So 2009 appears to be going down in the books as the Year of the Cable in Sub-Saharan Africa what with all the cable lighting up in East Africa and now the Glo-1 landing in Lagos over the weekend which will provide additional bandwidth to West African countries. Friends in Ghana were excitedly talking about this when I was there last month as it will open up a second route out of the country above and beyond the single line that they currently have which is tied in to the old SAT-3 line.
Throughput is going to start out at 640 Gbs and eventually be cranked up to 2.5 Tbs. There's been a bit of coverage on it which you can read at 27 Months, TechMasai, Vanguard, ITNewsAfrica, and This Day. I'm probably missing a lot of others as cable landings are a pretty big deal and this one is made even more so as it's being deployed primarily by Globacom Limited who are a Nigerian company.
The only thing that should probably be mentioned in all of this is that from Ghana to Senegal, the cable leapfrogs six countries (yes, I am indeed counting The Gambia in there). I'm not sure if this is because these other countries didn't want in on the connection (which colleagues in Côte d'Ivoire tell me is often the case) or if the countries were simply left out. It's a shame about this as a lot of Information Ministers are going to hobble their countries in the future if they don't have enough connectivity coming in. They'll have to run connections to neighboring countries who do have it and then pay a premium for something they should have had directly in the first place. So it goes apparently, but bandwidth is decidedly becoming a hard currency around the world and countries need to get in on it when they can.
You know the bit from that James Bond film where he kills the Russian? It's not really important which film, because for a vast chunk of the series, the Russians were the go-to bad guys. You could always count on some American actor to snarl out some badly pronounced Slavic and you would know that yes, that was your bad guy for the film. And it doesn't stop with Bond. Russians were the potential baddies in any number of films produced during the Cold War period.
I'm not sure if it's part of a larger trend, but it appears that film producers are gladly turning to Nigerians to fill that role of eternal evil. I bring this up because of a number of factors. The first is that I've recently returned from Ghana where it seems to a number of people, Nigerians are always criminals. Sometimes this is meant in a heavily joking way and more of a friendly rivalry which I assume is due to their somewhat shared history and lingua franca. Other times, with people more ignorant, it can be meant quite seriously. Of course, I found out that this attitude is often prevalent across a great deal of Africa when it comes to Nigeria, who seem to be scorned much like Albanians in Europe.
But, this isn't my business. People will have the opinions that people will have of one another. My issue is with film. On one of my many recent flights, I watched, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Not an amazing film overall, but pretty good. Yet one bit stuck out where this early team of mutants went to Lagos to rough up some kind of diamond operation. Naturally this was a group of Nigerian thugs armed to the teeth who were soundly defeated.
Not a tremendous deal by itself, but something to note as then I watched District 9 last week. It's quite a good film really and one of the better science fiction films I've seen in a long time, although it does digress in to a shoot out action movie towards the end. But it's here where we really see Nigerians painted in such an extremely bad light that it's hard to ignore, although some (I'm assuming Nigerians) figure that they've done a great deal to earn this scorn. It stems from the fact that these Nigerian thugs run an inter species prostitution ring, trade in stolen goods, practice voodoo, kill, and do any number of less-than-amazing activities.
Naturally this spurned a great many blog posts on the subject such as District 9 is racist and Is District 9 racist?. I don't want to get in to that whole debate even though I thought the depictions were quite over the top no matter which country would have been involved. But what it does do is form a rather disturbing trend of showing one people in a continuously bad light. And beyond the fact that this is rather ignorant, it has the added issue with the fact that while white people can often distinguish Russians from other white people, white people cannot distinguish Africans from other Africans. So, while it may just be singling out Nigerians as evildoers, it makes it appear to the whites outside of Africa as if this unidentifiable African is a primitive person not to be trusted. This is dangerous on any scale and quite sad to see that we're really nowhere near overcoming this depiction of Africans.
But that's the one thing that's really been strange to me with District 9 (as Wolverine was Hollywood fare and not much can be expected of them in overcoming easy stereotypes) is that the director, Neill Blomkamp, is South African. Yes, he is a white South African, but still he is from there and that being the case, for him to make any kind of negative or generalizing statement about black Africans is quite a precarious position for him to take publicly no matter what he may think privately. As it is strange that the Nigerians are not speaking Igbo, Yoruba, or Hausa (big languages in Nigeria), but it appears they are speaking some bizarre version of Swahili as noted on a comment on this article (which was rightly unhappy with certain elements of the film). So, why were they not just the "thugs"? Why were they Nigerians speaking an East African language? Maybe this was some kind of a terse joke that some people got, although most Nigerians seem none too pleased about it.
In closing, keep an eye on how Nigerians are portrayed and note that while it's fine to show someone from a country as being bad, you also need to show others from that country as being good as those are usually the people that are the biggest part of a society.
Ubiquitous in production across Central and West Africa (as well as other regions of the world), palm oil has been lubing and frying things around the world for a couple of centuries now. It is such a cheap oil in a world sense that it can be found just about everywhere. Of course, the debate rages on as to whether it is healthy or not, can be a sustainable agricultural product or not, or can be used for biofuels... or not.
