Did you hear we halved poverty while we were all distracted by
Invisible Children? The Internet is on fire debating Invisible Children
and the Kony2012 campaign targeting UgandanJoseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army. Rarely does news from Africa
so consume the chattering classes – who, as it turns out, are missing
some real news. In no particular order, here are some stories from
Africa this week:
1. On International Women's Day, Kenya's sex workers offer to pay income tax
-- to make the point that sex work is as valid as any other work, and
to force the government to recognize the practice as a labor. (Kenya,
meanwhile, fired 25,000 striking nurses, arguing that nurse strikes endanger patients lives. Twenty-five thousand missing nurses, however, is apparently totally safe.)
2. The UN claims to have met the clean water Millennium Development Goal, and scientists rebut. The World Bank says the world met the Millennium Development poverty goal.
The maternal mortality MDG, however, looked pretty awful from Gobah, Liberia. Yesterday, I visited a clinic there – in the same county as the capital, Monrovia
– that doesn't have a microscope, malaria meds for kids 5-10, or water.
That's right, water. Read about it over on the project page for our Pulitzer Center collaborative project on reproductive health in Africa.
3. The International Peace Institute calls our attention to actually underreported topics, namely, security in West Africa.
In addition to the notorious drug smuggling, IPI draws attention to
the scary combination of terrorism, drugs, crime and insurgency in the Sahel region (especially in Mali, it notes, citing a recent UN assessment) and to piracy in the Gulf of Guinea. (That's right. Pirates advance on great white saviors. Pirates, checkmate.)
Bonus points for IPI, which tell us what we can do, rather than wring
our hands and feel guilty, or not guilty, or guilty about not feeling
guilty, or questionable making others feel guilty about the guilt others
try to put on them... er... work it out according to whatever made you
angriest on the Internet.
So what can we do to stop these two burgeoning crises? Send planes
to the Sahel and patrol boats to the Gulf, says IPI. And maybe some
radar and comms equipment.
4.Three men were killed in Burundi
in an exchange of gunfire with the police, the latest in a series of
killings that have been documented intermittently since the country's
troubled 2010 election. The UN has confirmed that the FNL, an ex-rebel
group and former opposition party, has relocated to Congo, and some
observers fear the ongoing gun battles suggest a return to violence with
the FNL.
5. Sam Bell, who knows a thing or two (to say the
least) about what it means to do American advocacy on African
atrocities, wrote a moving tribute to Representative Donald Payne, a long-time Sudan
(and Africa) advocate who died on Tuesday. Bell's tribute is itself an
insightful reflection on some of the challenges of advocacy.
6. Ashley Judd listened to this awesome radio piece I did about some incredible Congolese women busting through the countryside to bring women's news to the airwaves. Did you?
7. Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, stares down a cholera outbreak after a month of water shortages.
Still thinking about the LRA?
If, after all of this, you're still thinking about the LRA, I urge you to read this piece by indefatigable Elizabeth Rubin. it's from 1998, when the LRA was still in Uganda kidnapping children at night. Not that being in Congo and the CAR and raping women and looting villages is any less of a crime. Just saying, note the time flashback. Also, it's amazing journalism. (Thanks Nicholas Thompson for freeing it from behind the New Yorker's paywall.)
Meanwhile, I find these two things to be the most lasting, as the Internet exploded this week:
Photographer Glenna Gordon, who took the only still picture of Invisible Children you've ever seen, was interviewed about the photo by the Washington Post.
Answering a question about whether this IC stuff is all neo-colonial,
Gordon said, "I don’t think they think there is a problem with the idea
that they are colonial. This photo is the epitome of it, like, we are
even going to hold your guns for you."
And novelist Teju Cole said yesterday (on, sigh, Twitter):
"The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about
having a big emotional experience that validates privilege." All those
blog posts, and dude gets it right in 140 characters.
Jina Moore is a freelance multimedia journalist who covers Africa, human rights and women in conflict zones. She blogs here.
This article, "7 stories on Africa this week, other than Kony2012," first appeared on CSMonitor.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment