the human province

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Kristof has a disturbing op-ed in the Times about violence in Kenya. It's hard to know if things are getting better or worse there, and a brief talk with a European journalist friend who just got back from Nairobi doesn't clear matters up much. When I was in Ethiopia, I didn't hear much anything about Kenya, although that's really neither here nor there, since the family I was staying with didn't seem very preoccupied with foreign affairs, with the exception of Eritrea (the mother was originally from Asmara).

In any case, Kristof recounts some pretty gruesome stuff (which honestly sounds a little sensationalist), including the decapitation of infants and forced circumcision with a machete:

Until he was circumcised with a machete in front of a jeering mob and then dragged off to be beheaded, Robert Ochieng had been a symbol of modern, post-tribal harmony in Kenya.

A member of the Luo ethnic group, 16-year-old Robert had played and studied with members of another ethnic group, the Kikuyu. They were friends. And then Kenya erupted in rioting after a rigged election, and suddenly Luos were chasing and killing Kikuyus, and a mob of Kikuyus was running down Robert.

He claimed that he was Kikuyu as well, but the suspicious mob stripped him naked and noted that he was not circumcised, meaning that he could not be Kikuyu. That’s when his attackers held him down — smashing his arm when he tried to protect himself — and performed the grotesque surgery in the street to loud cheers from a huge throng.

The crowd shouted war cries and was preparing to decapitate Robert with a machete when the police arrived and rescued him.

The main thrust of his column though isn't just to describe the violence there but rather to bring attention to the idea that US acquiescence "in election irregularities in countries like Ethiopia and Nigeria, inadvertently signal[ed] that Mr. Kibaki could get away with stealing re-election."

He likens Kibaki to an African Musharraf, and while his tone in the column sounds a little too Manichaean for my taste, it is true that the US has a bad habit of supporting undemocratic leaders when it suits its immediate needs without much foresight when it comes to the consequences of that undemocratic rule.

By the by, ICG has a new report out about the situation that's worth reading.

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.



If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

I know very little about Kenya, so I'm not going to open my mouth about what's going on there, except to say that it's been disappointing and surprising to me.

I've mentioned the McClatchey blogs before, but if you haven't already, you should go look at the Africa one, which is based in Nairobi.

In other Africa news, I may go to Ethiopia for a couple of weeks at the end of the of the month, so I've been trying to read up a bit and will hopefully be blogging while there.

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Kristof has a disturbing op-ed in the Times about violence in Kenya. It's hard to know if things are getting better or worse there, and a brief talk with a European journalist friend who just got back from Nairobi doesn't clear matters up much. When I was in Ethiopia, I didn't hear much anything about Kenya, although that's really neither here nor there, since the family I was staying with didn't seem very preoccupied with foreign affairs, with the exception of Eritrea (the mother was originally from Asmara).

In any case, Kristof recounts some pretty gruesome stuff (which honestly sounds a little sensationalist), including the decapitation of infants and forced circumcision with a machete:

Until he was circumcised with a machete in front of a jeering mob and then dragged off to be beheaded, Robert Ochieng had been a symbol of modern, post-tribal harmony in Kenya.

A member of the Luo ethnic group, 16-year-old Robert had played and studied with members of another ethnic group, the Kikuyu. They were friends. And then Kenya erupted in rioting after a rigged election, and suddenly Luos were chasing and killing Kikuyus, and a mob of Kikuyus was running down Robert.

He claimed that he was Kikuyu as well, but the suspicious mob stripped him naked and noted that he was not circumcised, meaning that he could not be Kikuyu. That’s when his attackers held him down — smashing his arm when he tried to protect himself — and performed the grotesque surgery in the street to loud cheers from a huge throng.

The crowd shouted war cries and was preparing to decapitate Robert with a machete when the police arrived and rescued him.

The main thrust of his column though isn't just to describe the violence there but rather to bring attention to the idea that US acquiescence "in election irregularities in countries like Ethiopia and Nigeria, inadvertently signal[ed] that Mr. Kibaki could get away with stealing re-election."

He likens Kibaki to an African Musharraf, and while his tone in the column sounds a little too Manichaean for my taste, it is true that the US has a bad habit of supporting undemocratic leaders when it suits its immediate needs without much foresight when it comes to the consequences of that undemocratic rule.

By the by, ICG has a new report out about the situation that's worth reading.

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.



If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

I know very little about Kenya, so I'm not going to open my mouth about what's going on there, except to say that it's been disappointing and surprising to me.

I've mentioned the McClatchey blogs before, but if you haven't already, you should go look at the Africa one, which is based in Nairobi.

In other Africa news, I may go to Ethiopia for a couple of weeks at the end of the of the month, so I've been trying to read up a bit and will hopefully be blogging while there.

