China will not usher in an African Renaissance

John Gatsiounis in the Monitor:

When the new Chinese-funded African Union headquarters was recently unveiled in Addis Ababa, Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema hailed the $200 million spectacle of marble and glass as “a reflection of the new Africa .” Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi called it a symbol “of the African renaissance.”...it’s a myth that Chinese infrastructure is opening Africa up to its economic potential, and it may in fact hinder it. As with the AU headquarters, many Chinese projects use Chinese labour and materials, minimising skills transfer and stunting local production.

More here

A Poverty in Knowledge Production

Syerramia Willoughby in Africa at LSE:

The challenge for Africa is that it must first take hold of the intellectual battle before it can wage a physical battle against violence and poverty and all other problems that it is currently facing. The battle against violence, underdevelopment, poverty, does not begin by looking to the outside, it begins with a sustained debate on the inside. Without winning the intellectual battle, Africa cannot pull itself out of its current morass. Africa’s success hinges precisely on its ability to take hold of the field of inquiries by formulating original “problematics,” that respond to issues that are first and foremost important to Africans and rooted in their own experience. Exporting these important questions abroad and expecting good answers and solutions to resolve Africa’s problems has not only proved disastrous but will only deepen Africa’s misery in the decades ahead less Africa take hold of the process and start producing quality knowledge of its own.

More here

Beyond the balance of the stories - Ikhide R. Ikheloa

Ikhide R. Ikheloa writes:

African intellectuals are at war with the West. They are human beings and they are not going to stop telling white folks that. They write obsessively about the otherness that is African but they are obsessive about not living the life that they describe so hauntingly in their oh so cute books. Kiran Desai’s gorgeous book The Inheritance of Loss is a work of haunting beauty and dark genius, lovely how she mimics our mimicry, our rejection of the state of being conferred on us by a racist, mean God. We do not question why things are the way they are. We describe what is and demand equality and respect. The self-loathing manifests itself in many ways, not only in Naipaul’s books.

It is tempting to romanticize the writer as a dreamy eyed idealist resting only on truth-oars. With respect to African writers, nothing could be further from the truth. Many African writers have written for dictators, and continue to share wine and break bread with thieves mimicking democracy. When it suits their purposes, they ignore, with powerful words, atrocities committed by their friends and relatives. It is an abuse of power: The power of empty words. But mimicry is not going to get us far. We are building monuments that are unsustainable. We insist on going to the moon when our people hanker for the simple pleasures of clean water, good roads and safe communities. We have embraced a religion that is dismissive and contemptuous of our past and present. Their God says we must reject our being in order to be accepted by him. Ours is the only race that has uncritically embraced this new plague called Christianity. Mimicry. It will kill off our race.

More here

#Malawi sliding towards violent #anarchy

In Africa at the LSE Linje Manyozo writes:

Image courtesy of the LSE

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the peaceful Malawi we knew is gradually disappearing right before our eyes. An important instrument of democracy, kumemekeza maustogoleri (a combination of bata and ulemu) is slowly disappearing into the political horizons. Instead, what we have in its place is the foreign concept of citizenship that is rooted in arrogance, aggression and the deliberate undermining of the very weak governance institutions that we should try to protect. I have to mention that one contributing factor is the disaster of the government’s public relations – characterised by denial, lies, outright arrogance and miscommunication of policy direction. People do get angry when they are talked at rather than being engaged with...[continue reading]

Are Diaspora Bonds Worth the Risk?

Dele Meiji Fatunla writing in African Arguments:

Image courtesy of African Arguments

The estimated $400 billion in savings of Diaspora Africans is clearly an attractive pool of serviceable investment for African governments, and Diaspora Bonds, offer a way to get hold of it. The attraction for governments is plain enough, but is the temptation worth the risk for their citizens in the diaspora? Like all investors, Diaspora Africans are being asked to take a bet on the future prosperity and stability of their countries of origin. A bet that those in the international market might not make for a variety of reasons; the low returns compared to risk as well as the general problem of political instability. So far, citizens of African countries that have launched diaspora bonds have overwhelmingly voted no with their pockets. Ethiopia launched a diaspora bond, – The Millennium Diaspora Bond – in 2009 to finance the building of a hydroelectric power damn. Take-up of the bonds was low.

