You can't go to Asmara and not note the architecture. While most African capitals today are replete with drab, hulking towers from the 1960s and 1970s, the Eritrean capital, dating back to its days as an early-century Italian colonial pied-a-terre, is home to some of the boldest designs on the continent.
Benito Mussolini saw Asmara as an extension of his Fascist empire. He used the highland city, as Barney Jopson wrote recently in the Financial Times, as "a laboratory for bold architectural styles – rationalism,
futurism, monumentalism – that would never pass muster in Italy. The
result is a cocktail of convex façades, jutting balconies and porthole
windows."
UNESCO says the city of 400,000 "represents perhaps the most concentrated and intact assemblage of Modernist architecture anywhere in the world." "Intact" is a relative term, however. Most of the celebrated buildings are in dire need of a touch-up. Porthole windows are shattered or missing. The gently curved facades need repainting. The vibrant colors have faded down to that familiar drabness brought on by weather and neglect.
Yet the buildings still stop you in your tracks as you drive by, and it's cool to think of what the city looked like in its heyday. The Fiat Tagliero service station, with its iconic "wings," is probably the most famous of the lot:
Up close, the badly faded lettering still looks sharp.
The largest movie theater in colonial Asmara was the Impero, reportedly named for Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia. It dominates the main Harnet Avenue strip and is a modernist landmark, to be sure, but don't look too closely -- many of 45 round lights dotting the front are cracked.
The Irga building gets overlooked because it's next to the Tagliero. But it's another art deco standout, built in 1961, according to architecture types smarter than me.
Finally, strolling past the Cinema Roma (1937), with its marble facade, and watching as ancient vehicles motored down the street, I could almost imagine myself in an old Italian hill town.
I've just returned from a brief trip to Asmara, Eritrea, where I had the chance to interview Isaias Afwerki, the country's only president in 16 years of independence.
The Ministry of Information gave me less than a week to prepare, and Isaias isn't an easy interview. He's famously prickly and doesn't seem to think much of journalists. As the story goes, he expelled a wire-service reporter from the country a few years back after the reporter repeatedly referred to Eritrea as "the tiny Red Sea state."
But for me the most difficult thing about the interview was that it was taped live by the presidential media service, with three cameras and an array of lights. Before Isaias walked into the room, while I was looking over my notes, one of the cameramen startled me by straightening my tie. When the interview began, I was given a countdown as if I were a seasoned TV personality.
When I got the wrap-up sign, nearly two and a half hours later, I briefly contemplated signing off with "You stay classy, Asmara." (Not really.)
The staged aspect threw me off, but it was stranger after the interview aired on EriTV, the country's only TV channel, and I started being recognized in my hotel, in the street, in the immigration line in Cairo after my flight out. In a deeply repressive and suspicious country, this would have been an excellent way for Isaias to ensure no one spoke to me -- except that few people wanted to speak with me, anyway.
I'd been told to watch out for Isaias's footwear, and sure enough he was wearing his trademark sandals. Although the 63-year-old ruler hasn't created a cult of personality there is, among his supporters, an almost cult-like appreciation for his lack of pretension, which measured against his African counterparts makes him seem positively ascetic. His photo doesn't hang in every store window, he hasn't constructed an over-the-top presidential palace, and when he travels through Asmara in the presidential car (a sensible sedan) he rides shotgun.
Later this week we'll be running my story as well as a short video I've produced with clips from the interview. Stay tuned.
Nairobi put on a good show Saturday night at the annual MTV Africa Music Awards. There was more talent (Nigeria's D'Banj, Kenya's own Nameless), style (tight dresses, shiny sunglasses), celebrity (Akon, Wyclef Jean) than this city usually sees. I can't judge how it looked on TV but inside the hall it was a pretty great party.
As the host, Wyclef brought his A-game, a pleasant surprise to those of us accustomed to big stars coming to Africa and putting on lackluster performances (I'm talking about you, Ja Rule, and you, Mos Def). Wyclef even went topical, at one point bringing a chef onstage to talk about Kenya's current food crisis.
What's the one thing Kenya needs to stave off a food disaster, the chef was asked. "Seeds," he responded, as the crowd cheered. Kenyans need help growing more of their own food, he went on. They don't want handouts.
Then Wyclef looked into the camera and made a plea to viewers -- to donate to the World Food Program. The massive U.N. agency that provides food handouts by the megaton to crisis zones, and is sometimes accused of distorting local agricultural markets and criticized for buying the bulk of its food from American farmers. The exact opposite, I think, of what the chef intended.
