Africabeat

Laphto (Addis Ababa)

Shawel Hailu stands in front of Laphto, a new multi-purpose entertainment center which will feature luxury apartments, an art gallery, bowling alley, pool hall, arcade, night club, cafe, fusion restaurant, shopping, swimming pool, health club, running track, movie theatre (for indy/art house films), VIP center, rentable shopping/office space, Wifi hotspots, a Montessori school and, eventually, a world-class pediatrics hospital. He's part of the wave of returned Diaspora Ethiopians driving the current building boom.

His materials?  Sourced from China, of course, via Guangzhou.  The foreman on his work site are also Chinese.

Louis Michel Heckled by Congolese Protestors at the London School of Economics

A recent French translation post on GV:

Le renouveau congolais posted [Fr] a YouTube video which shows Louis Michel, European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid and formerly Belgian's foreign minister, as he was confronted by Congolese protesters during a talk given earlier this month on the EU and Africa at the London School of Economics.

Keep on readin'

Kenya, Obama and Hope

I was in Nairobi, Mombasa and Lamu just four short months ago and I fell in love.  I fell in love with Kenya for her people; for the hospitality, wisdom, kindness, brilliance and courage I found.  But I suppose I never got to know Kenya well enough to have imagined I was in a tinderbox, that this would happen. 

Now Kenya is burning, and I still haven't been able to get in touch with any of my friends except for my friends who are bloggers, and from them I get images of troops marching through Nairobi's empty streets (streets I remember quite differently), sad stories, stories of human life wasted.   I've started praying and I'm not the praying kind.

Which brings me to Barack Obama.  He isn't exactly an African topic, but his win at the Iowa Caucus and his speech tonight have given me reason to believe in my own country again. 

To be sure, the kind of unity he's calling for--one that transcends red states and blue states--is a lot easier to come by than the love Kenya will need to heal itself from this.  But Barack Obama is a son of a Kenyan, and after tonight it looks like he might just become America's first Black president, all because he promises the only thing that can bring a lost and divided people back from the brink: hope.

They said this day would never come.  They said our sights were set too high.  They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.  But on this January 9th, at this defining moment of history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do.

If you really believe the President of the United States is the leader of the free world, then this son of a Kenyan just may change the world.

Why Will Saletan's Calling for the Miscegenation of the Races

I've been meaning to respond to Will Saletan's piece in Slate last month on race, genetics and intelligence.  In it, he summarizes a number of genetic theories, which all point to the disturbing conclusion that:

"Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there's strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true."

I cannot deny the possibility that there are racial differences in average intelligence (or rather differences in average intelligence between previously isolated populations, since race is a social, not a biological concept), even though my gut reaction is disgust.  I know this is something about which I ought to remain agnostic absent credible, compelling evidence not just because that's the position from which a social scientist, whatever his or her unspoken agendas, ought to begin, but because my emotions on the subject run so damn deep, it's hard to be "objective" (as if anyone can be about a topic as dangerous as it is seductive).  Without a certain intellectual coolness, I'm liable to burst out in expletives.

Kebra Nagast

I'm a little surprised I managed to be on this planet for 25 years without learning anything about the Kebra Nagast.  Samuel Malher, a scholar from Strasbourg, has just published the first unabridged French translation, and I have excerpts from an interview with him by Roots and Culture up at Global Voices.

This week, francophone blog Roots and Culture interviews [FR] Samuel Malher, a religious scholar from Strasbourg who has written the first unabridged French translation of the Kebra Negast, a sacred Ethiopian text.

The Kebra Negast, or the Glory of Kings, is considered sacred not only by Orthodox Ethiopian Christians, who comprise 65% of the country's population, but many Jamaican Rastafarians who believe it predicts the last Ethiopian King was God incarnate. It documents the lineage of the Ethiopian monarchs, who are said to descend directly from Menelik, son of the Israelite King Solomon and the Ethiopian Queen Makeda, otherwise known as the Queen of Sheba.  It also tells the story of how the Ark of the Covenant was taken from Israel to Ethiopia, and how the Ethiopians became God's new chosen people.

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