My Beauty Best Teacher

Chinua Achebe writing in the NYTimes:

What can Nigeria do to live up the promise of its postcolonial dream? First, we will have to find a way to do away with the present system of political godfatherism. This archaic practice allows a relative handful of wealthy men — many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs — to sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process. We will have to make sure that the electoral body overseeing elections is run by widely respected and competent officials, chosen by a nonpartisan group free of governmental influence or interference.
And we have to find a way to open up the political process to every Nigerian. Today, we have a system where only those individuals who can pay an exorbitant application fee and finance a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury are the ones able to run for the presidency.

In the end, I foresee that the Nigerian solution will come in stages. First we have to nurture and strengthen our democratic institutions — and strive for the freest and fairest elections possible. That will place the true candidates of the people in office. Within the fabric of a democracy, a free press can thrive and a strong justice system can flourish. The checks and balances we have spoken about and the laws needed to curb corruption will then naturally find a footing.

Kwame Anthony Appiah on honor:

via 3QuarksDaily

Susie Linfield writing in Guernica:

“Reconciliation” has become a darling of political theorists, journalists, and human-rights activists, especially as it pertains to the rebuilding of postwar and post-genocidal nations. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Rwanda. Numerous books and articles on the topic—some, though not all, inspired by Christian teachings—pour forth. It can plausibly be argued, of course, that in Rwanda—and in other places, like Sierra Leone and the Balkans, where victims and perpetrators must live more or less together—reconciliation is a political necessity. Reconciliation has a moral resonance, too; certainly it is far better than endless, corpse-strewn cycles of revanchism and revenge. Yet there is sometimes a disturbing glibness when outsiders tout the wonders of reconciliation, as if they are leading the barbarians from darkness into light. Even worse, the phenomenological realities—the human truths—of the victims’ experiences are often ignored or, at best, treated as pathologies that should be “worked through” until the promised land of forgiveness is reached.

In 3QuarksDaily Tolu Ogunlesi on a re-energized literary scene in Nigeria:

Image via Wikipedia

Lagos is suddenly a hot new destination for writers from all over the world – courtesy of the exploits and efforts of writers like Adichie. Her four-year-old annual Creative Writing workshop, sponsored by Nigeria’s oldest and biggest beer company (which before now appeared to be more at home with sponsoring music festivals and talent hunts) has brought Jason Cowley, Nathan Englander, Binyavanga Wainaina, Jackie Kay, Doreen Baingana and Dave Eggers to Lagos, to facilitate writing sessions. This year Ama Ata Aidoo, Niq Mhlongo...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali discusses tolerance and Islam during an interview about her new book Nomad:

If you compare the way Muslims take offence at perceived insults that are not insults, but are just a critical way of looking at their religion, then I start to ask myself, why are Muslims so hypersensitive to criticism and why don't they do anything with it except to respond by denying it or playing the victim? And I've come to the conclusion it's because of the gradual indoctrination – from parents, teachers – that everything in the Qur'an is true; Muhammad is infallible, you have to follow his example and defend Islam at all times, at all costs.

In 3QuarksDaily Tolu Ogunlesi writes:

Lamenting the presence of Nigeria on the US government’s list of “countries of interest” (in the war on terror), Nigerian writer and first African Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka told British journalist Tunku Varadarajan, at the Jaipur Literary Festival in January: “[Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab] did not get radicalized in Nigeria. It happened in England, where he went to university.”...[continue reading]

In 3QuarksDaily Aditya Dev Sood writes about India's 'Mela Economy'...analogues of our Jua Kali's,Nnewi's ,Suame Magazine's and other under recognized informal networks? :

In the absence of malls and supermarkets, and given the diffuse distribution of the population in the countryside, a system of local weekly markets operates, which cycles through the countryside, so that on any given day you might be able to find a local market less than five kilometers away. You might go there to buy groceries or staples or fuel or essential tools and supplies, but you might also go to sell what was cooking or pickling or spinning or weaving or otherwise in preparation within the house. Most of the buyers at such santhey-s or haat-s or peth-s or similar weekly local markets might at the same time or on other days be sellers. The relationship between buyers and sellers is direct, and in principle at least, reversible. Through the propagation of the charkha, the manual spinning wheel, Gandhi's social philosophy expressly enjoined all of us users to also be creators of value. The village market and Gandhian economy, therefore, follows a decentralized peer-to-peer model, the very antithesis of the modern retail chain, and of late capitalist consumerism in general.

Mela-s are more festive, extensive and intensified versions of local markets, conducted to an annual rather than weekly calendar, often in alignment with harvest cycles. The people must have something to trade and something to trade with, for there to be a reason for a mela. The form of the mela seems to promote a kind of critical regionalism, similar to the wine concept of terroir: the kinds and varieties of goods available can be known on the basis of where they are from, the special techniques were employed in the creation, and the distinctive natural materials of which they are constituted.

From United from Human Rights

Ideas  to ponder from the African Media Leaders Forum,Tolu Ogunlesi in 3QuarksDaily:

• Monetising content

• The Obama Effect

• The Law OF ‘KATO’

• The State Versus The Market

Pervez Hoodbhoy writes:

For three decades, deep tectonic forces have been silently tearing Pakistan away from the Indian subcontinent and driving it towards the Arabian peninsula. This continental drift is not physical but cultural, driven by a belief that Pakistan must exchange its South Asian identity for an Arab-Muslim one. Grain by grain, the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the rich soil that had nurtured a magnificent Muslim culture in India for a thousand years. This culture produced Mughul architecture, the Taj Mahal, the poetry of Asadullah Khan Ghalib, and much more. Now a stern, unyielding version of Islam (Wahhabism) is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis and saints who had walked on this land for hundreds of years.

Particularly relevant, black African and Arab scholars say, are accounts of how the African interpretation of Islam helped regulate the affairs of men, resolve disputes and provide a model of tolerance. Buried in the crumbling manuscripts of Timbuktu and neighboring cities, scholars are finding evidence of wars averted, sieges ended and lawlessness put to rest.
The information is all the more valuable for moderate Muslim leaders because of the rise of less tolerant forms of Islam, like Saudi Arabia's Wahhabism or the Salafist movement in Algeria, that are expanding their foothold.

In Bookforum James Gibbons writes:

Are we in the midst of an “African literary renaissance,” as Rob Spillman (author of God and Soldiers) contends, an el boom from the other side of the Atlantic? Perhaps, but the surge of African writing is tellingly different from the Latin American explosion of the ’60s. Besides being identified with magic realism (though not all its writers practiced it), the literature of the Latin American boom was already formed within the region’s own institutions and coteries before being packaged in translation and exported. The new African writing is emphatically not homegrown. Forged in the crucible of globalization, it is a literature largely of displacement and exile.

Abigail Tucker at the Smithsonian reviews George Steinmetz's aerial photography:

...his Africa pictures convey a kind of intimacy that comes only with a certain distance. His perspective is lofty but not detached, and it's informed by his love of geophysics, which he studied as an undergraduate at Stanford University. His aerial pictures trace human patterns, too, in the slums radiating from Cape Town, South Africa, for example, or the crowds at a Soweto cemetery assembled for Saturday morning funerals...[continue reading]

Helon Habila writes at Granta:

After 1985 the military regime systematically undermined the once-buoyant, fuel-driven economy of Nigeria. The country’s infrastructure collapsed. There were no plans for industrial and technological recovery. Local manufacturers couldn’t compete with the cheap foreign goods that were dumped daily on our shores: everything was imported, including toilet paper. Publishing was one of the businesses that was worst hit. What small market there had been, thanks to a pre-independence curiosity about African literature--which had encouraged energetic literary activity inside the country--fizzled out because ordinary people couldn’t afford to buy books for pleasure. The big publishing houses disappeared, to be replaced by small-time hustlers moonlighting as publishers...[continue reading]

From Edward Rackley at 3QuarksDaily:

Conté belonged to a dwindling species of wizened and paranoid leaders-for-life, whose ranks include Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Omar Bongo of Gabon. Once hailed as liberators and visionaries, they became pathetic parables of 'absolute power corrupting absolutely'. The psychological path from flamboyant liberator to murderous despot is dramatic stuff, and was ably fictionalized in The Last King of Scotland. An excellent non-fiction account of Mobutu Sese Seko’s rise and fall is Mobutu, Roi du Zaire, by Thierry Michel...[continue reading]