Recently in Understanding Africa Category

The surprise ending was that Christoph Schlingensief (who I had never heard of, myself being neither German nor avant-garde) was the Fitzcarraldo of Burkina Faso, but didn't get too far... or was the whole thing an elaborate joke?  Read article here- plus illustration of the design of the savannah opera house...

In the African savannah, a good half-hour drive from the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, Christoph Schlingensief felt at home. It is a place surrounded by green fields, granite cliffs and gnarly baobab trees.

"When I was doing so badly, I told my wife, when things get really tough, we can come here with a suitcase full of pain pills," Schlingensief said in February of his African paradise. "I have the feeling that here I can give myself over to nature, to the motion of this world, without the pressure of the life I led in Berlin."
 
This was the place Schlingensief had chosen to build what he called an opera village. The village was to include an opera house, but also a school for theater and music, performance spaces and a clinic.

Now, after his death on August 21, Schlingensief's family is doing everything to make sure his vision becomes a reality. In his obituary, they requested that donations be made toward the opera village, instead of flowers or wreaths. 

Trust is a big word in economic development... African societies are often said to be low in trust, and this explains their slow economic development.  Low trust may have been a consequence of slave raiding.  I'd love to replicate this paper in African village settings.... and I'd love to see whether reading lots of fiction makes you more trusting.

People high in trust were more accurate at detecting the liars -- the more people showed trust in others, the more able they were to distinguish a lie from the truth. The more faith in their fellow humans they had, the more they wanted to hire the honest interviewees and to avoid the lying ones. Contrary to the stereotype, people who were low in trust were more willing to hire liars and they were also less likely to be aware that they were liars. "Although people seem to believe that low trusters are better lie detectors and less gullible than high trusters, these results suggest that the reverse is true," write co-authors Nancy Carter and Mark Weber of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. "High trusters were better lie detectors than were low trusters; they also formed more appropriate impressions and hiring intentions. "People who trust others are not pie-in-the-sky Pollyannas, their interpersonal accuracy may make them particularly good at hiring, recruitment, and identifying good friends and worthy business partners."

N. L. Carter, J. Mark Weber. Not Pollyannas: Higher Generalized Trust Predicts Lie Detection Ability. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2010; 1 (3): 274 DOI: 10.1177/1948550609360261

"Un vieillard qui meurt n'est pas toujours une bibliothèque qui brûle."  Kind of a strange blog, from Benin, but I appreciated the sentiment...

En 1980, nous avons eu une séance de travail Issalè (sud-est de la, République Populaire du Bénin), capitale d'un très ancien royaume yoruba; nous fûmes surpris de constater que le meilleur en tradition orale concernant l'histoire de la région avait a peine la trentaine : en effet, Agbo Ola Ogudele, non seulement connaissait parfaitement tous les récits utiles à une bonne approche de l'histoire d'Issale, mais il demeure actuellement le seul informateur à pouvoir réciter de mémoire la liste complète et dans l'ordre de succession, des 17 souverains qui ont régné à la tête de cette modeste entité politique; au cours de la même séance de collecte de tradition orale, les 5 vieillards que nous croyions être de vraies bibliothèques vivantes, et qui avait chacun au moins le triple de l'âge d'Agbo Ola Ogudele, connaissaient

Photodocumentary in French on the Sahel zone of western Chad. 

Just finished this book by Randall Bennett Wood. Excellent, though as Wood notes, there isn't nearly as much material to go on as he (and the reader) would have liked.  I hope someday soon a history PhD follows Wood's lead and takes up the period in Madagascar history and sheds more light on Waller's life.  Nice summary at blackpast.org

