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4:26
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
It's become a recent tradition here for me to return from a long absence to apologize for not writing and I won't break that tradition today: sorry! Whether you recently stumbled across the blog or you've been reading for awhile, thanks for your patience and your readership.
In the spirit of trying harder, I have in fact started
a new blog that I hope you will enjoy as much as you enjoyed (I hope...
*gulp*) this one.
I will try and transfer all my blog posts from here to there, so in case you're subscribed to my RSS feed, make sure to update it to that of the new blog
[kobigraham.wordpress.com] Don't forget to let me know what you think. Feedback is always, always welcome.
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8:47
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
If you are reading this, then I put it to you that you are ignorant; that you have lack the ability to exhibit any signs of intelligence. Even worse, I think you’re incapable of emerging from your state of ignorance.
Annoyed?
Good. What you have just experienced is an iota of the prejudice faced by Ghanaians struggling with mental illness.
Here in Ghana, we use the word ‘mad’ to describe anyone exhibiting any degree of mental illness, like we are qualified doctors prescribing some incurable disease we are all experts on. We extend the word to cover anyone who exhibits any sign of consistent irregular behaviour. If they are ‘lucky’, we treat them like outcasts. If that person is really unlucky though, they may find themselves in church with a pastor holding their their head, chanting “shabalababalalalaba” over them.
Very few of us have any real understanding of mental illness, how many different kinds of mental illnesses there are, whether any of its many forms can be cured and how to deal with it when we are confronted by it.
Georgina Pipson, the 33 year-old mother suspected to have poisoned her five children at Nyanoa in the Central Region,
died in hospital this morning after having earlier tried to commit suicide.
Many people began judging this woman before her death with the same level of judgement they would apply to someone cold, calculating and in full possession of their mental faculties (PS:
Lady Jaye has since corrected me here, reminding me that just because someone has a mental illness does not mean they are never lucid. See
her comment).
Some will say Georgina got what she deserved, while others may say she should have stayed alive to face the criminal consequences of her alleged actions. What very few people will however wonder is what was the extent of her mental ailment and whether this dire tragedy could have been avoided by dealing with it effectively.
Think about it this way. If - with your full faculties - you have ever found it difficult to control your thoughts, words or emotions; buying something on impulse although it makes no sense, or falling in love with the wrong person even though you know they will hurt you, then imagine how hard it is for someone with a mental illness is to control their thoughts, words and emotions.
Murder is still not justified in such circumstances, but there is a reason why it is possible for people to make insanity or reduced capability pleas in a court defence. Why? Because it has implications for establishing
mens rea and
actus reas (intention and action), the two things that need to be established before someone can be found guilty for a crime.
Media reports suggest Georgina Pipson had been in and out of Kpantang and was receiving medical treatment for her condition. No one has said anything about exactly what her condition was, what the symptoms are of that condition (was it schizophrenia, for example?), whether she had made any progress, whether she was taking her medication and if not, why not.
If we fail to ask and demand answers to these questions, then we are setting the tone for this kind of tragedy to happen again and when it does, we will only have ourselves to blame.
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22:35
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
(To
Crystal,
Emmanuel and
Esi: thanks for the encouragement.)
I owe this one to
Twitter.
First thing in the morning, journalists in the
Joy FM newsroom scramble for newspapers, trawl through
Ghanaweb or call up their contacts for stories (don't worry: I don't think I just gave away any big trade secrets). Seeing as everyone has those media covered, I make it a point to be that strange guy who goes online. I ran a search for 'Ghana' on Twitter and came across a tweet about
Ladysmith Black Mambazo doing a benefit concert for Ghanaian kids. Yes, it was in Washington... but it was for Ghanaian kids and that was enough to make the story relevant to a local audience. I found who their press agent was from their website and sent them an email, asking if I could interview a band member. By evening, she'd gotten back to me and the answer was 'yes'. Isn't the internet fantastic?
Anyway, here's the interview:
LADYSMITH.mp3 - Sadly, we didn't air the interview in the end. It was my fault, really. Although my heart was in the right place, there were several things wrong with the report.
For one, it was too long. Although there are moves to change this, Joy News is somewhat politics-driven. It's unfortunately what our listeners respond to the most. I was very dismayed the other day when more listeners responded to a story on political clashes in Agbogbloshie than the news that half of the nation's young
BECE applicants had failed, but that's just the way it is. As such, there was no way Joy was going to give 3.25 precious minutes of Newsnight to a general entertainment story vaguely linked to Ghana. In the end, I trimmed the fat off and we played a brief excerpt from the report as a smaller news item.
Secondly,
Paul Simon. Much as '
Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes' is a great song, I gave too much prominence to it for a song on which the group mainly sing backup. And it was a little too loud. In my defense, it was one of the first reports I ever did for Joy. I'm still pretty proud of it.
After all, I did get to interview someone from a group I dig.
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9:50
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Another day, another apology for not having blogged in ages. Got my laptop repaired though and I'm almost back online at home, so expect improvements in that department :o)
I finally sat down with Ghana's most irreverent journalist (c),
Ato Kwamina Dadzie and, as promised, I threw all your questions at him. Click
here to listen to what he had to say. It was a 25-minute chat and it was both fun and informative, especially for anyone curious about challenges facing people chasing the news in Ghana. I was personally most intrigued by the journalists who taught him not to give a
**** and his thoughts on political bias in the Ghanaian media.
I'm looking for a better way to post it to the blog besides Sendspace, so anyone with any ideas should let me know. We did the interview after work in the Joy FM news so you can still hear phones going off, Nathaniel Attoh furiously typing in the background and a couple of journalists engaged in a shouting match... sorry, I meant
passionate debate in the background. It'll take awhile to transcribe, but I'll put up some quotables soon.
It's good to be back.
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12:57
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
It's been just over a month since I started working in the Joy FM newsroom and one of the best things about the experience so far has been watching one of my favourite Ghanaian journalists in action.
Ato Kwamina Dadzie is hands-down the country's funniest commentator. One listen to his newspaper reviews on the Super Morning Show, his Not-News segment on the Weekend City Show or a read of any of
his blog articles should be enough to confirm this to anyone with any doubts.
Even better than all that though, Ato's been kind enough to agree to an interview on this blog so I figured I would throw it over to you.
All questions welcome. No holds barred (I think).
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11:53
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Is it just me or is Jeremie's voice
all over radio these days?
Jeremie hosts the Y-Lounge every night, one of the most popular shows on Accra's most popular youth radio station
YFM. She's pretty damn good at it too, especially if
yo!yo! music is your thing. I'm too old. My sister jokes that when YFM claims to be the station 'for the young and young-at-heart' I fall into the latter category:
ouch!It's Jeremie's voiceovers that I'm a little tired of though.
I work at a radio station so the radio is always on, and barely an hour goes by when Jeremie's
not-quite-and-yet-somehow-just-maybe-(or-not)-authentic American (
?) voice jumps out of a speaker somewhere, trying to persuade me to buy something, do something or go somewhere. I think she's the official female voice for Tigo but besides that, she has either inspired an army of clones or she's winning a small war to corner the female voiceover market.
Don't get me wrong: I admire her work ethic. I even like her personally: we had a nice little verbal spar the other day when her colleague/my friend Ms. Naa called me on-air to ask whether
Jazmine Sullivan or
Keri Hilson is the better artist. I dig Keri but I figured Jazmine takes it. More diversity and she doesn't get accused of being Rihanna all the time. Listeners agreed with Jeremie though so Keri took it, which was always going to happen: kids will vote for straightforward R&B over new soul music
everytime. Anyway, as I was saying, I like the lady but I can only take Jeremie's voice in small doses. Way too much energy and, like I said, I'm way too old.
Diversity's always good: could someone give the girl some competition already?
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10:22
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I can't figure out whether last night's showdown at the Bureau of National Investigation was funny or whether it was plain pathetic. Either way it was pretty embarrassing for the NPP.
To those who haven’t been following the story, Ghana's new NDC government has repeatedly threatened to prosecute former officials suspected of corruption. They have done this so many times that the opposition NPP have called their bluff and told them to put up or shut the f*** up (not in so many words, but you know that it is African tradition to embellish...) Recently the BNI (Ghana's very own not-so-secret service) visited the home of former President Kufuor's Chief of Staff Kwadwo Mpiani (perhaps the second most powerful and more importantly
involved man in the previous administration) only to find him away on a funeral tour. The BNI subsequently 'invited' Mpiani to visit them for a chat over some check-check (refer to my previous point on embellishment). Yesterday was the day it all went down.
Mpiani went in with a gaggle of lawyers at around 11 am. A crowd of NPP supporters started forming at the BNI's very tall gate. By nightfall, the crowd had grown to around 200 people and when - by nightfall - their man had not come out, I guess the terror started setting in.
You see, this was no ordinary crowd of supporters. It included reportedly over 20 former ministers, apparently there in solidarity with their mighty-has-fallen brother. When they could no longer contact him by mobile phone, they apparently assumed the worst and literally started rattling the gates demanding his release. The only thing missing was pitchforks, flames and perhaps Radio Gold. Their argument was that Brother Kwadwo had been 'invited' there and it is only after a citizen has been 'arrested' that he can be kept for questioning for up to 48 hours. To misquote Cinque in Amistad, "give him his free".
Let's go back to a similar incident when the NDC was in opposition and the BNI 'invited' the party's founding father, Uncle JJ . Back then, a few of the NDC’s big men also showed up in 'solidarity', accusing the NPP of irresponsibility, unneccessary secrecy and intimidation. Uh-huh. The then-ruling NPP bemusedly told their opponents to calm down... until last night when their own saggy behinds were on the line.
Mpiani emerged just before midnight. He did not look like a man who had been given an extensive anal probe or anything so invasive. His brothers-in-arms looked relieved. A little anyway. After all, the questioning continues today. I wish I could tell you that Mpiani’s supporters feel sheepish and embarrassed, but this is Ghana and that’s not how things play out here. There will be press conferences, counter-press conferences, conjecture, propaganda and childishness. It's all '
sini': the NPP probably felt they had a duty to the people to play their part well and they did.
Shame it's a crap movie overall though.
And a repeat at that.
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5:09
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
If someone asked you to name an English word coined by ancient Greek poets from their words for child and friendship; a word which inspired the fables Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs amongst others, you would be forgiven for thinking of something sweet and innocent.
'Paedophilia' would probably be last on your list of guesses, if it occurred to you at all.
However the word does indeed stem from the ancient Greek words for child ('pais') and friendship ('philia'), and whether you realized it or not, you were being warned about sexual predators every time you were tucked into bed as a child with stories of little children being chased for food by wolves and wicked witches.
The abuse of children evokes very strong reactions, even in jail where paedophiles are often sectioned away from other inmates for fear of retribution and death. It would seem that even serial murderers and rapists find the idea of someone abusing children too much to stomach.
Two stories made the headlines last week involving Britons accused of sexually abusing Ghanaian minors. The sad fact of the matter is that their stories represent the tip of a nasty iceberg. Where paedophilia is at least as old as the tales it has inspired, sex tourism is a more recent phenomenon: a negative by-product of the ever-smaller global village we live in today in which cheaper air fares, lightening-fast emails, and instant access to information conspire to bring us ever closer together.
The combination of paedophila and sex tourism is particularly sinister. Beyond the abuse of the trust of the child, it also represents the abuse of the poor by people from wealthier countries. Asian countries (the most prominent of which was once Thailand) used to be their destination of choice. However, with awareness and economic advancement leading to clamp-downs on such activity in that part of the world, another continent has started looking increasingly attractive:
Ours.
If you were in any doubt how easy it is to access African children, cast your mind back to last week's news story involving Zoe's Ark, a French charity some members of which are currently being held in Chad pending trial for kidnapping Chadian children and attempting to smuggle them abroad as Sudanese orphans.
Science is still trying to explain paedophilia. Experts suggest that some people suffer a developmental disorder in which they do not stop being attracted to children after their own childhood ends. Others suggest that traumatic experiences in childhood can lead to an over-compensation of love for children, which manifests itself in sexual attraction. These are but two of many explanations though.
While the scientists figure things out, it falls to us be aware and to protect our children; not just our own children but those around us, especially the most disadvantaged as they are more vulnerable to people with big wallets and evil intentions. Parts of Ghana’s tourist industry are already rising to the challenge. Staff at Novotel have, for example, been trained to apply procedures aimed at completely eliminating sexual tourism involving children in line with the Global Code of Ethics for Tourism. Anyone interested in finding out more or getting more involved can contact local agencies like the Ghana Working and Children’s Protection Association (GWACPA) and
the Ark Foundation, or international groups like
UNICEF for information and advice. Of course, the Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (formerly WAJU) of the
Ghana Police Service can be contacted immediately in critical situations.
If you see something suspicious, say so. Look away too long, on the other hand, and by the time we lift our heads out of the sand, witches and wolves may tell tales of Ghanaian children abroad that will not have fairy tale endings.
Links
Ghana Working and Children’s Protection Association (GWACPA): 021.252.600
The Ark Foundation: 021.511.610
UNICEF: 021.773.583
Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU): 021.662.438
This article was printed two years back in the Sunday World newspaper
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2:00
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I've seen it butchered a couple of times on Idol but Nina Simone's original version is the soundtrack to my day today, my first day in my new job as a News Sub-Editor for the Multimedia Broadcasting Group's flagship radio station,
Joy FM.
Took me awhile to figure it out but it's long been a dream of mine to be a journalist. Freelance dabbling aside though, I deferred that dream as far back as when I was living in London. Journalism from the foot of the ladder is a thankless task with an equally thankless salary and opportunities for growth in a melting pot as large as London were few and very far between back then. I know because I tried looking. I still have a small box somewhere full of the rejection letters I used to receive.
One such letter - from the BBC World Service - was the last straw for me and the first step in my journey back home to Ghana. I had really believed that I would get that job and when I was not even shortlisted for interview, something inside me died. I should have known that I would be reminded once more that the universe has its own order and time for things.
Ghana has been good to me. This is my fourth job here and as I have moved from each one to another, I have felt the Cosmic at play: consequences that - as Lauryn Hill might put it - cannot be coincidences.
As with each job I have taken up since moving here, I came across this opportunity directly through the job I was in before it. What is different and feels so good about this time around though is that this gig came looking for me and that two things that I have been doing for free and out of love - this blog and co-hosting the Soul Explosion on Vibe FM with Anansi - played no small part in the process.
Between its website and the Super Morning Show's coverage, I think Joy set new standards for election coverage last year. The station also boasts journalists both past (the BBC's Komla Dumor and Akwasi Sarpong, the latter of whose shoes I'm stepping into) and present (Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, Matilda Asante, Israel Laryea and one of my favourite writers, Ato Kwamina Dadzie) who I genuinely think to be (amongst, if not) the best in Ghana. Working with this team is going to be both an honour and a challenge, one that makes this day one of the most satisfying of my young life. To top that all off, it looks like I will still be given the chance to host a music show (with a difference). All that and Joy is online and so my friends abroad will finally get the chance to tune in too.
I used to hear the saying 'Love what you do and do what you love' and think that it annoyingly applied only to the Beckhams, Brad Pitts and Beyonces of this world.
That changes today.
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9:36
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I caught
this film on a flight from the UK a couple of years ago. The Godfather it isn't but regardless, halfway through it I had already decided it was one of my favourite films ever.
Unluckily for me, it was the third or so film I was watching (gotta love British Airways) and the plane landed before I could see the ending.
People, I'm begging you: if anyone in Accra has this film or knows a DVD library here that stocks it, please get in touch!
Here's the only clip of it I can find on YouTube:
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4:00
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women is written , amongst others, by a friend of mine but I will try and write this without bias. Its intriguing title is largely self-explanatory but if your imagination is low on gas today then think of it as the blog version of all those necessary yet secret conversations African women (used to/still) have with their daughters when men are busy elsewhere.
Well-written, honest, deeply personal and actually serving a purpose,
Adventures... is vying with Esi Cleland's
Wo Se Ekyir and cousin Whapibak's
Second Child, Last Born for my favourite Ghanaian blogs of 2009 (so far).
Highly recommended.
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10:39
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
An interesting Popafricana article here by Ikechukwu (the Naijja rapper of
Wind Am Well fame? I'd be really impressed...) on
Fela Anikulapo Kuti (my favourite African artist of all time) influencing a song on
The Roots' (my favourite band today) last album.
Being associated (through band leader,
?uestlove - my favorite musician... lots of favourites in this piece) with the
Soulquarians, it stands to reason that The Roots would be aware of and influenced by Fela's music and politics. Indeed, another Soulquarian -
Common - has recorded with Fela's son,
Femi, on both their albums, and the Roots played a big role in one of the best tribute records I think has ever been produced,
Red Hot + Riot, performing on a remake of
'Water No Get Enemy' that also featured
D'Angelo,
Macy Gray,
Roy Hargrove,
Nile Rodgers (of Chic), as well as
Nikka Costa on backing vocals. That album also featured
Sade,
Tony Allen,
Kelis,
Jorge Ben Jor from Brasil,
Bilal,
Les Nubians,
Manu Dibango,
Res,
Bugz in the Attic, the amazing
Wunmi and more.
If you can't get that album, it's okay: just go read the article already.
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4:18
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I suffered many a withdrawal symptom after turning my back on DSTV to embrace terrestial television. Between
Viasat 1 and broadcasts of CNN, Al-Jazeera and BBC World on Metro TV et al though, I am not entirely without the foreign content that I live on.
This week is looking interesting with Al-Jazeera's interesting music programme
Playlist shining the spotlight on our very own hiplife this week.
Playlist explores fusions between different musical genres in this increasingly globalized world in which we live and is recommended viewing for anyone who gets the feeling that there is more to music than the same-old, same-old churned out to us on radio and MTV.
The programme should (you can confirm
here depending on your timezone) be airing in Ghana at the following times:
Mon: 5.30 am / Tues: 1.30 am, 2.00 pm, 11.30 pm / Wed: 6.30 am, 4.30 pm / Thur: 3.00 am, 2.30 pm
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What does everyone think of all our new TV channels in Accra this year?
Besides the usual Metro, TV3, TV Africa, GTV and Metro Sports (which I hear is set to become a 24-hour digital station), by the end of last year we already had Net 2 (which has become completely irrelevant post-Second Chance... which I cannot believe is being repeated by yet another station) and Viasat1.
As of 2009, Crystal TV (previously only available in Kumasi) have thrown their hat into the ring with three channels. In addition to that, the
Global Media Alliance are on the verge of launching Ghana's version of South Africa's
eTV. Multimedia Broadcasting look set to launch a formidable number of digital channels on their MultiTV platform, all for a one-off payment for a digital box. I think
Skyy (from T'adi) are doing something similar, although I've heard rumours of trouble with some of the channels.
Whoever said there was a recession clearly has not been paying attention to Ghana's media industry.
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7:48
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I know I should be thinking about more important things and I assure you - I do, but this one has been a long-running dilemma that needs solving right now!
Can anyone explain to me why waakye (or 'Rice & Peas... but better' to my non-Ghanaian friends)
is often described as a breakfast meal?I know it
can be eaten any time of day and that some people also have rice dishes like jollof in the morning, but no one would ever call jollof a breakfast meal whereas waakye apparently has some particular association with breakfast.
The reason I have heard posits that it has something to do with the black-eyed beans not being good for night-time digestion. I have yet to hear of anyone calling 'yorke gari' or other bean dishes morning meals though.
Personally, I went to Kwabotwe and still have fond memories of breaking out of (...sorry, I meant sending other people from) the boarding house (*ahem*) into the middle of Kotokraba Market to buy me waakye by night from Jet. It's been a night meal for me ever since...
... so what's this 'waakye for breakfast' nonsense?
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13:07
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
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12:54
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
One of my favorite writers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, was
interviewed in the Observer last week promoting her new collection of stories,
The Thing Around Your Neck.
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12:28
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I managed to miss both the show and the last broadcast but my sources tell me that the Ghana Music Awards were pretty good last weekend. Okyeame Kwame won big and that's a good thing, but I don't understand how he could possibly have won Video of the Year for 'Woso' when Kubolor's 'Kokonsa' was a better video all round. It had a nice storyline, cameos, inventive camerawork and nothing about it was cliche whereas Okyeame Kwame had girls shaking their asses and him rapping in front of Cedi signs and in a shiny car: wow.