More here

The Rise of Nollywood: Creators, Entrepreneurs, and Pirates by Olufunmilayo Arewa

In a paper Olufunmilayo Arewa writes:

The rise of Nollywood illustrates the revolutionary potential of digital technologies in Africa. Nollywood, or the Nigerian video film industry, reflects technology leapfrogging that is increasingly prominent in Africa today. Such leapfrogging, however, may raise significant issues with respect to legal and other institutions. Film production had largely ceased in Nigeria by the end of the 1980s. Despite this absence, in the early 1990s, Nigeria started on a path that has led it to become the top producer of digital video films in the world. Nigeria is, however, an unlikely locale for the development of a major film industry. In addition to lacking fundamental infrastructures for the development of a film industry, Nigeria has not historically had robust intellectual property enforcement. As a result, Nollywood may be seen as a natural experiment for creativity in the relative absence of intellectual property. This Nollywood natural experiment reflects the actions of varied and at times overlapping roles, including creators, entrepreneurs, and pirates, all of whom have contributed to the growth of Nollywood and Nollywood distribution networks. The viral spread of Nollywood films has thus far been a key element of Nollywood successes. Nollywood films are watched, for example, throughout Africa and in African immigrant communities in Europe and the United States. The Nollywood example suggests the need for more nuanced understanding of the interaction between intellectual property and cultural production and greater recognition of potentially varied ways that intellectual property may influence the shape of cultural production...[continue reading]

'Birds of our Land' by Virginia Dike

From Cassava republic:

Virginia Dike is the author of Birds of Our Land, our upcoming children’s guide book to West African birds that will be available in March.
The book, accompanied by beautiful paintings by illustrator Robin Gowen, explains the basic features of 25 birds representing the major species in the region and keys to observing them.

Medici is the Crowd | Art, democracy and crowd-funding

Molly Crabapple in Rhizome:

Galleries sell one-off objects at prices the majority of people can't afford. A fanbase means nil, if your fans can't spend thousands of dollars on something that isn't a computer or a car. Nothing of mine had even netted the price of a beat-up old Nissan.

Shell Game by Molly Crabapple

It's a problematic business model. While there's nothing wrong with a liquor store selling a thousand buck bottle of scotch, a prestigious gallery doesn't just position itself as a luxury vendor. They define what art is good, what gets reviewed, and what gets into museums.

If big, elaborate paintings (and reproductions thereof) are something that everyone can enjoy, why should the only people funding them be the rich collectors who can buy them outright? If the tastes of rich collectors dictate what sort of art gets made and acknowledged, isn't that pretty limiting for everyone?

Continuing...

We're living in a time where the structures around artistic endeavor are, for better or worse, mutating. Record labels, newspapers, publishing houses, and movie studios are collapsing like flan left in the heat. Yet in many ways, the art world has remained the same. This is because only a relatively small amount of people can afford to buy original art, and only a select few galleries have access to these people.

Banksy, the British street artist, says it best: "The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires."

What I wanted to figure out was a way to create work that was funded neither by rich collectors, nor by grant committees, nor by someone's supportive sugar daddy. I wanted to make giant, fancy, glittering art, paid for by small donors, all of whom, even if they couldn't afford the pieces I was making, got something of value in exchange. I wanted to make and fund art with the democracy and speed of the internet.

I decided to turn to the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, where I had done three other successful projects.

More here

What’s Behind the Coup in Mali?

Alexis Okeowo writing in the New Yorker:

Photograph by Malin Palm/Reuters.

