R. E. Ekosso's Blog

Now Available on Amazon.com: House of Falling Women by Rosemary Ekosso

Rosemary E. Ekosso. House of Falling Women. Cameroon. Langaa Publishers, May 2008. Available on Amazon.com.

House of Falling Women is the story of a young woman with quixotic ideas about improving the lot of women who finds out that that the crusader’s cloak is an uncomfortable one.

Martha Elive, armed with a university education and a substantial legacy from a Dutchwoman she meets while studying abroad on a scholarship, decides to create an institute for the empowerment of women, only to find that the contradictions to be resolved are more firmly anchored in her psyche than elsewhere. In addition to her unexorcised ghosts and the legacies of a chequered love life, she has to contend with recalcitrant public opinion and moral inertia, the opposition of old-guard reactionaries, and the incomprehension of her small-town parents.

House of Falling Women is a poignant, often hilarious story of the search by a group of women for a new place in society in a world where women are dissatisfied with the old values and bewildered by the new.

"At once shrewd and compassionate, funny and inspiring, Rosemary Ekosso's first novel is both a devastating critique of prevailing attitudes to women in her native Cameroon, and a recognition of the universal sexual interdependency that makes the struggle for equality so complex. Sympathetic characters and an intriguing plot make this an essential read for those concerned with women's aspirations both within and outside Africa."

Susana Mitchell

"House of Falling Women is a powerful story about the oppressive weight and irrationality of tradition, gender and class inequality, a desperate yearning for freedom and dignity, and a journey of self discovery, empowerment, and redemption."

Dibussi Tande

Rosemary Ekosso is a Cameroonian translator and court interpreter. She lives and works in the Netherlands.

ALICE WALKER'S OPEN LETTER ON RACE AND OBAMA

I apologize to my more faithful readers for not posting much of late. I am a little busy. However, while I get my act together, here is something from Alice Walker. It is a topical letter in that it addresses issues that people prefer to ignore as they watch the US polls.

At least in the eyes of some, Obama's pastor erred not because he said what he said, but because he dared to mention something that America prefers to ignore. Alice Walker makes many a point in her letter. It is well worth reading. Here's an excerpt:

It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton ( I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man."  One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact.  How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.  I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.  I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.

Wish we had many like her. The full letter follows.

OF IDOLS AND CLAY FEET: WAS GHANDI RACIST?

Early in 2000, Nelson Mandela wrote an article about Ghandi in TIME magazine. It was highly laudatory. Said Mr. Mandela: “He dared to exhort nonviolence in a time when the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had exploded on us; he exhorted morality when science, technology and the capitalist order had made it redundant; he replaced self-interest with group interest without minimizing the importance of self.”

The Wikipedia article on Ghandi says Nelson Mandela was inspired by him.

Martin Luther King was also influenced by Ghandi’s when he espoused non-violence.

These people are saints to many people, black and white. So is Ghandi.

Until fairly recently, I had no reason to question this. However, a few years ago, I read something about Ghandi’s racism towards black people in South Africa that I found deeply distressing. But I decided that it was just cyber-muckraking and ignored it.

The Disillusioned African, by Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Francis B. Nyamnjoh. The Disillusioned African. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Publishers, 2007. 264 pages. Available on Amazon.com & Michigan State University Press

The relatively few people who read books published and/or written by Africans (when they can find them) might find that some of these works are famous for little other than their typesetting errors. I once got into trouble for telling a rather self-regarding young reporter that while I thought it was a good thing for a country to have a vibrant private press, its effect was somewhat marred by the fact that half the words in his newspaper were spelled backwards.

Needless to say, we did not part on friendly terms. However, the reason I mentioned this is that Langaa, which last year published the book I am attempting to review (it was first published in 1995 by Nooremac press) seems to have escaped this. It is true that a meal is much more that the plate on which it is served, but one does rather like clean plates in these matters.

Why can’t the English be more like the French?

An Englishwoman, Sarah Long, had an excerpt of a book published in the online version of the Sunday times, a British newspaper, in November last year. The excerpt from the book is hilarious in itself, and for personal reasons, I intend to buy the book.

But what has been even more revealing is the comments on the article which, at last count, had reached 247. The article is purportedly written by a French woman of some means who moves to England with her husband. It is less than flattering about the English. But the catch is that it is written by an Englishwoman (Sarah Long), not a Frenchwoman, as many of the commenters failed to realise. This means that, feeling themselves to be under fire from the French, a number of English people have abandoned their “traditional” tact and said some very rude things about French people.