Anyhow, I had to post the new Obour video. The subect matter (Ghana's dying music industry) and lyrics are spot on. Even Anansi likes it and he's quite wary of Richie's faux American excesses.
The video is pretty self-explanatory even to someone who does not speak a word of Twi and sets a high bar for next year's GMAs.
Let's just hope no one releases an booty-clapping video between now and then.
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8:15
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Soulbounce have a href="http://www.soulbounce.com/soul/2009/03/a_sampling_of_hip_hops_changin.php"a nice little piece/a on the history of sampling within hip-hop music...div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-5139540142784288050?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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12:46
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Kal Penn is another actor I think's got next.
Everyone is probably cracking
Harold & Kumar Go to the White House jokes, but he has more range than that -
House...
Superman Returns...
The Namesake off the top of my head - and now he's put acting aside (for now) in the name of public service as a
White House Public Liaison Official with the Obama Administration.
Inspiring.
Shame they wrote him out of House completely though. Suicide? Damn. I was hoping he'd slip back into the role sometime.
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10:12
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I've been a faithful Last.fm user since I left Britain. In case you are unfamiliar with it,
Last.fm is a website that (with your permission) monitors your listening habits, telling you which artists and songs you listen to the most. So far, so normal. However things become cool when last.fm compiles a radio show based on your habits, makes recommendations of other songs and artists you may like and gives you the opportunity to get in touch with other people with similar listening habits. Tonnes of fun for music-obsessed individuals like myself.
Sadly, last.fm have just announced that they are
going to charge listeners outside of the Western world to stream music from their website i.e. no more radio unless I pay three euros a month.
I understand the importance of having a workable business model especially, in these interesting times, but I am increasingly getting the feeling that internet users in Africa are getting some kind of cyberparthied treatment.
Maybe my expectations are unjustifiably high but I thought this brave new world was supposed to be the great equalizer. It sure doesn't feel equal when I want to watch a new music video and I am told by
YouTube that I cannot watch it because I am not based in the US.
It's hard enough resisting the temptation to illegally download music, movies and TV shows otherwise not made available out here. Sure we're not owed media by anyone, but still... using Paypal or credit cards from local banks to try and get stuff sent to you from the likes of
Amazon seems - at least for now - a non-starter. I don't think they do Africa.
The internet - with all the comforts it makes possible - may not be much of a big deal in Africa at this moment in time. Thinking longer-term though, that fact makes Africa the market with the most potential for growth and, have no doubt, grow it will. New technology always finds a way to trickle down and the amount of time it takes to do this is always shrinking. Things will be no different in Africa.
I can easily foresee a not-so-distant future where more people (especially in - but not exclusive to - the cities) will have more access to the worldwide web, be it through computers (big or basic) in their homes or offices, in communications centres offering cheap Skype calls or on premium mobile phones (the prices of which are always dropping) giving people access to the mobile internet, even during power cuts.
Those people will be looking for content. I hope there will still be some left.
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10:01
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Museke have posted
a nice little interview of someone I have come to think of as a friend, Richy Pitch. Well worth the read... and with Samini, Reggie Rockstone, Wanlov, Mensa, m.anifest and many more of our finest on there, the album's going to be smoking too.
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9:47
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Saw
an article today on an experiment the results of which indicate that people with religious beliefs seem to fear death more than those without. Very strange. One would think that people who believe in eternal life would be in more of a hurry to embrace it.
It reminds me of how I have always found it strange how Ghanaian Christians hold the notion that the flesh is impure and temporary... and then spend unreasonable amounts of money (to the point of getting into debt) on the dead bodies of our loved ones before sending them off into the afterlife.
Both seem a little hypocritical.
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9:42
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
... and so it begins. I cannot make up my mind whether
this is really cool or really creepy. Let's just hope that when the robots develop to a point where they don't need humans anymore, they will forgive us for our early creations.
:)
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9:32
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Apparently,
this is news to some people. How quaint. Even the BBC put it in their Also in the News section.
*Shakes his head and moves along...*
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9:13
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
The last time I wrote about the global economic meltdown, our media was stuck on the general elections and its aftermath, skipping back and forth like music from a scratched record. Another day, another media obsession. Last week, it was which make of motor vehicle our former leader should spend his post-presidential days driving around in.
Interesting…
… but back in the real world. The global financial crisis remains the single biggest story there is, looming over the African horizon like a slow-but-steadily approaching giant. It is not often one gets the chance to revisit a topic so soon in a column, but so much has been written and said about the downturn since I wrote ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Downturn?’ that the topic warrants a second look. It has been very hard to make sense of it all though.
Take, for example, last week’s declaration of confidence in Ghana’s economy from 519 Ghanaian CEOs from all ten regions, according to the Association of Ghana Industries’ (AGI) most recent Business Climate Survey. With an optimism so boundless that it cut across all sectors of the economy - especially finance, banking and insurance, and agriculture - our business leaders have spoken and, like Americans voting for Obama, they have chosen hope over fear.
Looking at agriculture, perhaps their confidence is justified. Agriculture aimed at domestic markets is less exposed to the international economic climate. Sales of Fairtrade products in the UK too continue to grow in spite of the recession, which is probably why Cadbury announced last week that it would triple the amount of Fairtrade cocoa it buys from Ghana paying a guaranteed minimum price even if it rises above the open market price for cocoa.
Our banks too have few investments, if any, in the problematic financial assets behind the global crisis. If there is anything to be fearful of, the business executives surveyed by the AGI ranked inflation as the biggest, followed by high costs of credit and high taxation levels.
On the same day the AGI report came out, Reuters was reporting that Ghanaian inflation rates had surged by 20% to their highest peak since 2004 and the Ghanaian Cedi had lost more than 30% of its value to the dollar in the past year, on account of widening budget and current account deficits. Just one week before that, the international ratings agency Fitch revised its rating of our economic outlook from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’.
The Economist’s Intelligence Unit ended last year by including Ghana on its list of the world’s fastest growing economies, predicting that Sub-Saharan Africa will perform better than other emerging regions. Last week however, we had the World Bank’s Vice-President for Africa, Ms. Obiagelli Katryn Ezekwesili, stopping by the Castle to warn President Mills and all Ghanaian people to brace ourselves. Her message in a nutshell? The worst is yet to come.
Ezekwesili predicted that the Mills administration would have considerable difficulty implementing its budgetary projections on account of a reduction in the otherwise massive sums of money that pour into Ghana from wealthier economies. As if to underline the seriousness of her prediction, the World Bank – not usually so free with its wallet – announced that it would loan Ghana up to 1.2 billion interest free dollars over the next three years to help to buffer different sectors of our economy from the crisis, accelerating an immediate payment of 250 million dollars from Ghana’s allocation within the Bank.
Breathtaking stuff.
However, Ezekwesili cautioned that the bank’s assistance would be predicated on a number of economic factors including far-reaching budgetary reforms. Maybe I’m wrong, but that has a strong whiff of conditionality about it and is now really the time for the Western-lead World Bank to be preaching conditionality when they so royally screwed up the world’s economic system? I think not. As South African Finance Minister recently put it, "If an African country would have been the cause of the crisis, the IMF would have been at you like a tonne of bricks."
As it were, the IMF was busy last week convening a summit of Africa’s Finance Ministers in Tanzania (from where Manuel spoke). According to the IMF’s Managing Director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (popularly known as known ‘DSK’ and not to be mistaken for a Western corporate fat cat), the African economy would indeed buck global economic trends and grow… but only by 3%.
I am not as good with figures as I try to be with words but one BBC correspondent put this all in a context that even I could understand:
“… suppose the population of the region continues to grow at 2.4%, as it did in 2007. [Then] with economic growth of 3% it would take 118 years to double output per person. At 6% economic growth it would take 20 years. At 9% - the kind of performance China has achieved in recent years - it would take just 11 years.”
In summary, 3% growth will not do much to help the African on the street for a long, long time to come.
It is a crime that, in spite of our collective efforts as a nation to move our economy forward over the past decade or so, a crisis that we had no hand in causing looks set to derail us. It is a very good thing that we are not due to produce oil for another three years. Demand for exports and industrial commodities is currently falling faster than fufu down the throat of a Ghanaian CEO in a chopbar. China predicts that things will pick up by 2010 but anything could happen over the next few months: no one really knows. In the meantime, we can at least import crude oil down from the ridiculous peaks it hit last July. Hopefully, this means that fuel prices in Ghana will fall (but I doubt it, President Mills. Hmm?)
For all of the schizophrenia in the media about our prospects, our country and our continent remain the world’s last real land of opportunity. It is even possible that growth here is what will rekindle growth elsewhere in the world, something that should be of inspiration to our super-rich, our mega-poor and to all the people in-between.
Things are indeed going to be tough, but – to use the popular pidgin words of wisdom – “wettin Ghanaians no see before?”
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8:32
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I love it when
actors I like turn out to have leanings towards social activism.
Been a fan of
Jurnee Smollett since I saw her in
Eve's Bayou. She was pretty damn good for someone that young in Samuel L. Jackson's movie and I wondered when I would see her again in film until I saw
Rollbounce and then Denzel Washington's
The Great Debaters, all worth a peek in their own way.
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8:28
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Hmmmmm... I have mixed feelings on GM food. I will have to revisit
this news item.
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8:20
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
The newspaper industry is quite poor in Ghana anyhow - we don't like reading so much out here - but if a href="http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/03/the-future-of-n.html"this interview of a New York Times editor /aon the future of news is any indication then it looks like it is set to die a quiet death elsewhere in the world too.br /br /(As far as Ghana is concerned,) good riddance.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-7000466491953366347?l=wilmh.blogspot.com' alt='' //div
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7:54
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
object height="344" width="425"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iAWfvkGMR0samp;color1=0xb1b1b1amp;color2=0xcfcfcfamp;hl=enamp;feature=player_embeddedamp;fs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iAWfvkGMR0samp;color1=0xb1b1b1amp;color2=0xcfcfcfamp;hl=enamp;feature=player_embeddedamp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/objectbr /br /I love a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_mayer"John Mayer/a. Besides being criminally talented, he's a pretty funny guy too. In response to Kanye's attempts to expand beyond hip-hop with a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/808s_amp;_Heartbreak"i808s amp; Heartbreak/i/a, Mayer has decided to take a foray into hip-hop. His de/reconstruction of the break he chooses isn't actually bad but it's his choice of lyrics that crack me up, summing up the essence of half the hip-hop and Ramp;B songs floating around the charts these days.br /br /Oh, and if you don't know about Mayer's guitar skills then check out his take on a popular Timberlake/Timbaland collaboration. Mad skills:br /br /object height="344" width="425"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4ruic_HgQ6Uamp;hl=enamp;fs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4ruic_HgQ6Uamp;hl=enamp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/objectdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-6871528852428982394?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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6:21
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Two years ago, my best friend told me she was heading off on a bus full of fellow academics to Burkina Faso to watch the latest films our continent has to offer. I was gutted I could not go (work...) and told her I would make the trip to the next a href="http://www.fespaco.bf/"FESPACO/a two years later. Didn't happen (work...), so a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7931321.stm"here's/a a report from the ever-reliable Beeb instead.br /
br /
I miss African cinema.br /
br /
No offence to Nollywood, a href="http://www.google.com.gh/url?q=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DwFjrkrKvV4gamp;ei=t4rcSay1K4a7jAfW8L2qDgamp;sa=Xamp;oi=spellmeleon_resultamp;resnum=1amp;ct=resultamp;cd=1amp;usg=AFQjCNHMhKQo5OZlYeQTQWzGfEIg7PV4uA"Egya Koo/a and friends but I wish there was a balance here between the mini-series that pass for movies these days and more artistic African fare by directors like a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0030503/"Kwaw Ansah /aand the late great a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousmane_Semb%C3%A8ne"Ousmane Sembene/a (or the recent FESPACO winners who represent the next generation). Launches of the latter used to be major events back when I was in Mfansipim. Today I find it shocking that I am more likely to find rubbish like a href="http://movies.ghananation.com/Romance/ad1.asp?blurb=2012"iBeyonce and Rihanna/i/a or mediocre titles from Hollywood here in Ghana than I am to find a href="http://www.tsotsi.com/"iTsotsi/i/a, the first African film to score big at the Oscars. I am still in shock that people thought iBeyonce/i was good enough to warrant a part half, much less parts 2 and 3. A series of childish and unimaginative catfights between two spoilt, noveau-riche, wannabe-Nollywood Ghanaian girls, iBeyonce/i was not clever, artistic or entertaining.br /
br /
Two more years and counting...div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-2204027451699033510?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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10:51
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SdzPu0z6g_I/AAAAAAAAAVs/1Ig6sKQcFRY/s1600-h/kalpenn+nymag+opener070312_1_560.jpg"img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SdzPu0z6g_I/AAAAAAAAAVs/1Ig6sKQcFRY/s320/kalpenn+nymag+opener070312_1_560.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5322357263002403826" border="0" //abr /br /br /br /br /br /br /br /br /br /br /a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kal_Penn"Kal Penn/a is another actor I think's got next.br /br /Sure everyone is going to crack span style="font-style: italic;"a href="http://www.haroldandkumar.com/"Harold amp; Kumar/a /spanjokes, but he has more range than that - span style="font-style: italic;"a href="http://fox.com/house"House/a... a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_Returns"Superman Returns/a... /spanspan style="font-style: italic;"a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433416/"The Namesake/a /spanoff the top of my head - and now he's put acting aside (for now) in the name of public service as a a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088amp;sid=aFXnt_hqV._8amp;refer=muse"White House Public Liaison Official/a with the Obama Administration.br /br /Inspiring.br /br /Shame they wrote him out of span style="font-style: italic;"House/span completely though. Suicide? Damn: I was hoping he'd slip back into the role sometime.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-2387891629204179324?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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3:53
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
span style="font-style: italic;"/spanAn African traveling abroad would be surprised by how his or her continent is seen by others, a “scar on the conscience of the world” as Tony Blair once famously put it. We do not smile much here, apparently. No: we are too busy razing villages to the ground, putting guns into the hands of children with big innocent eyes and bigger bellies around which swarm flies of the 'house' and 'tsetse' varieties. We spend our nights singing and dancing against colorfully sunlit backdrops, spreading disease through sweaty, primal sex, or with help from mosquitoes, who swarm around the swamps and safaris where our rich wildlife is to be found. Did I miss anything? Oh, of course: we are waiting. Africa is waiting for enlightened and well-intentioned Western talk show hosts, musicians, actresses, NGO workers, retiring statesmen, and philanthropists to come and save us.br /br /Mostly from ourselves.br /br /Obviously this is not the entire picture. There has come to be such a thing as a middle-class African. The 'middle African' is underrepresented in literature and commentary on Africa though. Perhaps he or she is an embarrassment. Having relative wealth on a continent where most people are poor is perhaps not a thing to be celebrated. Never mind the fact that most middle Africans started out poor and worked their way up: the 'African Dream,' if you will. Instead Africa is depicted as a basket case into which aid is poured and largely lost. Africa needs saving... and we are apparently not the ones to do it.br /br /Last weekend, I attended a memorial where the deceased's family announced that they would construct new Class One and Two blocks for pupils at the primary school that the deceased attended as a child. It was a simple, beautiful gesture in that it went beyond the usual donation to extended family members that represents most social philanthropy here in Ghana. The extended family system is probably the closest thing we have to a welfare state here: an institution with wide responsibilities towards the poor. Some churches also make important charitable contributions but many are less interested in solving the suffering in their surroundings than they are about keeping congregation members who drive from far away content. I think it is distasteful that churches can be erected in residential areas and show no concern for people who live in those areas, but that is another topic for another day. Going back to the extended family, people often complain about ebusuasem but it would be worth keeping in mind parts of the Horn of Africa where the system is so dominant that family members have strict obligations to contribute money as soon as it is needed and to house any extended family member who shows up on their doorstep, even while abroad. We have it good here.br /br /Money sent home by family members abroad outstrips into insignificance the amount of aid sent year by year by foreign donors. However, putting remittances aside, what about acts of philanthropy from wealthier Ghanaians living right here in Ghana?br /br /When floods recently hit the North, it was interesting to see television spots asking for money from ordinary Ghanaians. I wondered who would heed the call. The vast mass of people here are indeed very poor. Everyday I find myself in awe of African entrepreneurship and resourcefulness: the things that ordinary people do to get by. How people live on the little that they earn. I can only imagine an expansive system of credit where people fluctuate between being poor and less poor: whoever finds him or herself less poor at any moment in time lends money to someone poorer until their situations reverse; a system bolstered by gifts or loans from wealthier extended family members. Perhaps taking an overdue cue from the mobile phone industry, banks that were once exclusively obsessed with chasing the wealthy have woken up to the fact that there is money to be made from the poor, and are now falling over themselves to learn how to talk that sweet microfinancing talk. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing, but the credit industry is about to explode here, and Unique Trust is only the beginning.br /br /Fast becoming an adage as wise as any ancient proverb, “African solutions to African problems” makes a lot of sense. Whatever people's good intentions (and dodgy perceptions) are on the outside, ultimately we are our own responsibility and if we are ever going to spread our wings, it will come from encouraging the African entrepreneurial spirit. Not from buying into other people's perceptions that it does not exist.br /br /In real terms this means things like blocking the bureaucracy and bribery it takes to start and maintain businesses here; fighting for fairer international trade rights; celebrating successful businessmen and women instead of always attributing their achievements to drug smuggling, corruption and witchcraft. In the run up to the general elections, we must look out for leaders who preach these messages and can demonstrate that they mean it. Leadership aside though, there are simple things we can each do like supporting local products over imported goods, and – in line with the spirit of the Christmas season – giving. It's a struggle with no easy way out, but in the long run, as a nation and a continent, we must learn to rely less on aid than we do on our ability to save ourselves.br /br /Forget about making poverty history. Let's make Africans rich.br /br /span style="font-style: italic;"This article was printed in Sunday World on November 11, 2008/spandiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-3513397133785271626?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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5:16
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Been quite busy over this past week or two, leaving me with little time to post anything. Here are a few things I came across though. Thought you might be interested:br /
div style="text-align: left;"span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0000ee; text-decoration: underline;"br /
/span/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"/divdiv style="text-align: center;"/divbFor anyone who doubts they can live their dreams/b: br /
A BBC interview with a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7881708.stm"Dr. Awe Kludze/a, an Adisco old boy who has been helping NASA to develop rockets, satellites and such for over a decade.br /
br /
div style="text-align: left;"bFor anyone who thinks only musicians, movie stars and statesmen get the rock star treatment/b:/divdiv style="text-align: left;"a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7896665.stm"Chinua Achebe's return to Nigeria/a.bnbsp;/b/divdiv style="text-align: left;"/divdiv style="text-align: left;"br /
bFor anyone who can go/b: /diva href="http://www.fespaco.bf/index_A.html"FESPACO/a is going down in a couple of days...br /
... and a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7900836.stm"South Africa World Cup 2010/a tickets are now on sale.bnbsp;/bbr /
br /
div style="text-align: left;"bFor anyone interested in how the global recession can affect Ghanaian companies/b:/divAn interview with Ghana's most respected CEO, a href="http://ghanabusinessnews.com/2009/02/23/financial-crisis-affects-ut-financials-ipo-projections-%E2%80%93-amoabeng-part-2/"Prince Amoabeng/a of Unique Trust Financial Services.br /
ul/uldiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-2224253385085873616?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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4:25
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SaO3bOvLuAI/AAAAAAAAAUs/Jy1-CX8VWkU/s1600-h/full.594721WF1207_Dirie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SaO3bOvLuAI/AAAAAAAAAUs/Jy1-CX8VWkU/s320/full.594721WF1207_Dirie.jpg" style="cursor: move;" //anbsp;/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divThe first time I interviewed anyone, it was the model Waris Dirie. The venue was the BMG building just off Time Square; all lights, bustle and money, money, money. We must have been close to the top floor; the view across the New York night skyline was incredible and I couldn't help but wonder how many times music executives like a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffy_Combs"Sean Combs/a had been up here in and out of business meetings with their bosses.br /
br /