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Kristof has a disturbing op-ed in the Times about violence in Kenya. It's hard to know if things are getting better or worse there, and a brief talk with a European journalist friend who just got back from Nairobi doesn't clear matters up much. When I was in Ethiopia, I didn't hear much anything about Kenya, although that's really neither here nor there, since the family I was staying with didn't seem very preoccupied with foreign affairs, with the exception of Eritrea (the mother was originally from Asmara).

In any case, Kristof recounts some pretty gruesome stuff (which honestly sounds a little sensationalist), including the decapitation of infants and forced circumcision with a machete:

Until he was circumcised with a machete in front of a jeering mob and then dragged off to be beheaded, Robert Ochieng had been a symbol of modern, post-tribal harmony in Kenya.

A member of the Luo ethnic group, 16-year-old Robert had played and studied with members of another ethnic group, the Kikuyu. They were friends. And then Kenya erupted in rioting after a rigged election, and suddenly Luos were chasing and killing Kikuyus, and a mob of Kikuyus was running down Robert.

He claimed that he was Kikuyu as well, but the suspicious mob stripped him naked and noted that he was not circumcised, meaning that he could not be Kikuyu. That’s when his attackers held him down — smashing his arm when he tried to protect himself — and performed the grotesque surgery in the street to loud cheers from a huge throng.

The crowd shouted war cries and was preparing to decapitate Robert with a machete when the police arrived and rescued him.

The main thrust of his column though isn't just to describe the violence there but rather to bring attention to the idea that US acquiescence "in election irregularities in countries like Ethiopia and Nigeria, inadvertently signal[ed] that Mr. Kibaki could get away with stealing re-election."

He likens Kibaki to an African Musharraf, and while his tone in the column sounds a little too Manichaean for my taste, it is true that the US has a bad habit of supporting undemocratic leaders when it suits its immediate needs without much foresight when it comes to the consequences of that undemocratic rule.

By the by, ICG has a new report out about the situation that's worth reading.

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.



If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

I know very little about Kenya, so I'm not going to open my mouth about what's going on there, except to say that it's been disappointing and surprising to me.

I've mentioned the McClatchey blogs before, but if you haven't already, you should go look at the Africa one, which is based in Nairobi.

In other Africa news, I may go to Ethiopia for a couple of weeks at the end of the of the month, so I've been trying to read up a bit and will hopefully be blogging while there.

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Kristof has a disturbing op-ed in the Times about violence in Kenya. It's hard to know if things are getting better or worse there, and a brief talk with a European journalist friend who just got back from Nairobi doesn't clear matters up much. When I was in Ethiopia, I didn't hear much anything about Kenya, although that's really neither here nor there, since the family I was staying with didn't seem very preoccupied with foreign affairs, with the exception of Eritrea (the mother was originally from Asmara).

In any case, Kristof recounts some pretty gruesome stuff (which honestly sounds a little sensationalist), including the decapitation of infants and forced circumcision with a machete:

Until he was circumcised with a machete in front of a jeering mob and then dragged off to be beheaded, Robert Ochieng had been a symbol of modern, post-tribal harmony in Kenya.

A member of the Luo ethnic group, 16-year-old Robert had played and studied with members of another ethnic group, the Kikuyu. They were friends. And then Kenya erupted in rioting after a rigged election, and suddenly Luos were chasing and killing Kikuyus, and a mob of Kikuyus was running down Robert.

He claimed that he was Kikuyu as well, but the suspicious mob stripped him naked and noted that he was not circumcised, meaning that he could not be Kikuyu. That’s when his attackers held him down — smashing his arm when he tried to protect himself — and performed the grotesque surgery in the street to loud cheers from a huge throng.

The crowd shouted war cries and was preparing to decapitate Robert with a machete when the police arrived and rescued him.

The main thrust of his column though isn't just to describe the violence there but rather to bring attention to the idea that US acquiescence "in election irregularities in countries like Ethiopia and Nigeria, inadvertently signal[ed] that Mr. Kibaki could get away with stealing re-election."

He likens Kibaki to an African Musharraf, and while his tone in the column sounds a little too Manichaean for my taste, it is true that the US has a bad habit of supporting undemocratic leaders when it suits its immediate needs without much foresight when it comes to the consequences of that undemocratic rule.

By the by, ICG has a new report out about the situation that's worth reading.

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.



If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

I know very little about Kenya, so I'm not going to open my mouth about what's going on there, except to say that it's been disappointing and surprising to me.

I've mentioned the McClatchey blogs before, but if you haven't already, you should go look at the Africa one, which is based in Nairobi.

In other Africa news, I may go to Ethiopia for a couple of weeks at the end of the of the month, so I've been trying to read up a bit and will hopefully be blogging while there.

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Kristof has a disturbing op-ed in the Times about violence in Kenya. It's hard to know if things are getting better or worse there, and a brief talk with a European journalist friend who just got back from Nairobi doesn't clear matters up much. When I was in Ethiopia, I didn't hear much anything about Kenya, although that's really neither here nor there, since the family I was staying with didn't seem very preoccupied with foreign affairs, with the exception of Eritrea (the mother was originally from Asmara).

In any case, Kristof recounts some pretty gruesome stuff (which honestly sounds a little sensationalist), including the decapitation of infants and forced circumcision with a machete:

Until he was circumcised with a machete in front of a jeering mob and then dragged off to be beheaded, Robert Ochieng had been a symbol of modern, post-tribal harmony in Kenya.

A member of the Luo ethnic group, 16-year-old Robert had played and studied with members of another ethnic group, the Kikuyu. They were friends. And then Kenya erupted in rioting after a rigged election, and suddenly Luos were chasing and killing Kikuyus, and a mob of Kikuyus was running down Robert.

He claimed that he was Kikuyu as well, but the suspicious mob stripped him naked and noted that he was not circumcised, meaning that he could not be Kikuyu. That’s when his attackers held him down — smashing his arm when he tried to protect himself — and performed the grotesque surgery in the street to loud cheers from a huge throng.

The crowd shouted war cries and was preparing to decapitate Robert with a machete when the police arrived and rescued him.

The main thrust of his column though isn't just to describe the violence there but rather to bring attention to the idea that US acquiescence "in election irregularities in countries like Ethiopia and Nigeria, inadvertently signal[ed] that Mr. Kibaki could get away with stealing re-election."

He likens Kibaki to an African Musharraf, and while his tone in the column sounds a little too Manichaean for my taste, it is true that the US has a bad habit of supporting undemocratic leaders when it suits its immediate needs without much foresight when it comes to the consequences of that undemocratic rule.

By the by, ICG has a new report out about the situation that's worth reading.

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.



If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

I know very little about Kenya, so I'm not going to open my mouth about what's going on there, except to say that it's been disappointing and surprising to me.

I've mentioned the McClatchey blogs before, but if you haven't already, you should go look at the Africa one, which is based in Nairobi.

In other Africa news, I may go to Ethiopia for a couple of weeks at the end of the of the month, so I've been trying to read up a bit and will hopefully be blogging while there.

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:


Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara


Great Rift Valley


Zebras in Masai Mara


Sunset in Masai Mara


Lioness feeding on zebra


Lions lounging in Masai Mara


Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa


Masai kids at school


Zanzibar beach


Market in Zanzibar


Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.

He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.

One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Kristof has a disturbing op-ed in the Times about violence in Kenya. It's hard to know if things are getting better or worse there, and a brief talk with a European journalist friend who just got back from Nairobi doesn't clear matters up much. When I was in Ethiopia, I didn't hear much anything about Kenya, although that's really neither here nor there, since the family I was staying with didn't seem very preoccupied with foreign affairs, with the exception of Eritrea (the mother was originally from Asmara).

In any case, Kristof recounts some pretty gruesome stuff (which honestly sounds a little sensationalist), including the decapitation of infants and forced circumcision with a machete:

Until he was circumcised with a machete in front of a jeering mob and then dragged off to be beheaded, Robert Ochieng had been a symbol of modern, post-tribal harmony in Kenya.

A member of the Luo ethnic group, 16-year-old Robert had played and studied with members of another ethnic group, the Kikuyu. They were friends. And then Kenya erupted in rioting after a rigged election, and suddenly Luos were chasing and killing Kikuyus, and a mob of Kikuyus was running down Robert.

He claimed that he was Kikuyu as well, but the suspicious mob stripped him naked and noted that he was not circumcised, meaning that he could not be Kikuyu. That’s when his attackers held him down — smashing his arm when he tried to protect himself — and performed the grotesque surgery in the street to loud cheers from a huge throng.

The crowd shouted war cries and was preparing to decapitate Robert with a machete when the police arrived and rescued him.

The main thrust of his column though isn't just to describe the violence there but rather to bring attention to the idea that US acquiescence "in election irregularities in countries like Ethiopia and Nigeria, inadvertently signal[ed] that Mr. Kibaki could get away with stealing re-election."

He likens Kibaki to an African Musharraf, and while his tone in the column sounds a little too Manichaean for my taste, it is true that the US has a bad habit of supporting undemocratic leaders when it suits its immediate needs without much foresight when it comes to the consequences of that undemocratic rule.

By the by, ICG has a new report out about the situation that's worth reading.

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.



If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

I know very little about Kenya, so I'm not going to open my mouth about what's going on there, except to say that it's been disappointing and surprising to me.

I've mentioned the McClatchey blogs before, but if you haven't already, you should go look at the Africa one, which is based in Nairobi.

In other Africa news, I may go to Ethiopia for a couple of weeks at the end of the of the month, so I've been trying to read up a bit and will hopefully be blogging while there.