[african writing and new media]

(live blogged)

2 presentations on african new media writing

first up - Nur Yaryare of the Sommali Afro European Media Project

• SAEMP an online community TV station based in Leicester
• currently piloting the broadcasting of a number of prerecorded channels
• programmes that are presented range in social health, education, faith, local events, news etc...
• see www.saemp.org.uk
• tackles image of arabs are terrorists with the online site and the paper newsletter
• see www.saemp.org.uk/videos.php for videos and podcasts

2nd up - Anieti Isong, current phd student with Prof. Sue Thomas as supervisor. He is a novelist and his first book is to be published this year

• see youtube video on kenya - big differences since the use of mobile phones (see kenya's mobile revolution - part 1)
  
• huge technological leaps happening in kenya including paying for items using mobile 'phones - "using phones as wallets"
• what is african writing -goes back to Chinua Achebe who published Things Fall Apart in 1958, father of modern african literature
• there was the Heinemann African Writers series started in 1962
• then wole soyinka awarded nobel prize in 1986
• emerging african writers liks helon habila, chimamanda, helen oyeyemi, pettina gappah, mary watson, toly ogunlesi, brian chikwava, afolabi, binyavanga wainaina, monica nyeko, chika unigwe
• these writers are willing to experiment: homosexuality, crime, take risks
• some journals - eclectica, open wide, author-me, story south, g21, in posse review
• but now african online journals - african writing online, farafina, african writers, new gong, kwani, sentinel, chimurenga
• key issues: how has the internet influed writing and what do the readers make of this?
• the reach for online stories is global - everywhere there is an internet connection
• see great video poem about nigerian going back home after studying in england - cifeozo, "homecoming"
• blogs as form of storytelling - Diary of a Randy Man: "I woke up in the middle of the night to discover the duvet on the floor. she was lying on her side facing me, her nightie had opened..."
• Confusednaijagirl - deals with child abuse
  

[south african president fires deputy health minister who actually made a difference]

Former deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, an amazing, genuine, and driven person seems to be (or actually, was) one of the few forward-thinking and proactive people in politics in S.A. right now (certainly neither the the health minister nor Thabo Mbeki fall into either of these categories).

Madlala-Routledge put into place and fully supported a radical aids/hiv treatment plan in S.A. which enabled sick people (free!) access to treatment. Now, with the "health" minister in charge (known as "Dr. Beetroot" because she champions beetroot in the fight against aids) numbers of suffers will surely rise beyond the already epidemic proportions and not only because she sees antiretroviral medicine as poison. I'm stunned and dismayed that the South African president would cut off his and the country's line of hope and positive action in the aids fight.


Read the excellent Independent article A President in Denial, a Ravaged Nation Denied Hope which features Madlala-Routledge's own response.



For an idea of the idiocy that Madlala-Routledge has been up against take a look at this crazy response which supports Mbeki's move (if only because the former deputy health minister has an "unnecessarily complicated name" and that she's a woman!)







NB I met Nozizwe on a trip to South Africa a couple of years ago but knowing her only makes it more explicit for me how wrong Mbeki's move is.