Residents of Bamako, the capital of Mali, say that they didn’t see the coup coming. After a long night of gunfire in a battle between young, low-ranking government soldiers (most under the rank of captain) who had staged a mutiny and Presidential palace guards, the country underwent a radical regime change without anyone being completely aware of what had happened. Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure disappeared. In his place was a new military leadership, now in control of the state television channel, an unruly-looking bunch broadcasting a message to citizens: they had put an end to the “incompetent regime” of Toure. The soldiers, who call themselves the National Committee for the Restoration of Democracy and State, said they’d let Malians know when it was safe for them to turn over rule to a democratic leader. The whereabouts of President Toure are still unknown, and the allegiances of more senior military officers are unclear...[continue reading]

Waiting for the Arab Spring in Western Sahara

In Al Jazeera:

Image courtesy of AL Jazeera

The fate of the Sahrawi nation of Western Sahara hangs in the balance this week. About 165,000 Sahrawi refugees in Algeria are eagerly watching the current UN-sponsored negotiations taking place outside of New York City on the status of their country. For the past 36 years they have been languishing in camps, waiting for the day they may return home, which is currently under Moroccan control. Thus far, they have had little reason to hope.

The three-day negotiations, taking place from March 11-13, involve Morocco, with backing from the United States; regional nations like Algeria and Mauritania; and representatives from Western Sahara. It is the latest meeting in a 20-year process that has been marked by a continual failure to resolve the disputed status of this little-known and forgotten corner of Africa, wedged between Morocco and Mauritania.

The Stream - Western Sahara's Facebook revolution & Turkey's Kurds Morocco is a perennial favourite of Western tourists who rightfully admire its spectacular natural vistas and the hospitality of a friendly people. But its dealing with the Sahrawi people is a little-known, dark and festering sore...[continue reading]

Ecosystems interacting with other Ecosystems - African Economies

Bright Simmons writes:

...the overall difference in the structure of typical African economies, compared to the West, makes a big difference. The fewer resources available to regulatory and tax authorities and the smaller sizes of businesses jointly mean that when businesses make complex arrangements to rationalize their tax expenditures, their costs go up rather than down. Also, a shallower financial system makes the notion of a corporate treasury function similar to what is common in the West nearly redundant in the African setting. Higher inflation tends to discourage certain types of capital investment within a single organization but favors the parking of cash in trading affiliates. For this same reason, even "orthodox" businesses like banks that are not local outlets of multinationals maintain a wide array of subsidiaries that, considering their size (until recently, many such banks had a capitalization lower than $40 million), seems baffling. One such bank has security companies, car lots, courier firms, trading concerns, educational businesses, a golf club, and other similar operations all welded together in an unwieldy yet profitable group.

In a sense, African entrepreneurs run profit ecosystems rather than business units. These ecosystems interact with other ecosystems in a culturally elaborate manner that can produce extreme robustness, resilience, and flexibility.

More here

In Need of an Exodus

Adora Nworah writing in Africa is Done Suffering:

We are children of Africa, we are citizens of our respective countries, why do we beg and scuffle for these second class citizenships from other nations, plead for their sloppy seconds, only remembering our native lands during African Student Organization parties at colleges or to display the facade of cultural depth during those few occasions when showing some kind of diversity in the substance you’re made of could yield benefits when you’re in the midst of a certain group of people

Then there are those of us who convince ourselves that acquiring some random nation’s citizenship automatically gives us the right, no the audacity, to tear down our homeland, moaning and grumbling in what seems a lot like scornful glee when news of some disaster strikes our countries. We sit on our couches, tearing down the bad governments in Africa one dictator at a time, the non-existent infrastructure, exclaiming ecstatically about how Africa is doomed, throwing around one or two solutions that fade away as quickly as our lips stop moving, not once thinking we need to actively get involved by contributing our own quotas towards the overall quality of life in Africa. We convince ourselves that we are comfortable with our new life, a life of picket fences and neighbors we hardly ever see, a life of mortgages and high taxes, and health insurance, and a complex, uncompromising, faceless system that lacks the personal touch and feeling of communality that is a pertinent factor of life in Africa. We praise the superficial ease of life in these foreign lands, the booming economies and solid infrastructures which, from the sentimental point of view of a ranting African female, are the results of years of hard labor by our ancestors that were sold during the slave trade.

