Apathy & Political Engagement

According to Dave Meslin, in order to overcome apathy as it relates to the governmental process, we need to dismantle the current systems that sustain political disengagement.  Although Meslin is speaking about Canada, his analysis is transferable to the American political system and citizen participation in governance structures:

Gloria Steinem on Rape in War, Its Causes, and How to Stop It

"Conflict is not the only or even the primary normalizer of the extremes of "masculine" and "feminine." Those roles at home are the normalizers of conflict." - Gloria Steinem


This article is possibly the best analysis I've read thus far regarding gendered socialization in regards to rape, war, and political policy.  This article is an absolute must-read:  The Atlantic - "Rape in War, Its Causes, and How to Stop It"

Art, Activism, and Political Discourse

"We have to make sure that art is not a platform for activism. It’s a platform for discussing, for questioning, for putting doubts, for ideas. It’s not a place to make a revolution. If there’s a revolution, it’s revolution against myself, to provoke myself" - Rabih Mroué

Rabih Mroué is a Lebanese actor, director, playwright and artist.  As an artist, he continuously questions the role of art and society: from the relationship between performers and the audience to art's use as a revolutionary platform for activism.  

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN will present Rabih Mroué’s Looking for a Missing Employee January 12–14, as part of Out There 2012. His Pixelated Revolution will be performed on January 14.

Waiting for Dadaab - Photo Series

Photographic journal of the refugee process of accessing relief in Dadaab Refugee Camp:

Huffington Post: Waiting for Dadaab

Guns for Hire in Somalia

Bancroft Global Development is an American private security company that the State Department has indirectly financed to train African troops fighting against Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Based in a mansion along Embassy Row in Washington, Bancroft is a nonprofit enterprise run by Michael Stock, a 34-year-old Virginia native who founded the company not long after graduating from Princeton in 1999. He used some of his family’s banking fortune to set up Bancroft as a small land-mine clearing operation.  The Bancroft camp operates as a spartan hotel for visiting aid workers, diplomats and journalists. But the company’s real income has come from the United States government, albeit circuitously. The governments of Uganda and Burundi pay Bancroft millions of dollars to train their soldiers for counterinsurgency missions in Somalia under an African Union banner, money that the State Department then reimburses to the two African nations. Since 2010, Bancroft has collected about $7 million through this arrangement.

The Central Intelligence Agency, which largely finances the country’s spy agency, has covertly trained Somali intelligence operatives, helped build a large base at Mogadishu’s airport — Somalis call it “the Pink House” for the reddish hue of its buildings or “Guantánamo” for its ties to the United States — and carried out joint interrogations of suspected terrorists with their counterparts in a ramshackle Somali prison.

The Pentagon has turned to strikes by armed drone aircraft to kill Shabab militants and recently approved $45 million in arms shipments to African troops fighting in Somalia.

Unlike regular Somali government troops, the C.I.A.-trained Somali commandos are outfitted with new weapons and flak jackets, and are given sunglasses and ski masks to conceal their identities. They are part of the Somali National Security Agency — an intelligence organization financed largely by the C.I.A. — which answers to Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government. 
The C.I.A. has also occasionally joined Somali operatives in interrogating prisoners, including Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, a Kenyan arrested in Nairobi in 2009 on an American intelligence tip and handed over to Somalia by the Kenyans. “The C.I.A. does not run prisons in Somalia or anywhere else, period,” said the spokeswoman, Marie Harf. “The C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program ended over two and a half years ago.”
(New York Times - U.S. Relies on Contractors in Somalia Conflict)

Gender Bending in Modern Fashion

The NY Times photographer Hedi Slimane captures a stunning boy-meets-girl moment, convincing models Susannah Liguori, Margarita Kallas and Cecily Manson to (gasp) chop their hair.


