There are good lists (from which we learn), there are bad lists (from which we refrain, like Foreign Policy making a list of everything) and there are offensive lists: Take for example The Huffington Post’s Gadling blog which lines up “The World’s Worst Places: Top 10 places you do not want to visit in 2012.”
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As a child, I never believed in Santa Claus.
I believed in Saint Nicholas and Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). I remember waking up as a child on December 6, 1983, three hours before daybreak. I also remember waking up early on December 6 for years afterwards. Always early, always too excited to go back to sleep the night Saint Nicholas came by our house. Over the years, I got to share this rush of euphoric anxiety with my two younger brothers. We would be jumping on our beds, calling our parents, yelling out to ask whether it was time yet. They were never amused. My brothers and I knew there was no way we could pussyfoot downstairs into the living room to see which presents He had left us. Because each year, Saint Nicholas’s black servants, those sneaky Black Petes (‘Zwarte Pieten’) would have locked the room’s door on their way out. My parents held its only key.
You know Black Pete?
Remember the Mapping Stereotypes Project and the Afrographique project? (The former maps popular national stereotypes from around the world, while the latter turns any set of data about the continent into a graphic, including a series of maps.) A reader of this blog points us towards this “map” of stereotypes that’s been circulating online among Brazilians.
Here’s a translation for those who don’t speak Portuguese.
Verifiability and no original research are two core content policies for contributors to Wikipedia. You need to back entries with citations from print sources. What does that policy mean for societies with rich, oral knowledge cultures. Achal Prabhala, a Wikimedia fellow and a member of the Foundation’s advisory board, and some of his colleagues in South Africa and India, have other ideas for that policy.Check out the film, “People are Knowledge (directed by Priya Sen and Zen Marie):
Jon Lee Anderson’s long profile/obituary of Muammar Gaddafi in latest issue of The New Yorker reads like a compendium of how Libyans and Gaddafi (especially), related to the idea and continent of Africa. Here are the choice cuts:
After the fall of Tripoli, I joined a crowd of curious Libyans streaming into [Gaddafi's compound], which had become a destination for family excursions … I saw a man emerge from a room in a black silk robe and declare, “I am Qaddafi, King of Africa!” Indeed, trophies of the old order became fashionable around Tripoli. One evening, I saw a rebel soldier manning a roadblock with a gold-plated Kalashnikov, one of several such weapons found in Qaddafi’s residence. During a rally in Green Square, the center of protests in Tripoli, a fighter danced up next to me wearing a leopard skin, lined with green satin. He said it had come from Qaddafi’s closet, and guessed it had been a gift from a visiting witch doctor. It was an article of faith among the rebels that Qaddafi had regularly used magic to prop up his long reign. What other explanation could there be?
Millions of Muslims from all over the world are currently gathered in Mecca for the Hajj, a pilgrimage that must be made by every Muslim who is financially and physically able at least once in their lifetime. However, this year’s Hajj follows a tumultuous series of uprisings throughout Africa and Southwest Asia, and even the very pious have little patience left with Saudi Arabia’s management of this holy journey.
Saudi Arabia is not well-liked generally (what with their un-Islamic institutionalization of denying women basic rights, generously taking in deposed dictators, and their unabashed partnership with the United States on all matters ‘anti-terrorism’) but every year millions of pilgrims grit their teeth and endure the Saudi bureaucracy in order to fulfill one of the primary tenants of Islam. King Abdullah has already bought off his own citizens (and banned protesting) in order to prevent a Bahrain-style revolt, but can the kingdom continue to depend on the Ka’ba to stifle the misgivings and mistreatment of its annual visitors?
By Dan Moshenberg
Last week Ingrid Turinawe, the leader of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) Women’s League, in Uganda, was sent to the infamous Luzira Prison.
Everywhere one looks, there are “infamous” prisons. For the United States, for example, Guantánamo, with its regime of torture and its regimen of violence, is but the tip of a national iceberg. Every country has at least one. In Uganda, it’s Luzira Prison.