More here

Ghostpoet

A prote.in profile:

Image courtesy of prote.in

Ghostpoet, AKA Obaro Ejimiwe, makes music that drip feeds simultaneously upbeat and lo-fi sounds of longing and dubstep. His slurring, nostalgic vocals drop over a hypnotic pulse of beats and beeps, and the result is unique and frankly addictive.

African Rural Unversity for Women

Calestous Juma writes:

Image of the ARU

the African Rural University (ARU) for women inaugurated in Kibaale district of western Uganda in 2011...It is the first African university dedicated to training women. It is also the first African university to be incubated by a rural NGO and show great promise in the potential for growth among local organizations.
As documented in The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa, ARU is an innovative model that focuses on building strong female leaders for careers in agriculture and on involving the community in every step of the agricultural value chain.
A key feature of the new university is to help young women envision the future they want and design strategies to achieve their goals. Their programming is tailored to meet locally identified needs that value local lifestyles and traditions while allowing the adoption of new technologies and improved production.

More here

A chat with Ory Okolloh - Digital Continent Podcast

From the The Digital Continent:

TMS sits down for a chat with Ory Okolloh to talk about her transformation from young nerd to one of the most effective activists for citizen empowerment to come out of Africa in the past decade.

Quick Hits

Why Big Men Are Not The Answer to Africa’s conflicts
Strangling Democracy in Senegal
Darfur-Sudan - Women Under Siege Project

Toilet capitalism in Zimbabwe

The oily charms of West African cuisine

Tim Carman writing in the Washington Post:

Image courtesy of Deb Lindsey/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST 

“A layer of oil on top of the food is a way of honoring you,” says Osseo-Asare, a sociologist who has been studying Ghanaian foods since the early 1970s. “Somebody is trying to show you respect, and Americans are like, ‘Yuck, get that oil out of there!’ ”

Busted!

This is Osseo-Asare’s gift: She knows the soft, sensitive underside of the Western palate and how to attack it when someone dares to pass premature judgment on West African food. But more than that, Osseo-Asare knows the baggage that Americans can bring to the table. We’re not only averse to oily preparations and extreme heat, but we’re also not afforded a full view of the many cuisines that define West African cooking.

More here

'There was a Country' by Chinua Achebe

A penguin profile of Chinua Achebe's personal history of Biafra, There was a Country:

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe’s life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970. The conflict was infamous for its savage impact on the Biafran people, Chinua Achebe’s people, many of whom were starved to death after the Nigerian government blockaded their borders. By then, Chinua Achebe was already a world-renowned novelist, with a young family to protect. He took the Biafran side in the conflict and served his government as a roving cultural ambassador, from which vantage he absorbed the war’s full horror. Immediately after, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for more than forty years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Now, decades in the making, comes a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa’s most fateful events, from a writer whose words and courage have left an enduring stamp on world literature.

Achebe masterfully relates his experience, both as he lived it and how he has come to understand it. He begins his story with Nigeria’s birth pangs and the story of his own upbringing as a man and as a writer so that we might come to understand the country’s promise, which turned to horror when the hot winds of hatred began to stir. To read There Was a Country is to be powerfully reminded that artists have a particular obligation, especially during a time of war. All writers, Achebe argues, should be committed writers—they should speak for their history, their beliefs, and their people. Marrying history and memoir, poetry and prose, There Was a Country is a distillation of vivid firsthand observation and forty years of research and reflection. Wise, humane, and authoritative, it will stand as definitive and reinforce Achebe’s place as one of the most vital literary and moral voices of our age

Andrew Dosunmu's "Restless City"

via Shadow and Act:

Still image from Restless City 

“In this intense twist on the American Dream, director Andrew Dosunmu vividly captures the pulsating dynamic of New York city's pan-African community, a robust aggregation that subsists amid an often hostile foreign environment. “Restless City” is a mesmerizing glimpse into a culture and community that is only superficially seen by indifferent New Yorkers.” – Duane Byrge, The Hollywood Reporter

More here

Andile Ndlovu | Ballet Dancer

CNN reports:

Andile Ndlovu is one of South Africa's most prominent young ballet dancers, an international performer and award winner both at home and overseas.

But for Ndlovu to be accepted into the rarefied world of classical dance -- which in South Africa is traditionally seen as an elitist and a predominantly white preserve -- the boy from the rough Soweto townships says he had to overcome outdated stereotypes. "I used to be picked upon for the way I walk and the way I act or carry myself," he says of his time at school, where he became disparagingly known as "the dude who did ballet."

Cameroon's endangered Elephants

Julie Owono writing in Al Jazeera:

Image courtesy of USA Today

The year 2012 started dramatically for elephants in the central African country of Cameroon. According to the UN, 450 carcasses of these animals - a protected species - have been found in the Bouba N'Djida National Park, near Cameroon's northern border with Chad. The slaughter is especially worrisome given that, as of 2007, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated that only 1,000 to 5,000 elephants are still left in Cameroon.

The massacre is sad proof that in spite of serious efforts, poaching continues to damage Cameroon's biodiversity, endangering an animal so important in the collective imagination of a continent.

Cameroon's Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife, the government agency in charge of the country's anti-poaching policy, saw its budget slashed from $43m in 2011 to just $33m in 2012. The money dedicated specifically to anti-poaching action was only $2m in 2011 - an amount clearly insufficient for tackling the problem.

The Bouba N'Djida National Park, where the elephants were killed, comprises about 2,200 square kilometres, making it the biggest protected area in the country. Only five guards patrol its grounds, one of whom was killed in 2011. They receive a modest salary of $160 per month. In April 2011, it was announced that the US embassy donated $39,000 worth of equipment to the park, including motorcycles, bicycles, radios, digital cameras and truncheons

More here

Slacktivism in Africa

From Independent Global Citizen:

There is a lot of debate and discussion in the academic community and the professional aid industry regarding the effectiveness of programs and policies in developing parts of the world. There are college degrees offered in the subject. There are countless jobs related to delivering services and implementing projects to alleviate poverty. There are books published every year that detail, danger, death, destruction, and disease in Africa...[continue reading]

Watch related video 'I want to be an aid worker':

Re. #Kony2012 "You like to complain and criticize. But where is the action, eh??"- Mind of Malaka

From Mind of Malaka:

Can I speak plainly, reader? I am SO SICK of Black people and their twisted dogma concerning the “White Savior” Syndrome. Oh, you haven’t heard of it? It’s the belief in certain circles of the Black Intelligencia that because Black folk can’t do for themselves, White people have to come in and do for them, or more specifically, solve our problems for us. In the case of Joseph Kony in particular, one rather prolific individual on twitter summed up the KONY2012 (and implied White savior Campaign) movement by saying “the world exists simply to satisfy the needs – including, importantly, the sentimental needs – of white people and Oprah”. Prior to that, he says that “the white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evenings.” This message has been retweeted quite a few times on Twitter, and I do see why. At first glance, this all sounds very witty and well thought out until you think about it, at which point you grasp your head and shout:

Oh My GOD, Black people!!

On apathy:

Oh Black people. You like to complain and criticize. But where is the action, eh?? Why are we not staging sit- ins at our Ghanaian embassies around the world, demanding that OUR president take a firm stance on Kony until he’s captured. Why are Nigerians, Gambians and Kenyan’s not doing the same? Why are we not speaking out until our voices are impossible to ignore? Here’s a better question: Why did an AFRICAN not start the Kony2012 campaign? It’s because you people care, yes, but you don’t care enough

More here

#Kony2012 and its critics

From the 'The Stream' on Al Jazeera:

Image via Al Jazeera

A new 30-minute documentary calling for the arrest of Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony has gained over 7 million views since being released on March 5. For over 20 years, Kony has led a brutal insurgency against Uganda’s government, and is notorious for his use of child soldiers.

As support for the “Kony 2012” campaign grows, its founders have also faced backlash online for their portrayal of the conflict in Central Africa and endorsement of US military involvement.

Of mini-skirts and morals | In Nigeria

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf of Cassava Republic writing in Open Democracy:

The push to police the way that women dress continues across Africa on the pretext that it causes sexual harassment and violence against women. What really underlies this censorship of women’s expression? asks Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

Women’s dressing has become the site for pernicious policing and debates about social and moral decay in Africa, with calls for intervention within Nigeria’s higher education institutions, by religious organisations, and the media. Over the past decade, some universities have banned the wearing of trousers and any 'revealing' clothes by young women because they are seen as a distraction to male students and lecturers. The argument is that revealing attire has made sexual violation and harassment a marked feature of university life in Nigeria, and therefore imposing a strict dress code on female students is the only way to stop it...[continue reading]

Making Kenyan Graffiti

Vice reports:

Boniface Mwangi was joined by a half-dozen artists on a quiet Tuesday night in downtown Nairobi as they worked on painting their inaugural mural. A piece this size would usually take days, even with a large crew. They did it in seven hours. A blank wall in a filthy, abandoned lot near the city market was illuminated by floodlights as various crew members traced a 30-meter tall mural that tells the story of corruption in Kenya.

Photos by Andre Epstein

“We’re using images of a vulture MP stomping on a face, of protests and Parliament, to tell Kenyans that when you sell your vote, you’re mortgaging our future,” he said.

More here

Nigeria’s Iron Lady

The Economist profiles Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala:

Pan-African News Wire File Photos

“THE gele is my trademark,” says the Nigerian finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, describing the colourful head wrap she puts over her short, greying hair before she allows pictures to be taken. “I am very Nigerian from dress to everything.” Some of her critics disagree. During anti-reform protests in January, demonstrators focused their anger on the finance minister. They called her an unwelcome outsider because she spent long periods abroad. She was a managing director at the World Bank before coming home last year.

Sitting in her half-moon-shaped office overlooking Nigeria’s dusty capital, Abuja, Ms Okonjo-Iweala faces an unenviable task. President Goodluck Jonathan has given her just three years to overhaul sub-Saharan Africa’s second-biggest economy, one riven with corruption and inefficiencies, carved up by political bosses and vulnerable to bursts of communal violence.

More here

Entrepreneurial Learners are Makers

An Adafruit highlight:

If you’re interested in education (which means you’re thinking abou the future), you should watch JSB’s keynote from the DML conference this week. “Entrepreneurial Learning isn’t about creating entrepreneurs. It’s about people having an entrepreneurial way of learning.” “Entrepreneurial Learners are Makers and Tinkerers.” Tinkering is a way of dealing with constant change.

Africa’s Singapore or Uganda waiting to happen?

Opalo highlights an Economist article:

Yet Rwanda has one huge advantage: the rule of law. No African country has done more to curb corruption. Ministers have been jailed for it. Transparency International, a watchdog, reckons Rwanda is less graft-ridden than Greece or Italy (though companies owned by the ruling party play an outsized role in the economy). “I have never paid a bribe and I don’t know anyone who has had to pay a bribe,” says Josh Ruxin, one of the owners of Heaven, a restaurant in Kigali, the capital.

The country is blessedly free of red tape, too. It ranks 45th in the World Bank’s index of the ease of doing business, above any African nation bar South Africa and Mauritius. Registering a firm takes three days and is dirt cheap. Property rights are strengthening, as well—the government is giving peasants formal title to their land.

“Death Metal Angola”

In Global Voices:

Untitled from Coalition Films - Projects on Vimeo.
New York-based producers of a documentary called “Death Metal Angola”, about the emerging metal scene in Angola and a rock festival in the city of Huambo, are raising money for post-production costs on crowdfunding platform IndieGogo. The film's tagline: “The hardest hardcore is Angolan hardcore.”

"Rebel against old leaders"- Thabo Mbeki

In Zambian watchdog Thabo Mbeki states:

“To ensure that [the youth] actually exercises the leadership everybody rhetorically accepts and proclaims is its due, the youth must organise and ready itself to rebel, so to speak.”

“It would obviously be unnatural that I, a member of the older generation, would easily and willingly accept that younger people, my own children, should, at best, sit side-by-side with me as co-leaders, fully empowered to help determine the future of our people,” he said.

