Africa
>Egypt has much to teach the West
>
Adam John Waterman recounts his journey in Egypt after the revolution @ Feminist Wire.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Everyone wants to talk about the camels. “Can you believe they brought camels to Tahrir?” I’ve been in Cairo less than two hours and I’ve already heard at least three stories about the day, February 2, when pro-Mubarak supporters swept through Tahrir Square, attacking demonstrators with makeshift clubs, astride camels and horses. Three days before, on January 30, Mubarak had ordered the Egyptian air force to fly its American-manufactured F-16s low over central Cairo, an obvious attempt at staunching the demonstrations through threat of military engagement. As we talk through the events of that first week, however, this is not what anyone wants to discuss. “The camels came from Giza,” one person volunteers, “because the revolution scared away all the tourists.” Another friend tells a slightly different tale. “Egyptian state TV was reporting that Tahrir was occupied by Afghan guerillas and that they were handing out Kalashnikovs. My brother rushed there to fight the Afghans because he’s a patriotic Egyptian. He didn’t know what was really happening until later. Then he joined the resistance.” Several people I speak with conflate the events of this day, February 2, with those of January 28, the “Friday for Martyrs and Political Prisoners.” January 28 began with the nation-wide Internet crackdown, saw police attacks on demonstrators following the Friday prayer, and ended with Mubarak’s National Democratic Party headquarters in flames. The camels didn’t show up for nearly a week. Nonetheless, at least one person recalled them making their first appearance on January 28, and—in his memory—it was decisive. “It was after they came with the camels that we attacked the police. It was after the camels that we knew that we were going to win.”
>Life is unfolding exactly the way it is meant to
>
 |
| Ronald Ceuppens @ Paper Darts/ |
Scott Tucker recounts the everyday encounters in Guinea, West Africa @ Etude.
The sound of the boys crying out in pain is new. The other sounds are the same. The bat wings, quick and rubbery, flitting overhead in a haze of mango leaves and wood smoke. The old counterfeiter, sitting outside his front door, talking quietly with visitors in threadbare suits.
The children sing a school song in French outside in the dark, then start up a game of “de donc/dernier,” Simon Says, jumping forward and backward over a circle drawn in the dirt. They cheer noisily out of habit when the electricity comes on, although they continue playing the same games electricity or not. There are no vehicles again tonight on the main road, due to a military curfew that’s been in place since the near-assassination of President Dadis Camara more than a month ago. A dundunba party carries on, however, past 11 p.m. in a neighbor’s yard, with drumming and dancing and excited announcements coming over a microphone. C’est normal. C’est Conakry.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I have come to Guinea, West Africa, at a time when the U.S. embassy is closed and all Americans have been urged to leave the country. I have left the comforts of Seattle, Washington for this, to remind myself that there is power in ordinary people, even the world’s poorest people, going about living their daily lives. These people can save a nation. They can make a nation worth saving. They can turn around your thinking. I know only one person “on the ground,” Karim Koumbassa, my drum and dance teacher in Seattle, and a native of Guinea. He is, like most men in Conakry, strong and pliant from years of physical labor in the equatorial heat. He is 33 years old, best guess, although age is happily unimportant here. Dates of birth are routinely invented on official paperwork.
>In the blood-warm heat against the sun-baked walls
>
Ellen Cantarow’s 1985 essay on Khartoum published for the first time @ Talking Writing.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Cairo, March 1985
Cairo was only my way station to Khartoum, still sealed off from the press: The coup against the U.S.’s man, General Gaafar Nimeiry, was still underway. At the Sudan embassy, the ambassador received me. A few perfunctory courtesies; then he invited me for a drink.
I recognized him from all of Doris Lessing’s stories about Africa and the several Ousmane Sembene films I’d seen about the African bourgeoisie. Harris tweeds, very cultivated, westernized, charming, but African all the same, chivalry just the other side of a raging sense of male superiority and what I imagined he thought was the “easiness” of the western woman. I begged off with a vague excuse.
I moved out of my hotel, the General, and stayed with friends in Zamalek, waiting. One evening, they entertained me by taking me to hear Angela Davis address Egyptian feminists. The Egyptians came dressed in skirts and blouses with pearls, pumps, and stockings—the sort of thing League of Women Voters might have worn in the 1950s. Angela herself was sleek, with short-cropped hair, enormous studious glasses, a graceful drop of long white beads over an equally graceful drop of long coverall black sweater.
“She’s lovely!” a pale beige Egyptian lady to my right exclaimed in English. “I thought she would be much darker.”
>Tintin in Norway
>
Morten Harper on Tintin, comics, and racism @ Eurozine.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )We have all seen the blonde-fringed Tintin wriggle his way out of one sticky situation after another. But early 2010 saw the Belgian national hero’s past catch up with him; a past most of us had forgotten he had. Congolese Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo believes the comic book Tintin in the Congo is racist and should be banned, and has taken legal action against the series’ copyright-holder Moulinsart and its publisher Casterman.
It was during his second adventure, published in 1931, that Tintin travelled to the Congo, a Belgian colony at the time. There he was mixed up in a gangster showdown when some of Al Capone’s partners tried to take over the country’s diamond production. The early Tintin books are crudely drawn and feature a coarse style of humour, such as when Tintin escapes an angry rhino by blowing it up with dynamite. Even more notorious is the sequence where he visits a school to teach geography. “Dear friends,” he says to the Congolese children, “today I’m going to tell you about our country: Belgium.” This is the colonial master talking. In another sequence, he repairs a broken-down train for the helpless locals. In the new colour version of Tintin in the Congo, published in 1946, the geography lesson has been replaced by mathematics and the Congolese speak more comprehensible French, but the tone is still condescending. The population is presented as naive and lazy; a land of childlike beings.
A not altogether unnatural immediate reaction to Tintin’s paternalistic manner is that he ought to take a trip over here [Norway] and sort out our rail system – we can chuckle about that kind of thing. However, Tintin’s trouble in his home country is no laughing matter. “J’accuse,” proclaims [the plaintiff] Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo indignantly, and denounces the album as “offensive and demeaning to all Congolese”.
altimoniere 