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Archive for July, 2008


Not something to rejoice about, but two African players made the “Britain’s 25 richest young footballers” list:

= 9. Didier Drogba (Chelsea), £13 million – Ivory Coast forward who is convinced that he deserves more than £90,000-a-week at Stamford Bridge. Earns another £20,000-a-week from endorsements and commercial deals.
= 16. Michael Essien (Chelsea), £10 million – Ghana midfield player who has just signed a new five-year Stamford Bridge contract worth about £100,000 a week. Hit the jackpot when he joined Chelsea from Lyon for £24 million three years ago.

The top three earners are (1) 1. Michael Owen (Newcastle United), £41 million, (2) Wayne Rooney (Manchester United), £35 million, and (3) Rio Ferdinand (Manchester United), £28 million. But according to The Times of London the real rich make their money in steel manufacturing, mining, pharmaceuticals or packaging. That might be why FIFA President Sebb Blatter — with a straight face — referred to Ronaldo’s conditions at Manchester United as “slavery.”

The full list here.

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“Whenever we play at the same time as an Arsenal game, nobody shows up,” says Abdu Maikaba [coach of FC Abuja].
“If they can make it so we play on a day before or after Arsenal, that will be a start.”

From BBC World.

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Reporter Spencer Morgan at The New York Observer has some fun with a quote from a Donna Karan flack that the designer is traipsing through “the African jungle” looking for inspiration for a new line of clothing “Urban Zen.” Serious. Calvin Klein is also in on the trip. So where are these deserts and jungles: “Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya and Botswana.” While there they can say hi to Tarzan and adopt babies.
More here.

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The New York Times wants its readers to get interested. Not in the townships of course. More here.

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In NBA basketball lore, Kermit Washington of the LA Lakers will be remembered only for the “punch.” During a game in the 1975 season he sucker punched the Houston Rockers All Star Rudy Tomjanovich (it was gruesome as you can see here). Tomjanovich was knocked unconscious. He needed facial reconstruction. Kermit then went underground for a while, but now he is back — no surprises — helping Africans. He also took Ron Artest to Rwanda. Journalist Dave Zirin (from Edge of Sports) recently interviewed Washington about the punch and other things. Not surprisingly, Kermit, apart from his good intentions, also has good opinions.

Dave Zirin: What do you think is the root cause of poverty in Africa?

Kermit Washington: It’s corruption in the government. I have to be careful when I say that. It’s corruption. The people at the top just take. You have unemployment at fifty percent. The people work very hard in school, but when they get out, there’s no business. No jobs. Tourism is really all they have over there. So when you see the people from Africa and Asia and how they come over here and get such great grades, it’s because they know what they could go back to. We cry when we have to go to school. In Africa they cry because they can’t go to school.

The rest here.

[There's also a video on YouTube, made by Washington's NGO, here.]

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Doris Lessing in the New York Times Magazine:

Are you still practicing Sufism? I think the word is “studying” it, “learning” it.
Isn’t it a strand of Islam, founded by Muhammad? I know people think this, because they have looked in the nearest reference book, but the thing is Sufism has always had adherents from all faiths or none.
As a longtime resident of London, what do you make of the growing Islamic presence in Europe? I don’t go on and on about it, like our two knights.
You mean Martin Amis. And who else? The other one who never stops going on about Islam. Christopher Hitchens. I don’t want to add any nasty poison to this brew. It’s nasty enough as it is, so let’s leave it.

[Source]

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Egyptian-born Filmmaker Jihan El Tahri‘s film of post-1959 Cuba’s illustruous African connection, “Cuba: An African Odyssey” is being screened on August 7 at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. The film charts the government of Fidel Castro’s support for African revolutionary movements specifically. More information on the film here. For details on the event, here.  [BTW, if you can't make it and speak Spanish, someone posted the whole film online. here]. I’ll finally get to see it.

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I’ve been keenly following the writings Robert K Silverman, a Yale Law student interning in Cape Town for a human rights organization, who contributes pieces to the Boston Globe’s Passport Blog. The blog contains “dispatches from Boston-area residents as they travel the world.”  Silverman — I must have missed his earlier writing — writes really insightful (and passionate) diaries about his work visiting refugee camps for immigrants from neighboring African countries caught in the xenophobic violence in South Africa (62 people were murdered and thousands left homeless) a few weeks ago. You can read his writing here and here (unfortunately the Globe does not allow for author search on its Dispatches Blog).

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Robert Mugabe’s junta gets all the attention, but there’s a host of other despots on the African continent escaping attention. Like king Mswati III, a virtual despot in Swaziland (covered in the new documentary “Without a King“) or the oil-rich (that’s them personally, their families and their aids, and not their people) Jose Eduardo dos Santos in Angola or Omar Bongo in Gabon. And there’s Hosni Mubarak who has ruled Egypt for the last 27 years with the aid of the army and police. Its illegal to hold protests, publicly challenge his rule (unless you’re a famous writer whose arrest will result in howls of protest in the “West.” As for ordinary Egyptians, sorry). Mubarak gets by since he is a staunch ally of the US in the Middle East and North Africa.  But his repressive apparatus can’t always keep up with technology or the guile of its youth — really with blogs, Facebook and Youtube — as this excellent documentary by Journeyman Pictures show.

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If you live in the US, analysis of journalism (often referred to as “media criticism”) can across as half-hearted, overly focused on personalities and not terribly insightful. Take for example the Huffingtonpost.com’s “Media” section (for all their good stuff, they had an item about Perez Hilton yesterday). There are some exceptions, like MediaMatters.org (although they can appear rather humorless). When it comes to TV, the worst-best of the bunch is Howard Kurtz’s CNN Reliable Sources (I’d spare you the hyperlink to his program and instead point to Crooks and Liars, whose catalogued many of his offenses). For these reasons Al Jazeera English’s The Listening Post, a program about media hosted by the American journalist Richard Gizbert (a former London correspondent for ABC) is a much better option. Take some of its recent programs with Africa-related topics: coverage of the political and economic crises in Zimbabwe and of the civil war in Darfur. In the latter case the program assessed both Western and Arab media coverage of the Darfur crisis. The Listening Post features not just careful analyses of the issues, but interviews a wide range of experts, whether journalists, media researchers and politicians. Each episode features an insert dubbed “Global Village Voices,” where a range of media researchers or journalists record their opinion via webcams or camera-phones to be screened on the program. Hope Howard Kurtz takes notice.

The Listening Post archive (which is regularly updated) can be viewed here on Youtube.

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