He said the new generation should define its unique and historic contribution to their societies’ development, otherwise it ran the risk of betraying its mission which would condemn the continent to “the outdated views and prejudices of the older generations”.

Ironic from Thabo Mbeki considering his tacit support of Robert Mugabe when he was in power, nonetheless a welcome statement from an African leader (albeit former).Question, why aren't there more critiques of African leaders from their peers?

Letting Africa Down - It's Intellectuals

An Open letter to Africa's Academics, Scholars and Intellectuals from George Ayittey:

Upon reviewing the current upheavals in North Africa and elsewhere on the continent, I felt it is necessary for us – African academics, scholars and intellectuals – to take stock and a fresh look at ourselves: What role have we played in advancing the cause of liberty and improving governance in post colonial Africa. Our record is not very good. Sometimes, self-criticism is necessary in order for us to make progress. You do not have to agree with what I am going to say – diversity of opinion is healthy. There have been outstanding individuals among us who risked death to champion the cause of freedom in Africa. However, as a group we have let Africa down badly by not providing intellectual leadership to the democratic struggle.

“He who doesn’t know where he came from doesn’t know where is going,” says an African proverb. We of the intellectual community are lost; we don’t know where we are going. The recent upheavals in Africa caught us completely off guard. We did not see it coming because we were pre-occupied elsewhere. It seems we are way behind the curve, late to the struggle for democracy in Africa and are now only playing “catch-up.”...[continue reading]

Malawi's ‘Shredding’ of Public Institutions

Thandika Mkandawire writes:

Image courtesy of LSE

...one has to consider the cases of many African countries where these institutions were severely compromised during one-party rule.

Such countries have had huge political problems with their democratisation since they have no credible institutions to adjudicate even the simplest of squabbles. In Malawi all political actors have respected the courts and sought to redress their grievances through the court system. Malawi had more litigations going on than the entire SADC region. One can point to some of the abusive aspects of these litigations but all in all they are partly evidence of the faith in our court system.

When Bingu came to power he promised to reverse the creeping trend towards the politicisation of these institutions. He specifically promised to strengthen the meritocratic basis of the civil service. What we are witnessing now is the shredding of the legitimacy of these institutions by politicising them and by implying that their daily management of their affairs depend on “orders from above”. The institutions are now being pitted one against another.

More here
via Jimmy Kainja

Dawn Okoro | Artist

From African Digital Art:

Dawn Okoro is an African visual artist who specializes in pop art. Based in Dallas, Dawn is international known for her strong portrayal of black women. She works across several mediums experimenting with various techniques in order to communicate the effect of popular culture in society.
The Art Trade Presents: Dawn Okoro from TheArtTrade on Vimeo.

Standing on the Sun - New Rules of Capitalism

In Forbes, TJ McCue reviews Standing on the Sun - New Rules of Capitalism.

Quoting the authors who emphasize the power of the maker, open-source world view:

“Because we believe that in economies driven by innovation and growth, populated by digital natives, and not indoctrinated with regard to controlling intellectual property, such behavior will become the mainstream, not the fringe—and will confer an important advantage. Is it a dynamic that will come to characterize the entire economy? It’s hard to tell. Surely much collaboration will continue to be done explicitly, with clearly delineated contributors joining forces to achieve carefully architected outcomes.”

This is the invisible handshake. This handshake has more power potentially in emerging economies, which is one of their main points. These new capitalist thinkers don’t have the US baggage of what a business or company should look like. This isn’t to say that some in the US can’t or won’t be as innovative, disruptive, and adaptive.

Continuing:

“It’s a little fanciful, but think of a 3-D printer as a seed. Plant one in a village. If it’s a RepRap seed (and you have the raw materials to fertilize it with), it will yield more seeds. And if there’s a network, the village can have access to all the designs in Neil Gershenfeld’s (MIT Center for Bits and Atoms) open source libraries—and everyone else’s. To sum it all up, if information can be free and if goods are just information plus resin, then goods can be pretty close to free.”