I'm not happy. No, the bed at this hotel in Bamako was great last night, as well as the pool, and the breakfast. No complaints there and in fact, beyond the bus and transportation situation, I've been enjoying Mali a great deal. It's this article written by Belgian journalist, Franz-Stefan Gady, about the looming threat of a "Cyber Weapon of Mass Destruction" as "Darkest Africa" gets online that has fouled my mood.

To be short, blunt, and honest, this article is bullshit. I'm a Croatian national and so I've been following the accession of Croatia in to the EU with a good deal of attention seeing that it could happen in January of next year. As this possibility gets closer, the xenophobic news gets greater as news articles focus on everything bad about Croatia (and let's not even talk about Turkey's possible accession--ooooh scary developed Muslim country...) People are scared of change and scared of outsiders, especially those writing for some sections of certain British journalism outfits. As has been the case historically, it's much the same for Africa.

I mean, there are so many generalizations in this ridiculous article that I really don't want to waste time addressing each one. It's obvious that the author read some extremely general statistics of African internet penetration and computer usage to concoct this broad stroke, op-ed representation of a lurking, unseen threat from the "Heart of Darkness". Honestly, it sounds a lot like the same things said about AIDS and Africa.

But, let's just mention a few things. First of all, while there is a lot of old equipment looming around, there is also a lot of new equipment. The Africans I know aren't stupid when it comes to electronics. They know what a good operating system is, what a good browser is, and especially what a good phone is. They upgrade things whenever possible. Sure, there are a number of internet cafes who have old, crap machines lying around, but this is also the case in a great wealth of cafes outside of Africa.

On another note, technology in Africa has the tendency to leapfrog the feeble, dragging steps that plague the "developed" nations. For instance, the Orange internet connections throughout all of Mali are via WiMax. "Huh, what's WiMax?" many a DSL or cable internet user in North America would ask. It works great here and it bypasses the need for painstaking land connection deployment. I see it taking off in a great many African countries over time. It's going to be 5 years or more before we see this deployed properly in the US. So, on that note, I think that Africans have more to fear from older technology outside their continent than the rest of the world fearing Africa. It would be ironic if at some point in the near future, Nigeria had to block IP addresses from the United States.

I think that the biggest and most glaring issue with this article is that if one is to assume that there are unpatched, susceptible machines in Africa, won't access to faster internet allow them to download the patches needed to fix the issue? Won't faster access to information allow people to find out more about the threats to their machines? Won't faster access allow Africans to most likely undercut the inflated web development rates earned by those in places like Silicon Valley which means that scare tactics will need to be used in sloppy journalism pieces to keep them from being part of this economy. Oh, wait.

Overall just a bad article and something that should never had been published. If you want to talk about the real Cyber WMD, I see it on two fronts. The first is in Apple computers which, have lulled their users in to a false sense of security with their machines. Some day a virus will come along that will spread like wildfire when Macs are vulnerable to it. And this will happen. It's just a matter of time. The other front is the smartphone. Dear lord, there is no security on them whatsoever and as they get more and more connected to the net, the threat index goes up exponentially. Gady ("eumerican"), instead of pointing fingers at a continent which I wonder if you've ever set foot upon, how about looking in your pocket instead...

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.