We couldn’t let the week pass without celebrating one of its more significant events: Jeffrey Gettleman, East Africa correspondent for The New York Times (yes, only in Africa can journalists cover territories so vast) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize–valued at $10,000–for “his vivid reports, often at personal peril, on famine and conflict in East Africa.” […]
Chief among the debates (or what passes for debates on blogs, Twitter and in mainstream media) about #Kony2012, are these two questions: whether or not external observers should raise awareness or otherwise stage interventions in a conflict zone, and if so, how interventions should be carried out. While it is clear that Elliot Ross (on this […]
By Abdourahman Waberi* Jeffrey Gettleman will not run the risk of being seen as ‘a nobody, a cockroach, a gangster,’ unlike the Somali pirates he depicted in the columns of the New York Times Magazine last weekend (‘Taken by Pirates‘, Oct 5, 2011). In that particular piece of reportage, a totally asymmetric treatment is set […]
Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times strikes again. Last month anger resounded across the blogosphere after a bizarre rant by Gettleman appeared in Foreign Policy. In the piece, “Africa’s Forever Wars: Why the continent’s conflicts never end,” the NYTimes East Africa bureau chief gave us his opinion on ending the ‘forever wars’: “capture or […]
Guest Post by Mukoma Wa Ngugi In 1982, as the air force-led coup attempt in Kenya unfolded, we sat glued to our transistor radio listening to the BBC and Voice of America (VOA). In fact, the more the oppressive the Moi regime censored Kenyan media, the more Western media became the lifeline through which we learned […]
Since Jeffrey Gettleman’s beloved machetes remain sheathed after a peaceful (and therefore thus far apparently uninteresting) Kenyan election, America’s paper of records put Africa’s other most important story on its front page yesterday. That’s right, Oscar and Reeva. It was a blockbuster, stretching from the front page (above to the fold) to occupy an entire page […]
The tragic robber-hero. The mystical gunslinger. The cerebral crime-lord, drawn into events beyond his control. One of the most straightforwardly literal ways in which popular culture is able to challenge official ideology is in creating complexity and human drama around criminals that the state would rather have seen as villains whose only wish is evil. From […]
There are times we shake our heads or roll our eyes. When we could not invent some of the things that we spot in the media. For some reason especially New York Times journalists can’t help themselves (though there are some exceptions like Lydia Polgreen reporting from Johannesburg). For example, former Times editor Bill Keller […]
I know we’ve been hearing about evil Erik Prince and his name-swapping mercenaries for years (Blackwater, Xe, my personal favorite Academi, and the latest, Greystone). But I only recently discovered how close all of this is to my hometown. Hell, from their “idyllic Dutch hamlet” in Holland (Michigan) the Prince family has formed and backed some of the biggest and […]
Selling desperate people false hope, especially AIDS patients, are common on the African continent–well documented in my native country, South Africa–now there’s this “faith healer” in Tanzania who has people in East Africa traveling thousands of miles for a homebrewed drink that he claims can cure AIDS, cancer, diabetes, and other “incurable diseases.” There’s no […]