(New York Times Fashion Magazine)

Just A Band

The group was formed when their members were studying at the Kenyatta University. They went on to release the song "Iwinyo Piny" accompanied by a self-made animated music video. Initially the song received little airplay due to its unconventional musical style, but with time they started to gain popularity through underground channels. Their debut album Scratch To Reveal was relatively successful. They released their second single 'Ha-He' on 17 March, 2010, accompanied by a music video featuring a character known as Makmende. The video has subsequently been described as Kenya's first viral internet meme by the Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fast Company.

AYO's "I'm Gonna Dance"

AYO "I'm Gonna Dance" from Antoine Kenobi Ressaussière on Vimeo.


Ayọ is a Nigerian-German singer-songwriter. She uses the Yoruba translation Ayọ or Ayo. of her first name Joy. The name has to be written with a dot below or behind the o – without it, it would refer to a pitted board game.
(Wikipedia)

The Twin Cities...

Why We're Here: Twin Cities from Seven and Sixty Productions on Vimeo.

Rape as a weapon of war

Photographic Slideshow: Rape in the DRC

Rape in war is as old as war itself. After the sack of Rome 16 centuries ago Saint Augustine called rape in wartime an “ancient and customary evil”. For soldiers, it has long been considered one of the spoils of war. Antony Beevor, a historian who has written about rape during the Soviet conquest of Germany in 1945, says that rape has occurred in war since ancient times, often perpetrated by indisciplined soldiers. But he argues that there are also examples in history of rape being used strategically, to humiliate and to terrorise, such as the Moroccan regulares in Spain’s civil war.


For combatants who know little about each other, complicity in rape can serve as a bond. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, most of whose members say they were kidnapped into its ranks and then raped thousands during the civil war, is a case in point. Ms Cohen argues that armed groups that are not socially cohesive, particularly those whose fighters have been forcibly recruited, are more likely to commit rape, especially gang rape, so as to build internal ties.

For the victims and their families, rape does the opposite. The shame and degradation of rape rip apart social bonds. In societies where a family’s honour rests on the sexual purity of its women, the blame for the loss of that honour often falls not upon the rapist, but the raped. In Bangladesh, where most of the victims were Muslim, the use of rape was not only humiliating for them as individuals but for their families and communities. The then prime minister, Mujibur Rahman, tried to counter this by calling them heroines who needed protection and reintegration. Some men agreed but most did not; they demanded sweeteners in the form of extra dowry payments from the authorities.

In 2008 the UN Security Council officially acknowledged that rape has been used as a tool of war.The laws and customs of war are clear. But in many parts of the world, in the Hobbesian anarchy of irregular war, with ill-disciplined private armies or militias, these norms carry little weight.

But rape in war is not inevitable. In El Salvador’s civil war, it was rare. When it did occur it was almost always carried out by state forces. The left-wing militias fighting against the government for years relied on civilians for information. You can rape to terrorise people or force them to leave an area, says Elisabeth Wood, a professor at Yale University and the Santa Fe Institute, but rape is not effective when you want long-term, reliable intelligence from them or to rule them in the future.


Some groups commit all kinds of other atrocities, but abhor rape. The absence of sexual violence in the Tamil Tigers’ forced displacement of tens of thousands of Muslims from the Jaffna peninsula in 1990 is a case in point. Rape is often part of ethnic cleansing but it was strikingly absent here. Tamil mores prohibit sex between people who are not married and sex across castes (though they are less bothered about marital rape). What is more, Ms Wood explains, the organisation’s strict internal discipline meant commanders could enforce these judgments.


(Economist: Violence Against Women)

The Memory of Love

By Aminatta Forna

Sierra Leone’s civil war lasted until 2002, claiming as many as 50,000 lives and displacing as many as 2.5 million people. Forna, who grew up in Sierra Leone and now lives in London, introduces her characters in 2001, then slowly reveals them through the events of the preceding three decades. 

Sudanese Lost Boy Returns Home

The Largest Refugee Complex in the World: Dadaad

Dadaab Refugee Camps in Northeastern Kenya pose a critical question for the international community: How does it treat a humanitarian emergency that does not go away?

