Loomnie

A somewhat optimistic look at Africa and the global economic crisis.

A reflection on reporting from Africa

Madagascar and African Union’s increasing dilemma.

Eastern Europe’s Economic Crash.

The IMF is battling stigma.

Ethnography of Wall Street.

Last week we commissioned Akin to do a review of the coverage of the Nigerian re-branding excercise by bloggers and he delivered a really beautiful post. Please go over to NigeriansTalk.org to have a look at it. Probably the only group of people who have covered the re-branding excercise very well are bloggers. There are probably are reasons for that, but that is not the point of focus at the moment. If you are interested in hosting a review – a copy each on your blog and NigeriansTalk.org – please send an email to loomnie-at-loomnie.com or nnwachuku-at-gmail.com.

And the guys over at Turenchi.com are doing a really beautiful job. Their site indexes news sources and lists the news stories as they are posted on the original sites. Part of the beauty of the site is that it is uncluttered and very easy to navigate. Plus there is a mobile version at www.turenchi.com/mobile They promise that it will soon move to www.m.turenchi.com News buffs and junkies, a site to bookmark.

Have you seen this editorial from The Nigerian Guardian? See an excerpt:

Africans have a right to say ‘no’ to a movement whose ultimate outcome will be the destruction of the family. Homosexuals are claiming that men can marry themselves. If everyone followed their example, would they have even been born? Looking at the debate, we conclude that in the short run both parties cannot be reconciled without grave injuries being done to either of them.

To be fair to them, they say something about not being against the ‘medical condition’ itself, just that they feel that not everything that is baked in the West should be eaten in Africa. I thought that they would point to the fact that not everything can be legislated. Agitations by gay activists are in reaction against a proposed legislation that would ban gay marriage.  Don’t lawmakers have something else to do other than legislating people’s sexual preferences?

The full editorial is here.

$140 per barrel is the appropriate price of crude oil - Rilwanu Lukman, Nigerian Petroleum Resources Minister. Hat-tip to Nigeria, What’s New?.

Mr Obasanjo on Hardtalk.

The disconnect of the Pope.

Are we really in the age of mass intelligence?

Individuals give NGOs more funds than donors.

The Berlin wall came down 20 years ago this year. A look at Berlin by The Economist’s More Intelligent Life.

The credit crunch is dragging down the global economy and raising political tensions.

You may want to check out my review of a few selected blog posts that discussed the Nigerian economy during the week that ended 14 March, 2009. It is over at NigeriansTalk.org, and here is the direct link to the review.

last night we were driving to a restaurant when my friend who was driving realised, almost too late, that he was supposed to turn left not right. he had to hurry over to the lane that led left. he smiled and said that since he had a numbe rplate from a small city and not berlin (this was in berlin) he would be described as a person from a small town and excused. switching lanes that way is definitely not beyond those villagers.

flashback to me and my aunt driving in lagos, nigeria. the car has a lagos number plate, and whenever any of the public bus drivers tries to get ahead of her in a crawling traffic she yells at them to draw their attention to the numberplate of her car. they should know better than to try to get ahead of her; can’t they see that she is a lagosian? of course, her reaction only emphasises – at least to my mind – that she is not a lagosian, or at least that she had been using cars that did not have lagos number plates. and whenever i was in the car with my mother she would warn the driver to take it easy since the car does not have a lagos number and so the drivers would think it nothing to harass those in the car.

thinking about these leads be to wonder how we attach meaning to things. when we see a car that is from a particular part of the country it conjures images of our stereotypes of that place and then we watch to see the confirmations of those stereotypes. and even when we don’t watch for confirmations we are prepared to excuse their behaviour because of that/those sign(s). or we are prepared to cheat or bully them because of those signs. the same signs could take on different meanings at different points. dealing with number plates could be as harmless as it was last night, or as dangerous as to be markers for acts of violence. imagine a crisis in which people from a particular part of the country are targets. then imagine that someone drives over in the car that is marked as being from that part of the country. i don’t think i need to complete that picture.

of signs and actor-network-theory
so, while we imbue signs with meaning signs are things that sometimes go on to live a life all their own and in turn influence us. we love to emphasise the control of humans over things, and when we act based on impetus from things we quickly run ahead of ourselves to assert that we are not reacting to those things themselves but to the thoughts and imageries that humans have laid in them – to the social that has been put in them. but i wonder whether we realise that without that initial thing that sparks off a reaction we would not act or react or even think the way we did. we enjoy the tyranny of humans, who am i to think that we would be willing to give it up? that is the hardest thing to swallow in actor-network-theory.