It makes you wonder…

One of the kindest comments about British food I saw was this:

“ It doesn't have to look good to taste good.”

I don’t agree, actually, as I have had some very good British food, but as one of the comments says, it’s the cook, not the food.

Anyway, here’s a selection from the comments:

The angry ones:

“I would strongly suggest that the author packs her bags, heads back to Paris and hands her passport in to the French authorities with all possible haste!”

“…an obnoxious article from a woman from a country that is completely irrelevant in today's world.”

“I think we have declared war over less!”

“Yet the suicide rate in France is 2.5 times higher than the UK ((Source WHO International))”

“Well, we may all have huge bottoms but at least we use proper toilets here in England, unlike the French, who insist on going by the side of the road. Leave Paris and not ten miles out of the city you start to see country lanes strewn with toilet paper. Disgusting. I went to France once and never want to see the place again.”

“Dressing well has never been a big thing here in the UK. You'll get used to it…Pretentious, sanctimonious, arrogant, small-minded, boring, chauvinistic. Very French indeed.”

Here’s one of the(sad-but)-true ones from a Brit who thinks his country has gone to the dogs:

“…The country is increasingly anti elitist, ferociously aggressively and smugly working class and anti intellectual. There are little of the old glories remaining. The BBC, for whom I used to work, is imploding, The cost of housing!, the revolting health system…”

And here’s a balanced one:

“Hortense is an alter ego, a vehicle for Long to simultaneously expose the vanity and chauvinism of the French, and the slobbishness and insularity of the English.”

I find the whole thing, apart from being absolutely hilarious, also revealing in the extent to which tribal affiliations come to the fore, especially in the comfortable anonymity of the Internet. I remember thinking the same thing when the unspeakable Dr. Watson said black people are inferior. There were hundreds of comments saying, in essence: you know it’s true; I worked with a black person for a while and believe me, they’re ALL this or that or the other really bad thing.  We should stop being politically correct and call a spade a spade.

Yes, but it’s terribly hard when it’s your spade, eh? Especially when you know that it’s not a spade but a highly polished silver spoon.

One of the comments said:

“Hahaha this article is a blast. And the reaction by some English people is priceless! Hand out criticism but take none! So English!”

I think it is a bit of a generalisation. However, part of me is hoping that at least one of those people who insulted me and my kind in response to the Watson story was furious at being insulted by the generalisations of a “Frenchwoman” about the English.

Poetic justice, I call it.

Click here to read the article and the comments. I think it is a different way of looking at our "former" masters.

Letter from Judy, Kenya

The following is from an e-mail from the friend of a friend, who is in Kenya as post election turmoil rocks that country.

In reading it, it has come to me that this is eerily like a blueprint for what I fear will be Cameroon’s descent into hell when the time comes. The time will come.

It will come because people eventually become restive when power is kept in one sphere for what they consider to be too long, especially if such power is not perceived to be used wisely, and they become very angry when they think that the power has been retained by fraudulent means. This is what, as the posting below shows, has happened in Kenya.

It is a riveting story, told by a trained and balanced observer with a good eye for telling examples.

Article in the Proletarian : Africans need true independence not imperialist 'charity'

I found a 2005 article that reflects much of what I have been saying on this blog about Africa's relationship with the West.

As I have said before, what galls me is the hypocrisy that permeates everything the Western world, or at least its governments, would like us to believe about ourselves. The article that follows is reproduced with the kind permission of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It  reflects the socio-economic and political views of its author, and while I do not consider myself to be a  socialist or communist, I was struck by the careful research that produced it. It shows what people can do when they start thinknig for themselves. I was particularly interested in the following statement, which is attributed to John Pilger:

"At present, for every $1 of 'aid' to Africa, $3 are taken out by western banks, institutions and governments - and that does not account for the repatriated profit of transnational corporations."

I have seen equally damning analyses elsewhere, particularly in a paper written by John Christensen and first presented at the World Social Forum in Nairobi in January 2007. We shall return to Christensen's paper in another blog post.

In order to appreciate the full measure of the brainwashing and contempt with which we are bombarded each day as Africans, we have to know what it is that is being done to us, and what "they" are getting out of it. This will help us understand why it is important for Africans to stop believing everything they read and hear about themselves on the mainstream media. I cannot comprehend how we can bankroll the lavish lifestyle of these people and still manage to be portrayed as the poor cousins to whom they have to give "aid".

