November 12, 2009

'Obamarama': Barack Obama Road

After a hiatus, and in time for Friday, Obamarama is back, thanks to this image I fished out of my cell phone. I shot this in Mombasa back in April and forgot about it.

Yes, that's Barack Obama Road, printed in stencil.

Previous Obamarama images:
Cell phone, Kenya
Obama Restaurant and Cafe, Somalia
Bubble gum in Kisumu, Kenya
Kanga bag in Nairobi, Kenya
Hope Gift Shop in Kisumu, Kenya
Mini Market in Kigali, Rwanda
Video shop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Bar-cafe in Cotonou, Benin
Snacks Point in Ntulele, Kenya

November 10, 2009

Carryout chicken

You know you're in Africa when...

...after napping on a long road trip back from the bush, you reach your destination, look in the back of the truck and find your stuff has been joined by two huge sacks of charcoal and two live chickens.

This was from my trip through northern Mozambique last week with the good folks at World Vision. I dozed off on the long, flat road from Morrumbala to Quelimane, and was assured that the roadside poultry was better and cheaper than city chickens.

Here's a closer look at dinner:

November 09, 2009

Art deco Asmara

You can't go to Asmara and not note the architecture. While most African capitals today are replete with drab, hulking towers from the 1960s and 1970s, the Eritrean capital, dating back to its days as an early-century Italian colonial pied-a-terre, is home to some of the boldest designs on the continent.

Benito Mussolini saw Asmara as an extension of his Fascist empire. He used the highland city, as Barney Jopson wrote recently in the Financial Times, as "a laboratory for bold architectural styles – rationalism, futurism, monumentalism – that would never pass muster in Italy. The result is a cocktail of convex façades, jutting balconies and porthole windows."

UNESCO says the city of 400,000 "represents perhaps the most concentrated and intact assemblage of Modernist architecture anywhere in the world." "Intact" is a relative term, however. Most of the celebrated buildings are in dire need of a touch-up. Porthole windows are shattered or missing. The gently curved facades need repainting. The vibrant colors have faded down to that familiar drabness brought on by weather and neglect.

Yet the buildings still stop you in your tracks as you drive by, and it's cool to think of what the city looked like in its heyday. The Fiat Tagliero service station, with its iconic "wings," is probably the most famous of the lot:

Up close, the badly faded lettering still looks sharp.

The largest movie theater in colonial Asmara was the Impero, reportedly named for Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia. It dominates the main Harnet Avenue strip and is a modernist landmark, to be sure, but don't look too closely -- many of 45 round lights dotting the front are cracked.

The Irga building gets overlooked because it's next to the Tagliero. But it's another art deco standout, built in 1961, according to architecture types smarter than me.

Finally, strolling past the Cinema Roma (1937), with its marble facade, and watching as ancient vehicles motored down the street, I could almost imagine myself in an old Italian hill town.

Almost.

November 04, 2009

Spy games

I'd been warned before going to Asmara that I might be spied upon. In the extremely small capital of an extremely secretive regime, diplomats told me they assumed they were being watched by their neighbors and probably even by some Eritreans who worked for them.

On my first night in the city I was at a bar with some other foreigners, among them teachers and members of the small diplomatic corps. We were the only non-Eritreans there, and not difficult to spot. A half-dozen of us were sitting around a small, low table, drinking the sometimes skunky but not altogether unpleasant Asmara Beer, when an Eritrean man walked in and pulled a chair up very close to the table. If I turned my head 90 degrees, I was right in his face.

The guy was young-looking and stylish, in a tweed jacket and black spectacles. The bar was dark, but he carried a paperback book. He sat down facing away from us, never once making eye contact. Instead he stared off into the middle distance, the book lying unopened next to him, for at least a half-hour. He puffed on a cigarette or two, but didn't order a drink, and left without saying a word.

To the foreigners I was with, there was no question this man had been sent to eavesdrop on our conversation. They'd had similar encounters many times before in Asmara. I hadn't yet been conditioned into that way of thinking. But I had to wonder: would a real spy be so obvious?