First things: For those who don’t know – and I would expect that that is a large chunk of the readership – until recently, I used to have another blog called Native Anthropologist.It is a blog where I discussed my research as an anthropologist. I have decided to close that down and move the content over here (actually, the right term would be to duplicate, since the content is still there and I just copied it to Loomnie.com).  From now on I will have only one blog, which is Loomnie.com, and I will be discussing the issues I discussed on Native Anthropologist here as well. Those who don’t know much about anthropology or what anthropologist do will find some discussions around here. Of course, Loomnie.com is still about my experiences, thoughts, ideas and opinions; I have only added some more to it.

Now, to the link love:
Check out the blackboard blogger of Monrovia at White African’s.
My friend Oz guest-blogs at Nigerian Curiosity on the Economics of Nollywood.
Guess who would make the best journalists? Anthropologists, of course.
The political economy of urbanization in contemporary Africa, from the anthropologist who coined the term ‘informal economy’.

I just got a message from a listsrv to which I belong that Professor Adiele Afigbo, one of the most prolific and best known Igbo historians, is dead. I met Prof Afigbo last September in Nsukka and we discussed my research at lenght, with him offering suggestion on what I might look at.  I am still trying to understand that he is really dead. It feels very unreal.

The notification on the listserv by Prof Toyin Falola of the Department of History, The University of Texas at Austin reads:

It is with great sadness that I announced the death of Professor Adiele Afigbo who died this morning. His works transformed the studies of colonial history, the Igbo speaking people, and contemporary African development. Nigeria’s transition from the colonial to the post-colonial  closely parallels the academic career of A.E. Afigbo. He  graduated with a Ph.D. in History from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria in 1964, the first History doctorate produced on Nigerian soil.  He had a remarkable career. He  authored or co-authored eight books, edited four more, and published well over a hundred journal articles.  Afigbo earned numerous prizes for his scholarship, served on the editorial board of many acclaimed scholarly journals and was inducted into many prestigious societies, including the Nigerian Academy of Letters, and received also received government sponsored awards such as the Order of the Niger and the Nigerian National Merit Award.

I feel so sad I don’t know what to say.

One of the most notable things about Buchenwald is its relative seclusion. Although it is right in the vicinity of Weimar, the native home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, it still manages to remain a part of nowhere. Another notable thing is that the place manages to give off the feeling that whatever was done there could be done with impunity, partly because the doer has(d) an absolute right to do so, which in turn could be because nobody would question it. The worst that could happen would be to kill loads of individuals whose lives were utterly in ones hands, and perhaps to peal off their skins and either make lampshades of them or, if they are tattooed, hang the skins on walls as decorations. Or perhaps cut off their heads and shrink them, and exchange their body parts – including the shrunken heads – as gifts with fellow perpetrators.

A Concentration Camp
The Buchenwald Concentration Camp was built in 1937 by the German Nazi regime, and during the course of its existence as a concentration camp – between 1937 and 1945 – prisoners who did not belong to the National Socialist idea of the ‘community of people’ were sent there. During those years, more than 250,000 political opponents of the Nazi regime, criminals, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Sinti, Roma, and homosexuals were sent from nearly every country of Europe to Buchenwald and its subcamps to be imprisoned in the concentration camp. 56,000 of them died there. A trip into the camp quickly turns those figures into individuals, not simply by the fact of their death – one already knew that before visiting the camp – or even their life. They came alive through the scanty knowledge that one got of their life in the camp, and more powerfully, by the knowledge of the ways they died and what became of their bodies. Many dropped dead standing in line for the early morning and evening roll-calls; many starved to death; many were hanged to death; many were shot by their guards at the base of the skull, once the guards discovered that it was a very efficient way of bringing people to their death; and many still died from experiments with all kinds viruses in a secluded part of the camp.

Evil lives among us
Then, slowly, in the midst of learning about this, a thought, nagging and worrying, start forming in ones mind. One starts wondering who the people were who could have done this to fellow human beings. And then it dawns on one that it is very convenient to think of them as monsters, while in fact they were humans like us. That is a very scary thought. They were human beings like us. Although they were heavily indoctrinated to believe that those they held in the camp and systematically murdered were enemies, I still could not get my mind around it that they got to the point of killing off their fellow human beings the way they did. I wonder whether those guards could in any way have thought that they were in danger of being killed by the people they held in their cells, and justified killing them in those terms.

Or was it simply that they killed because there is something in us that could easily turn us into machines that could kill like those people? What did they become after doing these things? But the more one thinks of it the more one realises that they were people like us, human beings who grew up with other human beings and not on special facilities for would-be concentration camp guards. They had families and friends. Just as I was reeling under these thoughts one of my friends pointed it to me that there were some who refused to join the Nazi, and that many of them in fact ended up as inmates in concentration camps. Maybe one should take some solace in the courage of those individuals.

We still have not learnt
Immediately I twittered that I was at the camp, Akin replied that we still have not learnt, citing the cases of Bosnia, Rwanda and Dafur. How many more people are going to die before we learn?