Blogging Africa
What African bloggers say about Michael Jackson
Sokari Ekine
2009-07-02, Issue 440
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/57399
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The week Michael Jackson died, the media came to a standstill for three days, including dropping the Green Revolution like a bag of hot coals. Twitter and Facebook followed suit in the biggest media hyped death since the advent of 24-hour news, social networks and online media. On the social networks, there appeared to be three groups – those who ignored it completely, those who joined in the mourning and the few who tentatively dared to decent to the remaking of MJ as Black man who was a victim of racism from record companies and the media (referring to allegations of child molestation).
Despite the risk of being accused of committing sacrilege, I do not wish to dwell on MJ and his musical genius and flawed self. But for those who are interested in what African bloggers were saying, they can go to African bloggers pay tribute to Michael Jackson, published on Global Voices.
Having said that there is one particular post that stands out from the weeping and wailing at the loss of one musical icon. Koluki - K Faktor uses two videos to deconstruct the ‘formation and deformation’ of MJ and the future (struggle) of race in America.
The Zeleza Post takes an unusual and critical look at Civil Society discourse in Africa:
‘The civil society discourse ignored the realities that neither the state nor civil society has a monopoly on political truths, on either virtue or vice. As the pages of history around the world including Euroamerica drenched with civil conflict and unrest have amply demonstrated, civil societies can be uncivil. This is the subject of Celestine Monga's interesting reflections on the difficulties of defining civil society, which social realms and actors to include in its conceptual and ethical bosom, and how to assess the role of civil society and the production of social capital in both the generation and decomposition of democracy.’
App+Frica points to two recent articles on the ‘scientific realities of the African continent’ and Africa’s possible contribution to the overall sustainability of the increasing world population.
The first, published last year argues that the vastly uninhabited regions of the northern continent where the Sahara desert stretches, could be used to build massive solar farms that could theoretically power the whole planet. The second, published more recently, suggests that Africa could also feed most of the world’s population with its vast stretches of fertile soil and uninhabited land.
The Arabist reinforces the fickleness of the media and blogosphere with these two cartoons of Western hypocrisy over the Green Revolution in Iran.
A year after the xenophobic attacks, mainly against Zimbabweans, which took place in South Africa, Sokwanele reports the harassment of foreigners by Johannesburg police. The report was sent by a Zimbabwean living in SA:
‘I met three guys, so they showed me their police cards and demanded to search me. Since they were police I accepted and they did their work very fast. When they finished, I think they wanted unlicensed guns because here in Johannesburg robbers carry guns. They asked me questions like where am I going, what is your name only to identify which language to speak. They know that most of those who speak Zulu here in Johannesburg chances are high to be Zimbabwean. I am very fluent in Zulu because Zulu and Ndebele are almost the same and I have spent seven years here in South Africa of which the two years I was in KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.’
Last Monday evening Channel 4 [UK] television broadcast a new series Inside Nature’s Giants which exposes anatomical secrets of the some of the animal kingdom’s largest species. The first to be dissected was the elephant. We found that elephants are in fact very human in that they mourn the loss of their loved ones and even bury them if they can.
With this new evidence to hand, I was even more saddened to read this story from Gorilla CD about the killing of animals including elephants, chimpanzees, antelopes and hippos in the Congo National Park, by militants.
To put the killings in perspective, in 1987 there were 27,000 hippos. Now there are less than 300. No doubt without an end to the fighting in a few years there will be no hippos left in the Congo National Park. This is not to make comparisons with the violence which has impacted on human life but to recognise that those in the animal world also have a right to life and are part of the great ecological system in which we all should be free to live in.
White African reports on the release of new mobile phone applications developed in Uganda by the Grameen Foundation’s AppLab.
- Farmer’s Friend: a searchable database with both agricultural advice and targeted weather forecasts
- Health Tips: provides sexual and reproductive health information
- Clinic Finder: helps locate nearby health clinics and their services
- Google Trader: matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce and commodities as well as other products. Local buyers and sellers, such as small-holder farmers, are able to broaden their trading networks and reduce their transaction costs. (known locally as ‘Akatale SMS’)
Black Looks links to an article by Wole Soyinka on the proposed amnesty offered by the Nigerian government to the Niger Delta militants:
‘The attempt in some quarters to confuse issues by refusing to separate the principled militants, such as members of MEND and its affiliates, from the opportunistic mercenaries and criminals, has always struck me as dishonest and diversionary.
‘Extortionists? Hostage takers? Thrill killers? Since when was any liberation movement throughout history exempt from its quota of deviants! Was the Nigerian Federal Army itself even free of such human dregs when it was launched to prosecute a war dedicated, with all due sanctimoniousness, to “keeping the nation one”. We shall bypass for now, the question of what, and whose nation it has proved – an imperial delusion, or the genuine product of a people’s will?’
* Sokari Ekine blogs at Black Looks
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.
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