Anyway, I shall leave you with this paragraph from the article itself:

The point to grasp about debt is not simply its size, but the fact that it reflects underlying property relations. The wealth of a society is appropriated by the capitalists and, in the case of Africa, Asia and Latin America, very often by a foreign superpower making superprofits by exploiting cheap labour resulting from derisory wages and terrible living conditions. Without a fundamental change in property relations, dropping the debt of the oppressed nations today (were financiers to accede to such demands) would simply result in re-accumulation of the debt tomorrow, since, while their wealth continues being sucked out by multinational corporations, these countries have no other way to pay for what basic services and infrastructure they have other than by borrowing.

The complete CPGB article follows below.

No Turning Back by Dibussi Tande

Published by Langaa, 2007, 59 pages.
Available at Michigan State University Press and on Amazon

This review will not deal with matters of style. I am concerned with the ideas that I perceive through this work, and their implications in a broader context. I am reminded, as I tap this out, that yesterday I saw press reports of alleged killings by the police in Bamenda, Cameroon.

These are the poems of a young man. However, they are not marred by the blind anger and naivete by which young men of literary bent draw attention to themselves, often to the embarrassment of their friends. The collection of poems is, considering the writer’s age when he wrote this, a candid and mature look at Cameroonian society with its head-in-the-sand approach to the politics of oppression.

The work is reminiscent of the liberation poetry that has sustained the soul of Latin America through decades of torture and human rights abuse. Such poetry, while not shying away from grief and pain, brings with it the freshness of hope for humanity in the face of the ancient and universal crime of not loving one’s neighbour as one loves oneself. It is the tenacity of this hope, I think, that will make this work resonate with victims the world over.

In using the word victim, I do not refer solely to those who have suffered the depredations of the brutal and unfair appendages of a system that has no regard for how its actions can shape the future, or to those whose lives have been lashed to shreds by the poisoned tentacles of its bureaucracy. I also refer to those who suffer but survive. For hope is life. A feature of that hope is the impulse, as expressed in these poems, to explore the full depth of emotion that our experience arouses. Those whose hope for the future is adulterated or destroyed by a combination of their action and failure to act, and who are incapable of introspection, are those who feel that this hope is directed against them.

But unlikely as it may seem to some, they too are victims. Consider the many quislings on the African continent.  As Dibussi puts it in False Prophet:

…another deceitful son
Aiming for a place in the sun

None of these quislings are anything but the lavatory down which common human decency is flushed by their Western masters. As such, I feel they deserve nothing but the pity and contempt I read in these lines.

What I have said so far might give the impression that this is a collection of hopeful jeremiads (if you’ll forgive the contradiction in terms). This is not so. Dibussi Tande is by turns impish (as in I Know why the Frog Croaks so Loud), stern as a judge (Boomerang), and even imperious (Freedom Now!!!).

I grappled (fairly unsuccessfully, it now seems to me) with French literature in my undergraduate years. We were taught for some time by a dreadful Frenchwoman who made us feel like dirt. But I have been surprised, in later years, to find that I remember something of what I read:

You! Hypocrite lecteur! Mon semblable! Mon frère!

That is Charles Baudelaire at his strident and posturing best. This line attracts our attention. It is designed to do so. But the reason it holds and keeps our attention is that it speaks to something in us. I would call it our shared humanity if I did not feel, on the strength of what I see on the news, that many human beings are really not terribly human at all. But it is the same feeling I get when I read Dibussi’s poems. For those who have the receptors for it, I think they will come as a jolt to the system. Perhaps it is our common memory that is triggered. I do not know.

But I think you should find out for yourselves what it is.

Now, just the briefest of words about other things. I have always found that rhyme can stunt an otherwise natural flow of poetry. I am not sure that one or two of these poems would have suffered from its absence.

Mugabe's Speech to the UN General Assembly

Mr. Mugabe is not the most popular man in the world at present. I have previously written on his land reforms and was as a result erroneously considered to be his supporter. In so far as Mr. Mugabe's actions mirror those of other African leaders in terms of his attitude to real democracy, I do not agree with him.

But his vilification, though couched in terms calculated to appeal to all lovers of freedom and democracy (or those who imagine themselves to be so), was and is based on the fact that he took land from white people and gave it to black people. The redistribution may have its problems, but it had to happen. For that alone, I consider him a hero. Shortcomings similar to those he is projected as suffering from are evinced by many other leaders, and yet they are not the victims of the degree of opprobrium that has been visited upon him.

