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.
Back to the present. Love this song! How could it not conquer Eurovision? (via @textorian):
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.
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.
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.
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…
Nice bit of politics and music from South Africa’s Freshlyground
Last year I spent a few weeks in Nigeria looking into the state of the Nigerian film industry known as Nollywood, which I’ve reported on before. In the new issue of Afar magazine, there is a short piece I did about that trip, along with some brilliant photos by Marco Garofalo. While there, I spent a little time with Kunle Afolayan, who was filming The Figurine, which earlier this year swept the African Movie Academy Awards. It was amazing to see how much the industry has changed in such a short time, how it was transforming, and how it was taking its first few steps onto the world stage. Nollywood looks set to be a serious cinematic force yet. For more on that, stay tuned.
It was getting dark. Paulo had been walking with me for half an hour. He’d invited me to dinner at his house, up near Mount Meru, and now we were going back down the dusty road to my neighborhood in Arusha, Tanzania. I wondered when he would turn around. I kept telling him I knew the way. But he kept walking.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I can escort you.”
The last thing I needed was an escort. I enjoyed walking by myself. But I didn’t realize how much had been lost in translation between Paulo’s chosen English word, “escort,” and the Swahili word for what he meant, kusindikiza.
In my dictionary, kusindikiza signified “to see someone off” or “to accompany someone part of the way home.” I had read these definitions, but I didn’t really understand them. Why would you want to accompany someone part of the way home? That is often the problem with learning new languages: You are taking an idea from one world and transporting it to another. The edges of the word, the shape of the idea, do not fit neatly into their new box.
We hear a lot about soccer in Europe and Latin America, but less about its role in Africa. As we’ll see during the World Cup, African nations are mad about the sport. It’s woven itself into the fabric of life across the continent. How deep is it woven? Steve Bloomfield traveled from Somalia to Sierra Leone to South Africa to find out, a trip he chronicles in his new book, Africa United: Soccer, Passion, Politics and the First World Cup in Africa. I caught up with Bloomfield, who lives in Nairobi, via email to ask him about it.
World Hum: What does having the World Cup in South Africa mean for the continent?
Steve Bloomfield: This World Cup has the potential to begin to change the way the rest of the world views Africa. For an entire month one of the world’s biggest stories will take place in Africa and, with the odd exception, it should be an overwhelmingly positive one.