There are nearly 300,000 refugees in Dadaab, Kenya (composed of 3 refugee camps: Ifo, Hagadera and Dagahaley with a 4th camp currently under construction), making it the largest refugee complex in the world, with 6,000 third-generation refugees according to the United Nations.

Humanitarian officials say building schools and hospitals is the best way to protect refugees, but donors are hesitant to finance projects that will encourage more refugees to come and stay.  The impasse has left Dadaab understaffed and overcrowded. Half of its youth — who make up more than half of all refugees — are out of school and easy targets for militia recruiters.

Refugees queuing for registration with UNHCR

The use of child soldiers has become a major aspect of Somalia’s seemingly inextricable conflict, and the country’s transitional government, which is supported by the United States, has a history of using children in combat.  In 2009, the Kenyan government was accused of supporting recruitment drives among refugees from the camps to fight in Somalia’s army.  Al Shabab, the most prolific rebel group in Somalia, also recruits in the camp and United Nations employees have been approached to serve as go-betweens by Shabab agents.  Somalia’s notorious piracy networks have also been known to visit the camps.  


(New York Times)

Religious values and cultural traditions collide: Life after resettlement and the rise of Somali gang culture in the Twin Cities

In a surprising development, Federal and local Minnesota law enforcement officials are announcing they've arrested 23 people in two states in an alleged Somali prostitution ring.  Twenty-three people were arrested in Minnesota and Tennessee.  The investigation was led by St. Paul Police and members of the Task Force on Human Trafficking, which includes federal, state and local law enforcement.  The case first came to light in September of 2010, after investigators asked a Ramsey County judge for permission to search the cell phone records of a 15-year-old girl. Authorities believe the girl was lured into a large prostitution ring controlled by Somali gangs.


(Minnesota Public Radio)

V.S. Naipaul

Sir V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul is a Trinidadian writer born in Chaguanas, Trinidad on 17 August 1932.  Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, he is known for his novels set in developing countries.  The Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories" noting that "Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished."  However, His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Additionally, he has been criticised for dwelling on some negative aspects of Islam in his works, such as nihilism among fundamentalists.

His personal life was marred by drama and tragedy.  Naipaul's marriage of 41 years to Patricia Hale was marked by frequent infidelities, and he is cited as admitting that his devotion to his writing and infidelities may have hastened her death due to cancer in 1996.  During the marriage, he had a long-term love affair with his mistress Margaret Gooding.  Biographer Patrick French wrote that Naipaul subjected both wife and mistress to regular sessions of sexual and physical abuse.  However, 2 months after Hale's death Naipaul married former Pakistani journalist Nadira Khannum Alvi and abruptly ended his affair with Gooding.  


His first three books are comic portraits of Trinidadian society. The Mystic Masseur (1957) and  Miguel Street (1959), a collection of short stories, are among his first books. His acclaimed novel A House for Mr Biswas (1961), is based on his father's life in Trinidad.  Subsequent novels developed more political themes and he began to write about colonial and post-colonial societies in the process of decolonisation. These novels include The Mimic Men (1967), In a Free State (1971), Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979). The Enigma of Arrival (1987) is a personal account of his life in England. A Way in the World (1994), is a formally experimental narrative that combines fiction and non-fiction in a historical portrait of the Caribbean. Half a Life, was published in 2001 and follows the adventures of Indian Willie Chandran in post-war Britain while Magic Seeds (2004) continues his story.

The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010) is Naipaul's 30th book and 16th volume of nonfiction.  New York Time's book critic Eliza Griswold describes his newest work: "Naipaul is willing to express a new attitude, one of self-doubt. This acknowledgment of human frailty — starting with his own — broadens his observational powers immeasurably. As he sets out to explore what he calls “the beginning of things,” he proves willing to turn his brutally accurate lens back on himself...Naipaul has always revealed a curious admixture of extrovert and introvert on the page. The extrovert enjoys his public political scraps, his voyages and his love affairs — even as he seems to be loathing all three. The introvert demands time for the isolation that reflection requires".  


