In a video posted today on BBC News, the BBC’s International Development Correspondent Mark Doyle is shown in a helicopter, bullet proof vest atop of the foreign correspondent’s uniform–the baby-blue shirt, ‘flying low’ over what Doyle describes as ‘possibly the largest crime scene in the world’. Invited by Shell, and accompanied by some of its engineers, Doyle is flown over pipelines in Southern Nigeria where evidence of local siphoning is clear; home-made refining pits that Doyle describes as ‘cauldrons’ (without irony), and thick black smoke are visible from the aerial images. Doyle repeatedly uses the words ‘illegal’, ‘stealing’ and ‘hacking’, while offering almost no context as to why the locals are reclaiming some of the resources.
A BBC Report: “Shell brought me here …”
April 24, 2012 By 5 Comments
In Praise of Jeffrey Gettleman’s Pulitzer
April 22, 2012 By 9 Comments
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.” Floppy of hair, steely of jaw, noble of brow and almost invariably open of shirt, The Gettleman seems to have mustered his Pulitzer mainly by charming the Jury into submission with his carefully cultivated aura of old-world journalistic romance. The macho Gettleman thrusts himself into the torrid zone and must be decorated with all kinds of gongs and baubles. What did we expect? This is the Pulitzers after all. [Read more...]
Goldman Sachs’s Angolan interests
April 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Cobalt International Energy, a Houston based company with investments in the Angolan oil sector, for possible violation of anti-corruption legislation. Last week the Financial Times reported that three Angolan officials – the same three officials named in muckraking journalist Rafael Marques’s case now waiting before Angola’s Supreme Court – “confirmed to the FT (…) that they and another general have held shares in Nazaki Oil and Gáz, the local partner in a Cobalt-led deepwater venture launched in early 2010.” The Financial Times is no slouch of a newspaper. When they commit an entire article to topics Angolan it nearly fills my Google news alert for a week.
The war in Mali’s North–to what effect?
April 16, 2012 By 10 Comments
There is war in Mali’s North, and there doesn’t need to be. Some of this conflict is hard to stop–the shadow boxing of distant powers, the scattering of weapons, the spiraling circuits of revenge. But some of this conflict people chose, and they are choosing it now. Let’s leave why for another time and place. Let’s ask instead, to what effect?
First Lady Marieme Faye Sall: ‘The good Senegalese woman’
April 14, 2012 By 4 Comments
Joyce Banda of Malawi, the newest President of an African country–and only the second sitting African president who is a woman–is getting all the love for her achievements.* (So what if her ascendency came about due to the death of an aging president and his politically weak, colluding brother?). There is also much chatter on the internet about Malawi’s new First Gentleman, retired Chief Justice Richard Banda (with whom Madame Banda has two children). However, the Senegalese might suggest that their country’s new first lady, Marieme Faye Sall, represents a “bigger” deal in how her move to the presidential palace breaks with Senegal’s political history after independence.
Coup d’Etat is the new Black
April 13, 2012 By 9 Comments
It is official at last–what country watchers had been expecting is finally taking place in Guinea Bissau. No, the country is not becoming a municipality in Senegal. There is a coup d’etat unfolding in its capital, Bissau, by the military (apparently just 20 soldiers; just like Mali) against the Prime Minister, Carlos Gomes Jr., who was favored to win an upcoming presidential run-off in April in which he would have been the sole candidate as his opponent announced he planned to boycott the vote (now that was a mouthful). I am sure the average person googling “Guinea-Bissau” is by now wondering what I am rambling about … what is a Guinea-Bissau? I am glad you asked. Before the foreign and diaspora die-hards of Guinea Bissau get into a media music or cultural war of words, I thought it would be helpful to provide some base information about the country to novices here. In the spirit of brevity and over-simplification, here are ten (10) facts you should know about Guinea Bissau before it becomes the new “capital” of Africa for the next month or so it takes for ECOWAS to take action and resolve the crisis there (Hint: Drug trafficking is not mentioned below).
Bamako-sur-Seine
April 12, 2012 By 1 Comment
You don’t stand in one place to watch a masquerade, as Chinua Achebe famously said. It moves. You move with it. Same goes for demonstrations. On Saturday a few hundred people marched in Paris for peace in Mali. Mostly Malians, as you’d think, but also a few dozen sympathetic observors, several journalists, a well-received Senegalese woman—“Senegal for the return of democracy and peace in Mali!” read her sign—and me.
Germany’s Namibian Legacy
April 10, 2012 By 6 Comments
So the Bundestag have once again refused to acknowledge that the systematic murders of four ethnic groups in Namibia between 1904 and 1908 wasn’t genocide. Late last month, March 22, the German parliament debated a motion proposed by the Left party to officially recognise the genocide which took place in Namibia between 1904 and 1908. The Namibian confirmed that the motion has been overturned. It is not a coincidence that in a review of Sebastian Conrad’s book German Colonialism: A Short History, Richard J. Evans notes that evidence of this history can be seen in present-day Namibia: “If you go to Windhoek in Namibia, you can still pick up a copy of the Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper which caters for the remaining German-speaking residents of the town. … In Tanzania, you can stay in the lakeside town of Wiedhafen. If you’re a businessman wanting to bulk buy palm oil in Cameroon, the Woermann plantations are still the place to go. In eastern Ghana, German-style buildings that once belonged to the colony of Togo are now advertised as tourist attractions.” (London Review of Books) German colonialism in Africa, obscured by the comparatively more substantial colonies of other European countries and numerically superior crimes of the Nazi genocide, occupies a diminished place in German national guilt.
Good Friday
April 6, 2012 By 3 Comments
In the midst of so much global upheavals, it is good to know one can always count on religious and financial leaders to remind us of who the “good guys” are not. A recent Russian bruhaha over whether Russian Orthodox Church leader, Patriarch Kirill I, wore a $30,000 Breguet timepiece (watch) or not is causing an internet stir. For good reasons too. This is a story of a national religious institution and its leader lying publicly repeatedly and being incompetent enough to cover their tracks. If he was a US politician, he would be resigning now. It is sad and frustrating when an institution that claims to be a moral compass of a country often displays lavish wealth and power, dishonestly, when a majority of its congregation is suffering under economic repression. One wishes there had been the same viral passion by Nigerians when one of their wealthy mega-Pastors claimed to be starting his own airline, in addition to the four private jets he owns and allegedly barely uses. [Read more...]
The Jacob Zuma Era
April 5, 2012 By 4 Comments
Coming on June 1 is Northwestern University journalist professor Doug Foster’s new book, After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Postapartheid South Africa. The book is published by WW Norton in New York City. The title is unoriginal (Financial Times’s Alec Russell had the same title) but should not take away from what I think will be an excellent first take on Jacob Zuma’s presidency. Norton is marketing it as “the most important historical and journalistic portrait to date of a teetering nation whose destiny will determine the fate of a continent.” They promise that Doug has had “early, unprecedented access” to President Zuma as well as to “the next generation in the Mandela family.” The book is based on six years worth of interviews. I am looking forward to reading it. Here to remind you of Doug’s style are excerpts from a 2009 profile of Jacob Zuma in The Atlantic Monthly. [Read more...]