Wyclef is a smart guy, thoughtful, deeply committed to the plight of his troubled homeland of Haiti. He got this one wrong. Then again, I'm not sure how many people in that rocking, booze-soaked concert hall noticed.
I was walking out of a Nairobi movie theater last night. (Finally watched "Up." Enchanting.) An American friend saw this poster in the lobby and said: "Hey, a movie about the next Kenyan election!"
In February I wrote about the de facto retail ban in Kenya on "It's Our Turn to Eat," Michela Wrong's eye-opening book about ethnicity and political corruption here. Since then a creative U.S. Embassy staffer helped some activist groups sell a few thousand copies at reduced prices (under a grant by USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives).
But the book remains "too hot" for any Kenyan bookstore to stock openly and regularly, and the only Kenyans who buy the book now are those who travel overseas.
Michela e-mailed me last week about a new and innovative distribution project that I'm happy to help publicize. A group of Kenyans in London and Nairobi have launched a website that links customers in Kenya with local distributors who have the book but aren't selling it openly. Here's the best part: the buyers can pay with M-Pesa, the wonderful mobile money service that I believe is one of the best low-tech innovations of the decade. No need for credit cards.
Michela says the folks behind the website are keeping their identities secret for now, but she vouches for them. "This is not a con trick," she says. Sale price is 1500 Kenya shillings (about $20) -- cheaper than what I paid for my copy in South Africa, but higher than the USAID-subsidized price and still expensive for ordinary Kenyans. Delivery is same-day. They're starting off with 150 pilot copies to see what interest is. This morning the website says 140 copies are still in stock.
Michela says:
I'm doing my best to publicise this as there seems to be a real nervousness about using the site. It currently gets hits but very few orders. I'm told this might be because Kenyans have been burnt by various website scams in the past. Or maybe it's because of what Philo Ikonya called "the return of fear." Call me self-obsessed, but I doubt that the potential Kenyan market for this book has been exhausted yet, even if I'd like to see the price going down.
I have to agree with her: the book, despite being out for nearly a year, remains much more talked about than actually read. It's a shame, because it's one of the most important books on Kenya to come out in years.
The U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, Mike Ranneberger, has started a Twitter feed. In the inaugural Tweet he wrote that he was "Looking to expand contacts with Kenyan people as part of U.S. efforts to push for implementation of reforms."
So far he's come out swinging.
Already he's Tweeted in favor of the removal of hated police boss Hussein Ali and voiced opposition to President Kibaki's attempt to reappoint corruption czar Aaron Ringera, who's widely seen as incompetent. Ranneberger wrote: "Outraged by
Ringera's reappointment. Indication of impunity. A Kenyan told me it's
a slap in the face of Kenyans. What to do? Suggestions?"
Last week, after the Kenyan Parliament voted down the appointment, Ranneberger expressed his support not in an official statement, but via Twitter. Moments later, he wrote:
The ambassador has only 155 followers as of Tuesday afternoon, but I imagine that will be changing as nervous Kenyan pols create their Twitter accounts. We'll see how or if Ranneberger manages to balance diplomatic
nuance with Twitter's tyrannical brevity.
The British arm of Doctors Without Borders (MSF UK) has launched a provocative new advertisement that's worth a look.
It's known simply as "Boy" and it began airing last month in movie theaters across the UK. It's a one-minute wide shot of a bullet-riddled concrete house where, as a series of short titles gradually informs us, an MSF doctor is treating a wailing 5-year-old boy whose family has just been the victim of a vicious militia attack.
Watch the ad here:
The spot was created by McCann Erickson, a major British advertising firm, which has worked for MSF pro bono since 1995. Two independent theater advertisers, Pearl and Dean and Digital Cinema Media, are running the ad for free before movies rated suitable for people older than 15.
Figuring the ad would spark debate, MSF UK has been open about wanting to do something different:
It is our attempt to make a deliberate move away from some
traditional charity advertising which can tend to focus on images of
starving children. We have deliberately left the child nameless and not identified the
country in order to protect his identity and to encourage viewers to
realise that violence of this sort occurs beyond just the borders of a
single country.
Some of the blogosphere's response has been scathing. The Road to the Horizon says that replicating a war zone in a studio and a faking the child's cries are in terribly bad taste, and Aid Watch says that it plays on tired stereotypes: "In the absence of detail, this 'no place' becomes 'every place' in Africa, the terrifying Dark Continent."
I can't agree with the first point; it's an advertisement, and a clearly stylized one at that, not a documentary. I take Aid Watch's point, although the broad generalities of the violence in the ad also occur in war zones from Sri Lanka to South America.
