Archive for June, 2007
I should start by apologising. I am writing this using Microsoft (Micro$oft perhaps) Word on a PC running Windows XP. In a sense I am bringing the average down as Skunkers are generally dedicated open source warriors.
However I am using FireFox and this blog runs on WordPress both of which are open source so perhaps that is enough to balance things out (what is the verdict Skunkers?)
This is my first proper Skunkworks lecture. How Skunkworks Kenya works is one week they have a lecture on something IT related and the following week they have a more relaxed social gathering at Kengeles or some other spot in town. I seem to have only made it to the social gatherings thus far, skiving the lectures.
Today’s lecture is on ADSL and the format is quite interactive. Kip is at the front sharing his knowledge, most people are sitting back and listening, a couple a taking notes, and some, well they are messing around on their blogs. Questions are encouraged and are flowing. The range of questions is quite wide, some are purely technical, “How does this whole model change with the introduction of CDMA?”, to the practical, “We have tried ADSL in our office and now our ISP is suggesting that we try DSL. Is there any difference between the two?”, to the basic, “what does ADSL mean?”
If you are interested in IT, ICT, computers or simply want to learn something new every week that is IT related then you need to come to these meetings. Techie or not, geek or not, IT graduate or not, feelanga free like a fly in a fanta bottle.
Now let me get back to trying to understand what these guys are talking about!
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Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 7:05 PM
Get Your Smell On today at Skunkworks
When: Today the 26th of June 2007
Time: 18:00
Where: Training Room, Wananchi, 1st Floor Loita House, Nairobi
Presenter: Kip (do you have a website bruv?)
Topic: ADSL, Broadband stuff in general.
Come and find out why your internet is so slow and hopefully what you can do to speed it up (hint: may involve having to lay your own private submarine data cable).
Everyone welcome, yes that includes you, your better half, your clande, your clande’s better half etc.
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Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 3:31 PM
Well it has finally happened. The amount of attention this article has been getting means that I shall forever be tied to this domain and this blog:
I liked the separation between Mentalacrobatics and Daudi Were but hey it was time anyway.
Some advice if you want to remain anonymous as a blogger.
- Never ever go for a blogger’s conference/meet up/gathering. Those places are like show rooms for digital cameras.
- Do not talk to the main stream media, your name will come out eventually!
My only regret: that I never got around to finding a way to write a post with a link to goatse on this blog. Now that I have to be sensible, I probably never will.
(By the way http://goatse.cz/ do not open, don’t, just don’t, and do not OPEN. DO not, DON’T. NSFW! Just leave it alone, leave it, and don’t even think about it. Just smile and wave, just smile and wave and walk on by. I didn’t even hyperlink it so you’d have to cut and paste it, which is just sad. Just leave it, you’ll thank me for it. hehe.)
So that’s it, from now on, all sensible. I remember when people used to think that I was the other Daudi in the blogosphere. They would stay stuff like, that’s where you write your sensible stuff and Mentalacrobatics is where you mess around. Ha! The cheek. Especially when you consider that 90% of the people who read this blog think I am waaaaaay to serious for life.
Happy days. There are some bloggers who enjoyed revealing my name to newer bloggers (like it was big secret) and urging them, I imagine in a silly sinister voice like Skeletor from He-man, to “Google his name”. That would make me laugh because up to last week the top Google for Daudi Were was this page, so the new bloggers would email them back and say, ” Wow Mental is a serious scientist!” which would irritate the perpetrators even more, and apparently induce serious hallucinations (usually centred around imaginary “hacking”). Usijali one day nitatoboa vibaya - complete with screen shots, transcripts and recordings like my name was Githongo 
Happy days, eh, happy days.
The end of an era. No more food for thought, no more coming out the closet, no more big red buttons, all sensible from now on in. Promise!
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Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 11:57 PM
Lost in translation
At one of the evening dinners at TED Global I ended up sitting next to a group of Americans and we started discussing the TED bags that each one of us got. I told them the best thing in the bag for me, apart from the bag itself, was the torch (each bag came with a small yet powerful LED torch (number 6) ).
When I mentioned this, there was short silence, then they asked me,
“You got a TORCH?”
“Yeah”, I reply wondering why they would be so impressed. OK it is a bloody good torch but still.
“In your TED bag?”
“Yeah.”
“Can we see it?”
“Sure.”
I pull it out of my bag wondering which company these guys work for if they have never seen a torch before. Once they saw it, however, the disappointment on their face was telling.
Perplexed I ask them, “What did you expect?”
They explained that when I had said torch they thought I meant open flame, fire, as in burning torch, you know those things you dip into petrol and light at the end, to them that is a torch. You know, like that guy in the Fantastic Four who runs around on fire that is a torch.
To them what I was holding in my hand is a flashlight. To me, a flashlight or a flash is something you stick on top of camera when you want to take pictures in the dark.
OK I can see now why they were initially impressed. Imagine having one of those open flame “torches” in your rucksack just waiting for an opportune moment to light the petrol.
I blame Micro$oft and their “English (US)”!
How the players play
I asked another bunch if this was their first time in Africa, they said yes, they had been in Morocco for a couple of days and then flew to Arusha. So I asked them if they flew through Nairobi.
No, they said they flew straight from Morocco to Arusha.
So now I’m looking at them wondering what kind of a muppet they think I am, why the hell they would lie to me so badly, I mean which airline flies direct to Arusha from Morocco?
Just before I launched into a mini argument with them another Kenyan next to me notices the look on my face and whispers to me, “You guy, they came in their own plane.”
OHHHHH!
Serena Mountain Village, Arusha
Everyone thinks they had it going on but seriously the TED Group at Serena Mountain Village was fantastic. One of the guys predicts the future, another one is a leading Nollywood director, one has built the building with the most solar panels in Africa, one had a brilliant way of keeping intellectual debate going and another had the guts to show this picture during his 3 minute talk, meanwhile this geezer gave the best 3 minute talk any roommate of mine has ever given at a TED conference, at the same time Manu and I spent time debating the merits of a good single malt.
The TED veterans ensured we mixed and to be honest they even outlasted us and still sounded coherent at 5am. A better bunch of crazier yet interesting and completely unpretentious people you would not meet. All we were missing was a neo-con! I think there is a conspiracy going on here, aren’t neo-cons allowed to have passports by the US authorities? I have never met an American who says they voted for Bush. Aren’t they allowed to travel and leave America?
The lodge is very romantic and very honeymoon like. Luckily my roommate has already been on his honeymoon a couple of years back.
A Radio!
You may have heard that due to the generosity of the Google and AMD each of the TED Global Fellows will soon be getting a new Mac or PC laptop. What you may not have heard is that due to generosity of Noah Samara from Worldspace each fellow is also getting a satellite radio and an annual Worldspace subscription. As you can imagine we went, as a famous Kenyan blogger would put it, bananas. But I quickly realised I was going bananas for a different reason from everyone else. All the other fellows are going nuts over the Macs (is anyone seriously choosing a PC?) But me, I was going bananas over the radio.
Walalala.
Satellite radio, for one year. Yani I can wake up at 3am and tune into what the good people of Papua New Guinea are up to? And I’ve always wondered what the theme music for radio news in Peru sounds like. Now I’ll know. On News Year Eve I’ll start listening from Time Zone 1 and check out how each time zone celebrates the New Year! Imagine how many countdowns I will catch! Yeah ok, Macs are cool, very very cool. Lakini, you guy, a radio with a ka small satellite dish, come on now, what is cooler than that! Seriously!
Body no be wood
Umm well, yeah umm, ah ehhhh hmmm!!! If you know you know, if you don’t know, you don’t know, or ask a Nigerian. Don’t ask Google, it will just confuse you! However BNBW in the TED Global context may be slightly different from the traditional context. We kinda switched it into an ICT cheetah thing, (cough cough), let me just put it this way, YMMV, and I do not mean THAT mileage.
Kilimanjaro International Airport
Is there any reason why Kisumu airport can not be expanded to look and feel like Kilimanjaro airport?
TEDGlobal2007 | 
TEDGlobal
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Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 9:24 PM
Shashank Bengali the African correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers has written an article on the African blogosphere for his newspaper group. An edited version of the story was carried by the Miami Herald today. Shashank also runs a blog called “Somewhere in Africa” which is full of interesting read such as this post on the blogger/skunker/techie/TEDster/nyama choma lovers/penguins* meet up on Madaraka Day3 weeks ago.
(*Ask Riyaz about the penguins)
Aside: It is hard not to laugh nervously when a professional photographer is taking your mugshot in one of your regular cyber cafes! That may (or may not) explain why I look strange in the photo!
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Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 9:50 PM
Experienced bloggers are by nature a questioning lot. A less kind person would call us a cynical lot. You tell us something, we will question it. You raise a point, we will debate it. You lie, you will eventually get caught, usually by another blogger who notices inconsistencies. Like a girl on a first date, we are not easily impressed. To remix that old quote, you can fool one blogger one time, but you can’t fool all the bloggers all the time.
Experienced bloggers are by nature an articulate lot. We spend hours each week not just telling but analysing whatever we find important. It is vital that we are able to put our point across to our readers. We defend our positions, usually by employing intellectual debate. Experienced bloggers are generally not dazzled by your personality, popularity, or prosperity. We want to hear what you have to say and we will judge you on that basis.
So this TED Global thing, what is it about it that has us who attended walking around on cloud nine, talking about a “cheetah generation” and “forget making poverty history we want to make Africans rich“? It is almost like we were indoctrinated by the some powerful force. Every single blogger who was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend TED Global came out very very very very very impressed!. Why? Recently we got an email asking us to rate the conference, the organisation, the speakers on scale from poor to excellent. Talking with some other TEDsters over the weekend we were of the opinion that the scale should start at bloody brilliant and end at flipping unbelievable. (Thanks Hash for putting all those links together!)
In my experience there are a couple of reasons why I had a fantastic time.
- I am not alone.
I lie in bed sometimes thinking about Kenya and Africa and I can not sleep because my head starts feeling like it is about to explode. Where is the light at the end of the tunnel? In what way can I be most helpful? Where do we even begin? At TED Global I was in a whole room of people who go through the same thing. Young people across the continent who have a passion about this motherland called Africa that really surpasses all logic. They see what you are doing, you see what they are doing and suddenly you realise that you are not alone, and you do not have to do it alone. Instead of wondering if we will ever rise, now I am like, there is no way, absolutely no way that anyone can keep us down. The next 20 years will not be like the last 20 years, that I can guarantee you. In 2027 this will be the most linked post on Mentalacrobatics and you can all start calling me prophet!
- The explosion of ideas and learning.
What a speaker line up. You walked out of the room rubbing your head wondering how you are going to process all that knowledge. Next time you bump into one of those idiots who starts asking you questions like, “where is the African Mozart, or where is the African Brunel, implying that Africans do not think send them a copy of Ron Eglash’s study of fractals in African architecture and watch their heads explode as they try to understand just what the hell is going on, and that is just one of many many examples that were shared at this conference. Sending txt messages in Amharic, no problem, want to build a computer that thinks like a brain, easy peasy.
- The 1958 feeling.
This is the big one for me. I have often wondered how it would have felt to attend THE pan African conference of all pan African conferences, The All-African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958 as the wind of independence was sweeping over the continent. How exhilarating it must have felt to watch freedom galloping over the horizon coming closer and closer as one colonial power after another was kicked out. But I wondered more about how powerful it must have been to walk into a room and you have all those brains there, all those visionaries in one place at one time. Imagine standing in the queue for lunch and you see Nyerere chatting with Lumumba or W.E.B DuBois sharing a knock-knock joke with Nkrumah or something like that. At TED Global I got that same buzz, you got the sense that there were people in that room that would revolutionise this continent. Now you know why I was smiling strangely at all of you at lunch at TED, I was trying to figure out which one of you was Nyerere and which one was Lumumba, who would be DuBois and who Nkrumah! In the 1958 conference they elected a young man called Tom Mboya from Kenya as their chairman, in his summing up speech he called for a reversal of the Scramble for Africa addressing the colonial powers thus:
“Your time has past, Africa must be free. Scram from Africa.”
Substitute colonial powers then for your pet hate today. Corruption, nepotism, tribalism, maybe even neo-colonialism? Whatever it is, tell it to scram from Africa. Like 50 years ago, change must come and change is in the air and that change is unavoidable. But we have learnt the lessons of 50 years ago, this time the pact between African leaders and African people must be paramount.
Kudos to the Tom Mboya of TED Global, Emeka Okafor.
TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal
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Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 1:59 PM
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
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Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 9:43 AM
Yesterday I had one of those moments that you can only really experience in a place like Nairobi. A single question that could fill an entire term’s worth of philosophy, religious education, political science lectures.
I was sitting in a cyber café when the lady on the computer next to me, a complete stranger, turned to face me and pointing to her screen asked, “Excuse me, what does this word mean?” One of her friends had forwarded her a joke which had the word “heterosexual” in it; this was the word she wanted me to explain to her.
Easy peasy right?
Not quite, just try it now, how would you explain, in a couple of sentences what heterosexual means?
I fell into the trap of immediately going down the sexual route as I blurted out, “People who have sex with people of the opposite sex”.
“Ah you mean prostitutes?” she replied.
Ok clearly I wasn’t getting my point across. So I embarked on the opposites approach, employing the Law of Contradiction (or Noncontradiction if you prefer). I asked her if she knew what homosexual was. She wasn’t sure. Damn.
So now I am digging deeper, because she wants to know what homosexual is and I am not going to fall into the trap of defining everything by sexual intercourse again.
Forget sexual intercourse I had bigger problems as I now I found myself using words like “normal” as in, heterosexual are normal. Now do I really want to go there? Heterosexual as the definiendum and normal as the definiens for that definiendum? Or ‘normal’ as the prima inter pares in a series of definiens on heterosexuality? That implies, by extension, homosexuals are not normal. Isn’t that an abuse of the Law of Identity? Besides I feel that is not for me to decide for her, whatever my beliefs on homosexuality and heterosexuality are. One of my brothers told me, “The fact that you hesitated and resisted to using the word “normal” when describing heterosexual highlights that you have been living outside.” (Outside = outside the country and indeed the continent). Now that sparked of a whole new debate, but I digress. This lady and her question was threatening to take over my thought process for the rest of the month!
So try it now, explain heterosexuality without using the word ‘normal’ or referring to sexual intercourse.
Now you see what I mean about filling a term’s worth of lectures of philosophy, religious education, political science etc.
Later in the day as I shared this story with a friend she gave me her solution, I should have just told that lady to Google it. Now why didn’t I think of that!
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Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 1:14 PM
Thinker reminds us that …
Blogs, email and text messages, while lending themselves to informing, also lend themselves to abuse.
… in his post that argues it is irresponsible for us to report the blast in Nairobi as bomb or indeed suicide bomb unless we have official confirmation from the police. Agreed, it would be irresponsible for us to report the blast without checking the sources of the stories.
When I first heard the story on local radio stations I turned to Reuters which is a reliable news outlet and generally has an impeccable record as far as the accuracy of its reporting goes.
Reuters report now reads (bear in mind these reports are constantly updated):
A senior policeman at the scene said the explosion, which also left a mangled corpse in the street and sent passers-by flying through the air, seemed to be a suicide bombing.
My own blog post on the topic is full of qualifiers, apparently this, apparently that. I even put a paragraph at the end of the post cautioning that this is all speculation at the moment as we await the facts.
A quick look at the KenyaUnlimited Aggregator shows many other Kenyan bloggers qualified their reporting too.
Let me bring in another angle. The most common complaint I have heard today from Kenyans abroad is that the the Daily Nation and East African Standard websites had almost no information for a long while. The most frequently updated Kenyan news website these days is the KBC website, however earlier this morning when I checked it was down.
I would argue that it is stories like this that rather than showing the danger of blogs, HIGHLIGHT the importance of blogs and other citizen media. While the MSM was stuck in its procedures, bloggers wrote about what they had heard, seen or were told. There is nothing wrong with quoting primary sources. The historians amongst us can confirm the importance with which primary sources are regarded on any historical event. The eyewitness account, the man on the street as it were.
If you wanted to know what Kenyans were thinking and feeling at the time the blogs were a very good place to start.
As for waiting for an official police statement before commenting on this blast, to that I would ask: where is the lengthy police statement on the Mungiki crisis? Where is the lengthy police statement on the Mount Elgon clashes? Both were major incidents in the past month which claimed more lives that the blast this morning, yet we haven’t seen the same coordinated response to dishing out information as we have on this blast. Are we to await the official statement on those events as well before stepping in with our take on events? How long are you prepared to wait?
Isn’t it telling that Police Commissioner Hussein’s lengthy statement appears on the website of the Office of Government Spokesperson (OGS) and not on the Kenya Police website which carries a 3 sentence press release by the Police Spokesman?
Why would the OGS jump in on this story when Mungiki and Mount Elgon were much more serious events yet he restrained himself? I would argue it is because the OGS quickly realised that this was an international story which would generate interest from around the world.
Their intention was not to inform, their intention was damage control. I will agree with the Commish on one thing, however, in my opinion, the disaster management procedures worked well, after the initial shock everything seemed to click.
I firmly believe that the take up of the story by Kenyan bloggers helped generate this international interest. Don’t believe that bloggers have that much influence? Then explain why the “Blog Search button” is next to the “Advanced News Search” button on Google News or why Reuters has started featuring African bloggers prominently on its news site. In a round about way, the noise bloggers generated about this story is one of the reasons The Commish and the GOS rushed to get out that press release.
Hopefully if Kenyan bloggers keep the noise up on Mungiki, Mount Elgon et al and the Commish and the GOS will rush to release a lengthy press release on those stories as well.
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Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 11:42 PM
Once again it looks like Nairobi has been hit by a terrorist attack.
As you can imagine details are a little sketchy so far.
What has been reported so far is:
- An explosion hit central Nairobi near Ambassador Hotel around 8.30am this morning
- Apparently by a suicide bomber
- Witnesses say they have seen six bodies although only one death apart from the bomber has been confirmed.
- Witnesses also mention pages of the Koran strewn all over the place, whether these were carried by the bomber or one of the victims is not yet known.
Again this is all speculation at the moment. I’m sure the news teams will have some more information soon.
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Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 10:18 AM
Last month in a blog post called a “Tale of Two Kenyans” I wrote about how the Kenyan police woke up an entire slum when two suspected cop killers decided to hide amongst the residents. A couple of readers expressed doubts to put it politely. One of the emails I received even accused me of making the whole episode up claiming the Kenyan authorities did not have enough manpower to mount such an operation.
Kenyan police round up suspected Mungiki members in Nairobi’s Mathare slum. Click on the image to see the full size image.
Well, well, well. I get back from TEDGlobal in Arusha to find the world has gone mad back at home. Yesterday a combined force of 500 made up of regular police, administration police and the elite General Service Unit raided Mathare in a crackdown on the gangsters of the Mungiki Sect that is responsible for the deaths of at least 20 people included at least 12 who were beheaded in the last three months. So far the police operation, code named Operation Kosovo, has resulted in around 30 deaths and 300 arrests. Of course the police claim that they have good reasons to suspect that all those they have arrested and killed are members of Mungiki. Mathare is under siege. After months of harassment by Mungiki now they have another threat to watch out for, trigger happy police.
A policeman with a police dog rounds up suspected Mungiki members in Nairobi’s Mathare slum. Click on the image to see the full size image.
Another Kenyan blogger, Majonzi, writing on this story uses a powerful headline
Wananchi vs Mungiki vs The Police
I would change it to
Mungiki vs Wananchi vs The Police
The wananchi, the ordinary Kenyan citizen, is now caught in the middle of a battle between Mungiki and the police for the control of parts of Nairobi and parts of Kenya. Month after month, year after year this sect has grown unchecked, harassing, beating, killing and beheading ordinary wananchi going about their lives. This sect was seemed untouchable by the police. Well the authorities have woken up and as one policeman was quoted saying,
“Lala chini ung’orote. Unajua kuna serikali?”
(Lie down and sleep. Do you know there is a government in Kenya?)
Kenyan police round up suspected Mungiki members in Nairobi’s Mathare slum forcing them to lie face down. Click on the image to see the full size image.
Where has this “government” been up to now?
This is a clear example that we have to take the optimism, positive energy and empowering ideas from TEDGlobal and start making change in our society at a fundamental level. James Shikwati in his talk urged Africans to start panicking, to enter “panic mode”. We have to open our eyes to our society is breaking and in many ways in broken and perhaps if we enter panic mode we will start to deal with issues with the urgency they require.
Thanks M4 for sending me the images.
TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal
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Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 2:59 PM
No place in the world has ever grown a market sector on the type of risk that Africa’s farmers face.
Eleni Gabre-Madhin creator of Ethiopia’s first commodities market
Forget making poverty history. I want to make Africans rich.
Idris Mohammed believes that we should be talking about increasing wealth not reducing poverty.
I call it the African shuffle.
Idris Mohammed describes yet another graph that shows stagnant economic growth in parts of Africa where instead of rising the graph remains a flat line.
Dignity is more important that wealth.
Jacqueline Novogratz
Understand the power of patient capital.
Jacqueline Novogratz explains that taking time to engage with the communities you invest in helps the money do more.
The blind leading the clueless.
George Ayittey does not think much of Africa’s political leadership.
The Cheetah generation.
George Ayittey term for the progressive, active, integrity, entrepreneurial African youth.
The problem with computers is that they do not have enough Africa in them.
Kwabena Boahen quotes Brian Eno
Let us redefine poverty
P for possibilities
O for opportunity
V for validation of our ideas
E for enthusiasm to do things
R for resilience
T for trust
Y for yes
Ted Kidane
Indigenous communities used to make decisions after considering what effect the decision they take would have on the next seven generations.
Jane Goodall
To the guy who insisted on taking a photo with me because his wife wanted a picture of him with Larry from Google, well now you know the truth.
Dr. Larry Brilliant, Executive Director of Google.org, after introducing Larry Page, Google Co-Founder & President of Products
TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal
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Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 12:03 PM
The presentations from the TED stage yesterday were fantastic. Thought provoking, opinion shaping, informing, and interesting. After day 1 it would take something special to blow us away again and to raise expectations again, they managed to do that.
The whole premise of TED is based around the principle of “Ideas Worth Spreading”. This sharing is an essential part of the TED experience. Our programme guide urges us to sit next to someone different at every session and at every meal. The same guide urges us to switch of our phones and leave our laptops behind in our hotel rooms. This is all in order to encourage us to build social networks, brain storm together, learn about each other, learn from each other. TED is to be a fluid and interactive process. What happens on stage is important yes, but what happens between us is even more important. Yesterday brought this home for me.
I was invited to the Google.org private lunch yesterday where the people at Google told us about the philanthropic side of the Google organisation. At the lunch we heard from Joe Tackie an entrepreneur from Ghana who was the first winner of Believe, Begin, Become Ghana’s national business plan competition sponsored by google.org. During the afternoon tea break a couple of us spent time talking with Joe about the programme and the challenges he faced, how he over came them, the business he started and how it is growing. A fantastic story.
During dinner I was lucky enough to share a table with Esther a Community Development Facilitator working for a NGO in Cameroon, Megan a director at Google, William a secondary school student from Malawi who built a windmill to provide power to his family home from old bicycle parts and the renowned primatologist Jane Goodall. The conversation around that table was full of world changing ideas and this was being replicated on different tables around the room. There are no seating plans here, you just go out there and network.
After dinner I ended up on table full of Kenyan entrepreneurs, the people changing the nature of their business sectors in our country. We covered everything, politics, economy, redistribution of wealth, the politicisation of the youth, the power of blogs and the internet, investments, humour. Network at it is most energetic within our own. We only stopped because the last buses to our various hotels were threatening to leave us.
Back at the hotel is when TED came home. I sat down to write my thoughts on the day when Harinjaka shared with us the crazy deforestation that is taking place in his country of Madagascar. That was the beginning of all night thinking, sharing, debating session. Two Kenyans, one Madagascan, one Nigerian, one Italian, one American. We had never met before TED, all but one of us are at our first TED conference and we had our own TED session then and there. We talked about HIV/AIDS, about social disempowerment, about colonial legacy, about Nollywood, Bollywood and the Chinese film industry, about music, about deforestation in Madagascar, about the creation of Israel, about sports, about whiskey, about family, about the world economic market, about our experience in the formal job market, about starting businesses and creating jobs, and on and on and on. That is TED, TED 2.0 maybe but that is what all this is about, people from all around the continent and the world sharing and debating, engaging each others brains from a position of mutual respect.
TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal
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Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 11:44 AM
In a CNN interview last year Emeka Okator, the programme director of TedGlobal 2007, was asked, “How do you shed light on the brighter side of Africa?”
He answered, “It’s coming from the bottom or primarily from the citizen media type, the bloggers, who are covering Africa to an extent it has never been covered before. There’s strong belief that the rest of the world will catch up as this process accelerates.”
Emeka understands the vital role that authentic, uncompromising, voices from Africa that are expressed through blogs play. Probably because he is a energetic blogger himself. It is wonderful that there is a healthy mix of bloggers amongst the TED Fellows. I’ll highlight the KBW members who are here apart from myself; Afromusing, Bankelele, Kenyan Pundit and White African. Ndesanjo is here as well running things on his home ground. Outside KBW Jea Brea and Andrew Heavens are here too.
There are couple of other Kenyan bloggers who have promised to send me their URLs and I will share them as soon as I get them. We also have a number of bloggers from other countries and I will do the same with the links.
KBW members let me assure that your blogs have a wider readership then you may imagine. I have met some people here that have never been to Africa before but read the KenyaUnlimited aggregator regularly. Many of the other Africans here talk about the power of the Kenyan blogs on the internet and are inspired to go out and start their own blogs and aggregator. Perhaps we should look out for NigeriaUnlimited, MaliUnlimited, etc soon!
At some point in the next few days we will sit down and brainstorm about the African Bloggers’ Conference. Please feel free to share any thoughts you have on this with us.
TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal
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Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 1:41 AM
TEDGlobal is in full swing here in Arusha and it is quickly turning out to be unlike any other conference I have been too, and believe me I’ve been to a few. First of all there is the calibre and variety of people here that is just amazing. Everybody here is doing something revolutionary in their ordinary lives and we are all here to share.
I won’t do a session by session blow of what is happening on stage. For that I suggest you read Ethan’s blog. Ethan must be running a dual core processor brain. The man sits in the hall and blogs in real time like an episode of 24 taking in the talk, digesting it and laying out coherent blog posts all at the same time. Go there for a blow by blow account of what is happening. White African also has good posts on the sessions, with photos. If only all my roommates in life were this helpful eh, doing all the work while I sit there engrossed on what is happening on the stage.
Instead I will attempt to share a variety of titbits from around the conference.
Rokia Traore kicked things off with a song of welcome from Mali. Rokia has a fantastic, powerful and moving voice and set the tone for a wonderful conference. African, confident, powerful, human.
Euvin Naidoo quotes the philosopher who said, “The only dark thing about Africa is our perception of Africa.” This is a theme that is to remain central throughout the day.
Carol Pineau of Africa Open for Business fame, continues this theme as she shares with the stories of entrepreneurs across the continent. One of those featured in Carol’s talk is Mohammed Olan the CEO of Somali airline Diallo Airlines. This guy is happy that Somali doesn’t have a government because he doesn’t have to deal with government corruption. What I found most interesting about Carol’s talk was two tag clouds she shared with us. One showed what people in the west thought Africans wanted, and the second one showed what people in Africa want for themselves. I’ll try to find them and post them later.
Zeray Alemseged a palaeontologist from Ethiopia responsible for finding Selam a 3.3 million year old 3 year old girl. (Yes that sentence makes sense). He shared that the key thing as far as he was concern was to, “promote a positive African attitude towards Africa”. It is just like your parents used to tell you, you have to love yourself before anyone else will love you.
I am not much of cinema and movie person but Newton Aduaka blew me away with the short clips he showed of his films. Maybe I am a movie person and I’ve just been watching the wrong films. He has film coming out called Ezra about child soldiers in Sierra Leone that looks brilliant. Andrew Dosunmu shared some interesting clips as well.
But a conference isn’t a conference without some controversy and on Day One of TEDGlobal it was Andrew Mwenda – v – Bono. Andrew is a Uganda journalist and free speech activist that has seen jail time in Uganda for his beliefs. Andrew is against foreign aid in a big way. He feels makes Africa governments lazy as they do not have to invest in their entrepreneurs. If there was no aid and governments had to pay their way they would show a lot more interest in the people in their countries trying to generate wealth. As a Kenya trying to set up a business I can relate to that oh to well.
Bono on the other hand spends a lot of time campaign for aid to Africa to be increased. He also campaigns for debt cancellation and fair trade. Bono likes to stress the links between Africa and Ireland. Well.
It made for a lively session to say the least.
Youssou N’dour didn’t make it unfortunately but we did not have a chance to miss him as Rokia came back with her band and blew us away. My goodness, that woman’s voice, style and substance is unbelievable.
TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal
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Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 1:20 AM
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