What is your deepest fear?

I just came across a presentation on the TED talks website that I feel I must share.  There are very many talks on this website that I have heard that are great and have a great impact but it becomes more and more obvious to me that the ones concerning Africa(n) issues resonate very strongly.

This particular talk is from the author Chimamanda Adichie who talks about the danger of a single story.  It is about how dangerous it is to have only one side of a person’s story.  She has many strong words amongst which she says that when somebody tells another person’s story, they are able to rob one of their dignity.. but there is the positive side.. when somebody tell’s another person’s story they are also able to restore that dignity.

I transcribed a powerful a paragraph that was very powerful.

“… I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and aids, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner”

Today is one of those days I can say without a doubt that I read the newspapers and found positive refreshing news.

There were two headline items that caught my eye.  The first one “Mao’s victory is a taste of good things to come” was about the election of Norbert Mao to the presidency of the Democratic Party.  It basically mentioned that he is a mediator and somebody who has followed through with clean politics all the way in his career, and that this is the kind of person even President Museveni would not mind taking over from him.

The second headline was “Professor Mamdani returns to Makerere” referring to the appointment, as head of the Makerere Institute for Social Research, Prof. Mahmood Mamdani. He is a world renown scholar and one of the very top in development issues and to have him heading research in this department is a good thing.

Essentially the two articles were positive in the sense that these are two clearly good and very competent people, without any connection to the current government, but with a lot of merit, who have taken over significant positions in public offices in Uganda.

Hehehe… that is a catchy title I have to admit.  Anyway I was looking trying to fill in a contact form on the CIA website.. (don’t ask why I was trying to contact the CIA) and guess what? Their contact form doesn’t work!  I found this very funny because I always complained that Ugandan websites have contact forms that do not work, and here, we have the “top” intelligence gathering institution in USA, with an information gathering tool that doesn’t work.. could it be a conspiracy??!! :)  See the screenshots.

This is probably one of the most irrelevant posts I have made but what the hell!

Before filling inform:

After filling in form: The error message is not only wrong in what happened but even erased my data..

Enough time wasting…

Africa

Land of flowing rivers
Vast lakes
Beautiful hills
Mild quakes

They say
you take
breath away
Literally…
or metaphorically?

You are like a child
“When will you grow up
to face the world?”
Africa..
When will the world
Let you grow up?

- EM -
23h02, 19th August 2009

I was very amused to read a post by one member of a mailing list who was lamenting the corruption in the Ugandan government.  The whole issue started with an article from the Monitor newspaper that talked about the incomplete state of Uganda’s national fibre optic backbone.  Of course this non-completion is related to the fact that the money was allegedly “eaten” by the officials in charge.  However, it has the greater effect that there shall be delays in connecting the national backbone to the recently launched SEACOM undersea cable that connects the East African coastline to Asia, Europe and Southern Africa.

Anyway this gentleman was so incensed by the whole issue that his proposition was that we should hand back the management of Uganda to the British.  I picked a section of the email.

 ”Let us demand our government to hand us back to our colonial masters officially than give away Airport to Arabs, Diary Corporation to Malysians, L.Victoria to the Dutch. Lets do this in an organized way where all of us agree that we can’t do things right here except under supervision by the British Government. I am not pro the Brits, it could be a company like Cisco Systems diversifying its business portfolio. It could be Microsoft. It could be Egypt. It could be the Norwegians. Simply lets put Uganda including its people on auction because of the above.”

I was just reading an article about a new pair of slippers called by the dutch shoe designer Jan Jansen.  I picked out an excerpt

“The soles of the Plakkies are made from used car tyres. In South Africa, car tyres are dumped en masse and illegally incinerated, causing a devastating impact on the environment. Thanks to Plakkies, they can now be recycled. Shoe designer Jan Jansen and students of the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering came up with the design for the hip, socially responsible slipper.”

Full article about plakkies

As I read it I thought to myself… hmm that sounds quite close to what we call lugabire!!!  Unfortunately I have looked around for somewhere with a close up picture of these plakkies in vain.  I also thought I could find a picture of lugabire.. so if anybody has one please post it up!