Loomnie

1. LWKM – Laugh wan kill me
2. LWKMD – Laugh wan kill me die
3. MIDG – make i dey go
4. WGYL – we go yarn later
5. IGA – I gbadun am
6. ICS – I can’t shout
7. DJM – Don’t jealous me
8. WBDM – Who born d maga
9. UDC – U de craze
10. NUS – Na u sabi
11. WSU – who send u
12. OSABZ – over sabi
13. ITK – I too know
14. WDH – wetin dey happen
15. NDH – nutin dey happen
16. FMJ – free me jo
17. BBP – bad bele people
18. HUD – how u dey
19. WKP – waka pass
20. BBG – baby girl
21. KKL – Kokolette
22. MML – mamalette
23 GFF- Gbono fe le fe le (e.g., she GFF)
24. NTT – Na true talk
25. IKU – It koncain u?
26. NDM – no dull me
27. LGT – let’s goo there
28. IFSA – I for slap am
29. IGDO – I go die o
30. YB – Yess boss
31. NLT – No long thing
32. 2GB – 2 gbaski (e.g., the song 2GB!)
33. CWJ – carry waka jorh
34. WBYO – wetin be your own
35. U2D – U 2 do
36. U2DV – U 2 dey vex
37. MKG – maka gini?
38. WSDP – who send dem papa
39. INS – i no send
40. INFS – i no fit shout
41. WWY – who wan yarn
42. NBST – no be small thing
43. NWO – na wah oooooo
44. NMA – no mind am
45. MIHW – make i hear word
46. NBL – no be lie
47. NB? – na beans?
48 wd – wetin dey
49. UNGKM – u no go kill me
50. o2s – omo 2 sexy
51. BUNT – bros u no try
52. EFBU – e fit be u
53. U2DF – U 2 dey fap
54. YNGJ – you no get job
55. IWP – I Wan Piss (substitute for BRB)
56. IDC – I Dey Come
57. IWP – I Wan Piss (substitute for BRB)
58. IDC – I Dey Come
59. Uwta- you wan try am???
60. Wddu- Wetin dey do u?
61. Uwd- you wan die?
62. Idh- I dey house
63. Wut- Wetin you talk?
64. Ydttm- you dey talk to me?
65. Iwgs- I wan go sleep
66. Iwg- I wan go
67. Udsa- you don start again
68. Nma- no mind am
69. Cgkl- chicken get k-leg
70. Ndbl- nepa don bring light
71. Ucc- you chop crase?
72. Ungkm- you no go kill me
73. Ugkmo- you go kill me oo,
74. VDCM – Vex dey catch me
75. UTT – U too Talk
76. SYMJM – Shut Your Mouth Jobless Mugu
77. UGDB – U go die better
78. IOT – I open Teeth
79. SMSM – see me see motorcycle
80. DDBL (Dem don bring light)

From Naija Im Slangs.

as Nigerian Niger-Delta militants call off the ceasefire they declared last October.

In the powerful essay “Africa’s Tarnished Name,” for example, he returns to his highly polemical 1975 assessment of Joseph Conrad’s racism in “Heart of Darkness.” Adamantly refusing the notion that the British writer’s portrayal of African barbarity might be excused by his socio-historical context, Achebe makes Conrad, the man, answerable for the offensive stereotypes he promulgates as a writer. Comparing Conrad’s novel to other European portraits of Africa and its peoples, Achebe concludes that “without doubt, the times in which we live influence our behavior, but the best or merely the better among us . . . are never held hostage by their times.”

That is from a New York Times review of Chinua Achebe’s book of essays, “The Education of a British-Protected Child”.

This picture was sent to me by Kiran.

(click to enlarge)

1 The decline of Bin Laden’s relevance?

2. Tyler Cowen’s predictions about the iPad… Bill Easterly takes issues with the choice of name.

3. Black Looks on Homophobia – past successes and future struggles.

4. A Nigerian writes a hilarious letter to the underwear bomber.

5. The Lebanese in West Africa.

“Recycling Textile Technologies”

A workshop to be held at the Department of Anthropology,
University College London,
on June 14th 2010

This interdisciplinary workshop will bring together researchers who work
on textile recycling, including anthropologists, geographers,
historians, political economists, designers, and materials scientists.
This is with a view to develop a research agenda that explores
innovation in textile recycling technologies in the widest sense, and
how these succeed or fail in becoming socially embedded. Textile
recycling activities, as socio-technical systems, arise in specific
cultural contexts within global trading patterns, and their study may
incorporate the underlying relationships between people and things, raw
materials and technologies and the emergence of entrepreneurs and
innovators in social networks amongst other (f)actors.

We see at least three possible clusters of themes emerging, but welcome
further ideas:

1. Reinventing Old Solutions to New Problems?

Industrial recycling practises are specific, historically situated
socio-technical systems. While pre-industrial papermaking industries
used rags as a source of raw materials, 19th century textile mills
looked to recycled clothing as a cheaper source of raw material for the
wool shoddy industries. In the 21st century, the problem has changed to
what to do with mountains of cast-off clothing, and this drives the
search for technologically solutions appropriate to diverse cultural
contexts. Anthropological understandings of technology embrace
materials, makers, designers, and users in a relational networks
including socio-economic, political, and legal factors. In this broader
context, how are some old technologies being reinvented for the future,
and in what fields are new technologies being successfully developed?

2. The value of knowledge and skills in cultural contexts

As different cultures have developed different somatic skills and
practices, we wish to investigate the importance of tacit knowledges to
recycling. Consideration of these embedded knowledges within the global
perspective raises a number of questions specific to the processing of
waste textiles. How are knowledge and skills valued differently within a
textile waste industry compared to primary production? How intimately do
you need to know used textiles in order to process them effectively, and
how do differing levels of entanglement affect your social status within
a recycling system? For those who are bodily engaged with waste, how
valuable are these tacit knowledges and are they acknowledged by others?
And what are the cultural specificities of the valuing of people and
skills within different textile waste sectors? For example, there are
differences in skills and status between an immigrant rag sorter in a UK
factory, an illiterate migrant woman cutting up rags in an Indian shoddy
factory and the designer creating eco-textiles from recycled materials.
Do these differences come down to a narrowing of knowledge domains? Are
these limitations the only factors affecting personal value ranking
within global systems?

3. Networks of global trade

Since at least the early 19thC rags have been globally traded for reuse
and recycling industries. Many rag businesses are family businesses that
have been trading for generations, and have nurtured valuable networks
of business contacts that span the developed and developing world in
both directions. The movement of second-hand textiles across the globe
both creates social relations and at the same time is enabled by
pre-existing social contacts. Why is it difficult to start up a new rag
trade business? A related question is what can waste do as an actor in
international trade? For example, how does the trade in second-hand
clothing and textile waste facilitate the movement of other goods along
similar networks? To what extent is textile waste trade a conduit for
other licit and illicit goods? How might the degrees of regulatory
frameworks surrounding waste enable or inhibit other flows of goods, and
is this conducive to it becoming the visible front for invisible
commodity exchange? Is this particular to textiles, to waste or raw
materials in general?

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words by Feb 28th to:
Lucy Norris lucy.norris@ucl.ac.uk AND Julie Botticello
j.botticello@ucl.ac.uk
Department of Anthropology, UCL.

This workshop is being initiated as part of the ESRC project, the Waste
of the World
www.thewasteoftheworld.org

I just read this on the World Bank CommGap blog:

In India, petty corruption is pervasive – people often face situations where they are asked to pay bribes for public services that should be provided free. 5th Pillar distributes zero rupee notes in the hopes that ordinary Indians can use these notes as a means to protest demands for bribes by public officials.

It works this way: whenever some public servant demands a bribe before rendering service, they are given one of those notes as a form of protest. The origin of the idea?

According to Anand [president of 5th Pillar], the idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. Anand took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people. He thought these notes would be a way to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The notes did just that. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee notes to date since it began this initiative. Along the way, the organization has collected many stories from people using them to successfully resist engaging in bribery.

As a loud form of protest, it has apparently worked. But as soon as the novelty of the idea wears off, and the shock of being presented with such a note is, well, no longer a shock, I suppose things will return to business as usual.

Read the whole post here.

is the title of a Reuters report on Africa. Read this excerpt:

The International Monetary Fund believes growth in sub-Saharan Africa will be 1 percentage point above the global average, and puts eight African countries in its top 20 fastest-expanding economies in 2010. Oil-rich Angola and Congo Republic will lead the charge with growth rates of more than 9 and 12 percent respectively, both beating China, according to the IMF’s most recent projections.

