because, knowing no better, they’ll only copy themselves.’ Might as well go the whole hog and cite Shakespeare’s Iago: “These Moors are changeable in their wills.”

Related articles

• Chinua Achebe: A life in writing (guardian.co.uk)

Quick Hits

Sex and sensibilities in Africa-Economist
Industrial Capitalism to a Financialized Bubble how America lost its way.
"Spellbound": Inside the witch camps of West Africa-Salon
Zoning: Lesson from Cote d’Ivoire-Global Voices
Booming Ethiopia...the New Face of Africa?

Building up the Informal Economies and the role of Remittances

Sanou Mbaye writing in Project Syndicate:

He speaks on the need to liberalize the remittance channels:

The effects of banks’ hijacking of national payment systems to service only the modern economy are compounded by the exclusive agreements that banks and money-transfer companies such as Western Union have signed with most African countries. These agreements lock out non-banking entities from the highly lucrative market for migrant remittances from the African diaspora, which remain a key engine of growth

Furthermore on how key it is to nourish the informal economies:

African states must now recognize that modernizing their informal sectors by integrating them into the modern economy can be a major development tool. Yet only a few countries have started moving in that direction. Nigeria has refrained from signing any exclusive agreements with Western Union and others, and its newly consolidated banking industry is making significant inroads across the region...

Arguing for the broader inclusion of more financial actors in national payment systems

Giving micro-finance institutions access to national and regional payments systems and electronic retail facilities will go a long way toward meeting the requirements of the retail and business sector in terms of banking facilities. It will also help facilitate access by the poorest to financial services, thus helping to reduce the high proportion of the un-banked population.

All of this will invariably spur development and integration of national financial systems and intra-regional trade. This will be a welcome development, because a large proportion of intra-regional trade is carried out by informal operators and small and medium enterprises that do not have access to the banking system. Moreover, economic integration and increased intra-regional trade are the best entry point into global markets for all countries.

More here

Combating Corruption for Democracy & Tracking It

Firstly over at CIPE:

Betty Maina and others on developing "a link between fighting corruption and strengthening democracies."

In addition Global Voices on The Scandal of the “Ill-gotten Gains”:

On November 9, 2010, the French Supreme Court of Appeals overturned a decision rendered a year ago by the Paris Court of Appeals, agreeing to hear the case brought by the French section of the NGO Transparency International [fr] called “the ill-gotten gains” of the heads of state of Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinee and members of their entourage...[continue reading]

Related articles

• Three African leaders face fraud inquiry in France (guardian.co.uk)
• French inquiry for Africa leaders (bbc.co.uk)
• "Global Corruption Barometer 2010" and related posts (micheladrien.blogspot.com)

Nigerian GEodemographic Classification System

Nigeria Health Watch reports on NIGECS founded by Adegbola Ojo:

People are finding ways to present data in ways that make them more accessible to people, enabling them to use this as advocacy tools...the Nigerian LGA classification system (NIGECS) encapsulates spatially referenced datasets for the year 2006 sourced from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) for each of the 774 LGAs in the country. NIGECS is the first interactive repository for geographical and statistical information about the 774 LGAs in Nigeria.

More here

Related articles

• Nigerian women in 'Mali slave camps' (theworld.org)

Stolen Art Trafficker-Sotheby's

Over at Aachronym:

Sotheby's is trafficking in stolen goods and it is doing so without any concern for the fact of its brazen criminality. It is clear that the Benin artworks are a contested collection of cultural artifacts. The history of their plunder from Benin is not in doubt, and the Benin Kingdom has never at any time given up its claim to these artworks. There has been significant amount of words written about the history of the British plunder of Benin and why the artworks should be repatriated. How is it then that despite the constant requests for the repatriation of these artworks and their clear identification as stolen goods, they continue to be sold by firms such as Sotheby’s without any hesitation?

More here

Wouol-A hybrid value chain

Ashoka Fellow Antoine Sombié is the founder of Wouol:

...the first regional-scale, commercial hybrid value chain that joins European businesses with small local women’s vegetable and fruit producers from across West Africa. Antoine’s program has enabled women’s associations in Burkina Faso to be active producers of organically certified products for the first time. European certification secures a stable market with higher prices, and women’s participation and training brings the economic benefits to a greater portion of society, alleviating education and health. More than three thousand people—90% female—are part of the Association’s production, health insurance schemes, social and cultural activities.

"The Bright Continent" by Dayo Olopade

Dayo Olopade's

The Bright Continent will report a phenomenon that is not new but has been overlooked: that people are Africa’s most abundant natural resource, and that a long tradition of individual resourcefulness, creativity, and straight hustling is the best hope for the continent’s social and economic development.The book takes inspiration from the massive failures of the traditional aid industry—and from the promise of the guys selling Christmas trees in Lagos traffic.

