Global Voices Online

Stories

May 4th, 2008

Sub-Saharan Africa

Congolese blogger Cédric Kalonji [Fr] writes about a weekend visit to the Zongo waterfalls: “Even if the trip was exhausting, this little weekend getaway did me good and helped me realize once again that my country is very beautiful, and beyond minerals, its tourist potential constitutes a whole other resource for Congo.”

Sub-Saharan Africa

Babilown [Fr] puts Benin's local election results in perspective: “[it's as if] the opposition won China, Russia, Brazil and Mexico, while the ruling party snatched up Belgium and even Canada, but also Crete, Malta, the Cayman Islands, the Vatican, Albania, Haiti, Barbados, Cap Verde, Estonia, Lithuania, Israel, Jordan, Rwandan, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Serbia, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, all the members of the United Nations, and other more or less imaginary countries like the Kingdom of the Sahara and the Freedland Republic…or the Kingdom of Redonda.”

April 18th, 2008

Haiti, Congo, and the politics of hunger

Jennifer Brea · 21:30 · Americas , Sub-Saharan Africa

lingua → mg · es · zht · zhs

Skyrocketing food prices have already sparked riots in Haiti, Egypt and Mozambique this month as a worsening crisis not only threatens to leave thousands vulnerable to starvation, but will test weak and ineffective governments in poor countries around the world.

Two francophone bloggers, one Haitian, one Congolese, respond, but rather than blame the proximate cause–subsidies for biofuels in rich countries–they criticize the politics and the politicians who left their countries this vulnerable to begin with. They write that the riots of these last few weeks and the riots to come, like the crisis itself, are symptomatic of deeper problems that cannot be solved by the simple magic of foreign aid.
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4 comments · »»

Remembering Aimé Césaire

Jennifer Brea · 00:39 · Americas , Sub-Saharan Africa , Western Europe

lingua → fr · es

… when my turn comes into the air
I will raise up a cry so violent
that I will spatter the sky utterly
and by my shredded branches
and by the insolent jet of my solemn wounded bole

I shall command the islands to exist

– from “Lost Body”, by Aimé Césaire, trans. E. Anthony Hurley (via The Caribbean Review of Books)

* * *

Aimé Césaire - Martinican poet, politician and consummate West Indian - passed away today at the age of 94. It is not often that politics and poetry go together, but when they do, the West Indies is as fertile an environment as any for the two to coexist. Césaire seamlessly blended his love for language, ideas and writing into his political life, which spanned almost 60 years.
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13 comments · »»

April 15th, 2008

D.R. of Congo: Fifth fatal crash in under a year, food prices the real disaster

Jennifer Brea · 20:31 · Sub-Saharan Africa

lingua → mg · es · zht · zhs

News agencies are reporting that 75 were killed when a cargo plane crashed in Goma shortly after takeoff on Tuesday. An overloaded cabin may have been the cause. It's the fifth fatal plane crash since June 2007.

Last October, Du Cabiau à Kinshasa, responding to a plane crash in a poor district of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, wrote, ominously: “This crash was not the first…it will not be the last” (Fr).

Sadly, these words have proved prophetic. In the wake of this latest disaster, Cabiau reflects on how a plane crash can bring attention to the DRC, generally ignored by Western media, even though it's reeling from one of the greatest human disasters in a century.
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4 comments · »»

April 14th, 2008

Sub-Saharan Africa

Congopages writes about local efforts to protect endangered sea turtles [Fr].

Sub-Saharan Africa

In a commentary at Babilown (Fr), Eloi Goutchili compares Robert Mugabe and Paul Biya, president of Cameroon for over 25 years, concluding that only real difference between them is the way they are treated in the Western press: “..the Western press, so harsh when it comes to a Mugabe and so concerned with democratic progress in Africa remains silent about the exploits of this hero of françafrique's [sham democracies, Biya]. For this self-righteous press, as for Whites, it's dictatorship only when their interests are endangered.”

April 12th, 2008

Americas , East Asia , Middle East & North Africa

zizou from Djerba has volunteered to do live Arabic translation of the Dalai Lama's “compassion conference” in Seattle this week.

April 9th, 2008

Middle East & North Africa , Sub-Saharan Africa

Bassam Bounenni, a Tunisian journalist who blogs at Wherever I Roam, That's My Home, describes covering the elections in Zimbabwe for Al Jazeera [Fr]: “We have been stopped repeatedly and our hotel was surrounded by snipers, who had come to look for Western journalists without accreditation. The country is beautiful and the people are really wonderful, in spite of all the misery.”

March 27th, 2008

Sub-Saharan Africa , Western Europe

Cédric Kalonji writes about the mixed blessings [Fr] of life in Europe for Africans: “I ask myself what's better, living in an African hell or all of the less-than-positive looks and judgments [Africans get] in paradise.”