(Wikipedia), (New York Times), and (Contemporary Writers)

Mulatu Astatke, the father of Ethiopian jazz

ONSTAGE 68-year-old Mulatu Astatke is as subtle and understated as the Ethiopian jazz he created. The music, a hybrid of traditional Ethiopian music and jazz, is subdued, somewhat melancholy, and at times psychedelic. Mr Astatke, the originator and composer of songs in this canon, plays his principal instrument, the vibraphone, with a light touch. Between songs, there is no small talk. He thanks the crowd, and coolly introduces the next number.

Mr Astatke has completed a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard and been an artist-in-residence at MIT in recent years. But the seeds of his “Ethio-jazz” were planted in the 1950s and 1960s when he studied classical and jazz composition in Britain and America and honed his techniques while at Berklee College of Music, where he was the first African student. On visits to New York he hung out with jazz musicians such as John Coltrane and performed with the Duke Ellington orchestra in Ethiopia in the 1970s.

Mr Astatke’s name resurfaced in 2005, when his compositions appeared in the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers. A busy time of performing, recording, teaching, and composing has since followed.

(Baobab)

Kola Nuts

                                                

Kola nuts are important in many African societies, particularly in Western Africa. Besides the fact that Kola nuts contain caffeine and act as a stimulant and anti-depressant, they are also thought to reduce fatigue and hunger, aid digestion, and work as an aphrodisiac.

In some parts of Africa, kola nuts are given as gifts to visitors entering a home, usually with some formal ceremony. Offering the kola nut is a gesture of friendship and hospitality.  Elsewhere, before a marriage, a bag of kola nuts are often given by a groom to the parents of the bride. Kola nuts are a used in rituals performed by religious healers.

Besides the ceremonial uses, many Africans consume kola nuts regularly, even daily, for the medicial effects described above. Kola nuts are a common sight in African markets in cities and villages. They are often sold by street vendors at bus and train depots. On a train or bus, a traveler with a kola nut will often offer a piece to the others nearby, whether he knows them or not.


Kola nuts are consumed by breaking them open and into pieces, then chewing the kola nut pieces as one chews gum. Most people find the taste very bitter, especially at first. Sometimes a knife is needed to cut the nut into pieces.

Kola nuts are best known outside of Africa as an ingredient in cola beverages. The stimulative effect is similar to a strong cup of coffee.  There is some evidence that the first kola (or cola) beverage was made by Western Africans who mixed water with dried or fermented kola nuts. Commercially produced cola drinks were developed in the late 1800s, when chemists and inventors the world over used kola nuts (as well as other exotic ingredients) in various drinks and tonics. The most famous of these is Coca-Cola, which has become a truly global beverage.

(Congo Cookbook)

SHIS-toe-SO-my-uh-sis

After suffering from chronic stomach issues for over a year, I was finally diagnosed with Schistosomiasis (a.k.a Bilharzia) earlier this month.  Here are some interesting facts and information....

Schistosomiaisis is a disease caused by parasitic worms. You become infected when your skin comes in contact with contaminated freshwater in which certain types of snails that carry schistosomes are living.

More than 200 million people are infected worldwide.   

An estimated 85% of the world’s cases of schistosomiasis are in Africa, where prevalence rates can exceed 50% in local populations.

 

Schistosomiasis is the second most socioeconomically devastating parasitic disease after malaria.

There are many varieties of schistosomes, but only four which are particularly important in man:

1. S. haematobium occurs throughout Africa and in Arabia, South West Asia, and around the Mediterranean. The urinary tract and the portal system are mainly affected, but the lungs and colon do not escape, and the central nervous system may occasionally be involved.