Related articles

• Peace Anyiam-Osigwe on Creative Industries (timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com)
• Nigeria's Cinemart (timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com)
• The Last Frontier (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• How to Stop the Next WikiLeaks (thedailybeast.com)

Empowering Farmers

Ashoka Fellows Vincent Bagiire and Adrian Mukhebi, changing the field of agriculture:

Gbagbo is pushing Ivory Coast to the brink of war

Image via WikipediaChika Unigwe writing in the Guardian:

When, on 28 November – after Ivory Coast's elections had been postponed several times by the then president, Laurent Gbagbo – Ivorians took to the polls, there was a very real expectation that Gbagbo's government had come to an end. Unfortunately, they had miscalculated Gbagbo's determination to hang on to the post he had held since 2000 and which he – and his cohorts – see as his birthright...[continue reading]

Related articles

• White House says it's time for Ivory Coast's Gbagbo to go (reuters.com)
• U.S. ready sanction Ivory Coast's Gbagbo (reuters.com)
• Gbagbo resents France stance, unfazed by sanctions (reuters.com)
• Ivory Coast seeks election help from US lawyer (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Global Africa Project contd

via PBS

Paula Zahn speaks with Lowery Stokes Sims, the Charles Broadman International Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design; she is also a co-curator of the Global Africa Project an unprecedented exhibition which explores the broad spectrum of contemporary African art, design and craft worldwide.

Watch the full episode. See more SundayArts.

Related articles

• Art of Africa (africaunchained.blogspot.com)
• African Christmas Decorations from the African Art Centre (awesomesa.co.za)

"The Pilgrimages" contd

A CNN update on The Pilgrimages project covered earlier:

In an ambitious drive to promote African writing, 14 African writers have visited different cities across the continent to produce a series of travel books.The Pilgrimages project claims it will produce the biggest-ever collection of African travel writing by African writers.
It began during this summer's World Cup in South Africa, and it is hoped the books will be published to coincide with the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations football tournament...[continue reading]

Related articles

• Chimamanda Adichie -Celebrating Great African Literary Writers ! (siku-moja.blogspot.com)
• How the African Leadership Academy Is Fighting the Continent's Education Exodus (fastcompany.com)

Saraba Magazine

"...Saraba is an imprint of Two Iroko Limited whose goal is to create unending voices by encouraging young, previously unheard writers to publish their works, assist emerging writers (i.e. those who have been published little or not at all, whose talent are recognizable and whose works are qualitative) in establishing their voices by creating a platform for their writing to be showcased. Through an actualization of these purposes, Saraba would ensure that there is no generational gap, that succeeding generations of writers in Africa have unending voices..."

Fighting corruption, Trustlaw

The aim of Trustlaw is to:

• Spread the culture and practice of pro bono work around the world, connecting those who need legal assistance with lawyers willing to work at no cost
• Offer a one-stop shop for news and information on good governance and anti-corruption issues

via the Corruption Blog

Related articles

• The World Bank and the Hotbed of Corruption (psipsychologytutor.org)
• Raymond Baker: As Anti-Corruption Day Passes, a Look Back at 2010 (huffingtonpost.com)
• Expanding the global fight against corruption (thehill.com)

Covering Cote d'Voire

Image via WikipediaIn Sahara Reporters Gary K. Busch provides a contrarien view about the crisis in Ivory Coast:

The civil war which broke out between the North and the South in the Ivory Coast was largely about the efforts of the Gbagbo government seeking to achieve real independence; a breakaway from the colonial dominance of the French which controlled almost every aspect of national life. He had the support of the Ivorian people. However now, after all the fighting and suffering by both sides, the current policy of Gbagbo seemed to veer away from confrontation to a policy of restoring the status quo ante; French neo-colonialism. This didn’t work. It fostered is a level of bitterness and rancour among a people who were watching the yoke placed on their necks again and, despite their current apathy and discouragement after years of fighting and sacrifice, they realised that, North and South, they had nothing to lose by sweeping the board clean of their black Frenchmen and installing genuine Ivorian patriots in their place...[continue reading]

While Jordanna Matlon writing in Africa Report discusses the "high stakes" for southern loyalists:

