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...]
In Praise of Jeffrey Gettleman’s Pulitzer
’5 Networks that Matter in East Africa’
Rakesh Rajani, the head of Tanzanian “citizen-centered initiative”, Twaweza, on the “five key networks that need to be considered and collaborated with in development efforts.” According to the World Bank Blog Rajani’s insights are based on “years of experience working in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.”
H/T: Zein Rahemtulla
Colonial Photography
“Somalis” (undated) from the website for the Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860 – 1960, an expansive collection of 7,610 photographs organized in 76 separate albums, scrapbooks or loose collections assembled by the British collector Humphrey Winterton over about 30 years. It depicts colonial life–”the breadth of African experience; documents African life; European life in Africa in all its manifestations; and the African landscape, in particular as it changed over time”–primarily in East Africa, between about 1860 and 1960.
The originals are being held at the Melville Herskovits Library at Northwestern University in Chicago.
