Last month I attended The Darfur Debate, a conversation between African political expert Mahmood Mamdani and Darfur advocate John Prendergast. In case my arbitrary points-laden round-up wasn’t enough, you can now watch the video yourself, courtesy of Columbia’s YouTube account:
Let me know if you agree with my assessments of Prendergast’s sartorial choices.
Tonight Mahmood Mamdani and John Prendergast will fight to the death share a civil debate on the situation in Darfur, an event I’m hoping will end in hair-pulling and the shouting of epithets. I’ll be tweeting from the debate, and you can follow along below.
A paper I wrote for Anne Nelson’s New Media in Development Communications class last semester was published this week on DigiActive and reviewed by Pambazuka News. The abstract:
The proliferation of mobile phones in Africa is transforming the political and social landscape of the developing world, empowering people to source and share their own information and to have a greater say in what comes to international attention. This paper compares the use and impact of mobile technology in three recent African elections: Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenya.
In Nigeria’s April 2007 presidential election, a local civil society organization used free software to collect over 10,000 text message reports from voters around the country, boosting citizen participation in a political process many Nigerians doubted. In Sierra Leone’s August-September 2007 elections, trained local monitors used mobile phones to collect data from designated polling sites, enabling the independent National Election Watch to compile and release an accurate, comprehensive analysis of the election almost two weeks before the official report. And in Kenya’s December 2007 election, a group of local digital activists developed and implemented a citizen reporting platform to allow Kenyans to report and track post-election violence during a month-long media blackout, collecting and publishing a comprehensive account of riots, displacement and human rights abuses that serves as one of the best available records of the crisis.
You can read the whole paper here.
update
Katrin Verclas posted a critique on MobileActive.org. Many of her comments are spot on, and she sheds valuable light on the role the December 2008 elections in Ghana play in this discussion.
I’m taking a little break from the media-tech-Africa jumble that’s normally Jackfruit of the Week to point you all to a hilarious/amazing/inspiring project one of my housemates is working on.
This is Chaim:
Chaim’s a filmmaker:
Chaim’s also a superhero:
Together, he’s a superhero filmmaker. Or a filmmaking superhero (you can decide):
(Here’s the part where I went, “No, really?” and Chaim went, “Yes, really.” I’ll give you a minute.)
Chaim isn’t a Halloween superhero or a comic book superhero or a big fancy convention superhero. He’s a real life superhero who spends hours and hours feeding hungry New Yorkers, cleaning up trash and building homes. He’s part of a whole group of real superheroes that the New York Times profiled in 2007, including an ex-sex worker who uses martial arts to protect her former co-workers and a man who fixes leaky faucets for free. All of them — and there are hundreds throughout the world — are visible icons of community service and activism, and Chaim’s documenting their story at Superheroes Anonymous:
Here’s the part where I cheat a little and bring it back to Africa. Each month, Superheroes Anonymous chooses a cause to support. February’s is Starvation Salvation, an effort to raise money for PASSOP, a South African non-profit that, among other things, smuggles food into Zimbabwe to feed people who need it. If you don’t feel like breaking out your cape and spending a day helping your own community, think about helping PASSOP out.
Monday’s post about why the International Criminal Court should hold off on an arrest warrant for al-Bashir left out a couple of interesting details: last Thursday, the New York Times reported that a warrant had already been issued, an announcement the ICC immediately refuted.
Practicing for the real thing? Accident? What do you guys think?
Hat tip: Kate Cronin-Furman at Wronging Rights