Tonight however was to be a night of pleasure, a function organised by the NGO a href="http://www.equalitynow.org/"Equality Now/a celebrating the lifetime contributions of a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem"Gloria Steinem/a and my mother, a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efua_Dorkenoo"Efua Dorkenoo/a, to the pursuit of women's rights. I was surrounded by some of the hardest working people in human rights today but being the superficial boy I was at heart, I was soon scanning the room urgently in search of something, anything to look at:br /
br /
Sorry.br /
br /
She walked in and caught my eye immediately. Wearing loose brown trousers, a figure-hugging white cotton blouse, a yellow silk scarf tied sideways around her neck and a purple straw hat, you could tell the lady had a way around a wardrobe. I tried catching a glimpse of her face from under the shadow of her hat. As I did I was immediately struck by the experience betrayed there and for a split-second I wondered if she was as young as she seemed. Later on we were introduced and, along with my brother and the poet a href="http://www.sarahjonesonline.com/"Sarah Jones/a, we chatted until the night came to a close. As people started saying their goodbyes, she turned to me and gave me the warmest hug. When I asked her if it was an East African thing, she looked at me and smiled. "No" she corrected me; "it's an African thing". That was my first time meeting Waris.br /
br /
Meeting her again was all sorts of drama. A fashion shoot clashed with a previous engagement. Then her favourite Turkish baths were all booked up. Eventually she invited my family to her Brooklyn apartment, promising to cook us up a storm. Inside, the paint, ladders and cloth over furniture said she had just moved in but you could already tell how simply she was going to decorate the place. No marble floors, gold taps and encased enlargements of photos from old fashion shoots. Just plenty of books, shoes, some African art and a box of CDs lying in the corner on the wooden floor. Most might think that this is simple living for a supermodel but Waris' background is not like that of most of her colleagues.br /
br /
Born into a tribe of nomadic Somalian herders, she spent the first years of her life moving from place to place in the desert- a far cry from life in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu. Ask Waris when her birthday is and she will tell you she doesn't know exactly. It was more efficient for her people to base their movements and daily lives around the seasons and activity of the Sun, crucial factors behind the growth of plant-life the herds needed to graze on. Daily life, she says, was hard. As a little girl she "had to build pens, milk the cattle and lead over sixty sheep and goats out into the desert everyday to graze". Around the age of thirteen she left her family for the first time, running away barefoot to Mogadishu to avoid being married off by her father. Living with family there she worked as a servant and a construction worker before grabbing an opportunity to be a maidservant for her uncle-in-law, the Somali ambassador in London.br /
br /
Arriving in London she had no knowledge of English and was too busy working to find any time to learn. It was in performing one of her tasks, taking her young niece to school, that a photographer whom she thought of as “this strange man who would stare at me all the time” spotted her. He one day gave her his card and a few years later, when her uncle's term had come to an end and she was out of a job, she went to see him. He was a photographer and the photo he took of her was to be her first in a career starting with appearances in music videos and leading eventually to Revlon adverts alongside Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer. To date Waris has graced the covers of most if not all of the big fashion magazines and her biography ‘a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Desert-Flower-Waris-Dirie/dp/1860497586/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8amp;s=booksamp;qid=1235466389amp;sr=8-1"Desert Flower/a’ has been a bestseller in bookstores the world over. This desert girl has come a long way.br /
br /
I asked her what life is like being an African in the modelling business and whether other African models she met were competitive or warm towards her. "When you are out there and you meet different people, you'll quickly know who is African and who isn't. There's a warmth and a vibe around them, and when we see each other we say hi and all that, it's just different. To be black in this industry is to be the future. We have a new look and everyone is tired of seeing the same old faces. We are the future, just like in music".br /
br /
I had gone through her CD box earlier to find a pretty impressive collection. Starting us off with the a href="http://www.gipsykings.com/"Gypsy Kings/a, by the time the food was ready we were listening to a href="http://www.zapmama.be/"Zap Mama/a and a href="http://www.okayplayer.com/dangelo/interface.htm"D'Angelo/a. She described music as being 'like water and breathe to her', so I asked her if she would ever consider singing, like a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6v5-kG1Sl0"Naomi/a did some years back. She starts laughing.br /
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"I would love to be a href="http://www.sade.com/sade/"Sade/a! They don't play that kind of music on TV anymore" she laments. "It's all so mainstream. It would be nice to havenbsp; a channel playing music from the world over. I'd do it myself if I could. I'd love to do a TV show". I ask if she's serious. "Yeah, that would be wicked! You just watch. One of these days I am going to come to London and do a TV show. Maybe some acting too. As long as I have control". br /
br /
Control is something very important to Waris and it comes up in our conversation again and again. Lack of control over what she is doing is something she says will eventually lead her away from fashion and modelling. I point out that earning enough money to lead a comfortable semi-bohemian lifestyle in a new Brooklyn apartment can't be such a bad thing, to which she responds that she doesn't really like it in New York. "I find it too fast, too superficial, there is something selfish about the place. I would love to move to London... Brixton, yeah... or somewhere simple in North London. I remember London. I used to be on one of the train-routes all the time,nbsp; the grey one... yeah, the Jubilee Line". She recounts to me the experience of being stalked all the way home by an insistent admirer she bumped into on the line once, before she became a model: "Anonymity would not be a bad thing". When I ask her if there is anywhere in the world she would like to go to that her career has not yet taken her, she replies without hesitating, "Thailand. It looks so beautiful and very natural. I love nature and animals. I grew up around it. It reminds me of home".br /
br /
Somalia is in the news. A famine is sweeping across the horn of Africa and many thousands of people are dying. I ask her if she ever thinks of going back, perhaps to give her four-year-old son, Aleeke (asleep in the next room), a taste of home.br /
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"I feel so helpless (about the famine), like I should be there. I do want to go back... although I have been warned that I could be kidnapped and maybe even killed". Waris has suffered something known as female circumcision, or a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_cutting"Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)/a, that is practised not just in parts of Africa but across the world including the West. In one of its worse forms, young girls are forced to undergo gruesome coming-of-age ceremonies in which parts of their external genitalia, including the clitoris, are cut out (using a sharp, hot stone or a knife); vaginas sewn up leaving a small hole through which to urinate. Some years ago an operation took away a lot of the pain, but the damage is irreparable and Waris will never be able to truly appreciate the pleasures of sex.br /
br /
Today she is a Special Ambassador for the United Nation, and the face of its campaign against FGM. She says the response has been nothing short of inspiring, "… nothing but love. I have received letters from so many people thanking me for speaking out about it".br /
br /
On the other hand there are those who displeased by her candour. Hers are a very private people and even those who agree that FGM is a malpractice feel that she should not air their dirty linen in public: "I am not ashamed about it and I am not ashamed to speak about it, though some others are" she says exasperated. "Besides the ones talking are usually men and they can't know what they are talking about because they are not the ones who have to feel it".br /
br /
I wondered what she thought about men on the whole. She smiled at me and said "I just don't have time for men right now. Sorry... maybe later!". She paused for a second, and then she laughed. I reckoned she was bluffing, but the meal was ready. It smelled great:br /
br /
The interview was over.br /
br /
div style="text-align: left;"/divobject height="344" width="425"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ojRYxEseWa0amp;hl=enamp;fs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ojRYxEseWa0amp;hl=enamp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/objectdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-8161926133815165500?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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5:10
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Does anyone have any idea why power has been tripping on and off across Accra these past few days when Akosombo's water levels seem quite healthy?div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-2987009362033414587?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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12:21
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I was once standing in line at London cinema with a recently-married friend I had not seen since her return from honeymooning in her native South Africa. The African behind the counter was all smiles as my friend bought her ticket. Then he was hit by a bad and sudden case of constipation. Or maybe he found my attempt to offer him money in return for a cinema ticket offensive. I could not figure out what the problem was and so I took the ticket, shuffled into the cinema with my friend and enjoyed the movie. Afterwards I saw the same man looking at me, gossiping with his colleagues, and as my friend and I walked past them towards the exit I picked up the words ‘sell-out’. Only then did it occur to me that I was being judged because my friend, in case you had not guessed it by now, was white.br /
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Interracial relationships can be sensitive things. Black women in particular have huge problems with the idea, regularly hurling abuse at black male Hollywood icons with spouses of any colour besides black. Whenever I ask for the reason for all the neck-snapping, I hear arguments along the lines of:br /
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a)nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; There being too many beautiful and intelligent black women around to justify seeing white women;br /
b)nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; Diluting the strength of the black gene pool;br /
c)nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; Black men feeling inferior about their race; andbr /
d)nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; Creating mixed-race children who will grow up to be confused about their identitiesbr /
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My girlfriend is Ghanaian with a dash of Dutch and a whole lot of African American thrown into the mix. I am very much in love with her and will one day… well you can probably guess the rest so I will spare you the details. The interracial thing got me thinking though: would I feel the same way towards my girlfriend if she was not African? br /
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I am not a womanizer – I swear - but I have dated women of different races, colours, religions and nationalities in my time. My family still call me ‘Kofi Annan’ and the nickname has nothing at all to do with my diplomacy skills. I date whoever I connect with, whatever their colour, and it is with a straight face that I tell you that I had feelings for each girlfriend I ever had, black or otherwise. So here’s my cedis’s worth on each of the arguments above:br /
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bToo Many (Beautiful and Intelligent) Black Women/bbr /
This is true. I DJ, a hobby that connects me new people all the time, several of whom are beautiful, black, female and really, really smart. To expect that beauty and intelligence are all it takes for two people to connect though would be like having your parents introduce you to some random person from up the street and think that you should bond because you share a street name in common. Race might give you some shared experiences but even that depends on where you come from and who you are. br /
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I once went out with a Greek girl and I always felt conscious of people looking at us when we walked or sat down in public, hand in hand. Maybe it was my imagination. We had a lot in common but our relationship did not last very long. True: her mother did not like me, but in the end it boiled down to her wariness of black men. She felt that black men viewed white women as being easy. Try as I might to persuade her that I wanted her for more than her body, that insecurity festered in the back of her mind so persistently that I eventually gave up on the relationship. The issue was as much one of race as it was one of trust, something just as important in a relationship. Would such an issue have arisen if she had been black? Perhaps not. On the other hand though, all women have reason to be insecure that a guy is only interested in their bodies. In this instance my ex decided to shade her reasoning in race. For a black woman, it would might have been shaded in black male infidelity. br /
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Same difference.br /
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bInferiority and Diluting the Strength of the Black Gene Pool /bbr /
The argument here is two-fold: the black gene is a dominant gene and by procreating with white women, black men are letting the race down and creating weaker children. Furthermore they date ‘away’ in the first place because they feel inferior about their race. br /
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The ‘black’ gene is dominant in terms of colour but that’s about it. Black children are not automatically born stronger and taller. Some black people from some places are really tall, some are stronger or faster than the average Joe; some have rhythm, some can dance, some are well-hung… some are not and some cannotbr /
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Let us please not dignify the same kind of eugenic thinking as the Nazis did: Jesse Owens already disproved all of that. If anything racial ‘purity’ results in limited gene pools and inherited illnesses of the kind that plagued the royal families of Europe. br /
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As for inferiority, I concede that there are some black men who have the bizarre tendency to think better of themselves because they are dating white women. That said I refuse to think that EVERY black man who goes out with a white woman is a victim of that. Maybe a black man who goes out with only white women, or a black man who dates white women but screams “Dolly-Anne!” or some other Country-and-Western-sounding name whenever he has lays down with his girlfriend (whose name is actually Akosua), but surely not every black man.br /
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For some people blackness is the thing above all else by which they define themselves and so it would be hard for them to date someone who has not been through exactly the same experience: I dig that. However there are other black people for whom blackness is an important part of a whole that is defined by more than skin tone. Identity-wise I am African before I am black and black before I am British, and I would date a non-Ashanti Ghanaian girl, an African who is not black, a black girl who is not immediately African, and a British girl who is not black. It really depends on the girl and on what levels we click.br /
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bThe Children/bbr /
When black men in Britain marry English women, they are usually outnumbered by there being more members of her family being around than there are Africans. They sometimes begin kowtowing to her family and their way of life, leaving the children to be raised by the norms of a white society that will eventually label the children black. This can understandably cause the kids some confusion. br /
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I know a Nigerian-English girl whose Nigerian father banned his English wife from taking their children with her to a group of English wives in Nigeria because he felt that in such a club, his children might think of themselves as something other than Nigerian. For him, it was important that his children learnt to understand and embrace their Nigerian side, if only because it would anchor them later when they encounter their English side. Take Tiger Woods. When asked about his ethnicity, he famously explained that he is not black, but rather he is both black and Asian. In doing so, he was acknowledging that his Asian mother, her family and her values also had a role in the development of his sense of identity. Barack Obama won the American presidency on a similar platform.br /
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One thing against interracial dating is that a relationship is hard enough without adding further problems. Isn’t that the kind of thing we should fight if we want to see Martin Luther King’s ‘Dream’ come to more fruition beyond just Obama? People of different races who are genuinely into one another deserve our support, not our criticism. br /
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So would I feel the same way towards my girlfriend if she wasn’t African? Probably not: if she had not been raised an African she would probably have gone through different experiences that would probably have resulted in her becoming a very different person.br /
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Yet it is both naïve and depressing to assume that two people should have a better chance at a successful relationship simply because they are both black. In thinking that way, we are viewing ourselves exactly as those who hate us see us: as one indistinguishable mass of people who are all the same. br /
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Clearly, we are not.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-333939945654741224?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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7:56
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SZGA7zJULXI/AAAAAAAAAUc/_CiSKXnwa6M/s1600-h/betty.jpg"img style="cursor: pointer; width: 241px; height: 157px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SZGA7zJULXI/AAAAAAAAAUc/_CiSKXnwa6M/s320/betty.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5301160001221700978" border="0" //aa onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SZGAtTlubsI/AAAAAAAAAUU/TN3PqkDxmbA/s1600-h/hanna.jpg"img style="cursor: pointer; width: 241px; height: 162px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SZGAtTlubsI/AAAAAAAAAUU/TN3PqkDxmbA/s320/hanna.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5301159752232758978" border="0" //abr /br /Listening to the vetting proceedings, I cannot be alone in thinking that both Betty Mould-Iddrissu (yesterday) and Hanna Tetteh (today) are making their male counterparts (both fellow nominees and those asking the often inane questions) look and sound like utter amateurs.br /br /Class.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-4695194986035441764?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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11:33
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
While it's been part-fun and part-ZZzzzZzZZzzZz following the Ministerial vetting process, a href="http://ghanabusinessnews.com/2009/01/17/kwesi-botchwey-speaks-on-ghana%E2%80%99s-economy/"here's Kwesi Botchwey/a with what sounds like very sensible advice on another important issue:br /br /De-politicize Ghanaian economics.br /br /I wish I could say that it amazes and disappoints me that the economy has become a post-election political hot potato; that I would expect our politicians to realize that the state of the Ghanaian collective wallet is far bigger than their petty, egotistical nonsense - especially when the global economy is in the state that it is in.br /br /But I cannot and I don't.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-6561595972527148939?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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11:29
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
If ever I saw a headline that would give rappers more reason to grab their proverbial nuts, it's a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7869709.stm"this one/a.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-442269987574153319?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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11:06
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SZBY4iaHx1I/AAAAAAAAATs/L6TBZcn-0SQ/s1600-h/kae-kazim_hakeem_lost.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"img border="0" height="161" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SZBY4iaHx1I/AAAAAAAAATs/L6TBZcn-0SQ/s320/kae-kazim_hakeem_lost.jpg" width="252" //a/divdiv style="text-align: left;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divIn spite of being aware of its okayish rating on a href="http://www.metacritic.com/tv/shows/24redemption"Metacritic/a, I still managed to be underwhelmed by the TV movie 'a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Redemption"24: Redemption/a'.br /
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Reasons:br /
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1. I had high expectations of a '24' movie... and high expectations tend to precede extreme disappointment.br /
2. The Bauer-saves-Rwanda-from-happening-again plot was more tired than a trypanosomiasis patient overdosing on sleeping pills during a Spanish siesta.br /
3. I have an aversion to Hollywood inventing fictional African countries or conflicts (reference: a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_of_the_sun"Tears of the Sun/a).br /
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Nevertheless I was impressed with the first two episodes of 24’s seventh season. Disbanding CTU altogether and forcing Bauer to work with new FBI characters who barely trust him were smart scriptwriting moves, as was the idea of putting him on trial for use of torture.br /
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What I really love though is that the bad guy in charge of the bad guy behind who seems to be the bad guy (*pause to catch my breath*)... is African. Yes: I appreciate the fact that the character (played by a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0434444/"Hakeem Kae-Kazim/a who played a similar role in a href="http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page"Lost/a) is still a stereotypical, one-sided and (thus far/typically) underdeveloped, bloodthirsty warmonger. However I still find some pleasure in the fact that 24's scriptwriters thought the African villain had so come of age that he could be behind a plot as Machiavellian as those contractually required by Team 24. We (and by ‘we’ I mean Africans, as opposed to ‘we African criminals’… ahem….) are usually much further down the crime food chain.br /
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Being a bit of a pessimist though, I am still expecting a twist in which there is some white dude is who is the boss of the African bad guy in charge of the bad guy behind who seems to be the bad guy.br /
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There is also the chance that the novelty of the African criminal’s newfound standing will soon wear off, along with my patience for his pseudo-Nigerian accent and lack of character development.br /
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It’s not that I lack faith in the African villain.br /
It’s that I lack faith in Hollywood.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-1267649572016895379?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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0:55
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Earlier this week, Libyan leader Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi probably picked up an expensive-looking pen and drew a fresh line of ink through yet another item on his bucket list: br /
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strike#1234: Rehabilitate my image in the Westbr /
#1235: Get crowned King of Kings… (or at least King of all African Kings)br /
#1236: Become leader of the African continent (or at least AU chairman)/strikebr /
#1236: Unite the African continentbr /
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When I reported on Qaddafi being ‘crowned’ African Union chairman early last week, my blog was flooded with more comments than I will admit to being used to, and the verdict on his AU chairmanship was as split down the middle as a Ghanaian first-round election result. On the one hand are those who think that Qaddafi’s chairmanship will give much-needed momentum to the realization of African unity that the African Union is supposed to be moving towards (whatever form that unity eventually takes). On the other hand though are those whose opinions of the man run the gamut from mild distrust to utter disgust. br /
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One friend pointed out to me Qaddafi’s responsibility for the death of a number of her family friends. Libya’s human rights record indeed remains somewhat dismal to this day. Others accuse him of sponsoring wars the continent over, and look to his shoddy human rights record, his schizophrenia over being Arab or African, and the gulf between his lofty pan-Africanism and the treatment of black African immigrants in his own country. Stories haunt newsrooms here of Ghanaians being mistreated there. As recently as last month, two Ghanaians were executed for murder there – another remaining on death row – after former President Kuffuor was unable to secure their release through diplomatic channels.br /
