Africa

NYT: In Mauritania, lobsters vanished years ago. The catch of octopus — now the most valuable species — is four-fifths of what it should be if it were not overexploited. A 2002 report by the European Commission found that the most marketable fish species off the coast of Senegal were close to collapse — essentially sliding toward extinction. “The sea is being emptied,” said Moctar Ba, a consultant who once led scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa. In…

Reuters: DAKAR (Reuters) – As it steams down the West African coast, the USS Fort McHenry faces one of its toughest battles: to convince skeptical Africans their continent can benefit from more U.S. military involvement. The 600-foot (185-metre) ship, which saw combat in the first Gulf War, is embarking on a six-month mission to train West African navies to fight drug smuggling and maritime security threats in a region which supplies nearly a fifth of U.S. oil imports, rivaling the…

LAT: ASMARA, Eritrea — This struggling, low-profile nation is doing something virtually unheard of in Africa. It’s turning down foreign aid. With a president who vows not to lead another “spoon-fed” African country “enslaved” by international donors, Eritrea, a small, secretive nation on the Horn of Africa, has walked away from more than $200 million in aid in the last year alone, including food from the United Nations, development loans from the World Bank and grants from international charities to…

Canoe.ca New Pornographers battle Internet leaks on their own terms July 30 2007 “Personally, I don’t have a huge problem with leaks, I’m of the belief that if people get your record for free but they come to your show and buy a T-shirt or whatever, well, it’s the same difference. You’re not really losing much money. It’s better than them not taking the record for free and not coming to your show,” [New Pornographers singer/guitarist/songwriter Carl] Newman says during…

There’s a fantastic piece in today’s Times about the sad, sorry state of universities in Africa, and particularly, Senegal: Africa’s best universities, the grand institutions that educated a revolutionary generation of nation builders and statesmen, doctors and engineers, writers and intellectuals, are collapsing. It is partly a self-inflicted crisis of mismanagement and neglect, but it is also a result of international development policies that for decades have favored basic education over higher learning even as a population explosion propels more…

Dan says: Sometimes I get so caught up in Rosso that I start to think Rosso is Mauritania. What I’m trying to say is, sometimes I think the rest of Mauritania is just like Rosso. That, of course, is completely false. Rosso is the San Diego/Tijuana of West Africa. Unlike the rest of Arab Mauritania, the population here is predominantly black (Pulaar, Wolof). No matter what happens in Rosso, authority always comes from an Arab guy in Nouakchott. Therefore, somethings…

I just uploaded a bunch more pictures to my Flickr account. Go check ’em out. This one here is my name written in chalk on the wall next to my old bedroom door at UGB. I’m amazed that it’s survived five years.

* In 2002, I wrote my name in chalk on the wall outside my dorm room door at the Université Gaston Berger. In 2007, I confirmed that it’s still there. * Saint-Louis is basically the same as I remember it. There are some minor changes, as in walls where they didn’t used to be. The gas station where we used to buy cheap Spanish wine-in-a-box is now totally gone, as are many of the fruit sellers on the mainland side…

Slate: Scratch a KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski enthusiast and he’ll insist that everybody who reads the master’s books understands from context that not everything in them is to be taken literally. This is a bold claim, as KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s work draws its power from the fantastic and presumably true stories he collects from places few of us will ever visit and few news organization have the resources to re-report and confirm. If KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski regularly mashes up the observed (journalism) with the imagined (fiction), how…

BBC: Poland’s most celebrated journalist and non-fiction writer, Ryszard Kapuscinski, has died in Warsaw, aged 74, after a heart operation. I first discovered Kapuscinski after being given a copy of The Shadow of the Sun by my good friends Alan Wiig and Brynna Jacobson shortly before I embarked on my first voyage to Senegal in 2002. His depictions of West Africa resonated with me and my experience 50 years after he wrote them. While I’m hardly an expert on Africa,…