Mr. Mugabe knows how to fight back, and so he has at the UN. The BBC websites reports it, but I would have thought that the story would be given more coverage instead of the cleverly selected quotations the write-up contains. But inscrutable are the ways of large media corporations in countries which are, at least in part, responsible for Zimbabwe's current situation.

The full text of Mr. Mugabe's speech follows.

Larry D. Crawford: Racism, Colorism and Power

One of most self-abasing thing a black person can do is to try to lighten his/her skin. This is brought home to me on a daily basis, because when I look at the white people around me and how much lighter their skin is than mine, I cannot imagine a day when I should pass for one of them.

This means that when people lighten their skin, it is in pursuit not of a certain goal, but, but of a marginally higher (or lower, depending on where you stand) rung of a ladder whose end they will never see. You can never bleach yourself enough to pass for white. Even if you do, your nose and lips will give you away.

I think this skin lightening business is the clearest sign of our identity crisis. If you are black, why would you want to be white when you know the history of the interaction between black and white people? I understand trying to learn from him. The white man knows many things – not nearly as many as he thinks he does, perhaps, and his knowledge is not always honestly or honourably acquired. But he knows many things. But however much I admire his knowledge, I do not want to be him. I do not want to look like him. What is the point of it?

I have just discovered an essay about this by Larry D. Crawford. I do not know to what extent I agree with it, but I thought it was worth passing on. You tell me what you think.

Here's an except that will take you to the article:

The social ranking of people by skin tone within the Afrikan community requires serious, open and ongoing discussion as to its roots, manifestations and tenacity because it continuously feeds divisive political relations, particularly along class and gender lines. Colorism intensifies the intragroup antagonisms already aggravated by infighting over a limited number of discarded political and economic crumbs. The proverbial divide and conquer strategy endures because it is nursed, not because we have nothing in common.

Enjoy.

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The Cotton Wars: How Many Lives did your Shirt Cost?

When I need to buy bed sheets and table cloths, I source them from back home in Cameroon. This is expensive, of course, but I shall go on doing it. Over and above stylistic considerations, the grave injustice suffered by African cotton farmers helps to sustain my resolve never to buy anything made of cotton over here if I can manage it.

There are many websites which discuss the injustices of the cotton trade. I shall not dwell on the causes. I just want to pinpoint one aspect of it: the hypocrisy and misinformation.

Addax article: Cigarettes for Nigerian Children

I once read somewhere that at the height of the BSE (mad cow disease) crisis, British exports of beef to Nigeria increased by 300 per cent. I have searched high and low for the source of that statistic, but I cannot find it.

But I visited this ste a while ago, and bookmarked it for my blogging purposes. I have now remebered the story, and so I offer you another tale of amoral greed  to join the all-too-many similar tales.

Read on...the English article is below the French.

A Squalid End to Empire: British Retreat from Africa

Colonial history, seen from the side of the colonists, can be summarised as follows:

I came, I saw, I conquered. Then I lied about it.

The BBC radio 4 website has a story called Rigging Nigeria. I have not actually listened to the documentary, but I was intrigued, as you might imagine, by the title. The website claims that the British rigged the elections in Nigeria in 1960 to counter the threat of communism. You will have heard the recent outcry about the Nigerian elections and how deeply flawed they allegedly were. I decided to do a bit of digging, and came up with a mother lode of corroboration of this tale of British duplicity in dealing with its colony. All things are revealed in the fullness of time, in spite of official secret acts, hundred-year gagging orders and that sort of thing.

I have been struck, in writing this, about just how little I really know about what went on in colonial times. I think this is dangerous ignorance on my part, and I have resolved to do something about it…starting with force-feeding you the results of my peregrinations in the ether.

The Chagos islands: the British government’s recipe for dehumanisation

Ingredients
Warmongering
An innate sense of racial superiority
Landgrabbing
A god complex.
Method
Start in 17th and 18th century
First, uproot people from their homeland
Enslave them or otherwise press them into demeaning service
Then ignore them until a rich and powerful country wants their land
Next, turn your beady eye on this land, viewing the human inhabitants as an inconvenient weed on potentially lucrative real estate
Weed the natives out, referring to them as “Tarzan and Man Friday” , thus playing up racist stereotypes of savages who should be divested of their land because you are better at exploiting it.
Then lease the island to the rich and powerful nation in exchange for an 11 million pound discount on Polaris missiles.
Then lie about it all.
These are the bare bones. Now, let’s flesh it out.