Born enslaved on January 12, 1850 in New Madrid County, Missouri, Waller became free during the Civil War and settled with his family on a farm in Tama County, Iowa. While working as a barber in Cedar Rapids, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1877, moving to Kansas a year later. There through the 1880s he acquired a string of barbershops, founded Lawrence's first black newspaper, and immersed himself in state politics. An active Republican, Waller championed values of middle-class thrift, racial uplift, and laissez-faire economics. His Kansas experience also seems to have convinced him that expanding frontiers offered opportunities for black progress, leading him to defend the "New Manifest Destiny" of the 1890s. After an abortive attempt to gain his party's nomination for state auditor, he obtained an appointment as U.S. consul to Madagascar in 1891. Waller spent three years with the consular service, during which time he explored the possibility of African-American colonization--a type of "Black Empire"--in Madagascar. In 1894, the native monarchy granted him a concession of 150,000 acres of rubber-rich land. This collided with the goals of French imperialists who had long eyed the island for its natural wealth. Following an invasion and subsequent treaty with the Malagasy government, French authorities repudiated the concession and arrested Waller as a spy, sentencing him to twenty years hard labor. "The Waller case" provoked outrage in the U.S. among black leaders and expansionary nationalists who pressured the Cleveland administration to protect the rights of American citizens abroad. After a ten-month incarceration during which his physical health greatly declined, Waller was released and returned to the U.S. During the Spanish American War, he served as an officer with the Twenty-Third Kansas Volunteers. Waller died of pneumonia in Yonkers, New York in October 1907.

Sources: Randall Bennett Wood, A Black Odyssey: John Lewis Waller and the Promise of American Life, 1878-1900 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981).

It must have been a promotional video for his Wassa Club, in downtown Ouagadougou, which Leslie and I used to go to... or maybe that is what it is called now? The video imagery is by Phiip Mallory Jones, who is seriously awesome!

Few short novels have proved as striking to me as Ruin.  Perfectly composed,  and a great job by the translator, it puts all those silly books by development economists who try to "represent the lives of the poor" to shame.  Let a writer represent the life of the poor, not an economist.  Anyone who has spent a long time in a village setting in Africa will recognize so much of what Fenoglio writes about.  I almost started crying when Fenoglio writes about Tobia and Agostino, visiting the pharmacy of their landlord in the town of Alba for the first time.  A lady comes in to buy something, and the landlord puts the money in a great silver box that goes "dring" when the door opens.  Tobia and Agostino's ears "prick up" and it is the first thing they talk about when they leave.  The cash register. 

This book would be usefully paired with Uwem Akpan's short stories in a literature class, along with Daniel Mason's A Far Country.

Fenoglio's life is amazingly interesting, and completely unknown to me.  And by the way... I randomly grabbed this book off the shelves of Martin Luther King library in San Jose.  Literally picked it at random (well, from among the slim volumes.)

Here's a nice description of the book (in Italian). 

When I am teaching development economics, I always try to remind people of two things.  First, the economy of even the poorest developing country includes people who earn their living by drawing cartoons.  They are part of the economy too!  And second, even the poorest developing economy also has a service sector that includes beauty contests.  But one never hears mention of "beauty contest service sector government policy", and microfinance doesn't seem to include beatuy contest promoters and contestants in their panoply of deserving borrowers.  Why, though?  The beauty contest is a service sector activity, just like any other.  Or is it?

Brief summary by Elisee Sare and Emilie Crofton, who viewed the film in Burkina, of this excellent film (one of my favorites, though it is very slow) by Bassek ba Kobhio:

Jeune instituteur affecté dans un petit village du Cameroun Sango Malo s'attire, les mecontentement de son directeur qui trouve ses méthodes d'enseignant anti-pédagogique. Alliant la pratique à la théorie, Sango veut faire de ces élèves de « vrais hommes » qui selon lui, savent aussi bien se servir de leur cerveau que de leurs mains ; et non de simples diplômés. Pendant une réunion d'agriculteurs où il était question d'encourager la culture de cacao, Sango propose la création d'une coopérative de paysans pour la production et la
promotion de cultures vivrières ; toutes choses importantes pour un développement endogène. Refusant une décision de réaffectation, Sango rend sa démission, crée une coopérative d'agriculteurs et se consacre à la paysannerie. Taxé de communiste, Sango est arrêté par les forces de l'ordre et emprisonné.

Sango Malo, fresh out of school, is a young teacher sent to a small village in Cameroon. He quickly becomes noticed for his revolutionary teaching methods. Sango Malo wants his students to not only be graduates but to know how to use their hands as well as their minds. Unfortunately, his methods receive the wrath of the school director. When he is told to leave he quits his job instead and remains in the village as a farmer. At an agricultural meeting that encourages the cultivation of cocoa, Sango Malo proposes instead the creation of a farmer's co-operative for the production and promotion of locally used crops. This, he says, is imperative for the development of the village. Accused of being a communist, Sango Malo is arrested and imprisoned. With Sango Malo in prison, the villagers must decide whether to forget or embrace his teachings.

A nice review by Gareth is on his blog.