I have no interest in getting in to that, but since my family has started producing a very small amount of olive oil just recently, I've gone cuckoo for oil different oil production methods. I'm sure that some videos exist showing palm oil production in full, but the BBC has a nice photo montage showing the preparation process on the local scale in Nigeria from picking to pressing.
Oh, as a small note, it was interesting to read in that Wikipedia article I linked to above that, much as is the case with olive oil, the unrefined palm oil is much healthier than the refined. Something to keep in mind the next time you're making sambusas, one of my personal favorite snack foods, although I often make a meal out of them.
Google is nothing if not resourceful in creating new resources. Two days ago, those crafty buggers announced a very large expansion of search languages for their African portal pages. From the site, the rundown was:
Ethiopia got Tigrinya, Oromo and Somali
Nigeria got Yoruba and Hausa
Ghana got Hausa
DR Congo got Lingala
Congo got Lingala
Rwanda got Kinyarwanda
Burundi got Kirundi
This is good news for those who don't necessarily speak the already established Google search languages of English, French, and Swahili that they offer in some capacity to these countries. Naturally, it doesn't solve the issues of connectivity to just get on the internet, but it is definitely something good and I'm pleased to see it. This should of course be no shock to anyone given that when not blogging, I'm busy working to get as many languages as possible running for Maneno.
The biggest thing to me about this announcement from Google is the fact that it was all done by volunteers. This may at first seem quite cheeky given that Google has literally billions of dollars (yes, Dr. Evil would be proud) and they could quite easily pay folks to create these translations. I at first was a bit taken aback by this seemingly crappy way to save a buck, but then, I thought about how it is to run a multi-lingual operation. Yes, you can hire someone to work on it fulltime if there is the need and the money to pay them, but this is more of a piece of occasional work here and there. Plus, you get in to dialectical issues. While I've heard that Tanzanian Kiswahili is said to be better than Kenyan, who am I (pretend I'm someone with an O in my title at Google when I say this) to know the difference? I'm not. So... how do I choose the "one" person to create the translation.
There really are strength in numbers when it comes to these things and instead of having one, single voice that might be wrong for some people, you can potentially get a group to compromise on something that generally works for everyone. Yes, okay, they're "crowdsourcing" the translations, but I have a bit of trouble with this word as it's overused these day and often stops short of the true gravity of a project. While there are groups (maybe not crowds) of people working to create these translations, it doesn't stop there. They are creating a community of their language on the web. And I admit that this is another one of the things that Maneno is trying to do in that we know, as does Google, that there needs to be more content out there in African languages, and it takes a group to make that happen.
In closing, I just want to add that if anyone out there who worked on these Google pieces would like to volunteer their time to work on the Maneno language matrix (it's maybe two hours of work), we'd love to have an Amharic, Akan, Hausa, Lingala, and/or Yoruba version available. I'm just saying!
Back in October, when I was at Barcamp Africa, I was quite surprised at how many Google staff were there who had a vested interest in Africa. I had kind of forgotten about this until an article on White African prodded me toward remembrance me of it. Google has recently released SMS service for Ghana and Nigeria, which is good stuff for folks. They obviously have a long way to go and I'll be interested to see how they handle mapping requests since maps of African countries are a wee bit sparse on Google at the moment and the exact number addresses we're used to in the US and Europe aren't used in the same manner in a lot of places.
It was then that I went back and checked out the main Google Africa Blog and saw that they are indeed keeping it up to date with some good content. Admittedly, this is all Google-related stuff, but still it's news about Africa and what Google is doing there to stimulate (and of course ultimately monetize) the exchange of data within the populations on the African continent. I've added it to my Netvibes just to be a bit better at keeping up to date on everything.
It is interesting to see Google's approach to multi-lingual blog entries wherein they just stick the English and French version of each post directly in to one post. While immediately accessible, it won't fare too well for more than two languages as each post will get very long and unwieldy. I have to say that I am going to blow my own horn and say that I think Maneno's approach is quite a bit better and this is before we release a number of changes that are going to make it even more better, or at least I think so. I'm sure this will be a short-lived triumph as Google will undoubtedly make their system much, much better in short order if it is deemed worthwhile.
Oh, and do yourself a favor and install the font for Ethiopic languages. It makes viewing things a lot friendlier.
I came across mention of Mohammed Bello Abubakar before. This is a Muslim Nigerian fellow with 86 wives. Naturally the question arises as to why anyone would want to have that many wives, but who am I to judge.
Word has come down the he must choose only four. Yes, that's right, he has to really back it up and have just four ladies. If he doesn't comply with this, he's going to be put to death.
I see two outcomes for this. Seeing as how he's 84, he could very just go with the death option. That would probably be my choice. The other choice would be to sell this to an broadcasting company to make some kind of American Idol show where we go through an elimination system. I see the title now, Wife Hunt: Nigeria. You know it would spawn massive ratings as well as subsequent seasons. I can even see the reunion show now:
"Wife 37, how did it make you feel to be eliminated in just the first round?"
"Well, Carson, I was sad at first, but because I didn't have any children, I eventually found my way in to a home where there were only eight wives. It was really a step up for me."
"So, everyone was a winner?"
"Yes, yes, Carson, I'd have to say that everyone was a winner."
"Dear god I love doing my part to save Africa."