According to the report, China is an important part of the mix:

Massive Chinese investment, in return for resources to fuel its own economic boom, has helped drag the awful roads in many parts of Africa into the 21st century. Trade with China now tops $100 billion a year, and China has overtaken the United States as Africa’s main partner.

In giving the countries where the resources lie an economic boost, China’s need for oil and raw materials has transformed them into an investment proxy for the Asian giant’s growth, and handed the continent as a whole unprecedented negotiating clout.

China last year promised $10 billion in infrastructure funding over three years, amid talk by Chinese officials that Africa can experience a boom like the one in their country. But the challenges — or opportunities — are still vast.

And:

“Not investing in Africa is like missing out on Japan and Germany in the 1950s, Southeast Asia in the 1980s and emerging markets in the 1990s,” said Francis Beddington, head of research at emerging market investment house Insparo Capital.

He believes that in the long term, Africa has the potential to be home to a sizeable chunk of the factories and warehouses of tomorrow’s world.

The Africa of old — aid-dependent, and with large tracts of the economy controlled by corrupt and capricious governments — has not disappeared.

But for all the previous false dawns, there is a growing belief that the continent — home to 53 countries, a rapidly urbanizing young population of a billion people and as much as a third of the world’s natural resources — is changing.

The full report. The future might just be that bright.

I wrote last week about violent conflict and modes of identification. It comes up again in this nice piece by FT’s Tom Burgis:

Like previous outbreaks in 2001 and 2008, the latest bloodshed in Jos is wrought in the name of religion. Officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross said both Christians and Muslims were among at least 160 killed while other estimates put the toll much higher.

Kuru is almost exclusively Muslim. So too is Anglo-Jos, a neighbourhood of the city where the walls of torched homes have been daubed with Christian slogans. “Jesus the mighty man in battle,” reads one. Inhabitants of Christian quarters, meanwhile, say they are terrified by reports of Muslim vigilantes masquerading as security personnel.

But in Nigeria, religious differences often go hand in hand with ethnic rivalry or serve as a facade disguising it. There are more than 200 ethnic groups within the country’s uneasy federation and regular if often localised disputes among them have claimed thousands of lives in the 10 years since the military handed power back to elected civilians.

Jos, which is situated on the volatile fault-line between the predominately Muslim north and the mainly Christian south, has been among the worst affected areas. There, economic hardship and a long history of resistance to the Hausa-Fulani sultanates further north have been politically manipulated to create what one religious leader calls a “Molotov cocktail” of hatreds.

Some trace the roots of the brutality to the long decline of what was once a cosmopolitan boom town.

Members of the Hausa community, the predominant ethnic group in Nigeria’s north, began migrating to the area in large numbers 100 years ago when British colonial rulers started extracting tin on an industrial scale. Accomplished traders, they prospered not only from mining but also from distributing the agricultural produce of local tribes, among them the Christian farmers of the Berom.

World wars fuelled demand for tin; the gentle climate attracted large numbers of expatriates. Former UK prime minister John Major even did a stint at a local bank in Jos before returning to the UK.

But by 1967, when Nigeria was descending into civil wars, the tin mines had begun to decay. Mismanagement and the economic distortions that followed the discovery of oil rendered them uncompetitive. Residents say the resulting loss of livelihoods was compounded by a government austerity programme in the 1980s.

Underlying the animosities is a perception that the Hausas’ relative success in switching to new lines of business has come at the expense of the Berom. “Round the town, most of the businesses are being run by Hausa men – that has driven their jealousy,” says Mohammed Isa, 56, a Hausa sheltering at a makeshift refugee camp after being forced from his home by Christian gangs.

In full here. It is FT so it is somewhat gated.

BBC Focus on Africa Magazine:

It is early morning in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and a small independent wholesaler is doing a roaring trade.

The city’s street traders and small independent retailers have come to stock up on household products, one of which is toothpaste.

This wholesaler stocks two brands. The first, the so-called genuine article, is manufactured by Unilever, one of the world’s biggest consumer goods businesses.

The other, the wholesaler describes as “Chinese” – Unilever calls it fake.

By close of business this wholesaler is justifiably pleased. He has sold more tubes of counterfeit toothpaste than the genuine article, which is excellent news for the bottom line.

On the genuine product he has made a 13% mark-up, on the counterfeit an impressive 50%. Fair play to him, some might say – after all it is only toothpaste. Continue reading.