A friend of mine, who works for a different aid agency, wrote on Facebook:
Some
are saying it is 'aid porn'; I think it hits the mark. It shows what is
really happening in many war zones worldwide, the utter despair and
tragedy, ...and
yes, the need for funds for emergency response. I don't think, though,
that a similar ad would be appropriate for long-term development
fundraising.
There are generally two types of charity ads, and I salute MSF for
avoiding (1) the starving-baby cliche and (2) the
genre I loathe much more, which is We Save Dark-Skinned People. This kind of ad glorifies the aid worker for his courage and selflessness -- we have to live on PowerBars and get our clothes dirty, you know -- while making the tragedy itself a total afterthought. This is truly aid porn, and for a particularly galling example, check out MSF's own "t-shirt" ad.
After an advertising website, Osocio, called the new "Boy" spot "heartbreaking video with bad copy" and said "the call to action doesn’t have any connection with the rape and murder," dozens of people posted responses. One person said that MSF, rather than moving away from "traditional charity advertising" that features starving babies, have produced "an image of
a child suffering in an even more upsetting way than a photograph of a
starving child (by using audio)."
To me, however, "Boy" isn't as exploitative as the pictures of starving children, or as grotesquely worshipful of the aid workers -- precisely because we don't see faces. And for what MSF is trying to do here, which is raise money for its efforts worldwide, we don't need to know where this particular disaster is happening. The fact is, this kind of militia violence occurs in war zones across the world.
This kind of ad is designed to shock the viewer, and I have no doubt it'll be a slap in the face to a comfortable, well-fed moviegoer who just wanted to enjoy "Transformers" on a Saturday night. My main question about the ad is this: I don't know how much money you make by shaming middle-class people into thinking they're inadequate -- or at least not as brave as an aid worker: Yes, the doctors at MSF are heroes, as are thousands of charity workers around the world. No, you are not a hero. You are wrist deep into your tub of buttered popcorn.
In the end, the ad might be as offensive as it is stirring.
In elementary school, I loved playing the "Oregon Trail" computer game, which put you in the shoes of 19th century Americans setting off by covered wagon to settle the wild West. This was meant to be an educational game, providing timeless lessons about class issues (the banker from Boston always set off with the most provisions, although the carpenter and farmer had skills that were more valuable to survive the nasty journey) as well as the importance of good nutrition (this was how most kids of my generation learned to spell "dysentery.")
Video games have come a long way since the eight-bit, Apple IIC days of my youth. But the latest offering from Serious Games Interactive, a Danish maker of educational computer games, is ambitious on several levels.
"Global Conflicts: Child Soldiers" takes you to northern Uganda, with the task of bringing an end to the two-decade insurgency by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Our hero isn't a James Bond-like spy, CIA hitman or South African soldier of fortune -- he's a human rights investigator.
As a player, you will work for the
International Criminal Court and will be sent on an assignment in
Uganda, where you will meet the feared leader of the rebel
Lord’s Resistance Army, Joseph Kony. The game focuses on
topics such as child soldiers, human rights and war-crimes.
Previous games in the series have included "Global Conflicts: Palestine"
and "Global Conflicts: Latin America." When they say "Serious Games," they're not kidding.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun, a blog for PC gamers, has a bit more detail: You're looking for Kony, but along the way you meet people liekMonica Atto, an IDP prepared to forego personal justice in the interests of the
peace process (an idea popular among Acholis, as I and others have written). You also meet Dalson Oyo, who had his hands, ears, nose and lips chopped off by LRA rebels, and wants Kony hunted down and killed.
I was afraid the game would be exploitative or trade on stereotypes. But "Grand Theft Auto: Eastern Congo" this is not. Gamer Tim Stone offers a strong endorsement:
In pure game terms Global Conflicts: Child Soldiers has various
failings. As an educational device however, it’s pretty extraordinary.
Of the hundreds of NPCs I will doubtless meet over the next twelve
months, I can’t imagine any will fix my attention, or burn themselves
into my memory more effectively than Monica or Dalson.
Interestingly, northern Uganda is now also the subject of a comic book and an upcoming film due to star Uma Thurman. This long-running human tragedy, often overshadowed by the horrors in Sudan and Congo, is suddenly getting some serious attention.
My visit to Nigeria wouldn't have been complete without a foray into Nollywood, the prolific Nigerian film industry. After several phone calls to producers to find a film that was shooting on my last day in Lagos, director Ikechukwu Onyeka graciously invited me to hang out on the set of his new movie. (Read the story and watch a narrated slideshow.)
There was one thing every Nollywood player wanted to talk about, however: Pirates. And not those pirates.