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Speaking to Al Jazeera, Richard Dowden - director of the UK’s Royal African Society – offered another perspective: that Qaddafi’s AU chairmanship “i… says a lot about what African leaders think of the African Union. It was hoped that it would give great new leadership to Africa, create a sense of pan-Africanism even if they were not going to unite politically… it has got all these aspirations to be a club of democrats [but Gaddafi] is a man who has been a dictator for 40 years/i.” br /
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As Qaddafi himself once famously put it, “irevolutionaries do not retire/i” (words no doubt sweet to a certain former Ghanaian revolutionary leader’s ears). Whether or not this is so, the self-proclaimed ‘Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution’ clearly has many more people to persuade of just how brotherly his revolution really is.br /
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The African problem with Qaddafi extends as far back as the Seventies. It may come as a surprise to many that Libya was one of the founding members of the OAU in 1963. After the 1969 coup that brought him to power though, Qaddafi had pan-Islamist ideas and was interested in the uniting of iArab /inations. To that end he not only called for the creation of a Saharan Islamic state - trying (and failing) to set up first a Libyan-Egyptian-Syrian superstate and then a merged territory with Tunisia – but also underlined his unfriendliness towards sub-Saharan African leaders by offering resources and support to any movement that approached him with an anti-government cause and an empty bank account. br /
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To be fair to him, many sub-Saharan African leaders at the time were not worth defending. Qaddafi’s largesse however extended to almost any minority or left-leaning political group at the time. He offered support to both Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid African National Congress and to the Irish Republican Army (IRA); to ‘Lula’ da Silva (yes: he who is now Brazilian president) and to paramilitaries in Nicaragua; to Namibia’s SWAPO, and to Taylor in Liberia and Sanko in Sierra Leone. Today, he is still rumoured to sponsor rebel movements in Darfur, Cote D’Ivoire and Burkina Faso. As diplomatic relations with Tunisia and Egypt (the latter by then a friend of Israel) evaporated, he even began sponsoring subversive activities in other Arab countries. br /
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Come the Lockerbie bombings, after which the world reached the end of its collective patience with Qaddafi and imposed economic sanctions and a diplomatic blackout on Libya, it would take the intervention of two Africans – Nelson Mandela and our own Kofi Annan - to open Qaddafi’s fist (as Obama might put it), leading to the beginning of Qaddafi’s rehabilitation within the international community.br /
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Qaddafi had already thrown his (often unwelcome) weight behind pan-Africanism by this time and (contrary to the perception that he changes his mind between being Arab and being African - which are not in fact mutually exclusive) he has been fairly consistent ever since. He has shown African leadership before, personally financing and convening the session that would lead to the Sirte Declaration in September 1999 (Sirte being where Qaddafi was born) calling for the establishment of a more effective African Union to replace the OAU. The latter had already become known in international circles as the ‘Dictators Club’. br /
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Qaddafi has since been arguably the strongest advocate in the Union for the realization of a number of pan-Africanist dreams: a single African military force, one currency and a single passport to facilitate free movement of Africans all over the continent. (In response to this a href="http://wilmh.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-man-most-likely.html"someone commented/a on my blog saying, “iOf course the guy would advocate for a unitary passport for Africa: how else would he move his fleet of Hummers from his tent on the dessert to Jo’burg…/i”) br /
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In a sign of the kind of acceleration that Qaddafi has in mind, the AU is already putting in place new structures that, while not taking away sovereignty from member states, may mark the start of that very process. In Qaddafi’s own words: br /
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“iIt is a government of the union. It is an authority, a government. There will be secretaries … coordinators for various policies, like defense and foreign affairs and defense policies and foreign policies that are divergent and we will coordinate everything and our defense policies for Africa./i”br /
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It is perhaps fitting that this should begin one hundred years after the birth of a man who dreamed a similar dream. Qaddafi appears to have tapped into Nkrumah’s ability to dream big, both when it came to pan-Arabism and now with pushing forward the pan-Africanist agenda. Qaddafi is however not Kwame Nkrumah. While Nkrumah certainly had his fair share of flaws, Qaddafi has a history far more chequered to undo and as a Ghanaian I hope that simultaneously improving human rights and Ghanaian-Libyan relations makes his bucket list. br /
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Making the African Union work towards genuine unity would also be a good start though.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-1780500618661713176?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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12:23
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
div style="text-align: left;"a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SYcuhUchriI/AAAAAAAAATY/d1Ikftpv7rw/s1600-h/Muammar_al_Gaddafi.jpg"img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 265px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SYcuhUchriI/AAAAAAAAATY/d1Ikftpv7rw/s400/Muammar_al_Gaddafi.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5298254636583595554" border="0" //abr //divbr /Cannot wait for the next Africa Union summit: Gaddafi's a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7864604.stm"just been named/a the body's chairman.br /br /a href="http://wilmh.blogspot.com/search?q=gaddafi"Say what you will/a about the man but his visions of a single African military force, a single currency, and a single passport for Africans to move freely around the continent have an appealing whiff of Nkrumah about them that I cannot help but inhale.br /br /Should be a very interesting year.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-4465847514257375642?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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18:34
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SYY-O_LPEVI/AAAAAAAAASo/OCz-ft1ET8U/s1600-h/gatewaylogo.jpg"img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 118px; height: 106px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SYY-O_LPEVI/AAAAAAAAASo/OCz-ft1ET8U/s400/gatewaylogo.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5297990438845616466" border="0" //abr /br /br /br /... well, only a few privileged Ghanaian viewers: a href="http://www.gtv.tv/"GBS is apparently no more/a.span style="font-weight: bold;"br //spandiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-1331091207540189411?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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18:11
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I once had the pleasure of interviewing the Beninois singer, Angelique Kidjo, one of a handful of African musicians who can genuinely describe herself as being an international star without exaggerating or lying through her teeth. When she released her first internationally marketed album Parakou in the late eighties, Kidjo relied entirely on using Western instruments in the belief that she was what would make her sound African: her voice, her words and her melodies. World music critics, the vast majority of whom were not African, panned the album for not being African enough. Nevertheless, Kidjo stuck to her guns and today she records albums and tours with the likes of Santana and Alicia Keys. I heard her classic Batonga playing on radio when it dawned on me that her approach to Africanizing her sound had caught on and influenced more artists today than are even aware of the debt they owe her. Hiplife is a genre that draws from the same line of thinking as Angelique Kidjo’s. br /
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Hiplife is said to be a marriage of Ghanaian highlife and the hip-hop that has been so popular amongst the youth of Ghana since the sound first emerged from New York in the late Seventies and early Eighties. However, while it owes some influences to hip-hop, hiplife really is a different sound altogether.br /
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Hip-hop began as more than just saying something over a beat. It is said to have started when a man by the nickname Kool Herc – while spinning James Brown songs at a block party – realized that the crowd went crazy during the part of the song that Brown let his drummer play solo for an extended while. This part of the song was called the ‘break’ and Kool Herc realised that, by joining together two turntables and playing the same record on both, he could extend the break. The crowds went wild and the party goers who would dance during these extended breaks became known as ‘break dancers’, with the music growing to attract graffiti street artists and, eventually, youngsters who would keep the crowd hyped up with a word here or there over the beat. Those youngsters – Masters of these Ceremonies – became better known as MCs, forming the last element (besides DJing, break dancing, and graffiti artistry which came before it) of hip-hop. br /
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For years, hip-hop flourished on the underground while disco, Eighties soul and the power ballads by artists like Whitney Houston dominated the airwaves. The major music companies did not know what to do with hip-hop culture as a whole, but they knew what to do with the MCs whose rhymes and ability to entertain started to eclipse the DJs, dancers and artists who came before them. MCs (or rappers as they are now better known) would go from their humble beginnings to surpass rock musicians, somewhere in the Nineties, as the biggest-selling musicians in the world.br /
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Like the Ghanaians who created it, highlife has always flirted with American music forms. After starting out Calypso-like on the beaches, by the time of our independence, Ghanaians were into jazz music and so highlife got into jazz, producing bands with heavy horn sections and stars including E.T Mensah and the Tempos. Then in the Seventies, African Americans followed James Brown to say it loud how black and how proud they were. Highlife followed his lead, influencing Nigeria’s Fela Kuti to merge it with funk into a new sound – Afrobeat – that was championed in Ghana by artists like Gyedu Blay Ambolley and CK Mann. There was a flirtation with the jheri-curled soul of the Eighties that birthed 'burger highlife'. When Bob Marley caught on again, highlife suddenly became reggae-like, giving birth to artists like Kojo Antwi and Pat Thomas. For the longest time thereafter, highlife resisted hip-hop music but eventually something had to give.br /
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Some had tried (and failed) before him to impersonate American hip-hop acts, but when a young Reginald Ossei started rapping in Twi over beats by producers the likes of Mike Cooke, Panji and Zapp Mallet, he gave birth to both a new persona – Reggie Rockstone – and a new form of highlife. Some called it hip-hop highlife, but eventually the hop was dropped and what remained was simply ‘hiplife’.br /
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Hiplife struggled for popularity at first. Parents did not like the way that it aped the vulgarity and brashness of its American cousin and the teenagers thought it was hip-hop’s poorer and – God forbid – local substitute. Eventually songs by Rockstone, the Native Funk Lords and VIP came to vie with rap and Ramp;B for radio airtime and dance floors. Producers emerged who weaved the rap style with highlife making it even more accessible to the Ghanaian masses. Youngsters began emerging on the scene with no understanding of the fact that rap involves clever wordplay and is so rhythmic that you do not need to understand what a person is saying to appreciate the awesomeness of the rhyme. Sidney and Tic Tac, for example, can make great songs and A-Plus can be controversial but none of the above can rap. Ever the visionary, Reggie Rockstone saw the writing on the wall and disowned the sound, describing his own as hip-hop. Nevertheless, the music continued to sell like hot kelewele. When singers like Ofori Amponsah and KK Fosu began singing over its beats, even parents started picking up on hiplife’s catchy melodies…br /
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… which is probably when it all started going horribly, horribly wrong.br /
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No offence but, as a parent, think back to the music of your youth and remember how you had to explain its musicality to your parents; then remember the pleasure you took in how much they disliked or could not understand it. That was what made the music cool: your parents – who thought they knew everything – could not get it, making the music a joyous secret shared between you and all your friends. Keeping that in mind, fast forward to today and remember the way you danced to Praye’s ‘Angelina’ over the election period. Hiplife is safe and in its safeness, it is becoming uncool.br /
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The first lady of hiplife, MzBel, recently told me that her new sound will surprise a lot of people. I am not surprised. As I am typing this, a young man going by the moniker of Ayigbe Edem is being interviewed on a major radio station. His song is playing in the background and it does not sound like hiplife. Its beats are a less warm and feel rough around the edges.nbsp; Western. One of track’s featured rappers – Sarkodie - rhymes so fast that I can barely hear what he is saying, yet I am taken by the rhythm of his delivery. This is hip-hop.nbsp; Yet it is African. Nigerian artists with names like 2Face and P Squared are successfully selling a slicker, edgier sound not just in Ghana but all over the continent. It sounds like American Ramp;B but - with Fela’s pidgin – they have made it Nigerian. Miss Malaika, easily the best of Ghana’s many (many, many) beauty shows, is usually a reliable showcase for hiplife but last year its stage was shared by new acts – R2Bees, Okyeame Kwame, Richie and Asem – whose beats have little to do with the old sound. Yet they are distinctly Ghanaian.nbsp; I spent the latter half of last year explaining to an older work colleague how a rapper called Kwaw Kesse could seemingly glorify madness, speak no sensible lyrics and yet win Artist of the Year at the 9th Ghana Music Awards. My colleague never understood and that is the point. This new music – GH Rap – is not for you. It is for the kids and Kidjo’s musical children are many.nbsp; br /
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Do not worry though. Everything moves in cycles and while hiplife may be dying, highlife will ultimately live on.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-6855704106418782672?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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12:02
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
div style="text-align: center;"/divdiv style="text-align: center;"a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SYcpSBh3UEI/AAAAAAAAATI/9lNhauLfQSc/s1600-h/Andre+Dede+Ayew.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SYcpSBh3UEI/AAAAAAAAATI/9lNhauLfQSc/s320/Andre+Dede+Ayew.jpg" width="255" border="0" height="231" //a/divdiv style="text-align: center;" In the immortal words of a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flava_flav"William Jonathan Drayton Jr:/a /divdiv style="text-align: center;"/divdiv style="text-align: center;"br /"iYeaaaaaaaaaaaah Boyeeeeeeeeeeeeee/i!"br /br /div style="text-align: left;"In related (and slightly more serious) news, a href="http://news.myjoyonline.com/news/200902/25808.asp"this /awas pretty cool of team captain, Dede Ayew.br //div/divdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-6397569059125014680?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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4:02
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I recently saw a comedy in which two women-obsessed protagonists paid a visit to their mentor, only to find that he had given up gatecrashing weddings (to chat up women) in favor of crashing funerals. As he put it, “grief is nature's most powerful aphrodisiac.” While I laughed at the character's sheer sleaziness, it occurred to me that 'funeral crashing' is not such a laughing matter in here in Ghana. In fact, it is probably the norm.br /br /Death is Ghana's national pastime and Ghanaians spend most weekends of the year drifting from one funeral to another. Where the West has its 'Wedding Planners', Ghana has 'Funeral Contractors': people who are paid to take care of everything from the announcement of a late loved one's 'Calling to Glory' (or 'Transition' or 'Home Calling') to the hiring of 'professional mourners' to wail more loudly than everyone else at the burial.br /br /In a way, it is very beautiful; something linking us to a cultural past that we have otherwise forgotten. It is a profoundly African thing to venerate one's elders, and crossing over into the world of the ancestors once inspired the Pharoahs to have the Pyramids built to house their mummified bodies and focus their energies towards the skies; pyramids that people dedicated (and lost) their lives towards building. Funerals are part of the very fabric of African society as a whole. More so than weddings and births, they bring extended families together, pulling people in over air and sea to share in each other's grief and be there for each other. If you are ever to bump into family members you never knew you had, chances are that you will do so at a funeral.br /br /Sadly, there is a dark side to our obsession with the Dead. It is surprising that the people of a nation still emerging from being a 'Highly Indebted Poor Country' should spend so much on death. Bodies can lie in morgues for months amassing debt while loans are secured to finance funerals far more elaborate than they are reflective of the lives of the deceased. At the funeral of the late MP, Ms. Hawa Yakubu, the Catholic Metropolitan Archbishop of Accra - Archbishop Gabriel Charles Palmer-Buckle - expressed concern about our funerary culture, saying that "Funerals have become extremely extravagant... It is insensitive to the plight of the bereaved families."br /br /The matter has even been debated in Parliament, prompting Minority Leader Alban Bagbin to complain that “we are investing in the dead rather than the living through expensive funerals.” After spending money on thirteen different mourning cloths in one year, the Honourable MP for Ashiaman, Mr. Alfred Agbesi, went as far as to suggest the introduction of one cloth for all funerals, arguing that “after spending on expensive cloths, coffins and keeping the corpse in expensive morgues, the widow and children are left with nothing and are expected to fend for themselves.”br /br /Ghanaians have become very good at celebrating each other's religious holidays, but perhaps notes should be exchanged between the nation's two biggest religions on conducting funerals as well. Muslim tradition holds that the dead must be wrapped in white and buried after a maximum of three days. Biblical ambiguity over the matter however appears to have given Ghanaian Christians more creative license than they can handle.br /br /Surely a funeral should be a simple, heartfelt celebration of a person's life by people who knew and loved that person; not a symbol of status where far more wealth is spent on a person than they ever received in life.br /br /span style="font-style: italic;"This article was printed in Sunday World newspaper on November 4, 2008/spandiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-5687028445286375677?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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9:22
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SYMa-GACQqI/AAAAAAAAASA/fawTiRTvii8/s1600-h/tonyartist2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SYMa-GACQqI/AAAAAAAAASA/fawTiRTvii8/s320/tonyartist2.jpg" //a/diva href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7859235.stm"Yet another childhood hero/a of mine passes away.br /
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I watched a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartbeat"Hartbeat/a a lot as a kid and have some very fond memories of Tony Hart's artwork and his plasticine-animated sidekick, a href="http://www.aardman.com/morph/"Morph/a who, as it turns out, was an early creation of Aardman Animation (of a href="http://www.wallaceandgromit.com/"Wallace and Grommit/a fame).br /
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div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SYMQERln18I/AAAAAAAAARo/hH0yMW_QLpo/s1600-h/Morph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"img border="0" height="129" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SYMQERln18I/AAAAAAAAARo/hH0yMW_QLpo/s320/Morph.jpg" width="129" //a/divDefinitely someone who inspired any creativity I may now possess.br /
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Thankyou, Mr. Hart.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-7020234740410651625?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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7:43
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
1. In My Element (entire album) - a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Glasper"Robert Glasper/abr /2. a href="http://www.freshselects.net/bling47radioppp1"Pigeon Hole/a - Coultrainbr /3. a href="http://www.freshselects.net/exileradio"spanRadio/span/a - Exilebr /4. Miss Myriam - a href="http://www.okayplayer.com/featured/s/reviews/9/126/252/"Jaleel Shaw/abr /5. Daa Ke Daa - a href="http://museke.com/index.php?q=node/1330"Becca/abr /6. We Alright - a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMC_%28hip_hop_group%29"eMCbr //a7. Props Due - a href="http://www.myspace.com/mensa"M3nsa/abr /8. I'm Sorry (It Just Ain't Gonna Work Out) - a href="http://www.stonesthrow.com/mayerhawthorne"Mayer Hawthorne amp; the County/abr /9. Jump Off / Fearless (entire album)- a href="http://www.jazminesullivanmusic.com/"Jazmine Sullivan/abr /10. a href="http://www.zshare.net/download/5279296020d9b8a5/"Set It Off remix/a feat. Dr. Dre - Kardinal Offishallbr /11. (?) - a href="http://www.myspace.com/msarkodie"Sarkodie/abr /12. Abundance - Platinum Pied Pipersbr /br /A couple of these are pretty late but needed to be posted anyway.br /br /Robert Glasper's span style="font-style: italic;"In My Element /spanin particular. Much as I can listen to jazz, I have never had a jazz album on repeat like this since I used to listen to Miles Davis' span style="font-style: italic;"Kind of Blue/span. The same goes for the Jaleel Shaw track.br /br /Ghana represents in the form of Sarkodie's great piece of political commentary (will post the title when I find it), M3nsa's sublime span style="font-style: italic;"Props Due/span, and a beautiful track from a female for a change, Becca's song from the span style="font-style: italic;"Scorned /spansoundtrack. I should also mention Runaway from Irene (of Irene amp; Jane fame), produced - I'll bet - by Richie and featuring Asem (both of whom who I mentioned in a href="http://www.putmeonit.com/2008/10/kweku-anansi-state-of-ghanas-music.html"this/a blog for Put Me On It awhile back). I love how Richie is giving JQ amp; Appiatus a run for their money.br /br /Meanwhile, I hope Jazmine wins the Grammys she's been nominated for: span style="font-style: italic;"Fearless /spanreally was a great debut in which she freed herself from any Lauryn comparisons. All that and a brand new verse from the elusive Dr. Dre on Kardinal Offishall's bad-all-by-itself span style="font-style: italic;"Set It Off/span.br /br /Nice.br /b/bdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-1828801482141521424?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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3:05
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
"span style="font-style: italic;"Ten years ago... In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The A-Team./span"br /br /It may seem inane, repetitive and a little misogynistic when I watch it now but, as a kid in '80s London, when those words emerged - over a backdrop of military drumming - from our tiny Hitachi television, my parents knew better than to try and get me to pay attention to anything else. This morning, a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7856758.stm"it is being reported/a that Ridley Scott has signed on to produce (not direct) a remake of a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A-Team"the A-Team/a and I, for one, am excited.br /br /Sorry: can't help it (if I wanted to).br /br /I usually think Hollywood is being lazy and overly nostalgic with all these '80s shows they keep forcibly resuscitating and this time is no different. Regardless though, this could be fun. The idea of shifting the team's origins from Vietnam to the Middle East although unoriginal could make it a little topical, and the rumoured casting of Bruce Willis as a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_%22Hannibal%22_Smith"Hannibal/a and Ice Cube as the new Bosco Albert a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._A._Baracus"'Bad Attitude' Barracas/a sounds pretty inspired if you ask me (span style="font-style: italic;"if /spanthey go for the roles).br /br /I'm geeked, and for those of you who - like me - cannot wait, here's some BA to get you through your day:br /br /object width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/omgzk9sQ0eMamp;hl=enamp;fs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/omgzk9sQ0eMamp;hl=enamp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/objectdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-2748848740107973257?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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1:12