In a country of long-term and soaring unemployment, these men found that their political activities gave them slight leverage in an atmosphere of otherwise dwindled opportunities. As one of my respondents astutely remarked, in a crisis-ridden Côte d’Ivoire, “the one business that works is politics.” Admittedly these men were far from gorging themselves off the fat of party politics. Instead, situated at the bottom of the hierarchy, they received little more than its crumbs. But crumbs – to appear as a guest speaker here, to get help to pay a medical bill or a child’s tuition there and to be relatively immune to the informalised state extraction in the form of the regular bribes – are all heavy incentives in the absence of gainful employment. Moreover, each speaker boasted of meeting warm congratulations after a speech, having his name called when walking down the street or being bought a beer from an admiring spectator he encountered when out on the town...[continue reading]

Related articles

• Côte d'Ivoire suspended from African Union (propagandapress.wordpress.com)
• Calamitous Côte d'Ivoire: Another big test for Africa (economist.com)
• Saving Cote d'Ivoire From The Brink (vanguardngr.com)
• Cote d'Ivoire Roundup Part 2 (sahelblog.wordpress.com)

How Small Businesses Can Fight Corruption

Rebecca Regan-Sachs of Next Billion interviewing Alex Shkolnikov of CIPE:

NextBillion: You have mentioned that CIPE works frequently with business associations to find ways to fight corruption. However, in many developing countries, a large segment of the business sector is informal. If these "shadow economy" enterprises don't have official association representation, how can they defend themselves against corruption?
Alex Shkolnikov: We've actually seen in a number of countries that informal sector associations emerge spontaneously to defend the rights of small business. They act as a self-defense mechanism. So if inspectors come in, you have an association that basically provides protection. They also provide market information, of goods and prices and stuff like that, but they really emerged as kind of a self-defense mechanism.

More here

Related articles

• "CIPE Celebrates Global Entrepreneurship Week 2010" and related posts (cipe.org)

African literature is better off without another Nobel

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani in the NYTimes

Here, each successful seller of plantain chips spawns a thousand imitators selling identical chips; conformity is esteemed while individuality raises eyebrows; success is measured by how similar you are to those who have gone before you. These are probably not uniquely African flaws, but their effects are magnified on a continent whose floundering publishing industry has little money for experimentation and whose writers still have to move abroad to gain international recognition.

More here

Related articles

• No More Great Writers, Says Nobel-Winning Writer [Books] (gawker.com)
• Should African Author Ngugi wa Thiong'o Have Won The Nobel Prize For Literature? (huffingtonpost.com)

Presenting African Architecture

Bombastic Element covers MIT student presentations on African Architecture:

MIT student, Nancy Demerdash's "Before the scramble for Africa: tracing African architecture through trade" goes back to 1200 to understand the historical development of various architectural forms as a function of natural resources in the complex changing societies and trading economies that depended on these resources. Also, how different architectural typologies evolved and were impacted by environmental and climatic changes.

More here

Related articles

• Building with Fractals in Africa-XV Studio (timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com)
• Visual Culture Out of Africa (nytimes.com)

Unclogging Africa's road harassment bottlenecks

Joe Lamport writing at West Africa Tradehub:

Senegal has clearly become a case study in how road harassment can be effectively diminished. No one is trumpeting success but just a year after the country joined the USAID Trade Hub-UEMOA initiative that monitors the problem - after the first report shocked stakeholders - every successive report has shown improvement...[continue reading]

Down the related road harassment report here

NG 2011 Elections: Polling station locator

Alphagroup's winning application at the recently concluded Google lagos Devfest enables the easy location of Polling stations:

Africa 'can feed itself in a generation'

The BBC reports on Calestous Juma's new book New Harvest,where he contends:

that there is great scope to expand crops traditionally grown in Africa, such as millet, sorghum, cassava or yams.He sees areas where farmers will need to adapt to tackle a changing climate - cereal farmers may switch into livestock, he says, while others may chose more radical options."Tree crops like breadfruit, which is from the Pacific, could be introduced in Africa because trees are more resistant to climate change."...[continue reading]

GE on "Making Stuff" is Africa Listening?

In the NYTimes Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE on "making" i.e. manufacturing:

“Many bought into the idea that America could go from a technology-based, export-oriented powerhouse to a services-led, consumption-based economy — and somehow still expect to prosper,” Mr. Immelt said in a typical speech last year before the Detroit Economic Club. “That idea was flat wrong.” He added: “Our economy tilted instead toward the quicker profits of financial services.”...[continue reading]

Building Institutions for Democracy

Over at CIPE:

Elections are a key component of democracy. Without democratic institutions to operate between voting periods, however, elections will only produce the shell of democracy without the benefits of a truly accountable government.Institutions such as representation systems, consultation committees, and comment-and-notice periods ensure that policymakers must confer with their citizens and other elected officials before making policy. Without these institutions and practices, elected lawmakers can behave like dictators, enacting and implementing policies as they see fit.