November 02, 2009

On the air in Eritrea

I've just returned from a brief trip to Asmara, Eritrea, where I had the chance to interview Isaias Afwerki, the country's only president in 16 years of independence.

The Ministry of Information gave me less than a week to prepare, and Isaias isn't an easy interview. He's famously prickly and doesn't seem to think much of journalists. As the story goes, he expelled a wire-service reporter from the country a few years back after the reporter repeatedly referred to Eritrea as "the tiny Red Sea state."

But for me the most difficult thing about the interview was that it was taped live by the presidential media service, with three cameras and an array of lights. Before Isaias walked into the room, while I was looking over my notes, one of the cameramen startled me by straightening my tie. When the interview began, I was given a countdown as if I were a seasoned TV personality.

When I got the wrap-up sign, nearly two and a half hours later, I briefly contemplated signing off with "You stay classy, Asmara." (Not really.)

The staged aspect threw me off, but it was stranger after the interview aired on EriTV, the country's only TV channel, and I started being recognized in my hotel, in the street, in the immigration line in Cairo after my flight out. In a deeply repressive and suspicious country, this would have been an excellent way for Isaias to ensure no one spoke to me -- except that few people wanted to speak with me, anyway.

I'd been told to watch out for Isaias's footwear, and sure enough he was wearing his trademark sandals. Although the 63-year-old ruler hasn't created a cult of personality there is, among his supporters, an almost cult-like appreciation for his lack of pretension, which measured against his African counterparts makes him seem positively ascetic. His photo doesn't hang in every store window, he hasn't constructed an over-the-top presidential palace, and when he travels through Asmara in the presidential car (a sensible sedan) he rides shotgun.

Later this week we'll be running my story as well as a short video I've produced with clips from the interview. Stay tuned.

October 19, 2009

21st century air travel

What happens when the Kenya Airways computers go down for several consecutive hours at Entebbe airport in Uganda?

You board your flight with this rather ridiculous-looking piece of paper:

October 14, 2009

Snapshots of Madagascar

Very few outsiders get to the poor island of Madagascar. Yet it's one of the most fascinating places on Earth, with plant and animal species found nowhere else. Fortunately, my friend Robyn Dixon of the LA Times is there on a reporting trip, and Tweeting about it.

Her updates -- a warm, closely observed series of snapshots from a forgotten corner of the world -- have been a highlight of my week. And they're better than 99.99% of the stuff you find on Twitter.

Take a look:

October 12, 2009

Wyclef's thought that counts

Nairobi put on a good show Saturday night at the annual MTV Africa Music Awards. There was more talent (Nigeria's D'Banj, Kenya's own Nameless), style (tight dresses, shiny sunglasses), celebrity (Akon, Wyclef Jean) than this city usually sees. I can't judge how it looked on TV but inside the hall it was a pretty great party.

As the host, Wyclef brought his A-game, a pleasant surprise to those of us accustomed to big stars coming to Africa and putting on lackluster performances (I'm talking about you, Ja Rule, and you, Mos Def). Wyclef even went topical, at one point bringing a chef onstage to talk about Kenya's current food crisis.

What's the one thing Kenya needs to stave off a food disaster, the chef was asked. "Seeds," he responded, as the crowd cheered. Kenyans need help growing more of their own food, he went on. They don't want handouts.

Then Wyclef looked into the camera and made a plea to viewers -- to donate to the World Food Program. The massive U.N. agency that provides food handouts by the megaton to crisis zones, and is sometimes accused of distorting local agricultural markets and criticized for buying the bulk of its food from American farmers. The exact opposite, I think, of what the chef intended.

Wyclef is a smart guy, thoughtful, deeply committed to the plight of his troubled homeland of Haiti. He got this one wrong. Then again, I'm not sure how many people in that rocking, booze-soaked concert hall noticed.

October 08, 2009

Dark humor

I was walking out of a Nairobi movie theater last night. (Finally watched "Up." Enchanting.) An American friend saw this poster in the lobby and said: "Hey, a movie about the next Kenyan election!"

I laughed. Our three Kenyan friends didn't.

October 06, 2009

The trouble with Abu Sharati

Some clever sleuthing by Amanda Taub, who blogs at Wronging Rights, has revealed a potential problem with a source in three mainstream media stories on Darfur. Taub's claim, originally posted yesterday and now making the rounds of the Africa blogosphere (see here, here and here), deserves an answer from the three media organizations she lists.

More fundamentally, however, it underscores the pitfalls that face all reporters working in Africa.

To summarize: Taub believes that "Abu Sharati," who claims to be "a representative of Darfur refugees" and is regularly quoted by the news media, is more likely the nom de plume of a spokesman for one of the main Darfur rebel leaders, and therefore pushing his own agenda rather than representing the views of some 2 million displaced people.

Taub found that Abu Sharati was quoted last month in a story by the Associated Press, and prior to that in stories in The New York Times and Reuters. From the first of a three-part post:

None of my contacts could be sure, but they shared a common theory: that the supposed "refugee spokesperson" was actually part of the PR operation of Abdel Wahid Al Nur, a rebel leader who heads one faction of the Sudanese Liberation Army, or SLA. An activist from a different faction of the SLA, who asked not to be named, confirmed that Sharati was in fact one of Abdel Wahid's men.

Taub, a lawyer, contacted the reporters who wrote each of the three stories, and published their replies (Part II). Then she explains why getting a quote like this wrong is an injustice. It's all very hard-hitting, well reasoned and important media monitoring -- the best reason blogs exist.

A few commenters point out the No. 1 problem with quoting someone like "Abu Sharati" to begin with. How can one person claim to speak for the masses of suffering Darfuris? Surely the title "spokesman for Darfur refugees" should strike a reporter or editor as odd considering how diverse the population of Darfur actually is.

Others argue that this is the sort of "sloppy" work that the Western news media permits when it comes to faraway Africa, but wouldn't countenance on issues in its own backyard.

I don't want to seem like I'm reflexively defending the work of colleagues whose work I read regularly, and often admire. But surely there's more to an apparent inconsistency like this than sloppiness or willful ignorance. Taub has found one troubling problem in three stories over the course of a year of reporting on a major news story that has produced as much copy as any in Africa.

I think we should take it for what it seems to be: a mistake by reporters who are expected to cover and master an immense amount of territory, much of which they can't usually get to on deadline, or even within days or weeks.

The three reporters mentioned all cover Darfur regularly, but none of these three stories were written from Darfur. The region, as you can imagine, is exceedingly difficult and complicated to get to, and sitting in Khartoum or Dakar rarely helps you get a better feel for the ground in Darfur than sitting in New York City.

Yet it is Journalism 101 to get all sides of a story, so reporters try when they can to get local voices - "man on the street" opinions - into pieces they must write from these distant capitals. "Abu Sharati" stuck his hand up as someone who could speak for the masses of Darfur's displaced, the vast majority of whom don't have cell phone numbers and wouldn't be able to answer a reporter's question about a news development before that evening's deadline.

The couple of times I've been to Darfur, I've asked for phone numbers of people in the IDP camps, for just this reason. It's a vain exercise, but one I feel compelled to attempt. Most times I get a blank look. Sometimes people laugh at me. Most wouldn't even have electricity to charge a phone, and besides cell phone networks barely function in much of Darfur. You might find a Darfuri in Khartoum who could offer an opinion, but would he be any more representative of the views of millions of displaced people just because he'd pick up your phone call?

Quoting a "refugee representative" doesn't pass the smell test, and these news organizations should have been more vigilant in their sourcing. Yet I believe what we have here is a problem of overreaching, of trying to file a more complete story on a deadline when better options aren't available, rather than a problem of laziness.

Africa is a big, big place, and the relatively few reporters here must always do more with less. In this case, I believe, the reporters tried to do too much.