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Has anyone else noticed how you are more likely to hear Coldplay at the Mall than you are Kojo Antwi?br /br /While it span style="font-style: italic;"is /spanrefreshing to hear other forms of music - especially in public spaces (and span style="font-style: italic;" especially/span artists as foreign to Ghanaian airwaves as Coldplay) - isn't it a little disrespectful that span style="font-style: italic;"no /spanGhanaian music is played. I can understand why they might not play Okyeame Kwame - got to keep it smooooth, right? - but can't they throw on some Kojo Antwi or Becca once in a while?br /br /Maybe I missed the rule in the Universal Shopping Mall Manual that says that only Western music can play in Western-style malls...div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-2997618713113037792?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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11:47
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
My dying-to-model sister will be span style="font-style: italic;"all /spanover a href="http://www.wafntm.com/awafntm.html"this show/a... okay, okay: I will watch it too, but only because a href="http://oluchi.com/"Oluchi/a's in it (fine, she's not a href="http://www.liyakebede.com/"Liya Kebede/a... but Oluchi's still cool).br /br /I understand that it makes sense to crawl before walking but if auditions are only being held in London, New York and a couple of Nigerian cities, then why not call the show 'span style="font-style: italic;"Nigeria's/span Next Top Model' (especially seeing as a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria%27s_Next_Top_Model"the existing span style="font-style: italic;"NNTM/span/a was a one-off Nigerian TV event back in 2007)?br /br /I'm sure Ghanaians and other non-Nigerian West Africans can apply, but would it not have been fairer (not to say more West African) to knock off New York amp; London and throw in Accra and Abidjan or something? Or do we not have models of decent calibre here?br /br /Seems a little slanted if you ask me.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-5811788755432970952?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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11:08
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SX8zpHDmKYI/AAAAAAAAARI/BNzxzjMjQSA/s1600-h/slide_875_15345_large.jpg"img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SX8zpHDmKYI/AAAAAAAAARI/BNzxzjMjQSA/s320/slide_875_15345_large.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5296008468172777858" border="0" //abr /br /br /br /br /br /br /br /br /br /br /br /br /a href="http://www.africanloft.com/"African Loft/a have put up a href="http://www.africanloft.com/hillary-clinton-offers-an-insight-to-obama%E2%80%99s-africa-policy/"this piece/a pulling together Hilary Clinton's statements on Africa during her confirmation hearings to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee two weeks ago, offering a few insights into the Obama Administration's position on Africa.br /br /(Thanks for the link, Mr. Bensah).div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-1139846689371605073?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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1:51
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SX8wZw9iqJI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/m_F5G18Es08/s1600-h/twitter.png"img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 210px; height: 49px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SX8wZw9iqJI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/m_F5G18Es08/s400/twitter.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5296004906008881298" border="0" //abr /br /br /br /I just read an interesting post on span style="text-decoration: underline;"t/spana href="http://soyapi.blogspot.com/2007/03/potential-of-twitter-in-africa.html"he potential of Twitter in Africa/a. I must admit to being slow on the take regarding Twitter. My understanding of it is that it's something like Facebook status updates except perhaps they can be longer in length. I must be more significant than that though.br /br /I'm going to have to ask a href="http://ekbensah.wordpress.com/"Emmanuel/a.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-3596990627884132811?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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3:00
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
It always amazes me how just how different the same thing can look depending on your point of view. I have been having these fascinating telephone conversations with my mother since I moved back to Ghana three years ago. Travelling to London to study in the Sixties, my mother has since spent most of her time abroad - first in London, then Geneva, Cape Town and back to London – in a lifetime dedicated to improving the lives and health of women and children, for which she has won awards galore. She leads too busy a life to come home as often as she would like to and so when I moved here, it was inevitable that we would begin comparing notes.br /
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My mother’s viewpoint on the state of Ghana is considerably more pessimistic than mine. She cannot see past the pot bellies she sees protruding before corrupt African politicians doing the rounds in the British press. Corruption and stagnancy no doubt remain rife in this little country of ours, but I interact with too many good people dedicated to improving things here to be completely pessimistic. Even if it moves at a snail’s pace, progress still lives here.br /
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Judging by the media coverage we receive abroad, our friends abroad are even more optimistic than I am about Ghana’s prospects. We started out pretty well with our early escape from colonialism. After Nkrumah though, we descended into what I call ‘the Lost Years’. Coup. Republic. Coup. Coup. Coup. Republic. Coup… You get the picture. To the international eye, we were indistinguishable from all the other countries going up in smoke across the continent. I remember the exact moment when our fortunes changed though and Ghana stood apart from its neighbours again. It was after Asamoah Gyan and Sulley Muntari put two goals at the back of World Cup net.br /
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Seriously.br /
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I am not the biggest football fan in the world, but I was in a Ghanaian-owned bar in Britain at the time and, before the match, I and a room full of fellow Diasporeans listened with annoyance as the commentators kept on referring to our boys as “the Africans”, barely wasting their breath on explaining the impossibility of an African win over the Czechs. They ate humble pie that day and thereafter, even the most uninformed Brit knew where Ghana was on the map.br /
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After the World Cup came Ghana@50 and we found ourselves on the cover of magazines from Focus on Africa to The Economist and even Time. We hosted every conference imaginable, discovered oil off our shoreline, came close to winning the African Cup of Nations, had former President Bush visit us (and apparently not give a damn about our oil) and then came the high drama of our recent elections. With that much to report on, the foreign press feted us. I was pleasantly surprised by how much of its Zimbabwe coverage they gave up to cover the election and its aftermath. Fellow Ghanaians rejoice, for we became that rare thing: a positive African story. To be exact, we were an island in a region of instability, led by our soon-to-be former ‘Gentle Giant’, John Agyekum Kufuor.br /
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Oh, how they loved our John.br /
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To many a Ghanaian today, Kufuor’s name evokes mixed feelings but, even after an African Union chairmanship that failed to bring about Nkrumah’s dream of African unity and his failure to bring peace to post-election Kenya (where I am reliably informed he is revered as something close to a saint), Kufuor was the belle of the international ball and the suitors duly swarmed. In an article by their West Africa correspondent last week, Britain’s Telegraph.co.uk described Kufuor as having “halved the level of poverty and increased the number of children by almost a quarter… a rare African leader who fought corruption in his government and retired without challenging his country’s constitutional two-term limit”. My internet connection is so slow that, before his picture loaded up on my screen, I am sure I read something like ‘a Good Man in Africa’ written in the picture’s space. With awards from Liberia and Chatham House under his belt - in addition to being Time’s 41st most influential man in the world - a highly lucrative post-Presidential career seemed a shoo-in.br /
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While some were pretty peeved with the Presidential Awards last year – not least Kufuor’s own – and it raised a few international eyebrows, scoring a story on the BBC World News website for example, those very same brows fell as soon as it became clear that he would indeed step down as President at the end of his second term, something sadly rare on our continent. He carried himself quite well through the elections but the first sign of trouble was the controversy surrounding the extravagant scale and cost of renovating the-House-formerly-known-as-Flagstaff. I realized that the story had escaped our borders when, after watching the BBC news that morning, my Nigerian friend in London felt compelled to send me a text to say that he “thought that Ghanaians were better than that”. Internationally speaking, Kufuor’s reputation remained close to Clinton-like non-stick Teflon though and thereafter, Ghana stayed off the international news wires until the extensive attention given to our successful elections, from the heated run-offs all the way through to Kufuor’s last day and his controversial pardons and pay raises. Tsatsu, it seems, was not that internationally important but Kufuor’s pardon of former First Lady Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings made a couple of international headlines.br /
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Then came last week.br /
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A colleague of mine suspects that the Chinery-Hesse Committee were anticipating some haggling and so they came up with what they knew was an unreasonable list of gratia demands. Unfortunately - according to the theory - our Parliamentarians were in so much haste to safeguard their own packages that they dropped the ball, letting both the Committee and the people of Ghana down. Minus points, Parliamentarians.br /
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Whether or not he played a role in it (and I am playing Devil’s Advocate here), internationally speaking the egg seems to have landed in the former President’s face. I was (again) surprised when I saw the story pop up on both the BBC and VOA websites, but when it made BBC World’s television news the following morning, I knew there was trouble. Ghana is still doing fine. Kufuor, for the first time though, is not and having surrogates ask for a few less cars is probably not going to wash. Not at home anyway.br /
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Whatever the outcome, to the international community, it is only another disappointing African story. It did not even register on the Guardian or Independent websites, usually relatively good at reporting on Africa. If Kufuor’s post-Presidential employability dries up then we will know that the international community sees things through the same lens that most Ghanaians probably do right now. Somehow I doubt it though. If Obasanjo can get a UN job after his shambles-of-an-outgoing-election, then I doubt that Kufuor will lose much sleep over this. The story will become little more than fodder for conversations with my mother.br /
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Except, this time, the foreign press she follows will describe a Good Man in Africa, while I am the one joining my fellow Ghanaians in scrutinizing the ex-Presidential belt size.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-6051225480866525652?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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3:35
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Never assume.br /br /It is a lesson that I have learned a couple of times in my young lifetime; one that I will no doubt learn again. Take last week, for example. When his protégé won occupancy of Flagstaff House (side note: I refuse to call the building by its current name until it is given a more sensible one), one would have assumed that Uncle JJ was going to fade to black, moving away from the public eye, his mission to return his people to power accomplished. There was one moment in particular, after the results were announced, when he told journalists and cameramen gathered outside his house in anticipation of a ‘Boomism’ to head to town and follow the crowd as he should not be the centre of attention. Uncle JJ? Shying away from publicity? Glad that someone was capturing this genuinely historic moment on film, I thought to myself that we really had arrived at the end of an era. Alas: this was an assumption and, as I said earlier, one must never assume.br /br /Last week, our former leader was back in the news berating President Mills for his directive to District and Municipal Chief Executives of the outgoing administration to remain in their posts until new appointments have been made. I wonder what Old Boom-Boom expected? Mills’ nickname is not ‘God of War’: it is ‘Asomdwehene’. Besides, the NDC won the elections by so small a margin that reassuring the half of the country whose feelings towards their party range from mild dislike to full-blown terror makes far more sense than taking revenge for treatment meted out to the party faithful all the way back in 2001.br /br /Rawlings is by no means the first former President to make his successor’s life difficult. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher became a bane to John Major, who stepped into her high heels as head of the Conservative Party after she was pressured to resign in 1990. Thatcher was held in reverence by most party faithful but evoked very negative feelings not just among the rest of the electorate but among some members of her own party. Sound familiar? Thatcher too handpicked Major as her successor but accidentally let it slip that she expected to be a backseat driver of his administration. Even if she had not said anything, the perception was already there and it put Major in a tricky position, forcing him to demonstrate his independence from her. I repeat: does iany /iof this sound familiar?br /br /Major took new directions on key policies – regional integration and social policy spring to mind - and his leadership style was far less autocratic. Thatcher indicated her disappointment in him, making unhelpful comments and interventions that only deepened his public image of being a weak leader. After Tony Blair’s Labour Party crushed the Conservatives in the next election, Major would look back and describe Thatcher’s behaviour towards him as “intolerable,” accusing her of turning his government into a Greek tragedy.br /br /Of course, Britain and Ghana are different countries. The conciliatory approach that President Mills has adopted has been largely praised and, while Mills’ movements have been described as being somewhat effeminate by one cheeky (but on-point) journalist, his performance thus far has not been considered weak.br /br /Until now.br /br /Health concerns eventually forced Thatcher to fade into the background and it has done her image a world of good. In recent polls though, she has come out a British hero; one that even the current Prime Minister Gordon Brown – a Labour Party supremo - has not been ashamed to say he shares certain convictions with. Ghana is held in high regard the world over for what happened here in December, but how much more amazing will it be when our presidents are able to invite their predecessors – past and historic - over for dinner at Flagstaff and freely state their admiration for them without feeling like scrubbing themselves down with industrial-strength stain remover immediately afterwards?br /br /While I feel for President Mills, I sympathize with those who point to our constitution, indicating that it leaves Uncle JJ free to free his mind. I just wish that he would pick his moments a little more carefully. One week into your own man’s administration is a little too early to start knocking the man down. Even worse is the fact that he will go down in Ghanaian history as the first major critic to the Mills Administration… and all for a decision that has not even fully played out yet.br /br /Rawlings’ fighting talk had its uses during the elections, mobilizing NDC supporters to march to the voting booth and kick out their supposed ‘oppressors’. However for every NDC supporter inspired by their Great Founder, there were probably two floating voters who found his style and opinion completely off-putting. A fear of moving backwards to the revolutionary days that Rawlings seems to reminisce so fondly over kept many from voting NDC in spite of the fact that they too clamoured for change. I have a feeling that the margin by which the NDC won the election might have been wider had he stayed in the background and allowed his memory to foster a little nostalgia instead of constantly holding press conferences and reminding so many people why they dislike him.br /br /The cliché thing to do when talking about African leaders is to wheel out Saint Nelson and start using words like ‘legendary’, ‘heroic’ and ‘exemplary’. While I am loath to fall into that trap, it has to be said that Uncle JJ’s fellow Forum of African Elder Statesmen member sure knew how to pick his battles with his successor’s administration. The biggest single criticism that Mandela had of his successor’s government – one he never let him forget – was the Mbeki Administration’s stance on HIV/AIDS. Now that is something worth fighting your own about.br /br /One might have assumed that the Rawlings Clan would have spent the past few days celebrating the dropping of charges against Mrs. Rawlings and bonding over the juicy prospect of suing the former President.br /br /Like I said though, never assume.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-3845430964170902176?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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3:33
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
The temptation right now for anyone writing in Ghana is to pick up a pen and wax lyrical about some aspect of the election or its aftermath. After all, the elections – all the way up to last week’s inauguration - had all the trappings of an epic: heroes, villains, tension, action, high stakes, lies, betrayal… pretty much everything besides romance.br /br /For my first piece however, I thought I would do something that I will do a lot in this weekly column: deviate from the norm to provide an alternative take on items you should (but may not) hear about elsewhere in the media.br /br /Although my grandfather was someone Aretha Franklin would call a preacherman, I am by no means a prophet. However, it does not take magical powers to be able to foresee one thing looming over Ghana’s immediate future. Whether you choose to call it, the Global Financial Crisis or the Global Economic Downturn, just don’t call it a recession! Oh, and make a note of the capital letters because it is that big a deal.br /br /While I feel bad for all those people directly affected by it, it was difficult as an African not to sense some kind of poetic justice at play when Wall Street went up in smoke late last year. Western governments and institutions used nationalisation and the protection of their markets as tools to strengthen and grow their economies. Yet when countries like ours tried doing the same, we were held at economic gunpoint with aid conditionality and forced to hand our markets over to the same forces that – unregulated and unchecked - have today resulted in Western governments having to buy out banks and rescue entire industries. Back in the day this would have been called nationalisation, something so fundamentally evil that economic exorcists would have been immediately sent in, wielding suits and briefcases like cassocks and crosses. Today such interventions are called ‘economic bailout plans’ and they are met with sombre rounds of applause. How the times change.br /br /Out here in Africa we have been watching it all like an audience sipping drinks, nibbling on popcorn and enjoying a movie at the Mall. For once, the fact that we are not directly exposed to European and American financial markets is an advantage. Who would have thunk it? Tune into the international news stations and you will hear about the thousands of jobs being lost week after week in Europe and in the United States. Friends who did not make it to Ghana last Christmas blamed their inability to afford airfares on something called ‘the Credit Crunch’: a sudden reduction in their access to loans and credit. To a Ghanaian like me, loans are already hard enough to access, borrowing is an exchange between friends and credit is something you load onto your mobile phone. ‘Credit Crunch’ sounds like some new cereal the purchase of which entitles you to free units.br /br /While businesses in the UK keep closing down, Ghana remains a nation in a state of growth. People here are opening new businesses, big and small: not shutting them down. Although in many cases the jobs just are not there in the first place (something for the new Government to look into), few who have jobs are losing them and certainly not on the scale that we are seeing across the Atlantic.br /br /So who’s afraid of the downturn? Africa analysts, that’s who.br /br /My alma mater - the same School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) that nurtured the likes of Professor Adu-Boahen, Samia Nkrumah and our brand spanking new President – produces them by the tonne: well-meaning non-Africans who have made it their life’s work to know more about Africa than the people who live and die here. Have no fear: I am not about to launch into a diatribe about the lack of African ownership of African knowledge. That is another story for another column.br /br /The prevailing opinion among all the talking heads is that 2009 is the year that Africa will begin to experience the political and social effects of the global downturn. Take aid, for example. It was hard enough squeezing it out of the Great Eight when the money was blowing around in the wind. Today commitments made in merrier times towards meeting millennial goals are looking shakier than someone going “BRRRRRRRR!!!!!!” in a Coca-Cola advert. Personally I have always favoured improvements in our trading position over aid, but I have the comfort of living in a stable country with little need for emergency assistance: who am I to talk?br /br /Ghana may have struck black gold but as Russia’s Vladimir Putin recently put it, “the era of cheap gas is over.” Someone may need to send that particular memo around again, because the last one seems to have missed both the Ghanaian people and our optimistic new government. That aside, the fall in demand (from countries including African’s supposed great new ally China) will apparently not be limited to oil but will probably extend to many more commodities. Great…br /br /To top it all off, remittances are set to fall too. Ghanaians who protested so vehemently against ROPAB remain unaware of the contribution that Ghanaians abroad make to the Ghanaian economy and did not understand the importance of maintaining and rewarding those links. Money sent home by Ghanaians abroad so vastly outstrips all aid combined from all foreign donors that it accounts for a chunk of the Gross Domestic Product. Yet we flock to the airport to mob George W. Bush. Karma has a sense of humour and with jobs abroad being cut left, right and centre, it seems likely that there will be a fall in those remittances. Serves us right.br /br /It is not all doom and gloom though. Like I said, we are a growth market situated on a continent which is itself growing and so although that growth is predicted to slow down this year, the good news is that it will not stop altogether. Let our politicians not use the downturn as an excuse: life can get better.br /br /In these hard up times, that is cause for considerable celebration.br /br /Happy New Year.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/1948192178732938883-7018053453933363293?l=wilmh.blogspot.com'//div
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3:05
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I have started writing a column in the 'Sunday World', a relatively little-known newspaper from the good people of the a href="http://www.gmaworld.com/"Global Media Alliance/a, whose credits include:br /
ulli YFM/li
liThe Silverbird Cinema amp; Entertainment Store/li
liThe CNN African Journalist of the Year Awards... and more./li
/ulThe column is called 'bBetween the Lines/b' and I use it to delve into topical issues from a slightly different perspective than everyone else, bringing up issues I feel are not receiving due interest or simply freeing my mind. So far, I've looked at a href="http://wilmh.blogspot.com/2009/01/feature-whos-afraid-of-big-bad-downturn.html"the global economic downturn from a Ghanaian perspective/a and a href="http://wilmh.blogspot.com/2009/01/feature-jj-thatcher-and-art-of-picking.html"compared the relationship between Rawlings and Mills to that of Margaret Thatcher and John Major/a. Tommorow's column will go into how Ghana is depicted in the foreign press, especially in light of former President Kufuor's recent gratia package boo-boo.br /
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Without bias - as I thought this before I started writing for them - I think Sunday World is one of Accra's better newspapers. It sadly has some of the political bias that colours most Ghanaian journals but it makes up for this somewhat in the strength of its writers, who include a href="http://sakyi-addo.com/pages/home.php"Kwaku Sakyi-Addo/a, a href="http://ekbensahinghana.blogspot.com/"Emmanuel K. Bensah II/a, and, dare I say, yours truly.br /
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It is free but, for now, the newspaper is a little hard to find, your best bet being to walk into the lobby of any major hotel in Accra (Golden Tulip's good) and pick up a copy. In the meantime, I am going to follow the example of a href="http://www.atokd.com/default.aspx"one of my favourite Ghanaian journalists/a and start posting my articles up for mass consumption right here on this blog.br /
br /
Please scroll down for a recent few.