More here

South-South investment: Brazil Targets African Coal

In CNN, further evidence of deepening South-South ties within the energy markets:

Chibundu Onuzo-Writer

CNN reports:

A 19-year-old Nigerian undergraduate student has signed a two-novel deal with the British publisher Faber, making her its youngest ever woman author.Chibundu Onuzo, a history student at King's College London, will have her first novel, "The Spider King's Daughter," published next year."I wrote the book in my last year at school," Onuzo told CNN. "I've been writing since I was 10, but this was the first novel I finished, so it was very liberating to be able to write 'The End.'"...[continue reading]

via Celebrating Ndi Igbo

Irrationality vs The Scientific Method

G. Pascal Zachary on Africa's anti-science movement:

The large numbers of highly educated people who move to Europe and the U.S. and lack of social and financial support for scientists in most African countries means that there are few voices defending science in political and media debates in the region. The most passionate defenders of science often are foreigners and thus anti-science attitudes are fueled by resentments against outsider...The anti-science movement in Africa displays curious parallels with a similar movement in the U.S. This suggests that merely dismissing science skeptics in Africa as irrational or irrelevant won’t work. These science skeptics must be understood on their own terms. And the case for greater financial investment in research and development in Africa must be made convincingly in political, economic and moral terms. That greater benefits to African societies will result simply from more spending on more R&D should not be presumed but rather demonstrated.

More here

Related articles

• How can Africa grow more food? (guardian.co.uk)
• Africa can feed itself within a generation: study (reuters.com)
• Green activists 'are keeping Africa poor' (dianabuja.wordpress.com)

Global Africa Project

The NYTimes on the Global Africa Project:

Bibi Seck stools courtesy of Joshua Bright

...the show presents 200 works by nearly 120 people, teams and collectives. It represents artists, designers, artisans, D.I.Y. improvisers and people engaged in various combinations of those already fuzzy job descriptions, toiling in ways that blur aesthetics, sociology and philosophy.Astoundingly ambitious for a relatively small institution, “Global Africa” aims, in the words of its news release, to explore the “impact of African visual culture on contemporary art, craft and design around the world.”

by Lowery Stokes Sims & Leslie King-Hammond

More here

Related articles

• Art of Africa (africaunchained.blogspot.com)

Quick Hits

Women bloggers discuss war of a different kind of War-Global Voices
Law And Disorder In Lagos: Louis Theroux And Area Boys-Max Siollun
An ode to Fela "When you kill us we rule!"-Liberator Magazine
A Catalyst "Give to Nigeria"
The potential cost of another Sudanese war-FT

“Kenya Matters”

Ethan Zuckerman writing about his recent visit to iHub Nairobi:

Kenya’s not just part of the narrative behind Ushahidi, a platform used globally but developed by Kenyans to respond to a domestic political crisis. Kenya matters because it’s one of the places where the future of technology is coming into focus, where a generation of creative people are building the future, one experiment at a time. iHub makes sense because it’s the physical manifestation of the creative collaboration that took Ushahidi from idea to project to platform within months. I had to go to Nairobi before I really got it. And now I don’t want to leave.

More here

Related articles

• Kenya's Ushahidi: 'New Frontier of Innovation' - NY Times (africanloft.com)
• Quick, Stop All Ushahidi Deployments in Egypt! (irevolution.wordpress.com)

What Makes Countries Corrupt

Richard Florida writing in The Atlantic:

Corrupt nations have more traditional economic structures, based on resource extraction or manufacturing; they have not yet made the transition to highly skilled knowledge economies. Corrupt nations are more likely to be intolerant; their citizens not only must endure lower material living standards but lower levels of happiness and life satisfaction.
If we really want to combat corruption we must deal with the broader and much harder challenges of economic development. When less developed nations begin to leverage their knowledge, skills, and human capital to raise their levels of economic output, then the battle is already won.

More Here

"Staying Alive" In Kenya

Shadow and Act gives us an overview of Staying Alive, a web series which provides:

....a microscopic lens into the lives of young people around the world, and their sexual habits, with the goal being to challenge them to consider their behavior, in an effort to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS.Watch episode one here
Shuga Episode 1 from mtv staying alive on Vimeo.

Related articles

• Study finds MTV AIDS project changes HIV attitudes (reuters.com)
• The MTV drama raising HIV awareness in Africa (cnn.com)

Inuka Kenya Trust

Founded by John Githongo Inuka! is "...dedicated to inspiring Kenyans at every level to take charge of improving their own lives by promoting Heshima (dignity and respect for others), Diversity (inclusiveness and equality) and Self-Belief: Ni Sisi! – It is Us! And, Inuka believes It is Up to Us to transform Kenya into a country of which we can all be proud. Kenyan problems must be met with Kenyan solutions..."