2. S. mansoni is also prevalent throughout Africa, particularly in the north, in Arabia, and in the north of South America. It mainly affects the colon, the portal system and the lungs, very rarely the central nervous system.

3. S. japonicum is found mostly in Asia; in China and Japan, the Philippines, and other Pacific islands. It primarily affects the colon and small intestine, the portal system and the lungs, rarely the central nervous system.

4. S. intercalatum is much less common and occurs only in equatorial Africa, particularly Zaire, and affects the digestive tract and the portal system.There is one other, S. mekongi, clinically similar to S. japonicum, but found only in the Mekong river basin. 

 

The clinical manifestations of chronic schistosomiasis are the result of host immune responses to schistosome eggs. Eggs secreted by adult worm pairs enter the circulation and lodge in organs and cause granulomatous reactions. Eosinophilia may be present. 

S. mansoni and S. japonicum eggs most commonly lodge in the blood vessels of the liver or intestine and can cause diarrhea, constipation, and blood in the stool. Chronic inflammation can lead to bowel wall ulceration, hyperplasia, and polyposis and, with heavy infections, to periportal liver fibrosis 

S. haematobium eggs typically lodge in the urinary tract and can cause dysuria and hematuria. Calcifications in the bladder may appear late in the disease. S. haematobium infection has been associated with increased risk of bladder cancer.

(Medcyclopaedia) & (CDC)

Riba Stirling Prize win for Rome's Maxxi Museum

 

The Riba Stirling Award is given for the building deemed to have made the greatest contribution to British architecture.The 2010 award was given to Zaha Hadid Architects for their design of the Maxxi Museum in Rome.
(BBC)

Zaha Hadid, British-Iraqi Architect (b.1950)

Zaha Hadid has defined a radically new approach to architecture by creating buildings, such as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, with multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry to evoke the chaos of modern life.

 

Zaha Hadid was single-minded from an early age. Born in 1950 in Baghdad, she grew up in a very different Iraq from the one we know today. The Iraq of her childhood was a liberal, secular, western-focused country with a fast-growing economy that flourished until the Ba’ath party took power in 1963, and where her bourgeois intellectual family played a leading role. Female role models were plentiful in liberal Iraq, but in architecture, female role models anywhere, let alone in the Middle East, were thin on the ground in the 1950s and 1960s. No matter. After convent school in Baghdad and Switzerland, and a degree in mathematics at the American University in Beirut, Hadid enrolled at the Architectural Association in London in 1972.

You could call her work baroque modernism. Baroque classicists like Borromini shattered Renaissance ideas of a single viewpoint perspective in favour of dizzying spaces designed to lift the eyes and the heart to God. Likewise, Hadid shatters both the classically formal, rule bound modernism of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier and the old rules of space — walls, ceilings, front and back, right angles. She then reassembles them as what she calls “a new fluid, kind of spatiality” of multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry, designed to embody the chaotic fluidity of modern life.

Hadid’s architecture denies its own solidity. Short of creating actual forms that morph and change shape – still the stuff of science fiction – Hadid creates the solid apparatus to make us perceive space as if it morphs and changes as we pass through. Perhaps wisely, she talks little about theory. Unlike, say, Daniel Libeskind, she does not say that a shape symbolises this or that. And she wears her cultural identity lightly. Noticeably, and uncharacteristically diplomatically, she has declined to comment on the situation in Iraq. Instead Hadid lets her spaces speak for themselves. This does not mean that they are merely exercises in architectural form. Her obsession with shadow and ambiguity is deeply rooted in Islamic architectural tradition, while its fluid, open nature is a politically charged riposte to increasingly fortified and undemocratic modern urban landscapes.

(The British Council)

The Danger of A Single Story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba but grew up in the university town of Nsukka. She moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State with a major in Communication and a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African Studies from Yale.

Published Works
Purple Hibiscus
Half of a Yellow Sun
The Thing Around Your Neck

Ted Talks: The Danger of a Single Story 
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.