A sad building in Kisumu, Kenya, which is a very pretty city. Much of Kisumu burned in the 2008 post-election violence, but those trees look too old for the damage to be recent.
Africa
Kenyan film Togetherness Supreme
This film, which takes place in Kibera, looks interesting. Wish I could make the screening of the behind-the-scenes footage today.
A Marshall Plan for Africa? Hmm…
I am feenin’ for my podcasts lately, but expensive bandwidth means I rarely get to download to my heart’s content. I took advantage of a recent Safaricom promo to get updated on all the old episodes of NPR’s Planet Money, one of my favorites. On that recent 18-hour drive from Nairobi to Dar, I had more than enough time to catch up on them.
The episode called A Marshall Plan for Africa had me intrigued. It is a criticism of Jeffrey Sachs’s approach to poverty alleviation (big amounts of planned aid) that is quite different, as far as I can see, from Sachs’s arch-critic William Easterly’s position. In the podcast, Glenn Hubbard, a former economic adviser to the Bush administration, describes his vision for lifting Africa out of poverty. Basically, he wants a Marshall Plan-style lending program to fund Africa’s middle class. (He argues that the Marshall Plan was a lending program, not an aid package.) Continue reading
Africa: the upper middle class experience
It’s not all 18-hour bus rides.
The picture of Africa’s growing middle class is sometimes lost among the breathless dispatches from more rustic corners of the continent. I thought it’s worth posting this photo I just took in the Java House in Sarit Center, Nairobi, an upscale mall in the Westlands neighborhood. Having just enjoyed a perfectly brewed latté and a blue cheese hamburger, I am now surfing the net for free on my laptop.
Long gone bus rides
During this epic 18 hour ride from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam (really, not recommended — do it in two days) we got a flat on the high savanna below Mt. Meru, and were detained in the Arusha police station for nearly two hours. There was a passenger who was supposed to get down there but refused; the police made everyone wait while they took statements from the bus company people and the passenger. I’m not even sure what happened in the end. My eyes were red and nerves frazzled by the time we pulled into Kariakoo.
But views of vast Africa through poetically dirty bus windows, like this shot about three hours south of Moshi, made it all worth it.
Heading out again tomorrow.
More on Mwalimu
There’s been some interesting debate on the relevance of Julius Nyerere in the comments field of my blog (thanks to the input of the great TZ blog louder than swahili). On the subject, this week’s East African had a nice column about the ambiguity of Nyerere’s life and contributions, check it out. It’s hard to sum up Nyerere’s real contribution to Tanzania, but I remain impressed by his vision, which almost singularly among leaders of his era transcended tribe and the other constraints that colonialism foisted on the continent. I got more convinced of that after watching the documentary “Mwalimu: The Legacy of Kabarage Nyerere” at the Kenya Film Festival last week. (This film has almost no presence on the internet, which is unfortunately not too big of a surprise for something coming out of TZ.)
Good conflict media
In the last week, I came across two pieces of media about conflict that impressed me. One is a book called Kenya Burning. The other is a movie called This is Lebanon (Hayda Lubnan) that I saw for free at the Kenya Film Festival (sweet!). Continue reading
Nairobi
Jacaranda trees, cool breezes, a downtown that feels something like San Francisco (for lack of a better reference point). Seventeen hours on a rickety train, terminating in a landscape that looks something like the high desert between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, or the llano further east. Except that there are giraffes running off the train tracks here, ostriches prancing wild, and bizarre birds alighting and something hairy and baboonish lumbering through the bush.
I must be in Nairobi. It seems like life has been drawing me here for awhile. Continue reading
Greetings from Mombasa
Over the last two days I took the beautiful ride throught the verdant Usambara mountains of Tanzania to Tanga, and then on to Mombasa by way of a scraggly coastal road: red dirt, thatched villages in stands of coconut palms that looked like they could have been transplanted from Fiji, stout lonely baobabs on the hilltops. Continue reading
What do Lil Wayne, Jesus Christ and the Holy Qur’an have in common?
Not much! Except that a guy was selling posters of all three on a sidewalk near Kariakoo the other day. Also, check out the awesome Rambo bag distributed at the local vegetable market.
"You could love me or hate me/I swear to God it won't make me or break me..."
It's like they finished designing this bag and thought, "Crap, we didn't include any cpoyright violations. What can we slap on here?"
Eamon Kircher-Allen 