Today the American network NBC announced publicly that friend (and contributor) of Africa is a Country, Ashoka Mukpo, is the freelance journalist who has been diagnosed with Ebola and is being flown to the United States for treatment (read Ashoka’s thoughts on the root causes of the crisis here on Africa is a Country on September 23rd).

As a sort of get well card, I think it’s fitting for us to post the below video, recently shot by Ashoka, of Ebola songs performed at Pan-African beach in Monrovia. I know Liberian music is a great passion of his, it was through a shared interest in Monrovia’s Hipco scene that we first met in Liberia in 2011. After elections he stayed on in the country doing freelance work particularly around workers rights, but had recently returned to the states. This summer he hopped on a plane and decided to go back and help disseminate truth about the Ebola crisis (rather than the hysteria that tends to accompany the coverage of crisis in West Africa.) He had been doing a wonderful job of it.

We wish him a speedy recovery and return to action!

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.