Museveni writes a nuanced article on Qaddafi in Foreign Policy. I agree with Chris Blattman’s analysis.

From Gideon Rachman’s latest FT column:

A novel that made me rethink some of my assumptions about modern India was Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Like many foreign journalists I was attached to a few clichés about the country: booming economy, world’s largest democracy, fine tradition of the rule of law. Mr Adiga’s book reveals the brutality, lawlessness and exploitation of the poor than often lie behind these glossy slogans. It does what fiction can often do much more effectively than journalism – dramatise the stories of the powerless.

Fiction’s ability to give a voice to the voiceless explains why it sometimes needs a novel to convey why Egypt and Libya were on the point of revolution, or to help explain why India is still afflicted by Maoist rebellions, in spite of growth rates of 8-9 per cent a year.

I agree. The same goes for a well-conceived and well-written ethnography.

Alan Beattie, the FT’s international economy editor, reviews three books on the New World (dis)Order. The books:

The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Limits of Nations and the Pursuit of a New Politics, by Mark Malloch Brown, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 272 pages

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance, by Parag Khanna, Random House, RRP$26, 272 pages

How the West was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead, by Dambisa Moyo, Allen Lane, RRP£14.99, 240 pages.

The review is fairly long, but every bit of it is worth your time. The concluding paragraphs:

Perhaps it is not surprising that by far the most impressive of these three attempts to make sense of governing the world is by the author who has actually tried doing it [that would be Malloch Brown]: been there, done that, written the latrine sanitation handbook. As legacies go, that is a pretty good one. Neither wild pessimism about western governments nor bright-eyed optimism about the possibilities of bypassing them is a constructive response to the great global challenges of war, famine and pestilence.

Governments are an inevitable part of most solutions to global problems. They are not succeeding particularly well, and nor are the multilateral institutions that co-ordinate them. But that is an argument for driving forward the slow and halting process of trying to make them work better. These are difficult times, but they are neither a new Middle Ages nor the end of western civilisation.

Thanks to Akin for the link.

Nicholas Barber at The Economist’s Prospero blog:

No one would begrudge Colin Firth his Best Actor trophy: as well as putting in a tremendous performance in the film, his acceptance speeches are, time and time again, so gracious and fluent that all future nominees should be sent DVDs of them to study. But the choice of Tom Hooper as Best Director over the likes of David Fincher and Darren Aronofsky, when Christopher Nolan wasn’t even nominated, was a sure indication that the Oscars are as fundamentally conservative and sentimental as they always were.

Maybe we shouldn’t expect anything else from an annual backslapping session built around a ridiculous number of advert breaks. But that indie-friendly Best Picture list did make it seem as if the Academy was finally ready to be a bit more daring. The appointment of two such untried and unexpected presenters as Anne Hathaway and James Franco was encouraging, too. As Ms Hathaway quipped, “It’s the young and hip Oscars!” Initially it seemed as if she was right.

As it turned out, though, she and Mr Franco were depressingly lacklustre. Ms Hathaway did her best to jolly things along, despite being given precious little help by the ceremony’s writers, but Mr Franco was so under-used that for great stretches of the evening you could forget that he was involved. And he seemed to forget as often as anyone: whenever he was onscreen he looked as if his mind was on which pizza he would order after the show.

In full.

In The New Yorker:

The narrator of “Open City,” Julius, is in his final year of a psychiatry fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian, and the book covers roughly a year, between the fall of 2006 and the late summer of 2007. He is around thirty, and tells us that he came to America as a university student. He is estranged from his German-born mother; his father died when he was fourteen. But these personal details are withheld over many pages, and only very gradually sifted into the narrative. They finally arrive at a curious angle, so that we always feel, not unpleasantly, that the book began before we started it. We learn about Julius’s being African, for instance, by following clues: first of all, he discusses Yoruba cosmology; then he goes to see the film “The Last King of Scotland,” and mentions that “I knew Idi Amin well, so to speak, because he’d been an indelible part of my childhood mythology.” On the next page, he mentions that he was a medical student in Madison, Wisconsin, and recalls an uncomfortable dinner experience there, when an Indian-Ugandan doctor, forced to flee the country by Idi Amin, announced to his guests that “when I think about Africans I want to spit”: “The bitterness was startling. It was an anger that, I couldn’t help feeling, was partly directed at me, the only other African in the room. The detail of my background, that I was Nigerian, made no difference, for Dr. Gupta had spoken of Africans.” After thirty or so pages, we have discovered that Julius is Nigerian, but only by indirection. There is an interesting combination of confession and reticence about Julius, and about how he sees the world, and, insofar as the novel has a story, this enigma of an illuminated shadow is it—which turns out to be all we need.

H/T @chikaunigwe

I’ve been waiting for this book since I listened to Teju Cole on BBC’s The Forum (you can listen to it here). My copy is already in the mail.

Helon Habila’s Oil on Water is the best written book by a Nigerian author that I’ve read in recent times; I have a feeling that Teju Cole’s is going to take that title from it.

… in Newsweek. Which undermines the argument that one should pay attention to the message and not the messenger. As if the two could ever really be separated.

HERE are two predictions about the world economy. First, the West’s malaise and the rise of emerging economies will yield a mountain of books. Second, few of these are likely to be as bad as “How the West Was Lost”. Here.