Like its big brothers in Hollywood, Nigeria's straight-to-video movie industry is being cannibalized by DVD piracy. There's no box office and few cineplexes; Nigerian movies are burned straight to disc, and sell for about $2 a DVD on street corners.
It was only a matter of time before pirates with blank discs and laptop DVD-writing software began producing half-price knockoffs by the hundreds and thousands. Producers now say that most of the Nollywood films that are sold are unlicensed copies. (For an overview of the problem, read Will Connors' recent piece in the Wall Street Journal.)
Piracy was a scourge on Hollywood that prompted an industry-wide fight, but filmmakers there always had massive box-office receipts and law enforcement on their side. The only revenue source in Nollywood is DVD sales, and producers say that they get no support from Nigerian authorities. Police are supposed to crack down on unlicensed movie vendors, but bribery is commonplace.
"Piracy is the main problem we face now," Emeka Duru, one of the busiest producers in Lagos, told me as we drove out to Onyeka's movie set one afternoon. It's not like you can blame Nollywood fans. The quality of pirated discs is the same. The illegal sellers usually print their own disc jackets, so the copies look real. And producers have no way of knowing how many copies are being bought out there.
"If they sold 10,000 copies of your movie" -- which is pretty good -- "you have no way of knowing," Duru said.
Most Nollywood films are financed on shoestring budgets, from $20,000 and up. The financiers, often friends of the filmmakers, need to recoup their investment on one project before fronting cash for another. Increasingly, Duru said, films are losing money or just breaking even, and he believes that fewer films are being made this year than in previous years. (He knew of only one movie being shot in Lagos while I was in town last week; normally, he said, there would have been three or four.)
So what's Nollywood to do? Well, one way that producers have always hedged their bets with a fickle public is to release movies in multiple parts. So you have "Fatal Seduction" and, shortly afterward, "Fatal Seduction 2" comes out. It's the same movie, just cut in half with the second part billed as the "sequel." Duru thinks that more filmmakers will go to releasing three- and four-part movies. I have a feeling that could increase profits for the pirates more than the producers, however.
Duru also believes that more production will move to television, where African satellite networks would be willing to pay up-front for air rights, and to Ghana, which has a budding film industry of its own, nicknamed (naturally) Ghollywood. Ghana is better governed than Nigeria, and law enforcement takes a dimmer view of piracy.
But Nigeria, with 140 million people and counting, is by far the biggest market for these movies -- and until piracy there is brought under control, Nollywood will suffer.
I sort of put my foot in my mouth the other day when I met Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, a young Nigerian writer whose first novel, I Do Not Come to You by Chance,has won praise in The Washington Post, among other places. Adaobi's story takes us deep into the Lagos underworld of a 419er -- a young guy who helps create those "Dear Friend" Nigerian scam e-mails -- and delves into the reasons why these scams exist and why they sometimes work.
The concept sounds great, and I started to tell Adaobi that it must be a good time to be a Nigerian writer. I'd just come from the U.S., where Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's latest work was arrayed in bookstores amidst the bestsellers and editors' picks. Nigeria has the strongest literary tradition in Africa -- including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ken Saro-Wiwa -- and perhaps the West is starting to pay attention again to writing from the continent's biggest population.
As Adaobi gently reminded me, however, it's not that Nigerian writers have just now resurfaced. They've been writing all along. While she didn't refer specifically to Adichie -- a massive talent who moved from Nigeria to the U.S. as an undergraduate -- she was making a distinction between Nigerian writers in the diaspora and those who are 100 percent based in the home country. The writers we know about are those that have been "discovered" by a big Western publisher, which then brings those books back to Africa.
Without that kind of money behind you, it's impossible for a writer in most of Africa to reach a mass audience. Writers still write, Adaobi said, but they self-publish.
As it turns out, another person I met in Nigeria was Jeremy Weate, co-founder of a new, Abuja-based publishing house called Cassava Republic. Jeremy and his wife are hoping to give African writers greater voice by discovering unpublished writers and publishing African works locally at affordable prices. Adaobi's book, which has already been published in the UK and the U.S., will finally reach Nigeria under this homegrown imprint at the end of the year.
It's not unlike African coffee, for example, which for many years was
picked as beans here before being shipped off to Europe to be roasted
and "value-added" -- and sold for a massive mark-up. Now a lot more coffee from Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia is roasted at home, so more of the proceeds stay closer to home. In the case of writing, it hopefully means that more talents in Nigeria and throughout Africa will be "discovered" at home -- and that more of them will be able to make a living doing what they do well.
Somewhere in Africa was written by McClatchy correspondent Shashank Bengali, who covered sub-Saharan Africa from 2005 to 2009. He's now based in Washington, D.C., as a national correspondent.