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5:02
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
a href="http://ghanaelections2008.blogspot.com/2009/01/bush-vs-kufuor-comparison-of-retirement.html"Ghana Elections 2008/a as usual puts everything in perspective:br /span style="font-weight: bold;"br //spandiv style="text-align: left; font-family: trebuchet ms;"span style="font-size:100%;"span style="font-weight: bold;"Bush vs. Kufuor: Comparison of retirement Packages/span/span/divspan style="width: 750px;"span class="newstext"h4 style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"span style="font-size:85%;"United States (Per Capita Income: $46,000): President Bush/span/h4 ul style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"lispan style="font-size:85%;" US$191,000 for his pension; /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;" Life time secret service protection for president amp; spouse /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;" Official travel expenses with 2 members of staff /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;" 0 cars /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;" 0 houses /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;" No end-of-service gratuity /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;" Private funds for presidential library (tax exempt) /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;" Presidential widows receive a lifetime pension of $20,000 per year. /span/li/ulspan style="font-size:85%;"span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" source: /spana style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/98-249.pdf"http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/98-249.pdf/a/span h4 style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"span style="font-size:85%;"Ghana(Per Capita Income: $1,400): President Kufuor/span/h4 ul style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"lispan style="font-size:85%;"Lump-sum (thought to be worth $400,000) /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;"SIX fully maintained comprehensively insured, fuelled and chauffeured-driven cars to be replaced every four years. The fleet comprise of three salon cars, two cross country cars and one all-purpose vehicle. /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;"TWO Fully furnished residences that befit a former president at place of his choice /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;"60 day overseas travel with 3 staff members each year/span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;"18 months consolidated salary /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;" Million-dollar seed money for the setting up a foundation, /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;" Security - 24 hours security services /span/lilispan style="font-size:85%;" Budget for entertaining each year/span/li/ulCredit: ghp/span/span
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2:55
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SXcDepjg3nI/AAAAAAAAAO8/rAns1eFrkPY/s1600-h/prince_close.jpg"img style="cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 168px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SXcDepjg3nI/AAAAAAAAAO8/rAns1eFrkPY/s200/prince_close.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5293703712083074674" border="0" //aa onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SXcDxtP-w6I/AAAAAAAAAPE/1rbfnk_xAaA/s1600-h/dangelo.jpg"img style="cursor: pointer; width: 168px; height: 168px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SXcDxtP-w6I/AAAAAAAAAPE/1rbfnk_xAaA/s200/dangelo.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5293704039492404130" border="0" //abr /br /Between Prince proposing to release a href="http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/prince-to-roll-out-three-albums-this-year-1003926392.story"three albums this year/a and the news that D'Angelo will span style="font-style: italic;"finally /spanbe dropping 'span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"James River/span' this summer (I'll believe spanit /spanwhen I hear it...) it looks like 2009 is going to be an awesome year for my music collection.br /br /What's really got me geeked though is that, besides collaborations with his usual partners-in-crime Raphael Saadiq and Roy Hargrove, D's new album will also feature work with Cee-Lo Green, Mark Ronson... a href="http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/d-angelo-plots-prince-collab-spring-tour-1003932024.story"span style="font-style: italic;"and /spanwith Prince/a.br /br /You hear these things and try and not get your expectations up because, more often than not, great expectations tend to meet great disappointment.br /br /But...br /br /*span style="font-style: italic;"Brain freezes, unable to process the musical possibilities./span*
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1:04
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SXcdjmhBJSI/AAAAAAAAAPk/UMTdITt-cgw/s1600-h/_45396714_duo_ge466.jpg"img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 258px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SXcdjmhBJSI/AAAAAAAAAPk/UMTdITt-cgw/s400/_45396714_duo_ge466.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5293732384468968738" border="0" //abr /div style="text-align: center;"span style="font-style: italic;""... a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath."/spanbr //divbr /It made me feel like dancing too.br /br /Much of my interest in American politics evaporated as soon as Obama won the race to be President, but the man and his inauguration were always going to command my full attention.br /br /Obama's speech was - as one would expect - pretty good:br /br /span style="font-style: italic;""Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and /spanspan style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"curiosity/spanspan style="font-style: italic;", loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths..."/spanbr /br /I highlighted 'curiosity' because, as soon as he mentioned it, it got me thinking: perhaps we lack this as Ghanaians. On span style="font-style: italic;"the Super Morning Show /spanthis morning, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah asked what was the single most important value that would help Ghanaians today and while I heard all the usual suspects - love, tolerance, respect, blah, and blah - no one said 'curiousity'.br /br /It's an interesting value for Obama to have mentioned and it really is one thing that sets the West quite apart from society here. They have relentless curiousity where we often have... well, complacency and acceptance. span style="font-style: italic;"Fa ma Nyame/span.br /br /span style="font-style: italic;""To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect..."/spanbr /br /I hope so but I must admit to not getting my hopes up, as explained in a href="http://wilmh.blogspot.com/2008/06/change-we-can-believe-in-except-in.html"this/a earlier post.br /br /span style="font-style: italic;""To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."/spanbr /br /Sounds like the son of an African just passed the peace pipe to a href="http://dekerivers.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/mugabe-cartoon1.jpg"the self-styled father of African resistance/a. Wonder if he will accept...br /br /span style="font-style: italic;""To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it."/spanbr /br /Damn right it has. It may not be the weightiest or most revelatory of books, but I hope that Obama has read and absorbed Fareed Zakaria's a href="http://www.fareedzakaria.com/books/index.html"span style="font-style: italic;"The Post-American World/span/a. He suggests that America stop being increasingly irrelevant and start trying to be an honest broker in international relations, which makes a lot of sense in our new day and age.br /br /Overall, a great speech, a historic day and a beautiful evening. Wish I'd been in the States to celebrate with my friends there.br /br /Hangovers this morning, anyone?br /br /PS: Chris Rock once did a skit with someone being treated to extreme torture in the form of spoken word poetry with drums. While the drums were absent, I'm pretty sure Rock's eyes were twitching at Elizabeth Alexander's spoken word-influenced stylings. Now that would be some footage worth seeing.
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3:05
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
After the Daily Guide's 'bRawlings Punches Mills/b' headline last week and recalling Radio Gold's performance (and general existence) over the elections, I have decided to turn into reality an idea that has been bouncing inside my head for awhile now:br /br /The b'Ghana's Worst Journalism' Awards/b.br /br /The idea is simple. Throughout the year, feel free to point out any instances you see of bias (in favour of iany/i party), factual inaccuracies, poor quality writing or grammatical flaws on television, radio and in our beloved-but-not-quite-so free press.br /br /Don't worry about clippings or recordings: if it is a printed article, then give me the newspaper, date and page, and if it is on radio or TV, then give me a date, a station and the time you heard it (roughly). I have contacts with Steadman Media Monitoring Services who are listening and recording all major media 24 hours a day, every day of the year from whom I can verify.br /br /Nominations will be accepted between now and the 1st of December, when I will present a shortlist to vote from. Winners will be announced before the end of the year. No award ceremony just yet (maybe a small party...) but I am buying a crate of eggs this week that will sit there rotting until they are ready to go out. Each winner will receive a gold-sprayed rotten egg along with brief letter explaining to them their crimes against journalism. There is a good chance we will hand deliver these and film reactions to be played back on some national media outlet... or for our personal viewing pleasure.br /br /How does that sound?br /br /Here are the categories (feel free to suggest a few more):br /br /The 'Quit Journalism Immediately!' Worst So-Called Journalist of the Year Awardbr /Worst Headline - Newspaperbr /Worst Reporter - Newspaper / TV/ Radiobr /Most Biased Outlet - Newspaper / TV/ Radiobr /Most Irresponsible Outlet - Newspaper / TV/ Radiobr /Most Factually Inaccurate Story - Newspaper / TV/ Radiobr /Most Consistently Factually Inaccurate Journalist - Newspaper / TV/ Radiobr /Bad Grammar Award - Newspaper / TV/ Radiobr /br /Comments and suggestions for new categories can be posted here but kindly send all nominations to ghanabadjournalism@gmail.com.
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22:07
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
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br /
While it was only a matter of time before someone africanized it, I never expected a full-on a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup%C3%A9-D%C3%A9cal%C3%A9"coupé décalé/a remake of Estelle's American Boy:br /
br /
Goodness. br /
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Shouts to a href="http://birdsandthebeats.blogspot.com/"the Birds amp; the Beats/a for the link. Oh, and if you don't know about bm.anifest/b, then visit a href="http://www.myspace.com/manifestations"this page/a and educate yourself bimmediately/b.br /
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Support Ghanaian talent.
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16:56
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Sorry to vanish for so long, people. I hope that everyone had a restful / festive / wild / (iinsert desired adjective/i) end-of-year in spite of all the electoral shenanigans. Speaking of which, it looks like we missed a series of interesting lectures over the election period.br /
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Let's see...br /
br /
Topic: bAfrican Democracy/bbr /
Lecturers: The Good People of Ghanabr /
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Topic: 'bKill Those NPP Cockroaches!': a Masterclass in Media Irresponsibility/bbr /
Lecturers: The presenters of Radio Gold (with assistance from ex-President Rawlings)br /
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Topic:b The Art of Not Conceding Defeat When the Writing Is Glowing Fluorescently on the Wall/bbr /
Lecturer: Nana Akuffo-Addo and the NPP elitebr /
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Topic: bDiet amp; Win! - Why No NDC Man Can Become Leader of Ghana without Slimming Down/bbr /
Lecturer: Presidents Rawlings and John Evans Atta-Millsbr /
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Topic: bWinning Elections From 'Beyond the Grave'/bbr /
Lecturer: President John Evans Atta-Millsbr /
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Topic: bHow to Cover an Election amp; Cover It Well /bbr /
Lecturer: Joy FMbr /
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Topic: bMaking /bbTerrible Music in the Name of Promoting Peace/bbr /
Lecturers: The albeit well-intentioned artists whose peace songs aired on TV during the elections. You know who you are.br /
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Topic: bHow to Lose the Respect of Your Own Party... amp; Wipe It in Their Faces After Their Defeat/bbr /
Lecturer: Ex-President John Kuffuorbr /
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Topic: bWhen the People Lie to You/bbr /
Lecturer: Paa Kwesi Nduombr /
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Topic: bThe Importance of Being John/bbr /
Lecturers: Presidents Rawlings, Kuffuor and Atta-Mills (with vice President Mahama)br /
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Topic: 'bTo (Muga)be or Not to (Muga)be': Negative Coverage of Africa in the Face of Good News Worth Reporting/bbr /
Lecturers: Western Media Outletsbr /
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Goshdarnit, they all seemed so interesting too. Oh well: maybe next time around.br /
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Here's to a happy 2009; a year in which - no doubt - we will have plenty to dissect.
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21:16
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SSu67JzFdiI/AAAAAAAAAOc/HuwxV5uTTpk/s1600-h/MTN-Logo.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" style="text-decoration: none;"img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272513314172532258" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SSu67JzFdiI/AAAAAAAAAOc/HuwxV5uTTpk/s200/MTN-Logo.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; height: 200px; text-decoration: underline; width: 200px;" //aa href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SSu67O_eieI/AAAAAAAAAOU/w4A0PazNB2g/s1600-h/Glo+Logo.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272513315566684642" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SSu67O_eieI/AAAAAAAAAOU/w4A0PazNB2g/s200/Glo+Logo.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; height: 167px; width: 200px;" //abr /
divbr /
Rumour has it thatnbsp;a href="http://www.gloworld.com/"Glo/a have gone and bought the Osu building that a href="http://www.mtn.com.gh/"MTN/anbsp;rent and use as their flagship store.br /
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So MTN have to either:/divdiv/divdivbr /
(a) bounce/divdiv(b) pay rent to Glo./divdivbr /
Ouch.br /
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span style="font-style: italic;"If /spanthis is true then the first bullet has been shot in what looks set to be a war the likes of which Ghana's relatively sedate corporate scene has not seen in awhile.br /
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Let the games begin./div
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8:04
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
AAAAAAAaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAaaaAAAaAaAaAaAAaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAArgh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!br /br /Sorry.br /br /*Takes a moment to calm down... straightens his tie*br /br /What I was trying to say is that they have bfinally /bopened the Silverbird Cinema at the Accra Mall... and - even better - they have picked a way better choice than a href="http://wilmh.blogspot.com/2008/09/movies-w.html"W./a for their first film:br /br /a href="http://wilmh.blogspot.com/2008/09/geek-two-trailers.html"Quantum of Solace/a (the new Bond flick).br /br /I have been waiting for ages for this cinema to open, especially after a href="http://wilmh.blogspot.com/2008/08/life-lagos.html"my trip to Lagos/a where I had my first Silverbird Cinema experience. Heard this one is a five-screen multiplex too: probably a first for Accra.br /br /I never understood why cinema died in Ghana. We used to have a few - Rex and Roxy spring to mind - but after the advent of VHS and then DVD, the cinema shrunk into private viewing rooms where couples treated each other to a little more than celluloid.br /br /The way I see it, there is no substitute for the full cinema experience. Some of my favourite childhood memories are of trips to the Tufnell Park Odeon with my Dad (or my best friend Ben) to watch films like Never Ending Story, Labyrinth or Indiana Jones.br /br /Today I can watch drama on a small screen but if you want me to persuade me to watch any genre that makes use of sound, special effects and spectacle on a laptop, it had better be a big ass laptop.br /ulliWith a screen the size of the front of my house./liliSound loud enough to affect my hearing if turned up one more notch./liliThe laptop screen will need a curtain that automatically closes and opens again for the main feature./liliIt will need to come with someone serving me a hot dog (that I will finish before the trailers but anyway...) and a drink. Preferably sugary and unhealthy./liliButterscotch popcorn to get stuck in my teeth./liliOh and, of course, darkness: I want my attention to be on nothing but the huge laptop screen/li/ulI know this will cause more traffic but, in this one instance, I really could not care any less. Unless the person in front of me gets the last ticket to a film I badly and immediately wish to see.br /br /Feels good to strike 'cinema' off my list of things I miss about London.br /br /Now if I can just find a decent park, an extensive and up-to-date bookstore, persuade the Jazz Cafe to open up a Ghanaian hall, and some of my London friends and family members to move down, I will be all kinds of content.br /br /This will do for now though.
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5:48
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I still haven't had a chance to watch my office's tape of the first debate yet, but last night's was pretty good. The IEA really deserve some commendation for these things. I will leave the critical dissection to a href="http://www.atokd.com/blogContent.aspx?blogID=43"Ato Kwamena Dadzie/a, whose breakdown is pretty good (although I was not as dazzled by Nduom and I ranked Atta-Mills a little lower).br /
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Here was my overall verdict of each candidate:br /
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ibNana Akuffo-Addo/b/ibr /
I was pleasantly surprised by Shinehead last night. Good show. He was apparently a little more personable here than in the first debate. More importantly he really took on the questions and, more often than not, answered them. Or made good attempts at doing so. Sounded like someone with a grasp of the issues. Might need to run a fact check on some of those assertions though.br /
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biDr. Paa Kwesi Nduom /i/bbr /
"iWe are where we are.../i" Nduom tried to channel Obama last night, condensing big concepts into single words like 'hope', discipline' and 'peace'. Not a bad performance but was I the only one who got the feeling some of his answers were just different for the sake of being different? Choice is good but while some of his answers showed fresh-thinking, others sounded stale.br /
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biDr. Edward Mahama/i/bbr /
For someone barely mentioned in conversations about the first debate, Dr. Mahama was all over this one. Like an angry rash. Very vocal. Some of his proposed solutions seemed a little limited in scope though. He seems the kind of guy who would like to go from community to community, tackling problems one by one. Like a doctor, really. Sounds practical but does not good national policy make. br /
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biProfessor John Evans Atta-Mills/i/bbr /
The Good Professor was magnificent... at restating the question. I suspect that all the iapspan title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)"ɔ/span/i is in his head and that he is just a little media shy (I'm like that myself: it's probably why I write). He answered questions like they were WAEC-issued: restating the question before attempting an answer. This meant that he sometimes did not have enough time to outline solutions the way his rivals did. Not a disaster by any means but not particularly impressive either.br /
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Overall, I think it went to Nana.br /
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I would however advise that everyone read each party's manifesto and compare what the candidates said on camera with what they promise in print. a href="http://wilmh.blogspot.com/2008/07/politics-why-i-wont-vote-npp.html"As I have written before/a, any monkey in a suit can mount a podium and spit out promises.br /
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This time it's all on camera though. I just hope that in four years time, some bright spark at one of the TV stations will dig out the debate footage and do a story on what was promised and what was delivered.
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3:37
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
On Sunday I read a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7718277.stm"this BBC article/a about a possible realignment of the role of emerging economies in a world steeped in what seems to be deep financial doo-doo. It reminded me of an idea I had recently read about.br /br /My mother recently hipped me to span style="text-decoration: underline;"/spana href="http://www.fareedzakaria.com/"Fareed Zakaria/a, whose a href="http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/fareed.zakaria.gps/"CNN show/a she feels "every thinker must watch." He has written a book called span style="font-style: italic;"a href="http://www.amazon.com/Post-American-World-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/039306235X"The Post American World/a /spanin which he outlines what is not "the decline of the American empire, but rather... the rise of everyone else."br /br /A .pdf of the book's first chapter is available to read a href="http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/images/05/29/post.american.-.ch.1.pdf"here/a in case you're interested. Although I'm not as sold on Zakaria as my mother is, I like the basic idea.br /br /Interesting times we are living in.
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3:05
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah keeps a great blog and a href="http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2008/11/drum-magazine-ghana-1969.html"his latest post/a is particularly brilliant, looking at a freshly independent 1969 Ghana through the eyes of the iconic African magazine, span style="font-style: italic;"Drum/span (which apparently had a Ghanaian edition).br /br /div style="text-align: center;"a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRmT3S9H79I/AAAAAAAAAOM/ktVcmNkguJs/s1600-h/2429924054_c439a04f8b_m.jpg"img style="cursor: pointer; width: 174px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRmT3S9H79I/AAAAAAAAAOM/ktVcmNkguJs/s400/2429924054_c439a04f8b_m.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5267403817376804818" border="0" //abr //divbr /It's a great article (and a brilliant blog too) so make sure to check it out.
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21:00
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
div style="text-align: center;"a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRmEMerPS0I/AAAAAAAAAN8/gKfqdpS7BM8/s1600-h/_45193097_palace_226.jpg"img style="cursor: pointer; width: 226px; height: 170px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRmEMerPS0I/AAAAAAAAAN8/gKfqdpS7BM8/s320/_45193097_palace_226.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5267386589114223426" border="0" //abr //divbr /div style="text-align: center;"span style="font-style: italic;"Golden Jubilee House?br //span/divbr /I ignored all the talk of how extravagant the structure was to construct. Like it or not, we need these things. Ghana is itself - like most states - an artificial construct, and the varied and different people within these borders need more than flags, songs and Black Stars to hold us together.br /br /People underestimate the importance of history and symbols to the idea of the nation-state. The Golden Stool, for example, remains the stuff of Asante legend today, its history intimately tied in with the pride and identity of the Asante people.br /br /Consider the kind of patriotism that Americans derive from their flag, their national anthem and such buildings as the White House or the Jefferson Memorial. These things did not spring up overnight. Someone once decided on their creation in spite of other pressing issues of the day. Centuries later, they are important symbols of American national identity, pride and history.br /br /On account of this (and a general need in the capital for more interesting architecture), I can get past the construction of a structure more befitting of our Head of State than a former slave castle. What I can't get past though is the name.br /br /After all this time, all that money, all the controversy...br /br /span style="font-style: italic;"'Golden Jubilee House.'/spanbr /br /That's the best they could come up with? A name our children's children's children are supposed to say with some semblance of pride? And the Golden Jubilee of what exactly? Ghana is 51. The place already has a historical headstart, incorporating the very same Flagstaff House that housed our first President and his family. Why didn't they just leave it at that? Flagstaff House was just fine and is certainly less pedestrian than 'span style="font-style: italic;"Golden Tree H/span'... sorry, 'span style="font-style: italic;"Golden Jubilee House/span'.br /br /A friend of mine heard the name on BBC news this morning and texted me all the way from the UK to say that he thought Ghanaians were a bit more sophisticated than that. I thought we were too so I'm curious to know which misguided individual came up with a name more befitting of an office building in Adabraka.
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22:04
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRlK8rjX9tI/AAAAAAAAAN0/oIPhPaJ0HRQ/s1600-h/miriam-makeba.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRlK8rjX9tI/AAAAAAAAAN0/oIPhPaJ0HRQ/s320/miriam-makeba.jpg" //anbsp;/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"Truly a sad day in African music, if not for music as a whole./divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"You can read my small tribute to her a href="http://www.putmeonit.com/2008/11/makeba.html"here/a. /divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"Thank you, a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_makeba"Mama Miriam/a for both the music and the inspiration./divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"/divdiv class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"object height="344" width="425"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kCc61z9IFu4amp;hl=enamp;fs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kCc61z9IFu4amp;hl=enamp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/object/div
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3:16
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
I just posted a href="http://www.putmeonit.com/2008/11/on-dizzee-vs-paxman.html"my thoughts/a on the whole a href="http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=51216977120amp;h=22CWr"BBC vs. Black British Intellectuals/a debate on the a href="http://www.putmeonit.com/"PutMeOnIt/a blog, in case you were interested.
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15:22
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
div style="text-align: center;"a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRHpGMEB8rI/AAAAAAAAANs/PG-Xb8Ej4SY/s1600-h/slide_600_12501_large.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5265245731899437746" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRHpGMEB8rI/AAAAAAAAANs/PG-Xb8Ej4SY/s320/slide_600_12501_large.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; height: 233px; width: 320px;" //a/diva href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SREyr9KeDSI/AAAAAAAAANU/xihfoY0ZihE/s1600-h/El+Presidente.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"br /
/abr /
div style="text-align: center;"Unbelievable.br /
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div style="text-align: left;"The forty-fourth president of the United States of America is a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akuma_Obama#Habiba_Akuma_Obama"half-African/a.br /
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Not simply an African-American with an African (or Afro-Arabic) name. Not the distant descendant of an African stolen from home.br /
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No:br /
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The direct son of the African Muslim after whom he was named, an African who was himself born and raised in a Kenyan village. Not a city, you (we) pseudo-bourgeois city slickers:br /
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A village.br /
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And not only that (my mother just reminded me): he is also the son of Ann Dunham - a single-parent mother.br /
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Just a year ago - one simple year - if you had told me that an African (much less one with a distinctly non-span style="font-style: italic;"brofo/spanlized name like 'Barack Hussein Obama'... span style="font-style: italic;"ahem/span) would walk his family into the White House with the mandate to occupy it for the next four years, I would have told you that our juju men just aren't that visionary.br /
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I have worried for awhile now whether there is another African alive who could fill Madiba's frankly gigantic shoes on the world stage in case (God forbid) we lose him. I may have to wait awhile for someone born on this continent to do that. For now though it looks like Obama is the one and, although he is infinitely more American than he is African, his victory will inspire many of our young regardless.br /
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It's going to be one hell of a party today/tonight/this week/the rest of this year/next year, all across the continent - the world - and justly so. Even though it's what happens span style="font-style: italic;"after/span the party that really counts, what just happened is historic and must be appreciated, celebrated...br /
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... and only then absorbed.br /
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div style="text-align: center;"a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRG8n0bKE2I/AAAAAAAAANk/N0sQFiS4wTg/s1600-h/image001.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5265196831646290786" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRG8n0bKE2I/AAAAAAAAANk/N0sQFiS4wTg/s320/image001.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; height: 212px; width: 320px;" //a/div/div/div
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13:44
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRD2pHwyxwI/AAAAAAAAAM8/bQL1DwrPtxw/s1600-h/995935c454b2c22dcf80c84c0e64a560Debate+candidates.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SRD2pHwyxwI/AAAAAAAAAM8/bQL1DwrPtxw/s320/995935c454b2c22dcf80c84c0e64a560Debate+candidates.jpg" //a/divSo it was not apparently as slick as a meeting between Obama and McCain, but last week Ghana finally got the chance to see some of our leading presidential candidates face off against each other in a debate. Kudos to the Institute of Economic Affairs for finally forcing (at least two of) the panelists to stop slinging mud (and ego) in each others' directions and actually answer serious questions. How refreshing. Unfortunately, I was on radio at the time but I have been hearing pretty conflicting reports on who came out tops. br /
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The general impression I've received is that the CPP's Nduom was either the most personable (people here like personable so he's been deemed the winner) or the most cartoonish; that the NDC's Atta-Mills was more aggressive than usual, but nowhere near as much as he could have been (see my blog buddy Novisi's take on this a href="http://novisi.blogspot.com/2008/10/debate.html"bhere/b/a); that PNC's Mahama was a virtual non-entity; and that the NPP's Akuffo-Addo was definitely verbose but his verbosity was either the only genuine attempt at answering questions or just further evidence of the man's arrogance.br /
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Looks like I'm going to have get a recording from work (we do media monitoring after all) and have a look for myself.br /
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I'll keep you posted.
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13:14
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Wow, it's been a while. Sorry folks: got caught up in the corporate matrix and - believe you me - they have been making me earn those not-so-big bucks.br /br /Phew.br /br /That said, I still made time to host the Soul Explosion on Vibe 91.9 fm last week. Click a href="http://www.sendspace.com/file/f93022"bhere/b/a to download three solid hours of goodness from the likes of:br /br /Ne-Yobr /Q-Tip amp; Norah Jonesbr /Jazzanova amp; Phonte of Little Brotherbr /Estelle amp; Sean Paulbr /Black Milkbr /Okra Tom amp; Reggie Rockstonebr /Wale amp; Duffybr /Princebr /John Legendbr /Dbanjbr /Kardinal Offishallbr /... and many many more.br /br /Click on Comments for the full tracklisting. Apologies for the occasional breaks in sound: there were some problems recording that I will try and sort out next time around.br /br /Don't forget to tune in between 7 and 10 pm tonight as Kweku Anansi hosts the show.
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11:23
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
a style="left: 0px ! important; top: 15px ! important;" title="Block this object with Adblock Plus" class="abp-objtab-06516446664769233 visible" href="http://www.youtube.com/v/rP5y7yp06n0amp;hl=enamp;fs=1"/aobject width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rP5y7yp06n0amp;hl=enamp;fs=1"param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rP5y7yp06n0amp;hl=enamp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/objectbr /br /Okay, so I'm late to the party and a bunch of you have probably already seen this but I still think it's pretty cool.br /br /Disagree? Then here's a more humorous take on it. Enjoy!br /br /br /a style="left: 0px ! important; top: 0px ! important;" title="Block this object with Adblock Plus" class="abp-objtab-06516446664769233 visible ontop" href="http://www.youtube.com/v/CZrr7AZ9nCYamp;hl=enamp;fs=1"/aobject width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/CZrr7AZ9nCYamp;hl=enamp;fs=1"param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CZrr7AZ9nCYamp;hl=enamp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/object
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10:09
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Full story on the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7690419.stm"BBC News website/a but, in short, kidnappers here in Ghana have seized an Israeli businessman and are demanding a ransom from his family in Israel.br /br /Kidnapping...br /Here...br /In Ghana.br /br /I hope this is not the beginning of a trend. Kidnapping is not completely unheard of here, but it still sounds so span style="font-style: italic;"foreign/span.br /br /Don't get me wrong: Ghana has its fair share of serious crime. Take armed robbery, for example: so much more vindictive of late. Back in the day people just got jacked. Today they get jacked span style="font-style: italic;"and /spanbeaten (or cut) up for not having more money lying around. What's span style="font-style: italic;"that /spanabout?br /br /(Poverty's resentment spilling over into your living room, that's what.)br /br /Kidnapping is something more associated with activities in the Niger Delta than on the not-so-mean streets of Accra though.br /br /Remember last year's assassination outside Afrodisiac? I guess that if these things are happening only once a year we should be thankful and not expect Jerry Bruckheimer to come knocking anytime soon scouting for locations for CSI West Africa.br /br /Still: once a year is more than once a blue moon and that is not a good thing.
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4:47
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Just read a href="http://ghanaelections2008.blogspot.com/2008/10/sowing-seeds-of-disappointment-election.html"a great article/a a href="http://ghanaelections2008.blogspot.com/"/athat everyone in Ghana needs to read, absorb and have an opinion on...br /br /... especially if you blindly follow (or lead) these political parties who seem to assume that the electorate is not only unintelligent but lacks the capacity to develop intelligence.br /br /I am pasting the article below, but I highly recommend that you subscribe to a href="http://ghanaelections2008.blogspot.com/"the Ghana Elections 2008 blog/a from which I pulled it.br /br /Credit: span lang="EN-GB"a href="http://www.africanelections.org/"www.africanelections.org /a/spanh3 class="post-title entry-title" a href="http://ghanaelections2008.blogspot.com/2008/10/sowing-seeds-of-disappointment-election.html"Sowing the Seeds of Disappointment -Election Diary/a /h3 span lang="EN-GB"The late British politician, Enoch Powell, is credited with one of the most astute and prescient observations about politics: he said that "all political lives, unless they are cut off in mid-stream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs". No matter how much politicians may strive to achieve "the best" for their people, expectations will ALWAYS overtake what can be realistically achieved./span p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB" /span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB"That is part of human nature, but also it is because politicians always overestimate what they can do, especially when they are in opposition. This leads to gross over-promising which inevitably leads to disappointment, disaffection and frustration, if the party wins office and is seen not to have fulfilled its promises./span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB" /span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB"This classic scenario applies to the situation of both the NPP and NDC as they struggle for our votes in this year's election. However, it is the NPP that appears to bear the brunt of people's disappointment. In its manifesto, the NPP has catalogued many achievements in all spheres of life and they are impressive. And yet when you speak to many young people they say that the NPP has not fulfilled its promises./span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB" /span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB"It appears that the cause of this sentiment is a promise made during the 2000 campaign that the NPP would create hundreds of thousands of jobs for young people. It is the sort of vague campaign promises that are made every day in every political campaign across the world but it appears that this particular promise raised huge expectations of the NPP, which in power could NEVER be fulfilled./span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB" /span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB"Let us leave for the moment the fact that the government per se does not create jobs except for the few within the civil service. This promise could not be fulfilled because even if all the unemployed youth of 2000 found jobs, there would be many more young people in the job market by the end of the government's term of office. /span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB" /span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB"The NDC is in a similar bind. It is making promises which people simply cannot square against the party's performance in office from 1992 to 2001. Even worse for the NDC is the fact that many of the dramatis personae in its long life on the Ghanaian political stage were also part of the PNDC – a period that is remembered with less than fond memories in Ghanaian minds./span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB" /span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB"To put it mildly, there is a huge credibility gap in the public perception of the manifestos of the political parties, especially the NPP and NDC. People just do not believe that the parties mean what they are saying or will do what they are promising. This may be a tad unfair but the incredulity is rooted in the country's political culture and how the two parties have conducted themselves in opposition and in office./span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB" In Ghana, it appears that political campaigns are all about promises and thus a key benefit of campaigns, which is public education, is completely absent. For example, political platforms are used elsewhere to explain policy choices and why particular parties are making the choices they are campaigning on. The current campaign in the US is, in effect, a national class on issues such as taxation, energy, the environment, foreign affairs, and of course the on-going financial sector crisis and possible recession./span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB" Also absent is any appeal to the electorate to play its part in national development, or even the peaceful conduct of the elections. It is astonishing that some political parties keep exhorting the government to ensure peaceful and fair election but do not urge restraint on its own supporters and cadres./span/p p class="MsoNormal"span lang="EN-GB" President Kennedy famously called on Americans during his inauguration in 1961 not to "ask not what America can do for you, but what you can do for America". This kind of elevated rhetoric which places the burden of development on the citizen is largely absent from this campaign. At the very least, the politicians, when they promise the earth, could also tell the electorate to pay the taxes that will make it possible for those promises to be redeemed./span/pspan lang="EN-GB"/span
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11:39
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Looks like someone's gone and done the sensible thing and put together this a href="http://ghanaelections2008.blogspot.com/"this fine blog/a about all things related to our elections. Better still, here is a link to a href="http://www.africanelections.org/ghana/blogs/"the writers' full website with even more blogs/aa href="http://www.africanelections.org/ghana/"./adivbr //divdivWell done, guys: essential blog, great website./div
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10:47
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SPuPE7DY7LI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/z5su0CFZ-EI/s1600-h/yahooze!.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SPuPE7DY7LI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/_BtIS7GKj2s/s320-R/yahooze!.jpg" //a/divbr /
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Okay, okay... so the title is a bit misleading (just a bit).br /
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Yes:nbsp;Bush's former pet dove was caught on stage at the Africa Rising Festival in London last Tuesday with Nigerian hip-hop group, Olu Maintain, doing the Yahooze and making speeches about how Africa's time has come.br /
br /
Again?br /
br /
I'm just glad that African street music is getting some international shine. Many out in the West actually think that the average African actually listens to what they call 'World Music'. With genres like Naijja Pop, Hiplife, Kwaito, Rai and Bongo Flava dominating airwaves across the continent?br /
br /
Unlikely, mate.br /
br /
More importantly though, "Co-lin" - perhaps the only person (formerly) in the Bush administration with some international credibility (I said span style="font-weight: bold;"span style="font-style: italic;"some/span/span...) left - nbsp;has thrown his a href="http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/02/26/Poll_Powell_endorsement_carries_weight/UPI-27531204046379/"apparently considerable/a weight behind Barack. Now before you dismiss it as one black man simply endorsing another, you might want to a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/19/america/19powell.php"read his reasons/a.nbsp;Reminds me of why I used to admire him more (before thenbsp;a href="http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/08/19/powell.un/"whole 'WMD in Iraq' debacle/a).br /
br /
Good moves, Colin.br /
br /
UPDATE (20/10/08): The disappointing (but sadly expected) a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/19/limbaugh-george-will-powe_n_135968.html"Conservative response/a.
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Al-Jazeera ran a fascinating news piece on this over the weekend:divbr //divdiv"a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect"span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"The Bradley Effect/span/aspan class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"' - a proposed explanation for an alleged discrepancy between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in American political campaigns when a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other./span"/divdivbr //divdivLooks like I'm not the only non-American utterly fascinated with the American elections. a href="http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1222017567413amp;pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull"Here's an article/a summing the topic up nicely all the way from Jerusalem./div
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The man who started the trend of black celebrities getting acquitted was just found guilty of robbery and kidnapping and may go to jail for life.br /br /Where is Dave Chappelle when you need him?br /br /span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre;font-family:Arial;font-size:10px;"object height="344" width="425"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/759SCBcUxtoamp;hl=enamp;fs=1"param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/759SCBcUxtoamp;hl=enamp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/object/span
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a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SOX09CDbFFI/AAAAAAAAAMI/PoOMmpzE0XE/s1600-h/soto_68.jpg"img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SOX09CDbFFI/AAAAAAAAAMI/PoOMmpzE0XE/s320/soto_68.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5252873869757977682" border="0" //abr /br /Courtesy of a href="http://www.someecards.com/"the best card website on Earth./a
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21:23
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I just posted an article on a href="http://www.putmeonit.com/"Put Me On It/a that you might want to check out.
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5:56
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Just read a fascinating laundry list... sorry, I meant a href="http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ijvcK8P0ztXwMgir7NnkIy4rcI0AD93FQIA81"Associated Press article/a raising questions about some of Sarah Palin's activities while she was boss hog (ahem) in Alaska.br /
br /
Makes me wonder how fascinating it would be if a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_(TV_series)"The Wire/a returned with a special Wasilla one-off in the run-up to the American elections. Perhaps it could serve as a CSI-style pilot for anbsp;span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"spin-off. Or not./span/spanbr /
br /
div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SOD4UoMM8EI/AAAAAAAAAL0/B1b14noBbdE/s1600-h/The-Wire-Posters.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vnxMoUvEduo/SOD4UoMM8EI/AAAAAAAAAL0/rK3R_qDbwmQ/s320-R/The-Wire-Posters.jpg" //a/divbr /
I only just got into the Wire, courtesy of a href="http://www.net2tv.kencity.com.gh/"Net 2/a who are showing the fourth (and apparently best) season on Sundays. Each season offers insight into a different aspect of the US city of Baltimore: its drug trade, its port, bureaucracy in city hall, the school system and (in Season 5) the media, looking at how each institution affects the other and the people in the city.nbsp;I read a magnificent suggestion in a blog I follow (can't remember which one) that something similar should be done for international development. We live in hope.br /
br /
There are no famous actors or actresses to be seen on the Wire (although a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_Elba"Idris Elba/a and a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Reddick"Lance Reddick/a are becoming increasingly familiar faces). Above all the show just seemsnbsp;span style="font-style: italic;"real/span, stripping away the glamour and gloss; portraying ordinary people in bad situations, bad people in good situations and everything in between, with no syrupy Hollywood endings in sight.br /
br /
... and yes: like others things recently posted on this blog, it gets a href="http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jan/14/obama-gloves-off/"the Obama endorsement/a too.br /
br /
What?br /
br /
The man just has good taste...
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3:20
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I've put up a new edition of the radio show (click a href="http://www.sendspace.com/file/br7asj"here/a to download). This one went out last Wednesday with three solid hours of goodness from the likes of:br /br /span style="font-style: italic;"Q-Tip, Jazmine Sullivan, /spanspan style="font-style: italic;"Erykah Badu, Estelle, /spanspan style="font-style: italic;"Gil Scott-Heron, Stacy Epps, Raphael Saadiq, Wanlov the Kubolor, The Foreign Exchange, Wayna, Jennifer Hudson, Kanye West, Madcon, Common, Amanda Diva, James Brown, Camp Lo, Res, M.anifest, Muhsinah, Choklate, Sam Sparro, Jay Electronica, Flying Lotus, The Jazzyfatnastees, Ne-Yo, Zo! amp; Phonte, Coultrain, /spanspan style="font-style: italic;"Lauryn Hill (unreleased), /spanand many more.br /br /Click on 'Comments' for the full tracklisting amp; don't forget to tune in next week for the Reverb edition with Kweku Anansi. (Wednesday Oct 1st, Vibe 91.9 fm; 7-10pm).br /br /UPDATE (02/10/2008): Sorry, but it seems like the link has been broken. Not sure what Sendspace is playing at but I will sort it out as quickly as Ghana Telecom allows...divbr //divdivUPDATE II (13/10/2008): The link is back up!/div
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object width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7YWggEPqox0hl=enfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7YWggEPqox0hl=enfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/objectbr /br /The most creative, frenetic, insane, imaginative, beautiful, genius video I think I've ever seen.br /br /I think she just became my favourite artist today off the back of it. At the very least, she replaces Erykah Badu as the artist I cannot wait to argue with my crunk-addicted sister over.br /br /If you don't know about a href="http://www.myspace.com/janellemonae"Janelle/a, you need to get to knowing already. A few reasons:br /ulliBarack Obama is a fan.../lili... as are two of my all-time favourite artists: a href="http://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topicamp;forum=5amp;topic_id=1657028"Erykah Badu/a amp; a href="http://www.missxpose.com/2008/08/prince-says-he-loves-him-some-janelle-monae/"Prince/a /liliPersonally signed by a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Combs"Diddy/a to Bad Boy Records: a href="http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/how_janelle_mon_aacute_e_charmed_diddy/Content?oid=536952#top-tab1"an interesting move/a for a genuine artist.a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outkast"/a/lilia href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outkast"Outkast/a affiliate, signed at a point by a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Boi"Big Boi/a, later featuring on a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417225/"iIdlewild/i/a and in their a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPOCRRJw4gs"iMorris Brown/i/a video./liliActs too, and based on her creativity and the sheer level of iperformance/i she injects into her live sets and videos, I reckon she'll be pretty well known for it one day.br //li/ulOh, amp; besides Big Boi's cameo in the video as Sir Luscious Leftfoot, I'm pretty sure that guitarist is a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_3000"Andre 3000/a...br /br /Thanks a href="http://www.putmeonit.com/2008/09/janelle-is-one.html"Amelia/a for putting me onto this.
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A week?
What took them so long?
Reports of melamine poisoning emerged from China onto the wires a whole week ago. Considering how much trade goes on between Ghana and China,
this should have been pretty immediate.
Although no companies are officially registered to import Chinese milk, this is Ghana and we are a 'creative' people: TV news reports last night showed fresh-looking footage of Chinese dairy goods on Ghanaian shelves. Our citizens should have been warned not to buy any such products days ago.
Then again, news-following Ghanaians may have already made up their own minds. The Ghanaian grapevine is a very fruitful one and - as the saying goes - 'filla (gossip) no get legs'. In my opinion, it has wings. I guess it has to if the government's information machinery is this slow.
It would be interesting to find out what process went between the first news reports and yesterday's announcement.
I wonder:
- When the Standards Board even heard anything.
- How long it took for them to act internally.
- What kind of bureaucracy they had to go through before the announcement was authorized.
Most importantly though, I hope no Ghanaian children died waiting for the authorities to get their acts together.
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11:40
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The Silverbird really 'lost guard' by not opening up in time to show 'The Dark Knight'.
This might be an interesting alternative:
The penny drops 38 seconds in.
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Hurry & enjoy before it gets lifted (I give it a few hours... tops):
Part One
Part Two
Entertaining, although hardly earth-shattering. Blair is still on top of his game and Stewart does his best attempt to channel
Paxman albeit from a comedic standpoint.
I hope Blair is able to put in a word with Bush though: Stewart would tear
W. apart.
EDIT
Thanks to Anon. for this:
Hilarious (& spot on).
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0:58
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
If you scroll down the left column, you'll notice that I've been trying to compile all the blogs I can find that are written by Ghanaians. I've included a few Ghanaians abroad, but try not to include people who are merely blogging as they pass through (nothing personal).
The Problem...
I just read the latest post of one blog I recently added and the content was so ignorantly-worded (and I don't mean the grammar) that I've decided to remove it from the list. One too many expletives and exclamation marks... the content wasn't that hot either.
I'm having mixed feelings though.
On the one hand, I am not a big fan of censorship and the list is supposed to reflect the diversity and richness of Ghanaian blogging.
On the other hand, I try not to be pro-ignorance: a stance that has seen me refuse to play certain forms of music when I DJ.
Why should I not do the same with my blog?
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9:24
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If I was to post every article I've recently read in my endless fascination with their elections, you'd think this blog were American...
So I've decided to put them in one post. Let's see...
Sorry about the emphasis on America's elections. I follow Ghana's too... I do!
The Americans seem to take their elections a little more seriously than we do here though, with
our kangaroo dances and
bodyguards getting into petty catfights.
Ghanaian politics (and politicians) can be rather puerile at times, which gets depressing because reality out here is frankly more...well... real than elsewhere and probably deserves a little more seriousness than it is currently given.
Consider my fascination with the American polls a form of much-needed escape.
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8:35
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
One of my favourite Ghanaian journalists,
Ato Kwamina Dadzie, has written
a typically entertaining piece on
the recent banning of seven former military commanders from military installations in the name of national security, following a recent meeting with ex-President (and coup plotter extraordinaire), Jerry John Rawlings.
Couldn't have put it better myself!
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Sorry for the silence: been knocked out recently by a deadly combination of cold and malaria.
Anyhoo... two things to tie you over until my next post (smallest time...):
For people in Ghana:An invitation to come out and enjoy an alternative to the norm
tomorrow night at Rema's Bar in Osu (follow the link & click on
View All Events for details... or send a text to 0246625622). Yup: I'm DJing, which means underground soul, afrobeat, Yo! MTV raps, funk, new jack swing, broken beat and anything besides the usual.
For those of you not lucky enough to be in Ghana:A
link to a recent edition of my underground soul radio show on Vibe 91.9 fm (drop me a line if you want a tracklisting). It's quite a big file, but it's worth the wait (imho).
Gonna start putting these up every two weeks.
Sharing is caring, no?
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
... that have me all kinds of excited
1. The New 'Quantum of Solace' (aka.
Bond 22) Trailer:
(Thank you
Jason Bourne for forcing Bond to toughen up...)
2. A trailer for the video to Common's brilliant 80s hip-hop throwback anthem (featuring Pharrell), Universal Mind Control:
3. ... and Erykah Badu with information on her next album, Nu Amerykah Part II. (2 minutes 50 seconds in for the more impatient among you...):
Geeks rule.
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Happy birthday, Beloved.
I love (& miss) you loads.
K
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
You probably heard the numbers 9 and 11 circulate the media more than a few times this past week. US political rivals John McCain and Barack Obama agreed to put politics aside for a day to appear together where the Twin Towers had once stood, in honour of those who died in the 2001 Al-Qaeda attack on America.
I was not in New York in 2001. Neither am I American. I am a Ghanaian Afropolitan who had just finished my first degree in London and had invited a few friends over to celebrate the fact over jollof, plantain, chicken and juice. It took my friends and I a few minutes to realize that the smoking towers on my TV screen were not part of a paused movie trailer, but were rather images being transmitted live from New York City.
I heard the numbers 9 and 11 bandied across the news networks quite a few times that day too. The numbers stuck in my mind because Americans describe their dates differently, putting their months before their days. In the midst of the carnage, death and tragedy though, I remember thinking with considerable sadness that ‘9/11’ was probably going to become a brand; as recognizable and all-American as Coca Cola and McDonalds; Microsoft and Nike.
What of the numbers 7 and 8 though?
We share a continent with Kenyans and Tanzanians, yet we are more likely to remember intimate details of what transpired on 9/11 than we are even aware of 8/07: the date of the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
I have met many an African who imagines Osama Bin Laden some kind of folk hero, standing Mugabe-like in the face of Western hegemony. I would ask them to remember Osama’s part in the deaths of over 200 people – mostly African – and the injury of 5000 more on the 7th of August, 1998. Those who died that day were mostly Embassy staff trying to earn a living. They died over a war that had little to do with them. Lawrence Wright – the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist - wrote that Bin Laden “initially said that the sites had been targeted because of the `invasion` of Somalia; then he described an American plan to partition Sudan, which he said was hatched in the embassy in Nairobi. He also told his followers that the genocide in Rwanda had been planned inside the two American embassies." These motivations carry all the factual weight of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.
Perhaps the numbers 7 and 8 are simply not sexy enough for us – as Africans - to remember. Hollywood has not made glossy films about that day. Directors in Nollywood – the world’s third biggest self-contained movie industry (and Africa’s first) - are too busy selling soap operas and using outdated special effects to depict witches falling out of the sky to even consider telling a story of such importance as the East African bombings.
The Kenyans and Tanzanians who died that day were collateral damage as far as Bin Laden was concerned: he placed little to no value on African life. In remembering 9/11 but forgetting the 7th of August, 2001, we - as Africans – do exactly the same thing.
PS: if Obama and McCain can put aside their very genuine and pronounced differences to join forces in commemorating 9/11, then why can’t the flag bearers of Ghana’s major parties (whose only major difference seems to be their choice of animal-like dance moves) release a simple joint statement or host a joint rally denouncing political violence (and the childishness of their bodyguards, while their at it)?
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Never sure what to make of
these news stories of witches and wizards falling onto/through people's roofs from the sky. You come across such tales all the time out here and most people believe them absolutely.
Call me Scully though: I certainly believe in the possibility of things unknown...
but...
Hmm.
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
Fly gear we can believe in...
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17:00
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
A little something that I done wrote in partnership with my musical twin (and beautiful friend)
Negrita...Kobina: What do you mean
it's been ten years since Miseducation?.. I am old.
negrita: *sigh* me too...
The First TimeKobina: I'd just finished my fifth year at
Mfantsipim and joined my father to holiday in Malawi, where he was working.
My younger brother flew in from London bearing a couple of albums that he'd bought from a record store. Hip-hop was so rich back then that, randomly picking up albums that bore '
Parental Advisory' stickers, he walked away with gems that included Midnight Marauders, A Bizarre Ride to the Pharcyde, 93 til Infinity, Enter the 36 Chambers, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z... & The Fugee's
Blunted on Reality.
While
Award Tour was the soundtrack to that holiday, I remember looking with lust in my heart at Lauryn's sullen lips on Blunted's cover before being blown completely away by her talent: that voice (both rapping and singing). The complexity of her lyrics. Her poetry. Then I turned on the telly one day that same holiday and Sister Act 2 came on.
Hook. Line. Sinker... Game. Set. Match... I was in all kinds of love.
negrita: it was the summer of '94, i was in Grade 11 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. having grown up as the only black kids in each of our classes for years, my sisters and i jumped on every opportunity to watch ANY black movie that EVER came out (well...the ones my mother would let us watch, anyway). so you can imagine our excitement when we came across
Sister Act 2. the scene in which Lauryn Hill sang
"His Eye is on the Sparrow" with Tanya Blount literally moved me to tears. i could not believe the sheer power of her voice and the emotion it evoked. i knew immediately she was a force to be reckoned with. that role catapulted her to new levels of fame, and one day that same summer, she was subsequently featured in a brief story on an entertainment news magazine. they were introducing her not only as an actress and singer, but also as an emcee who made up one third of a group called the Tranzlator Crew (Refugees). they played a 30 second clip of her performing live and i was completely blown away.
the lyricism, the skills, the flow. she made me sit up and listen. i had never seen such incredible, diverse talent in someone so young. and the fact that she was a proud,
nappy headed, dark skinned black woman--someone on my screen with whom my little teenage self could finally identify. i was in awe.
Blunted on Reality was but a minute blip on the radar of the popular music scene in Canada at the time, but the impact of my brief introduction to the Fugees, and to Ms. Hill in particular, was immeasurable.
The Score
Kobina: I was in British sixth form the year The Score came out. I bought it after hearing Fugee-La on
Westwood. Hip-hop rarely went to number one back then and so I ran and commanded everybody in the boarding house downstairs to the TV room as soon as I heard Lauryn sing "Strumming my pain with his fingers..." and realized that no, this was not a joke:
the Fugees were Top of the Pops... and they were singing live!
negrita: first year of university. this is the year i started to fall in love with hip-hop. my first love had always been soul music and it was only later in my young life that i truly started to listen to hip hop. at the risk of lapsing into hyperbole, i would have to say that this was a legendary year for hip hop: Nas'
It Was Written; Jay-Z's
Reasonable Doubt; The Roots'
Illadelph Halflife; De la Soul's
Stakes is High; Tupac's
All Eyez on Me; Outkast's
ATLiens; and of course the Fugees'
The Score. i cannot forget the first time i saw and heard
Fugee-La. i came home to my sisters raving about this song that i just had!to!hear (not to mention the fly video that accompanied it). two years after
Blunted..., hip hop videos were finally being showcased a little more in Canada and we finally had an 'urban music' (heh) section in the bigger record stores. . the way the group worked together, both on the album and live, was inspired. and from the minute i heard Lauryn's verse on
'How Many Mics?', ["My mind makes incisions in your anatomy/And I'll back this with Deuteronomy/Or Leviticus, God made this word/You can't get with this/Sweet like licorice, Dangerous like syphillis, yeah."] i was awed, once again.
The Miseducation
Kobina: It wasn't just the album (which I was actually a little disappointed by at the time because I felt it showcased her singing at the expense of the rhymes of the greatest female rapper of all time). Lauryn - an intelligent, classy, dark-skinned girl - was on the covers of magazines that she just wasn't supposed to be on the covers of. We forget it now but the world was really at Lauryn's feet back then.
negrita:yes it was. and if this isn't proof of the sensation she became at that time, i know not what is:
this album, and all the [well-deserved] hype it generated, as well as its highly critical success was, indeed, Ms. Hill's
"thesis--well written words broken down into pieces." it reads like an anthology of poems and short stories, and is an exploration of love--in its many manifestations. it chronicles a journey of self-discovery and of emancipation that is rife with pain, grief, joy, celebration, love, birth and rebirth. it is life's lessons learned, without being preachy. it is
"this mixture, where hip hop meets scripture/develop a negative into a positive picture." and unlike some other female emcees who came out around the same time, she did not use overt sexuality and general nekkidness (*cough*lil kim*cough*foxy brown*cough*) to reach the masses. i, for one, think she
still came hard with the emceeing, despite the fact that there was more singing on this album. she had always had the instrument, but this effort felt like she had mastered it. like she had found her own voice, emerging out of the fugee-la and exploding onto the scene as an artist in her own right. and the impact of this emergence was massive.
and it wasn't just about the music. she was not only an artist, but she became a style icon. to this day, it remains evident how much i personally was influenced by lauryn's style during this time period. for so many of us who did fit the standard mould, the fact that a dark-skinned rapper with locs had now [albeit grudgingly] become an international trendsetting cover girl was revolutionary.
The Composite
This joint post came about because my
musical twin, negrita & I were chatting recently about Lauryn's musical absence and artists she influenced who each possess various aspects of what Ms. Hill represented back when she was at the apex of the fame she would later come to detest.
We don't think any of these artists is trying to be Lauryn, just as Lauryn wasn't trying to be, say, Aretha or Mary J. - there can only be one. Nevertheless, here are some of the artists who came up in our conversation:
Rapper/Singer: Estelle
Kobina: Although
Ms. Dynamite-ee-ee was the first rapper after Ms. Hill who I saw metamorphose into a socially-aware singer, Estelle really got her Lauryn on this year. The comparisons were especially inevitable given Wyclef's production on
'So Much Out the Way' and
'No Substitute Love'. Thankfully, Estelle found the comparisons flattering but went on to make her own name.
negrita: yeah...i fully gave Wyclef and Jerry Wonder the *side-eye* when i heard those two tracks. she does a remarkable job on them but you cannot help but immediately conjure up Ms. Hill upon first listen. Estelle's 'Shine' certainly does have a whif of Miseducationism to it...especially due to the fine balance between rapping and singing. she is a refreshing change from a lot of what's floating out there right now and it's lovely to see her finally break into the American market after paying her dues for so long. i think the aspect of Ms. Hill that Estelle has cornered is being able to balance the emceeing with the singing, while remaining truly original both in terms of style and content.
Genius/Madness: Amy Winehouse
negrita: lawdamercy. well, in this case, Amy Winehouse represents the parts of Lauryn Hill of which we are in awe and which we cannot even attempt to understand, respectively. they both burst onto the scene with voices unlike no other. there is only one of them. their innate skill is indisputable, their possibilities endless. they're both like vessels through which their voices come...pure, soul-full genius. also,
'Back to Black' should've been Ms. H Hill's sophomore album.
pre-Unplugged. their drastic physical transformations from the artists with whom we fell in love could be due to any number of things. i believe that, quite simply, when you are this kind of talent, everyone wants a piece of you. i think a natural reaction to that, to everyone wanting to take and take from you, is to make yourself repellent. it's a case of escaping from perception, of self preservation. recent images of Ms. Hill performing, though, illustrate that she seems be back on track. we can only pray that Amy Winehouse puts down the damn crackpipe and stops trying to destroy herself.
Kobina: Apparently ?uestlove of the Roots said of Amy's
Back to Black that it was the album that he had been trying to persuade Lauryn to make. I cannot help but think how dope it would have been if L-Boogie had taken his advice. I've been a fan of Amy's since her first album,
Frank. The girl has crazy skills and I try to focus on only those, but with all the drama (and she/the media making her some new Abu-Hamza-meets-Wacko-Jacko-esque-pantomime-baddie-hybrid) it's been hard... really hard.
Talent/Complexity: Janelle Monàe
negrita:
Janelle Monàe represents the new Ms. Hill, with whom we are just getting familiar. she pointedly refuses to fit into any mold and to be categorized. she joins this growing wave of genre-free Black artists who are so obviously influenced by an eclectic mix of artists and who now have a bit more freedom to make music they love, without necessarily catering to a target demographic.
Kobina: Couldn't have put it better myself, Negrita...
The Voice: Jazmine Sullivan
Kobina: I've been waiting for
Jazmine's album since Missy &
Giles P started hyping her a few years back and I'm so glad it's coming out and she's
already proving commercially viable. That first line she sings on
Need U Bad is so reminiscent of Lauryn that the phonelines lit up the first time I played it on my radio show like 'is this the Second Coming?' That said, Jazmine sounds about as much like Lauryn as Bilal does D'Angelo i.e. not so much... both great voices and both distinct.
negrita: i just feel terrible for poor Jazmine who cannot release a first single without being pronounced 'the next Lauryn'. that's a hell of a lot of pressure. that being said, one cannot help but notice the rich texture and power of a voice so similar to that of a young Lauryn Hill. like Ms. Hill, she is an old soul with a beautiful world-weary voice that betrays wisdom and/or experience far beyond her years.
The Rhymes: Jean Grae
negrita: there is absolutely no reason in the world as to why Jean Grae is not bigger right now. in a world so devoid of proper female emcees who do not just spit about sex, money, money, and sex (*side-eye at Trina*) or who are not too busy acting/endorsing to come back to the music world (*shakes tambourine at Eve*), Jean Grae is a breath of fresh air. her lyrics are tight, her freestyles are crazy, and it's just effortless.
Kobina: I cannot think of a better female MC than Jean Grae since Lauryn. Hell, I reckon she could even give L-Boogie a run for her money. She's
that tight... humourous with it too.
I hope the rumours of her early retirement prove to be just that: rumours.
Jeanius was genius.
Cover Girl: Beyonce Knowles
Kobina: Not sure if there's been another beauty as dark-skinned as Lauryn to have so many seminal magazine covers under her belt. Nevertheless, B' is the only black female artist to come even close.
negrita: with her million and one (*not exact figure) fashion magazine covers and spreads, her jazillion (*again, not exact) endorsement deals, and her generally ridiculously constant presence on entertainment blogs/television/magazines, Beyoncé is the consumate 'It Girl'/stye icon (although, ok, i beg to differ there for a myriad of reasons including, but not limited to, the ENTIRE 'House of Déreon' line debacle). she represents the Lauryn that set trends just by waking up in the morning.
... and so, Ms. Hill, these are the makings of you. this composite only proves that it takes a breadth of artists - incredibly talented in their own right - to come close to the inspired brilliance that is Lauryn Hill.
Kobina: Those of you who miss her music as much as we do might want to check out
a mixtape a friend of mine put up or the excellent
Re-education of Lauryn Hill.
negrita:
Re-education... gives me hope that Ms. Hill will return with a serious vengeance. apart from touring, which she's been doing for the past couple of years, she keeps re-emerging,
albeit quietly. and as serendipity would have it, while writing this entry, a new Lauryn Hill track was leaked. you can hear her latest offering
here.
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19:00
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Wherever I Lay My Hat...
The BBC has
an interesting project tracking the progress of a humble invention - more recognizeable to most Ghanaians than it is to Westerners, I reckon - that has apparently revolutionized international trade...
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Is it just me or is Jeremie's voice all over radio these days?
I love it when actors I like turn out to have leanings towards social activism.
A little something that I done wrote in partnership with my musical twin (and beautiful friend) Negrita...
Kobina: Although Ms. Dynamite-ee-ee was the first rapper after Ms. Hill who I saw metamorphose into a socially-aware singer, Estelle really got her Lauryn on this year. The comparisons were especially inevitable given Wyclef's production on 'So Much Out the Way' and 'No Substitute Love'. Thankfully, Estelle found the comparisons flattering but went on to make her own name.
negrita: lawdamercy. well, in this case, Amy Winehouse represents the parts of Lauryn Hill of which we are in awe and which we cannot even attempt to understand, respectively. they both burst onto the scene with voices unlike no other. there is only one of them. their innate skill is indisputable, their possibilities endless. they're both like vessels through which their voices come...pure, soul-full genius. also, 'Back to Black' should've been Ms. H Hill's sophomore album. pre-Unplugged. their drastic physical transformations from the artists with whom we fell in love could be due to any number of things. i believe that, quite simply, when you are this kind of talent, everyone wants a piece of you. i think a natural reaction to that, to everyone wanting to take and take from you, is to make yourself repellent. it's a case of escaping from perception, of self preservation. recent images of Ms. Hill performing, though, illustrate that she seems be back on track. we can only pray that Amy Winehouse puts down the damn crackpipe and stops trying to destroy herself.
Kobina: I've been waiting for Jazmine's album since Missy & Giles P started hyping her a few years back and I'm so glad it's coming out and she's already proving commercially viable. That first line she sings on Need U Bad is so reminiscent of Lauryn that the phonelines lit up the first time I played it on my radio show like 'is this the Second Coming?' That said, Jazmine sounds about as much like Lauryn as Bilal does D'Angelo i.e. not so much... both great voices and both distinct.
negrita: there is absolutely no reason in the world as to why Jean Grae is not bigger right now. in a world so devoid of proper female emcees who do not just spit about sex, money, money, and sex (*side-eye at Trina*) or who are not too busy acting/endorsing to come back to the music world (*shakes tambourine at Eve*), Jean Grae is a breath of fresh air. her lyrics are tight, her freestyles are crazy, and it's just effortless.
Kobina: Not sure if there's been another beauty as dark-skinned as Lauryn to have so many seminal magazine covers under her belt. Nevertheless, B' is the only black female artist to come even close.