A lot, argues journalist Patchen Barss, who has just published a book titled The Erotic Engine: How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google. From the publishers’ website:

From cave painting to photography to the internet, pornography has always been at the cutting edge in adopting and exploiting new developments in mass communication. And in so doing, it has helped to promote and propel those developments in ways that are rarely acknowledged. Without pornography, the internet would not have grown so quickly. The e-commerce payment systems that are now commonplace would be at a far more primitive stage security and usability. Without video streaming software developed for pornography sites, CNN would be struggling to deliver news clips. Without advertising from sex sites, Google could not have afforded YouTube.

Image via Wikipedia

From The Economist:

For anyone who has ever felt a tinge of rose-tinted nostalgia for the traditional, Ayaan Hirsi Ali provides a bracing, and on the whole healthy, cold shower. Having experienced traditional society from the inside—in the form of a Muslim Somali family headed by a well-known politician who practised polygamy and left a deeply troubled and dysfunctional progeny—she has no time for sentimentality. As the world’s most famous ex-Muslim (who became a politician in the Netherlands, then a public intellectual in America), she tells people who have grown up in countries shaped by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution that they don’t know how lucky they are.

(Mentions some of the shortcomings of the book later on)

From Pankaj Mishra:

“Nomad” is unlikely to earn Hirsi Ali many Muslim admirers. Neither will her recent support for the proposed French ban on face veils and the Swiss referendum outlawing minarets. In denouncing Islam unreservedly, she has claimed a precedent in Voltaire—though the eighteenth-century scourge of the Catholic Church might have been perplexed by her proposal that Muslims embrace the “Christianity of love and tolerance.” In another respect, however, the invocation of Voltaire is more apt than Hirsi Ali seems to realize. Voltaire despised the faith and identity of Europe’s religious minority: the Jews, who, he declared, “are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts,” who had “surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism,” and who “deserve to be punished.” Voltaire’s denunciations remind us that the Enlightenment was a much more complex and multifaceted phenomenon than the dawn of reason and freedom that Hirsi Ali evokes. Many followed Voltaire in viewing the Jews as backward, an Oriental abscess in the heart of Europe. Hirsi Ali, recording her horror of ghettoized Muslim life in Whitechapel, seems unaware of the similarly contemptuous accounts of Jewish refugees who made the East End of London their home after fleeing the pogrom.

Here is NigeriansTalk’s Saratu’s commentary on the review.

The Kristof weighs in here:

To those of us who have lived and traveled widely in Africa and Asia, descriptions of Islam often seem true but incomplete. The repression of women, the persecution complexes, the lack of democracy, the volatility, the anti-Semitism, the difficulties modernizing, the disproportionate role in terrorism — those are all real. But if those were the only faces of Islam, it wouldn’t be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today. There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews; charity for the poor; the aesthetic beauty of Koranic Arabic; the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque. Glib summaries don’t work any better for Islam than they do for Christianity or Judaism.

And:

It’s true that public discussion in some Muslim countries has taken on a strident tone, full of over-the-top exaggerations about the West. Educated Muslims should speak out more against such rhetoric.

In the same way, here in the West, we should try to have a conversation about Islam and its genuine problems — while speaking out against over-the-top exaggerations about the East. This memoir, while engaging and insightful in many places, exemplifies precisely the kind of rhetoric that is overheated and overstated.

Need a little more introduction to Ms Ayaan Hirsi Ali? See this. (Actually, you should check it out.)

Some Nigerians are complaining about the BBC documentary Welcome to Lagos because, they say, it is not balanced.

I have not seen the second in the series so I can’t really say much about that. The first, though, in my opinion, does not leave any gap that needs to be filled by any fair and balanced reporting.

It is a story about a dump and its dwellers, and how they manage to eke out a living, create a semblance of a government, and work towards achieving much more than they already have.

I would actually find it distasteful if the documentary had brought a bit of the Lekki side of life in order to show that there is more to Lagos than dumps. That would indeed smack of tokenism, and most likely remove from the main thrust of the documentary by drawing attention to the things that the dump-dwellers do not have. It might also end up portraying them as victims, something that the documentary was very careful not to do.

The other question here would be whether the story would in any way be advanced by showing those other sides. I doubt it.

The documentary depicts an important part of Lagos that is almost never talked about. For that, we should be grateful.

Britain
I would assume that it is an insult to the British audience – for whom the documentary is primarily intended – to believe that they do not know that there is more to Lagos than dumps. Really.

There are complaints that there are Brits who live on garbage. Oh yes there are, and I could almost bet that there are documentaries on them. Probably prepared by or for the BBC. But that is not the issue here.

The issue here is that this is the story of Olusosun and not a documentary comparing it with dumps in other parts of the world. I am sure that anyone who is interested in doing a documentary on that topic – a comparison – would be able to get some funding for that.

This documentary is one that I am the better for having watched.

Libertarianism
One take on this that I find really interesting is the description of life on the dump as libertarianism in action:

Not only did the scavengers sell on any rubbish of any value, but a market arose to satisfy their own needs; the tip had a café and even a manicurist. And at the nearby cattle market, every part of the cow except the hair was used for profit; even the blood that would otherwise drain away was scooped up and turned to chickenfeed.

In this sense, we saw the free market in its perfect form: sole traders exploiting every tiny profit opportunity; the minute division of labour; hard work, energy and entrepreneurship; the lack of any waste.

We also saw that the market policed itself. The scavengers claimed that they trusted each other – though whether this was because market transactions bred bourgeois virtues, or because they threatened to burn to death suspected thieves, was unclear. What was clear, though, was that they didn’t need the state to solve their disputes.

Interesting.