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In case you haven't heard about it yet, a new magazine about Africa in Spanish was just launched: Africaneando. It's published (on the Maneno platform btw) by he Barcelona-based and awesomely named association Oozebap devoted to the promotion of African culture, research and better knowledge. And it has a photo essay of life in Abengourou by yours truly. Oh, and they're accepting submissions, preferably in Spanish but also in English and French.

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Here's an awesome visualization of the decline of the four main maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries, which of course has a lot to do with the Scramble for Africa. By Pedro M. Cruz.

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As spotted by A Bombastic Element, Gawker managed to lay their hands on a picture of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue--son of the Equatorial Guinean dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo--rocking an S-curl and his million dollar watch. They conclude with "We are living in a Frederick Forsyth novel". Indeed.

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Last Saturday was International Day Against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), so a it seems only appropriate to post the trailer of the documentary film Africa Rising, about the grassroots movement to end FGM.

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KenyaBuzz has created a matatu map of Nairobi! I wonder if somebody could do the same with the gbakas in Abidjan...

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And speaking of matatus, Sarah Elliott has a hilarious photo series of matatus decorated with pictures of all sorts of political leaders, such as the one below:

It's Friday night (almost Saturday morning) and it's been a while since I've shared some of the music I'm listening to. Just a band is not really a discovery, as I've been a fan for some time now, since I discovered the cool music videos of their debut album. This song, Usinibore, is the first single of their new album "82" released last October. Daft Punk anyone?

[h/t A Bombastic Element]

[Previous Afrilinks can be found here]

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Nadytch, who writes a blog about advertising and communication in Côte d'Ivoire [in French], asks Is black awful? after observing the everlasting presence of skin-lightening commercials. Her post has sparked quite an interesting debate [in French, hello Google Translate] on why these products remain popular in African society.

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On the topic of skin whitening products, A Bombastic Element posted a video by AFP about their popularity in France among African diaspora communities although their sale is banned.

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Since I linked to a post in French and one in English on that topic, here's are a couple more in Spanish written here over a year ago: Ser blanco es tan ideal and Requisito: blanquitud which has a video in English about skin whitening in India.

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While skin bleaching creams are still popular among some African women and commercials tell women that lighter skin is more desirable, at the same time albinos are murdered for their body parts. What a paradox.

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Speaking of ignorance, Ghetto Radio collected a couple of videos on Stupid questions people ask about Africa. It's funny but sad at the same time because it's so true.

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On a lighter note, here's a cool photoset of Malian hairdos at Journal du Mali.

Stumbling upon some blogs, I found a very interesting excerpt from Barack Obama's memoir Dreams of my father which I think is worth sharing. I haven't read the book, which was written almost 15 years ago, but according to the back cover description it's about Obama's emotional journey after his father dies in a car accident. That takes him from Kansas and Hawaii to Kenya trying to retrace his African side by finding out more about his father, and his life away from him that he never knew.

This excerpt is a reflection about his passage through Europe on his way to Kenya, during which he remembers a Senegalese man he crossed paths with in Spain:

By the end of the first week or so, I realized that I'd made a mistake. It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I'd imagined it. It just wan't mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass. I began to suspect that my European stop was just one more means of delay, one more attempt to coming to terms with the Old Man. Stripped of language, stripped of work and routine - stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I'd become so accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation -I had been forced to look inside myself and had found only great emptiness there.

Would this trip to Kenya finally fill that emptiness? The folks back in Chicago thought so. It'll be just like Roots, Will said at my going-away party. A pilgrimage, Asante had called it. For them, as for me, Africa had become an idea more than an actual place, a new promised land full of ancient traditions and sweeping vistas, noble struggles and talking drums. With the benefit of distance, we engaged Africa in a selective embrace - the same sort of embrace I'd once offered the Old Man. What would happen once I relinquished that distance? It was nice to believe that the truth would somehow set me free. But what if that was wrong? What if the truth only disappointed, and my father's death meant nothing, and his leaving me behind meant nothing, and the only tie that bound me to him, or to Africa, was a name, a blood type, or white people's scorn?

I switched off the overhead light and closed my eyes, letting my man drift back to an Afrian I'd met while traveling through Spain, another man no the run. I had been waiting for a night bus in a roadside tavern about halfway between Madrid and Barcelona. A few old men sat at tables and drank wine from short, cloudy glasses. There was a pool table off to one side, and for some reason I had racked up the balls and started to play [...]

As I was finishing up the table, a man in a thin wool sweater had appeared out of nowhere and asked if he could buy me some coffee. He spoke no English, and his Spanish wasn't much bettr than mine, but he had the winning smile and the urgency of someone in need of company. Standing at the bar, he told me he was from Senegal, and was crisscrossing Spain for seasonal work. He showed me a battered photograph he kep in his wallet of a young girl with round, smooth cheeks. His wife, he said; he had to leave her behind. They would be reunited as soon as he saved the money. He would write and send for her.

We ended up riding to Barcelona together, neither of us talking much, him turning to me every so often to try to explain the jokes on the Spanish program being shown on a TV-video contraption hooked up above the driver's seat. Shortly before dawn, we were deposited in front of an old bus depont, and my friend gestured me over to a short, thick palm that grew beside the road. From his knap-sack he pulled out a toothbrush, a comb, and a bottle of water that he handed to me with great ceremony. And together we washed ourselves under the morning mist, before hoisting our bags over our shoulders and heading toward town.

What was his name? I couldn't remember now; just another hungry man far away from home, one of the many children of former colonies - Algerians, West Indians, Pakistanis - now breaching the barricades of their former masters, mounting their own ragged, haphazard invasion. And yet, as we walked toward the Ramblas, I had felt as if I knew him as well as any man; that, coming from opposite ends of the earth, we were somehow making the same journey. When we finally parted company, I had remained in the street for a long, long time, watching his slender, bandy-legged image shrink into the distance, one part of me wishing then that I could go with him into a life of open roads and blue mornings; another part realizing that such a wish was also a romance, an idea, as partial as my image of the Old Man or my image of Africa.

I had heard lots of good things about the Kenyan house/funk band Just a band a while back (namely on Afromusing), but hadn't really checked their music out and somehow managed to forget about it. Now the great African Digital Art has reminded me to check them out. They are known not only for their debut album Scratch To Reveal that came out last year, but also for their music videos. Not only they write and record all their songs, but they also make their own music videos, which often include animation and illustration. And after watching the ones available in their YouTube channel, I have to say I love both their music and their creative videos.

Here's the first one they released which caused quite an impression, titled Iwinyo Piny -that's the other thing you have to love about them, they mostly sing in Swahili in spite of making very non-traditional Kenyan music.

Probably my favorite song as well as the video, which has a couple of puppets as protagonists is this one, titled Hey:

And although this one is not an animation but has real actors, the song has a lovely, mellow ambiance tune. The title is If I could:

If by now you like Just a Band as much as I do, I recommend you check out their fictional bio and, of course, their blog. And as a bonus, read Afromusing's interview with Just a Band that she posted a year ago. The first part is here and the second one here.

It seems that the Africa Rising party I described last month, combining food, music, art, and fashion - all with an African theme - has become a monthly event at Project One Gallery in San Francisco. And I just discovered that the two singers that I enjoyed the most that night have recently posted videos of their latest songs.

The first one is Black President by Sila and the Afrofunk Experience, a San Francisco-based band of 7 musicians led by Kenyan-born Victor Sila. As you've probably guessed, the song is dedicated to President Obama and is all about change. Catchy.

The second song is Yearning for home by Adé Siji, a British-Nigerian singer also based in San Francisco who is less funk and more soul, but still full of afrobeats. A very sensuous rythm.

To tell you the truth, I hadn't heard of Jacqueline Novogratz until a couple of weeks ago when someone invited me to a talk she was giving in San Francisco about her book "The blue sweater: Bridging the gap between rich and poor in an interconnected world". I had only vaguely heard about Acumen Fund, the non-profit that she founded about eight years ago. The blue sweater is a collection of stories that she started writing back in 1996 about her lifelong quest to understand global poverty and find new ways of tackling it, which she started writing while she was visiting Rwanda 10 years after working and living there.

The topic of the book intrigued me and after coming across a review calling it a "visionary" book, I decided to go to the talk. There were only about a dozen people at the bookstore where the event was taking place, in spite of being located in a shopping area of San Francisco, and they all seem to know Novogratz personally. She read two chapters of her book in a soft and nervous voice, something surprising for someone that is used to speaking in front of big audiences at the some of the world's most prestigious conferences. One of the stories was extremely sad, about a young woman she met in Rwanda named Honorata who lost her beloved twin sister during the 1994 genocide. The second story had a very different tone, and described how one day after work in Kibera (a township in Nairobi, Kenya) she was sitting in her car with frustration while it was pouring rain outside. Then an old woman tapped on the window and completely changed her mood - if you want to know what happens, I've uploaded the audio of her reading of the story, which is only 3min long.

The atmosphere of the book reading was almost intimate, and Novogratz words seemed genuinely filled with emotion. From her stories I gathered that although she seems quite shy and calm, even frail, she is quite the opposite. I have the impression she has had a very intense life in which she has accomplished a lot of things. Now Acumen Fund, with its bottom-up approach to development and its notion of patient capital, has become a model to follow to end poverty without creating dependence. I learned later, after googling her a bit, that Jacqueline Novogratz is quite a celebrity in the development world, and that she is one of the people responsible for changing traditional charity and old-fashioned aid.

She concluded her talk by these hopeful thoughts:

When systems are broken there is no better time to reinvent, to re-imagine and to innovate. There is such a groundswell of excitement and enthusiasm in the next generation, who don't want to just make money for its own sake but really want to use their skills and the resources they have to change the world. And that gives me great hope that together we really can. I'd like to leave you with a final thought, that I hope is in every page of this book: dignity, in the end, is so much more important to the human spirit than wealth, and if we could truly could create a world that extended the global economy to each and every one of us so that we could make our own choices and our own decisions, then we would see a world of dignity. Not only for the poor, but for each and every one of us.

I'll most definitely read The blue sweater at some point, but in the meantime I've been watching her talks at the TED conference in 2006 and 2007. Here's the first one, in which she tells the story of the blue sweater she had as a kid, the story that gave the title to her book.

Update

It seems that right after I published this, TED posted Jacqueline Novogratz latest talk at their annual conference, I'm guessing from last February. In it she talks about the definition of "poor people" in development through the story of a woman she met in Kenya, and I recommend watching it too (it's only 7 minutes). But do watch this one below:

Kenyans have been partying since dawn since learning that the man they consider their native son will be the next President of the US. Especially in the small farming village of Nyangoma-Kogelo where Barack Obama's father was born, but also all throughout the country and in the Kenyan blogosphere everyone has hailed Obama's victory as an event of historic relevance.

Arisa Moraa, a Kenyan American, describes at Kenya Imagine her first US election being able to vote:

I never had the chance to engage in the voting process in Kenya because I left Kenya before I was of age. I stood by in 2007 as millions of Kenyans voted and felt a sadness at being of age to vote and unable to vote in my home country.

But then came 2008 and I was of age, and I could vote, and Barack Obama an AmeriKen (American Kenyan) like me was on the ballot. It was a chance for me to make history.. first time voting, and voting for a Kenyan. It is an incredible moment in history.

I couldn't sleep last night, and was up at the crack of dawn enroute to a polling station to exercise my privilege to vote. I was a mixture of emotions.. joy, excitement, anxiety, angst.... all at the possibility... the hope, anticipating CHANGE that I can believe in. It took an hour because there was a lot of people there, but I was excited as I checked in my federal selection.. Obama/Biden.. and the other numerous democrats I don't know. I am beyond myself... First time voter... in a historic election.. Obama IS my president!

Kumekucha describes the festive mood in Kenya, including a few photos from the celebrations in the Kogelo village:

Back home in Kenya, President Mwai Kibaki was not just among the first to send congratulatory message to the new President-elect, but he also declared Thursday November 6th 2008 a public holiday throughout Kenya. Almost everywhere around the country, Kenyans are in celebratory mood as people digest the fact that a man whom they share an ancestry has been elected to the helm of global political and economic power.

Read the rest of this article on Voices without Votes