THE STRANGE STORY OF THE BREAST-LOVING TORTOISE

There used to be a blogger in Arusha, Tanzania called Tunduzi who sometimes wrote human interest stories. The blogger remained anonymous, but admitted to working for the international tribunal based there. He  has unfortunately gone off the ether, but I was able to obtain one of his stories, written in 2006, I believe, which I reproduce here for your amusement.

There was a meeting held recently about a tortoise. Yes, you read right. A tortoise. There has been some sort of urban legend circulating about a tribunal employee who picks (or at least used to pick) up local girls in the street, take them to his house and ask them to let their mammary glands be interfered with by a tortoise. After that, the girls generally died, it was said.

It so happened, the story goes, that on one occasion, a girl who was picked up and taken to the man’s house managed to end up in hospital after her breast-feeding episode. With her dying breath, she told the medics the story of how a man had picked her up in the street, taken her to his home and made her indulge the tortoise. Before she could reveal the name or other identifying particulars of this strange pervert, she died, thus conveniently preventing anyone from finding out if the story really is true.

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Robert Zoellick and the World Bank: Putting the Fox in Charge of the Hen-House

In Cameroonian Pidgin English, when a person refuses to give up on something, he is said to “hold grass”. This image is drawn from small animals clinging desperately to grass to avoid being washed away by water.

We all saw how Mr. Paul Wolfowitz, (now, thankfully, former) head of the World Bank, held grass for weeks after it was brought to public notice that he was embroiled in a sordid scandal involving a female companion. Well, Mr. Wolfowitz was swept away by the flood of public opinion. And now the US government is offering to replace him with someone who is, as evidenced by the article below, even worse, especially for the Third World.

The grass-holding of the US government, which in the past few years has squandered whatever moral currency it ever garnered as the leader of the “free world”, should be a cause for great concern for those of us who cannot hold grass when faced with an unprincipled giant.

Third-worlders and Bank borrowers, take out your hankies and sniffle after me…

The article follows.

SO WE'RE CANNIBALS, ARE WE? PART II

I promised to examine two aspects of cannibalism in my previous posting. The first one was the claim that some medicine men use children’s body parts in their medicines. I shall examine this in the next article. This one’s just too long. The second thing I promised to examine is the historical accounts of cannibalism. How did this thing start and how had it come to be accepted as a fact that it did occur on the scale on which it is described? In my next and hopefully last posting on cannibalism, I will examine in some detail the case of reports of cannibalism in Africa.

In this article, I will start with the historical accounts of the practice. There is such a plethora of “evidence” that I shall have to limit my rant to two cases. Let us start with this quotation from J. Q. Jacobs , who wrote a really interesting study of portrayals of cannibalism. You can read the entire article here:

SO WE'RE CANNIBALS, ARE WE?

Sometime in 1992, I was talking to the nursemaid who lived with one of my sisters. Her name was Emilia, and she was an Ibibio girl from Nigeria. We were expounding on the relative merits of our countries. Then Emilia said a startling thing:

“I don’t like Cameroonians because they eat people.”

I had been doing quite well in the argument, but this gave me pause. I had grown up “knowing” that though not all Nigerians ate people, some of them did. Obviously, Emilia had been brought up to believe the same thing of Cameroonians.

Time passed.

A few months ago, I was talking to a European friend in the office, and we got on to this cannibalism business. I said many of those stories were made by Europeans who wanted to find an excuse to steal from people with impunity. But she mentioned that there had been cultures where this thing was accepted practice, like those people in the New Guinea who got a strange disease, kuru, from eating people. I blustered a little after that, but I was stumped. This is what I also “knew”. I decided to find out more about cannibalism.

Chinua Achebe's Famous Essay, Part II

Now that I have rid myself of the jumble of thoughts that filled my head when I read the Achebe essay again, I shall allow you to read it for yourselves without further comment. I did think of writing a sort of commentary, but it would spoil the fun, wouldn’t it?

Enjoy the master!

On reading a great man: Chinua Achebe's famous Conrad essay

I studied Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, as an undergraduate. The Norton edition of the novel I used at the time included several critical articles. One of them was Chinua Achebe’s essay, An image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Never have I, on reading something, agreed with someone so strongly that it brought the tears to my eyes. Never have I admired a writer more.

That was fifteen or so years ago. I have just reread the article again, and it has lost none of his power. It has caused me to start thinking of two main aspects of my relationship with the people on this continent. I am referring how much the people I rub shoulders with know about the world I come from. I am also referring to the things that make me different from them.

In this post, I shall rant and rave a little about what the article brings to mind, but I shall publish another post, possibly next week, which deals with the essay in greater detail.

Achebe is an excellent writer. But though his style makes the article delightful to read, it is the content that is gripping. I can hardly describe the exhilaration that his words inspire. For African lovers of football, imagine if your country were to win the world cup. Then think of this from an intellectual viewpoint. Think of it in terms of cogent, beautiful argument that allows no intelligent or honest riposte.

Mr. Blair and Africa: first, do no harm

I love this blogger’s satire:

Tony Blair is to launch a range of cosmetics upon leaving office, DeadBrain can reveal. The first of those, Blair Foundation, has already been developed and was discovered by our intrepid reporter during a bored afternoon searching the internet.

It’s alright to send Mr. Blair up, I suppose. If you cannot get rid of a leader you do not like, you might as well laugh at him.

But I’m picking another bone here.

Foreign aid: This kind of 'help' is just no help at all

By Michael Holman, The Africa Report
October 2006

From Kubatana.net

The multi-billion dollar aid industry has largely failed in Africa. Not only have they failed along with others in the aid industry, most nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become part of the problem. Not that they will admit their failure. They refuse to share the blame for the grim record. Instead they have closed ranks - along with UN development agencies and bilateral agencies - and all sing from the same hymn sheet: 'Aid works', they claim. 'Give us even more money and we will complete the job…'

They would say that, wouldn't they? The alternative is far too uncomfortable. The rapid growth of NGOs dealing with Africa has given them enormous power, but they have been slow to adapt to their responsibilities.

Increasingly, NGOs are becoming the spending agents of government development agencies, and are losing their independence. One consequence of their increasing role in Africa has been the atrophy of the muscles of the State in Africa, which in turn erodes loyalty to the State - and I think this goes to the heart of the problems that beset Africa, from corruption to low domestic savings.

The BAE scandal: big business, government and the lack of morality

BAE says the following in its bit on corporate responsibility on its website:

We must fully understand and comply with laws and controls governing defence exports everywhere we operate, and ensure we meet the highest standards of conduct in our work.

I don’t want to sound prejudiced, but a company that sells weapons that are then used in wars to facilitate the killing and maiming of countless human beings really shouldn’t say things like that in public. When you sell things like tanks and fighter jets, what do you think they’ll be used for? Playing tennis? But then BAE is not the only weapons systems company in the phonebook. There are many others.

The reason BAE has been in the news of late, however, is not because it sells weapons systems. It is because of a corruption scandal.

OF TOMMY HILFIGER AND OTHER URBAN LEGENDS

How many of you have heard that Tommy Hilfiger said if he had known that black people would like his clothes, he would never have made them? How many of you believed that it was an actual racist comment by the designer, made on the Oprah Winfrey show?

And how did you hear of it? Someone forwarded you an e-mail, right?

Well, according to this article on about.com, this information is wrong.

Are we Failed States?

In a 16 November 2006 New York Times article by one Howard French, Africa is described as follows: “home to the greatest collection of failed states and underdeveloped nations anywhere”.

I take issue, with this. I take issue really bad.

Mr. French is by no means the first person to use this term, and he may be guilty of nothing more than subscribing to received wisdom. Lord knows there are enough people out there writing about failed states, and even, in the case of this website and this one, publishing a failed state index. I do not really quibble with the failed states indices as such, although one might say that such indices should examine the underlying causes of what they describe as state failure rather than dwelling on the results.

But how long does a state exist before it can be described as having failed?

Dr George Ayittey on China (France) and Africa

SOURCE

The write-up below was posted on an online forum in response to a discussion about what China wants in Africa and how Africans should view this new pragmatic "friendship". Dr. Ayittey, the author, is a professor at Howard University and a respected academic and published author. His works includes Africa Unchained, Africa Betrayed, and other books and articles.

I have Dr. Ayittey's permission to post the article. I have taken the liberty of editing out direct references to the participants in the argument. Other than that, the article is almost unchanged.

Read on...I promise you will not be bored.

STARBUCKS AND ETHIOPIAN COFFEE: THE BITTER TASTE OF EXPLOITATION

If you go to the website of Starbucks, the international coffee chain, this is what you will read: