Brilliant new song: “There’s more to Mama Africa than poverty and war.” (Via Chris Vourlias)
Archive for the Africa Category
Twende Twende (Wainaina and Mtukudzi)
Posted in Africa, Arts in Africa, Music, Video on February 3, 2012 by frankburesThe Food Less Traveled
Posted in Africa, Clips, Travel on November 4, 2011 by frankbures
The best meal I ever ate was at a roadside restaurant in the middle of Nigeria. I was in a microbus heading north through an otherworldly landscape strewn with giant boulders. It was mid-morning when we pulled over at an open-air restaurant. The counter where people were ordering was jammed. An old man, seeing my confusion, explained the menu and ordered for me.
We sat down, and the waiter brought our food: a ball of pounded yam and a bowl of egusi soup, made with crushed melon seeds and containing a hunk of beef. The waiter asked if I wanted utensils. I looked around. No one else had them.
The old man leaned over. “You know,” he remarked, “they say your food tastes better when you eat it with your hands.” Sometimes I still wonder why that meal was so transcendent.
Jaguar: Kigeugeu
Posted in Africa, Arts in Africa, Music, Video on October 17, 2011 by frankburesJust back from East Africa, where I heard this song on a bus. It’s been in my head ever since.
Bittersweet Goodbye
Posted in Africa, Arts in Africa, Video on July 21, 2011 by frankburesA beautiful, poignant film, Kwa Heri Madima, by French-Dutch director Robert-Jan Lacombe about leaving the village in eastern Congo where he lived the first ten years of his life. (Via Texas in Africa and Africa is a Country)
The Penis Thieves: Now a Handy eBook!
Posted in Africa, Clips, Travel on July 1, 2011 by frankbures
On a slightly different note, my story A mind dismembered: In search of the magical penis thieves, is now available in various formats for your e-reader, from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iBookstore. Can you have too much magical genital theft? Of course not.
Stella Mwangi Shines
Posted in Africa, Art, Arts in Africa, Music, Video on March 5, 2011 by frankburesBack to the present. Love this song! How could it not conquer Eurovision? (via @textorian):
Give and Take: The Art and Science of the Gift
Posted in Africa, America, Clips, Science, Travel on November 25, 2010 by frankbures
Last year I traveled to Nigeria, where I knew some people, and where I also had some work to do. Before I left, I racked my brain for small gifts that I could give to friends and others I met along the way.
At the time, I was a bit low on funds. I wanted to give something meaningful, useful – and affordable. Because a lot of the people I would be seeing were journalists, I thought a great idea might be flash drives – the storage system of the future! I’d been to Nigeria a few years earlier and had not seen them anywhere.
So I stocked up. When I landed in Lagos, I proudly handed over my gift to a friend who took it, turned it over, and said, “Thanks. I could use another one of these.” And he pulled a small handful out of his pocket.
Welcome to the global economy, where everything is available everywhere, and simple abundance is no longer unique to the United States. So much has changed so fast, it often seems that giving gifts isn’t as simple as it used to be.
But gift giving has always been complicated. Fraught, even. In his 1925 essay The Gift, French anthropologist Marcel Mauss argued that in preindustrial societies, the “gift exchange” was part of a complex social cycle made up of three interlocking obligations: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.
On the Curious Journey of V.S. Naipaul
Posted in Africa, Arts in Africa, Books, Clips, Writers on November 7, 2010 by frankbures
At some point while I was reading V.S. Naipaul’s new book, The Masque of Africa, it became hard not to picture the venerable Nobel Prize winner in a pith helmet and khakis, doddering around the continent looking for bits of religious trivia he could take home and put on his mantel. This was not, of course, his stated purpose, which was, instead, to investigate the current state of “belief” in Africa, and to see how the modern world is intermingling with the older one on which it rests.
To this end, Naipaul travels to Uganda, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Gabon and South Africa, an impressive itinerary for the nearly 80-year-old. Along the way, he spends time with witch doctors, politicians, businessmen, professors and the like, all the while peppering them with questions about their rituals and religions and historical events.
Those events are something in which Naipaul is steeped: The writings of Mungo Park, John Hanning Speke, Henry Morton Stanley and others who first wrote about the continent. In a way, this is refreshing since that context is sometimes lacking in writing about Africa. But in the end, Naipaul seems perhaps too steeped in it…
Read the rest here, or see a copy of the October-November issue of The Africa Report.
Africa’s Mobile Revolution, Solar Oven Fails, and How Technology (Not Bono) Will Save the World
Posted in Africa, Clips on November 5, 2010 by frankbures
Back in the mid-1990s—the Dark Ages—I was living in a semi-rural area on the slopes of Mount Meru, just outside Arusha, Tanzania. Every now and then I had to make a phone call back home, across the world.
This is not an easy thing to do, I often thought to myself as I headed out into the neighborhoods to inquire about using one of the few phone lines at houses near mine. Often, these lines would be broken, or working spottily, and it could take weeks to get a repairman out to find the place where there was a problem. Moreover, the calls had to be arranged in advance so both people’s ears could be physically connected to the line that ran under the sea.
Usually, I would end up knocking on the door of a business in town (owned by friends of friends), trying to be 
unobtrusive as I heard the crackly sound of the voice of the woman I would later marry. But our words seemed to run into each other along the way, and we each had to wait a minute to be able to hear the other. In the lag, the distance seemed tangible.
These days, when I’m in Africa, I tell people this story and they laugh. They laugh as if they can barely remember those times. They laugh like I was telling them I used to hunt with rocks and start fires with sticks. Because technology in the developing world has changed so much and so fast that it’s hard to believe unless you see it yourself.
Read the rest in text here, or in layout here.
Maggie Gee’s My Driver: Dark, Hilarious, Humane
Posted in Africa, Arts in Africa, Books, Clips on October 25, 2010 by frankbures
Vanessa Henman is the aging writer at the heart of Maggie Gee’s luminous new novel, and she’s been invited to Uganda for the International Conference on African Writing. When she lands, it’s hard not to despise her, since she’s every bit the obnoxious foreigner she hopes she’s not: “Black tea, cold milk, English-style,” she tells a waiter, “slowly and with emphasis. Why can’t they ever get tea right?” When the Internet connection fails, she laments her “right to good communication.”
And yet, as the book unfolds, we see that Vanessa is not quite as she seems. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise, since Maggie Gee is no ordinary novelist…
