“Remapping Africanness” by Anouar Majid on the complicated understanding of Arabs in Africa, giving an interesting example of sportscasters during the African Cup of Nations. “I almost got in trouble when I first came to New York in 1983 for insisting to an offended Jamaican that I was African. Obviously puzzled that a non-black could make such a claim, the Caribbean man became openly hostile, even though we were in an academic setting. But I was no less confused by his response—a native of Jamaica, a country on the American continent, was denying me the right to be from Africa, the landmass that includes my native Morocco. It was, to say the least, an odd scene. Bystanders, mostly white, were amused by the dispute because they, too, had their own understanding of Africa based on their own history with race.” (via.)
Mapping Memories
South African artists Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter interviewed a number of Senegalese immigrants for their 2006 project UrbaNET: Hillbrow/Dakar/Hillbrow. Hillbrow, a poor neighborhood in Johannesburg is home to a number of Dakar expats. The artists asked the Senegalese immigrants to draw maps for them to use during their two-week residency in Dakar. From Rhizome:
Over the course of the residency, the artists documented their journey in photographs and video and even visited friends and relatives of the mapmakers. For the 2007 exhibition of their project at University of Johannesburg, Neustetter and Hobbs conducted a twenty-person walk from the campus, in Auckland Park, to a Congolese nightclub in Hillbrow, where the project was discussed by art-goers, neighborhood residents and the mapmakers. Neustetter and Hobbs’ project thus does not profess to establish any authoritative study of the respective cities it maps, but rather overlays remembrance, map-making, navigation and the documentary image to tell the specific tales of a group of immigrants and a broader story about home, migration and place.
If you Google around, you’ll see memory maps are often assigned in grade schools. I wish my teachers were that creative. There is a Memory Map Flickr pool and last year, Kottke made a list of a projects. Al
Fraken can draw the United States from memory, which makes one wish there 
were a quiz show/pictionary component to political debates.
Veering in a different direction, City of Memory compiles stories and anecdotes marked by contributors on a map of New York City. Next Great Thing suggests with a “mobile component, people could lifecast their past, in a way, letting place serve as a trigger for recollection.”
A great book about recollecting memory is Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. It’s a story about a man awarded millions in compensation after an accident. He constructs buildings and hires actors to act out the parts of a memory he remembers only slight details about, but keeps coming back to mind.
Nothing is more frustrating then realizing a memory isn’t coming back. And there’s not much you can do it about it. The more you revisit a memory the more you damage it. It gets tainted by present events and reanalysis.
Art by Kunie Sugiura.
The Economist on Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first woman in Africa to become a democratically elected head of state. (via.) Liberia’s new president has “made headway against what she calls the ‘debilitating cancer of corruption.’”
BBC reports on e-waste dumping in Ghana. It’s a good overview of the problem: Western countries avoid bans on exporting dead computers (and their toxic contents) by shipping them abroad off as “usable second-hand goods” — much worse as this can be a tax write-off. An expert estimates 90% of the computers shipped to Africa are “just junk.” More from Treehugger’s Simran Sethi on HuffPost.
How the front page of today’s New York Times “perfectly encapsulates” Zimbabwe’s horror
Years ago, in George Ayittey’s Africa in Chaos, I read about African cities replicating European landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, hoping to attract tourists. Unfortunately, I can’t find any photographs or references of this practice online. But, the Wikipedia entry for Architecture of Africa is a fascinating read, “The Italian futurists saw Asmara as an opportunity to build their designs. Planned villages were constructed in Libya and Italian East Africa, including the new town of Tripoli, all utilising modern designs.” Here’s an article on the capital of Eritrea, and another from the NYT, “Bold experimentation that might have gone too far in Europe was permitted, even encouraged, in this colonial outpost. ‘The Italians tried to express the modern Roman empire in grand terms on a blank slate, just as the British did in Delhi,’ said Gabriel Abraham, an Eritrean architect based in Cambridge, Mass. What remains today is an architectural mishmash, but one that makes Asmara one of rarest concentrations of modernism in the world.” Here’s a book about “Africa’s Secret Modernist City.” (And some Flickr images.)
“A few months before I went to the Congo, I’d had a discussion here on Slate with Luc Sante, during which I argued that American news venues had not just the right but the duty to publish photographs of atrocities. At the time I had, of course, seen those sorts of pictures, but I’d never taken them. Now that I have, I’m not so sure. It’s not that the public deserves to be spared such things, because they don’t. It’s just that I no longer think that what happens when horrifying pictures are published has anything to do with journalism.” - Jim Lewis on the pros and cons of graphic photojournalism.
Global mashup: Gnarls Barkley’s new video for “Going On,” taking inspiration from Clayton Cubitt’s “Lagos Calling”, mixing African tribal style with working class British skinhead punk style.
“The artists asked Hillbrow-based Senegalese immigrants to draw memory maps of their home city, which they would use to navigate the capital during their stay. Over the course of the residency, the artists documented their journey in photographs and video and even visited friends and relatives of the mapmakers.” - rhizome
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