thanks, zapiro (check him out here).
Friday, February 23, 2007
Thursday, February 22, 2007
happy birthday, jackass
I know, I know. But the idea that Bob here gets to eat cake while there is literally no bread in the shops, inflation is at a world record 1600%, and life expectancy has dropped to 36 (the lowest on the planet), well, it really pisses me off. That's his wife Grace on the left, and the martini glasses hold an 8 and a 3. Which is already more than double what most Zimbabweans are getting these days. Mugabe has been P-resident since 1980 and recently parliament voted to move the dates of the next election from 2008 to 2010, so that prez and parl can be chosen at the same time. I haven't been to Zimbabwe since 2002 but i'm going there for Easter, and in some ways I am really not looking forward to it at all.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
go well, ryszard
He certainly never knew it, but I am quite sure that Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist and interpreter of Africa extraordinaire, helped me to get my first job out of grad school. In the guest lecture I gave in a comparative politics class as part of my job interview, I read aloud from one of his books. Yes, I know, it sounds odd. But in talking about the development of the state in Africa, I read Kapuscinski’s description of Idi Amin. “Everywhere he went, it was as if Amin moved the state with him,” he wrote, I read, separating the weight of each word carefully, placing them gently into the ears of the students staring at me. The dean himself also sat in the front row, rapt, and told me later that to him my reading was more like dramatic performance. But it was Kapuscinski’s words that animated the room that day.
For a journalist, Kapuscinski was a freak. He was eloquent, modest, and lived in slums and got robbed with sides of TB and malaria. He was so far off the journalist’s path that, when I first read one of his books, I refused to believe he actually WAS a journalist. He covered the entire continent, loved it, breathed it in, and wasn’t big on talking to government officials. Real people were what mattered. Real people in villages sprinkling the countryside, people without food or reliable income or access to power. A traveling companion of Kapuscinski’s once remarked, “Because people from Europe spend their time here only in the cities and drive along the major roads, they cannot even imagine what our Africa looks like.”
Kapuscinski, however, makes imagining possible:
“More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun. Just yesterday, an autumnal London was drenched in rain. The airplane drenched in rain. A cold wind, darkness. But here, from the morning’s earliest moments, the airport is ablaze with sunlight, all of us in sunlight.
In time past, when people wandered the world on foot, rode on horseback, or sailed in ships, the journey itself accustomed them to the change. Images of the each passed ever so slowly before their eyes, the stage revolved in a barely perceptible way. The voyage lasted weeks, months. The traveler had time to grow used to another environment, a different landscape. The climate, too, changed gradually. Before the traveler arrived from a cool Europe to the burning equator, he already had left behind the pleasant warmth of Las Palmas, the heat of Al-Mahara, and the hell of the Cape Verde Islands.
Today, nothing remains of these gradations. Air travel tears us violently out of snow and cold and hurls us that very same day into the blaze of the tropics. Suddenly, still rubbing our eyes, we find ourselves in a humid inferno. We immediately start to sweat. If we’ve come from Europe in the wintertime, we discard overcoats, peel off sweaters. It’s the first gesture of initiation we, the people of the North, perform upon arrival in Africa.”
-Ryszard Kapuscinski
First three paragraphs of “The Shadow of the Sun”
For a journalist, Kapuscinski was a freak. He was eloquent, modest, and lived in slums and got robbed with sides of TB and malaria. He was so far off the journalist’s path that, when I first read one of his books, I refused to believe he actually WAS a journalist. He covered the entire continent, loved it, breathed it in, and wasn’t big on talking to government officials. Real people were what mattered. Real people in villages sprinkling the countryside, people without food or reliable income or access to power. A traveling companion of Kapuscinski’s once remarked, “Because people from Europe spend their time here only in the cities and drive along the major roads, they cannot even imagine what our Africa looks like.”
Kapuscinski, however, makes imagining possible:
“More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun. Just yesterday, an autumnal London was drenched in rain. The airplane drenched in rain. A cold wind, darkness. But here, from the morning’s earliest moments, the airport is ablaze with sunlight, all of us in sunlight.
In time past, when people wandered the world on foot, rode on horseback, or sailed in ships, the journey itself accustomed them to the change. Images of the each passed ever so slowly before their eyes, the stage revolved in a barely perceptible way. The voyage lasted weeks, months. The traveler had time to grow used to another environment, a different landscape. The climate, too, changed gradually. Before the traveler arrived from a cool Europe to the burning equator, he already had left behind the pleasant warmth of Las Palmas, the heat of Al-Mahara, and the hell of the Cape Verde Islands.
Today, nothing remains of these gradations. Air travel tears us violently out of snow and cold and hurls us that very same day into the blaze of the tropics. Suddenly, still rubbing our eyes, we find ourselves in a humid inferno. We immediately start to sweat. If we’ve come from Europe in the wintertime, we discard overcoats, peel off sweaters. It’s the first gesture of initiation we, the people of the North, perform upon arrival in Africa.”
-Ryszard Kapuscinski
First three paragraphs of “The Shadow of the Sun”
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
mmmm, sparkly
[just in time for Valentine’s Day…ah, I’m laughing now…]
Last week while in South Africa, I saw the movie “Blood Diamond.” This decision was, in some ways, against what remains of my better judgment, because I know it would make me angry. But I couldn’t quite NOT see it either, so, there I was. The movie is about how alluvial diamonds in Sierra Leone fueled a rebellion that turned kidnapped children into drug-addicted murderers who chopped off the hands of the less cooperative, and made a few gun runners and smugglers wealthy. It is also yet another movie about Africa through the eyes of white people – a South African smuggler and an American journalist. And imagine! They somehow find love and screw in a landscape swarming with mostly crazed, heavily armed Africans killing each other, but for one good black man (who just happened to find a big fat rock) trying to save his family. A surprising approach, no. But still infuriating, definitely.
A bit of background. Last year in my African Politics class, I gave a lecture on diamonds. I started with the whole idea of a wedding ring – a prehistoric reminder of ownership and property. Some historians say that it comes from women being bound hand and foot when married off. Once she learned to behave and promised not to run away, her feet were untied. Eventually her hands would also be released, with the exception of a single strand left around her finger as a reminder. Romantic, no?
Then, there are stories about gemstones and royalty in Europe going back hundreds of years. Eventually we work our way up to DeBeers, the largest diamond company on the planet. DeBeers is South African and controls the vast majority of the world diamond market by hoarding diamonds and heavily restricting sales to artificially inflate their value. DeBeers built prisons for the apartheid government in exchange for the labor of black prisoners who had done unconscionable things like walk through a white neighborhood on the way home without a government-issued pass. DeBeers is largely responsible for a marketing campaign in the 1930s and 40s that created the idea of the engagement ring and the two-month salary rule. They actually sent sales reps from jeweler to jeweler to talk about their stones, weddings, and how much men should be advised to spend. So much for cultural tradition (for another iteration, see the more recent ‘right-hand ring’ campaign – though you have to go to this site to connect DeBeers with ‘a diamond is forever’…).
As I am sure most of you know I could rant on about this for a while. I must have had my angry juice this morning. But let’s get back to the movie. Nothing about its setup surprised me in any way. It’s simple, it sells. And Leo DiCaprio has come a long way since The Blue Lagoon, baby. We are, however, talking about a cadre of actors and filmmakers who did not even go on a ‘fact-finding’ trip about diamonds in Africa until after the film was already in the can. AFTER. And did I mention that the trip they did take was organized by none other than DeBeers?
But here’s the kicker. Jennifer Connelly’s character, the well-meaning journalist, says tearfully towards the end (as Leo’s mocking her for thinking writing makes any difference…wait…), “But if those girls KNEW someone died for that stone, they wouldn’t BUY them!!” Or something like that.
Now that, as my brother would say, is one metric shit ton of crap. Stories about blood diamonds have been in the American media for years. Granted, they are not exactly first on the evening news, but they are out there. This is not new information. Even here we have a few models who cried when they found out that the Botswanan government moved the San out of an area in which they wanted to sell mining concessions. And at the same time, DeBeers was recently allowed to begin opening stores in New York and Beverly Hills. Sounds like their market is really shrinking. And I am foolish, but not so foolish as to think that the sorority girl in the back row of my African Politics class is going to forego that diamond engagement ring she’s been taught to fantasize about since she was in a frilly pink dress because of her crazy professor’s stories.
What exactly would it take, do you think?
Last week while in South Africa, I saw the movie “Blood Diamond.” This decision was, in some ways, against what remains of my better judgment, because I know it would make me angry. But I couldn’t quite NOT see it either, so, there I was. The movie is about how alluvial diamonds in Sierra Leone fueled a rebellion that turned kidnapped children into drug-addicted murderers who chopped off the hands of the less cooperative, and made a few gun runners and smugglers wealthy. It is also yet another movie about Africa through the eyes of white people – a South African smuggler and an American journalist. And imagine! They somehow find love and screw in a landscape swarming with mostly crazed, heavily armed Africans killing each other, but for one good black man (who just happened to find a big fat rock) trying to save his family. A surprising approach, no. But still infuriating, definitely.
A bit of background. Last year in my African Politics class, I gave a lecture on diamonds. I started with the whole idea of a wedding ring – a prehistoric reminder of ownership and property. Some historians say that it comes from women being bound hand and foot when married off. Once she learned to behave and promised not to run away, her feet were untied. Eventually her hands would also be released, with the exception of a single strand left around her finger as a reminder. Romantic, no?
Then, there are stories about gemstones and royalty in Europe going back hundreds of years. Eventually we work our way up to DeBeers, the largest diamond company on the planet. DeBeers is South African and controls the vast majority of the world diamond market by hoarding diamonds and heavily restricting sales to artificially inflate their value. DeBeers built prisons for the apartheid government in exchange for the labor of black prisoners who had done unconscionable things like walk through a white neighborhood on the way home without a government-issued pass. DeBeers is largely responsible for a marketing campaign in the 1930s and 40s that created the idea of the engagement ring and the two-month salary rule. They actually sent sales reps from jeweler to jeweler to talk about their stones, weddings, and how much men should be advised to spend. So much for cultural tradition (for another iteration, see the more recent ‘right-hand ring’ campaign – though you have to go to this site to connect DeBeers with ‘a diamond is forever’…).
As I am sure most of you know I could rant on about this for a while. I must have had my angry juice this morning. But let’s get back to the movie. Nothing about its setup surprised me in any way. It’s simple, it sells. And Leo DiCaprio has come a long way since The Blue Lagoon, baby. We are, however, talking about a cadre of actors and filmmakers who did not even go on a ‘fact-finding’ trip about diamonds in Africa until after the film was already in the can. AFTER. And did I mention that the trip they did take was organized by none other than DeBeers?
But here’s the kicker. Jennifer Connelly’s character, the well-meaning journalist, says tearfully towards the end (as Leo’s mocking her for thinking writing makes any difference…wait…), “But if those girls KNEW someone died for that stone, they wouldn’t BUY them!!” Or something like that.
Now that, as my brother would say, is one metric shit ton of crap. Stories about blood diamonds have been in the American media for years. Granted, they are not exactly first on the evening news, but they are out there. This is not new information. Even here we have a few models who cried when they found out that the Botswanan government moved the San out of an area in which they wanted to sell mining concessions. And at the same time, DeBeers was recently allowed to begin opening stores in New York and Beverly Hills. Sounds like their market is really shrinking. And I am foolish, but not so foolish as to think that the sorority girl in the back row of my African Politics class is going to forego that diamond engagement ring she’s been taught to fantasize about since she was in a frilly pink dress because of her crazy professor’s stories.
What exactly would it take, do you think?
"i care"
A friend of mine suggested to me a few days ago that in fact, most people don’t care about poor people. “I’ve literally been sitting in meetings where someone will say, ‘I don’t have time for the poor!’” he insisted.
I argued. I felt I had to. I also felt he wasn’t quite right. But it wasn’t because of some burgeoning faith in humanity’s fundamental goodness. It was because I wanted to spin his comment differently.
“I think they care in the abstract,” I said. “Like, oh, wow, that’s really too bad that she’s living in a dumpster and he has no access to medicine. It really shouldn’t be that way! Let me put on a ribbon to show everyone else that I care, that I think it’s BAD! And then I can go back to sipping my cappuccino and planning my trip to Hawaii and feeling good about myself. Whew!”
He laughed with a sharp bitterness that is increasingly familiar to me.
“It’s like looking at a puppy,” I continued. “You go, awwwww, isn’t that adorable, I really FEEL something warm and fuzzy here…for about ten seconds…then I go on with my life. Don’t KICK the dog. Just give it a pat. And then walk away.”
I wasn’t being terribly articulate, I admit. But I was trying to get at something I’ve been trying to, well, get at for a long time. It’s the gap between what we know and how we act. Maybe it’s more a matter of what we are willing to know, and the extent to which we are willing to align our behavior with that knowledge. I’m not sure. But I do know it’s easy not to pay attention – to poverty, to HIV, to developing world debt, to the war, whatever. And it’s easy because it doesn’t really affect the lives of most people in the West. Not really. I know that when I go back to the States, I have a good job. I can go to the grocery store and buy onions any time I feel like it (Botswana decided to ban onion importation because we should be able to grow our own…but instead, we have no onions). I can call my parents, go on vacation, sleep on flannel sheets in the winter and crisp cotton in the summer with no malarial mosquitoes lurking in the curtain folds. And I can make my own cappuccino.
Now before I piss anyone off, let me say as well that I clearly am as guilty of not being affected as anyone else. I can’t figure out how to align my actions more closely with what’s going on in my head (ok, maybe that would be a disaster anyway). I’m swimming in a soupy sort of cognitive dissonance these days – somewhere between how I am, and the way I think I should be. I suppose that’s not so unusual, given that I work in a building where they lock the bathroom door when there’s no toilet paper and live in a house that has fleas (maybe – we’re still not sure).
I imagine that we all want our lives to ‘add up’ somehow – to amount to something, to have weight and shape and a pleasant taste when we take time to savor them. Here, I have a Zimbabwean sister – but I also have white friends who have lived in Africa for 15 years and can’t count a single black friend. I just spent three weeks in Europe, where among other things I bought a cobalt vase of Venetian glass and ate risotto with black truffles. But next week, I could go down with malaria and, well, possibly die. Last week I participated in a conservation workshop where one moment, I was being called “Dr. DeMotts” with a shovelful of thick disdain smeared on my title, and in the next I was asked to give a presentation to people who’ve been working the region for twenty years. Back, and forth, and back again. It’s just increasingly difficult to have my feet on the ground when I’m not sure whose ground it is, or what I’m doing on it. I asked my boss how he manages all the bouncing around between continents and cultures, and he said, “I’ve been doing it for twenty years.”
But that didn’t really answer my question.
I argued. I felt I had to. I also felt he wasn’t quite right. But it wasn’t because of some burgeoning faith in humanity’s fundamental goodness. It was because I wanted to spin his comment differently.
“I think they care in the abstract,” I said. “Like, oh, wow, that’s really too bad that she’s living in a dumpster and he has no access to medicine. It really shouldn’t be that way! Let me put on a ribbon to show everyone else that I care, that I think it’s BAD! And then I can go back to sipping my cappuccino and planning my trip to Hawaii and feeling good about myself. Whew!”
He laughed with a sharp bitterness that is increasingly familiar to me.
“It’s like looking at a puppy,” I continued. “You go, awwwww, isn’t that adorable, I really FEEL something warm and fuzzy here…for about ten seconds…then I go on with my life. Don’t KICK the dog. Just give it a pat. And then walk away.”
I wasn’t being terribly articulate, I admit. But I was trying to get at something I’ve been trying to, well, get at for a long time. It’s the gap between what we know and how we act. Maybe it’s more a matter of what we are willing to know, and the extent to which we are willing to align our behavior with that knowledge. I’m not sure. But I do know it’s easy not to pay attention – to poverty, to HIV, to developing world debt, to the war, whatever. And it’s easy because it doesn’t really affect the lives of most people in the West. Not really. I know that when I go back to the States, I have a good job. I can go to the grocery store and buy onions any time I feel like it (Botswana decided to ban onion importation because we should be able to grow our own…but instead, we have no onions). I can call my parents, go on vacation, sleep on flannel sheets in the winter and crisp cotton in the summer with no malarial mosquitoes lurking in the curtain folds. And I can make my own cappuccino.
Now before I piss anyone off, let me say as well that I clearly am as guilty of not being affected as anyone else. I can’t figure out how to align my actions more closely with what’s going on in my head (ok, maybe that would be a disaster anyway). I’m swimming in a soupy sort of cognitive dissonance these days – somewhere between how I am, and the way I think I should be. I suppose that’s not so unusual, given that I work in a building where they lock the bathroom door when there’s no toilet paper and live in a house that has fleas (maybe – we’re still not sure).
I imagine that we all want our lives to ‘add up’ somehow – to amount to something, to have weight and shape and a pleasant taste when we take time to savor them. Here, I have a Zimbabwean sister – but I also have white friends who have lived in Africa for 15 years and can’t count a single black friend. I just spent three weeks in Europe, where among other things I bought a cobalt vase of Venetian glass and ate risotto with black truffles. But next week, I could go down with malaria and, well, possibly die. Last week I participated in a conservation workshop where one moment, I was being called “Dr. DeMotts” with a shovelful of thick disdain smeared on my title, and in the next I was asked to give a presentation to people who’ve been working the region for twenty years. Back, and forth, and back again. It’s just increasingly difficult to have my feet on the ground when I’m not sure whose ground it is, or what I’m doing on it. I asked my boss how he manages all the bouncing around between continents and cultures, and he said, “I’ve been doing it for twenty years.”
But that didn’t really answer my question.
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