Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Copyright Newsweek

…Denis Dutton, an art professor in New Zealand, has proposed a bold new explanation. He argues that humankind’s universal interest in art is the result of human evolution. We enjoy sex, grasp facial expressions, understand logic and spontaneously acquire language—all of which make it easier for us to survive and produce children. In “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution,” Dutton contends that an interest in art belongs on this list of evolutionary adaptations.

In making his case, Dutton has to refute the late Stephen Jay Gould’s argument that human culture is a socially formed byproduct of our large brains. Dutton easily overcomes this argument by pointing out how many “byproducts”—such as a spoken language—have given humans a huge evolutionary gain. But he must still explain why an interest in art gives us an edge. This is no easy task. Just because many people have a trait does not mean that it confers an evolutionary advantage. I like the Boston Red Sox, but I doubt that preference was genetically passed on to my children. (Happily, they became Sox fans anyway.)

Drawing on Charles Darwin’s second great book, “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,” Dutton argues that art, like broad shoulders in a man and a narrow waist in a woman, facilitates seduction. We tell stories, sing songs, invent tales, recount jokes and draw pictures in order to find a mate and, having found one, produce children. We value art because, Dutton claims, it may be made of rare and valuable materials and require much skill to produce. People value wealth and skill in choosing a mate. We can add to Dutton’s argument the fact that when 3-month-old infants are shown pictures of women who had been rated by adults as either attractive or unattractive, the babies looked much longer at the attractive ones.

This is a stimulating but not entirely satisfactory argument. Some forms of art may have evolutionary explanations that do not involve sexual selection, and some forms of beauty may not be linked to art at all. Take music: we can imagine men and women singing to one another for sexual reasons, but we can also imagine music being used to induce sleep, energize an army, or identify friends and enemies.

Or painting: zoologist Desmond Morris and others have encouraged chimpanzees to paint. Some of their works were hung in museums, without being labeled as the work of chimps, and they received much acclaim. Did these animals paint to lure sexual partners? It seems unlikely. Likewise, the cave paintings done 30 millennia ago probably had no connection with romance (many were done in remote parts of caves in which no one lived) and may have been produced by shamans for religious purposes…

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Posted at 2:07 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Newsweek

…Denis Dutton, an art professor in New Zealand, has proposed a bold new explanation. He argues that humankind’s universal interest in art is the result of human evolution. We enjoy sex, grasp facial expressions, understand logic and spontaneously acquire language—all of which make it easier for us to survive and produce children. In “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution,” Dutton contends that an interest in art belongs on this list of evolutionary adaptations.

In making his case, Dutton has to refute the late Stephen Jay Gould’s argument that human culture is a socially formed byproduct of our large brains. Dutton easily overcomes this argument by pointing out how many “byproducts”—such as a spoken language—have given humans a huge evolutionary gain. But he must still explain why an interest in art gives us an edge. This is no easy task. Just because many people have a trait does not mean that it confers an evolutionary advantage. I like the Boston Red Sox, but I doubt that preference was genetically passed on to my children. (Happily, they became Sox fans anyway.)

Drawing on Charles Darwin’s second great book, “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,” Dutton argues that art, like broad shoulders in a man and a narrow waist in a woman, facilitates seduction. We tell stories, sing songs, invent tales, recount jokes and draw pictures in order to find a mate and, having found one, produce children. We value art because, Dutton claims, it may be made of rare and valuable materials and require much skill to produce. People value wealth and skill in choosing a mate. We can add to Dutton’s argument the fact that when 3-month-old infants are shown pictures of women who had been rated by adults as either attractive or unattractive, the babies looked much longer at the attractive ones.

This is a stimulating but not entirely satisfactory argument. Some forms of art may have evolutionary explanations that do not involve sexual selection, and some forms of beauty may not be linked to art at all. Take music: we can imagine men and women singing to one another for sexual reasons, but we can also imagine music being used to induce sleep, energize an army, or identify friends and enemies.

Or painting: zoologist Desmond Morris and others have encouraged chimpanzees to paint. Some of their works were hung in museums, without being labeled as the work of chimps, and they received much acclaim. Did these animals paint to lure sexual partners? It seems unlikely. Likewise, the cave paintings done 30 millennia ago probably had no connection with romance (many were done in remote parts of caves in which no one lived) and may have been produced by shamans for religious purposes…

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Posted at 2:07 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

…In the 1980s Japan accomplished its century-long goal of “catching up with the west”. It has groped unsuccessfully ever since for what to do for an encore. It sent the economy into overdrive to accomplish the other part of that Meiji-era slogan, which was not only to catch up with but to “overtake the west”. That produced an economic bubble and subsequent “lost decade”, a period that came to an end after Mr Koizumi became prime minister in 2001.

But his success in pursuing a reform agenda came in the face of intense resistance from within his own party and was more a consequence of his personal popularity than a result of any public enthusiasm for a more liberal economy. Once he left office, traditional forces that had been knocked down but not knocked out recovered a lot of ground. The result has been a succession of inept leaders and the absence of a coherent policy agenda.

It would be comforting to think that this is all part of a Schumpeterian process of creative destruction. But since Mr Koizumi’s 2006 departure, it has been a process without creativity. There will be more destruction, perhaps including the demise of both the LDP and DPJ and the formation of new parties. Whatever the political goings-on, there is no optimistic short-term scenario for Japan…

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Copyright Gawker

Japan’s finance minister resigned over this video of him sleeping and slurring at a G-7 meeting in Rome. If he was drunk, he wouldn’t be the first to buckle under economic stress.

The minister, for the record, denies being intoxicated. He blamed his behavior on fatigue and a cocktail of medications. Either way, the intense pressure of trying to rescue a national economy from a global financial meltdown got to Shoichi Nakagawa somehow.

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Posted at 10:19 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Books of The Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
February 16, 2009

Barely pages into Emmanuel Jal’s fast-paced memoir about growing up amid modern African warfare, the reader is brought up short by the following sentence: “There was peace in Sudan for the first three years of my life, but I cannot remember it.”

WAR CHILD

A Child Soldier’s Story

By Emmanuel Jal with Megan Lloyd Davies

262 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $24.95.
***

It is the first of many stark, declarative statements about a human condition of cruelty and wretchedness that afflicts the lives of countless young people in distant African lands, people whose stories we are unaccustomed to hearing.

Mr. Jal’s tale, of a lengthy and devastating civil war between northern and southern Sudan (not the conflict in Darfur, more familiar to readers today), begins in the mid-1980s when he is somewhere around the age of 7 — though he is not altogether sure because he inhabits a world where time is marked by seasons, including one for hunger, rather than calendars.

At the very outset we are introduced to the boy’s family as they move southward through their country in a convoy of trucks from an area controlled by “African Arabs” to their own ethnic heartland, inhabited by “pure Africans,” in the book’s somewhat overly reductive language of ethnicity.

Four Arab men with angry eyes speak among themselves about a rebellion brewing in the country. It will fail, and the pure Africans who seek to revolt “will remain slaves beneath us just as they are meant to be,” one vows.

Moments later, a fight breaks out when the Arabs steal the meager rations of Emmanuel’s family; after they begin to beat his uncle, the boy throws himself onto one of the men’s ankles and bites it.

The scene ends with a fadeout to unconsciousness. Thus started, time rushes past in this recollected tale of appalling violence, “like sand,” in the words of the narrator, “running through my fingers as I look back.”

The attack in the truck marks Emmanuel’s loss of innocence, and with it is born a burning hatred for Arabs that will drive his behavior, often with tragic consequences, through most of the story.

Emmanuel is taken by his mother from one village to the next in the south, each time under the pretext that the new destination will be safer. There is little respite, though, as Sudan’s relentless army, bent on ethnic cleansing, unfailingly closes in and attacks anew.

At one early stop the boy learns that his father has absented himself from the family to undergo officer training in the rebel southerners’ Sudan People’s Liberation Army (S.P.L.A.).

In quick succession the young boy witnesses the rape of an aunt and then is separated permanently from his mother amid another army onslaught. At the next way station he is taken in with scores of other children who are told they are being moved to Ethiopia to go to school. But once there, he is told he must join the southerners’ rebellion as a fighter. It is his father’s will, the boy is told.

For good measure, an elder intones, “The gun does not know who is old or young.” Emmanuel, for the record, is 9.

Despite these grim contours, the story sometimes has the cloying feel of a fairy tale. This, perhaps, is a risk of the “as told to” genre. Mr. Jal, who received little schooling until well into his teens, after he was rescued by an aid worker, immigrated to England and eventually became a successful musician. His co-writer is Megan Lloyd Davies.

The writing is usually sturdy, and in a middle section that relates a long death march through the south it even rises to an urgency that recalls Jerzy Kozinski’s novel “The Painted Bird.” Elsewhere, though, it sometimes feels dreamily like Technicolor when color would do, and admits insufficient room for reflection on many themes, notably fear and hatred.

Some of the book’s most interesting observations seem almost inadvertent, depriving the reader of context that is important to understanding this conflict, and African conflicts in general. From Biafra to Rwanda, and now Darfur itself, the West has a long tradition of reducing them to good-versus-evil stories bereft not just of nuance but also of politics, history and complexity.

There is no gainsaying Mr. Jal’s experience of terror, but amid his frequent loathing for Arabs the book provides only a glimpse of the geopolitics of the war, with Ethiopia hosting hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees near their common border and allowing rebels to train on its territory.

In one recollection, the young Emmanuel, at the time he thinks he is being sent to school, astutely wonders why the Western aid workers are “nowhere to be found except in food lines or the hospital.” A few pages later he says that “while the khawajas” — a local expression for whites — “thought they ran the camp, it was the S.P.L.A. who were really in charge.”

These words amount to a provocative challenge to the myth of the beneficent and powerful Western humanitarian worker whose impact is thought exclusively good. Too often in African conflicts these workers’ presence has amounted to unacknowledged collusion.

Mr. Jal’s narrative makes another important point, but again almost incidentally. As horrible as civil conflicts are, often their collateral damage is worse. After lusting for vengeance against the Arabs, the boys’ first “battle” is a murderous raid against an Ethiopian village. The next combat is against the Ethiopian state, whose army evicts the rebels.

“War Child” ends with its least compelling material, a made-for-Hollywood account of how Mr. Jal succeeds as a antiwar musician, playing concerts around the world and toasted by the likes of Peter Gabriel. “I’m still a soldier,” he writes, “fighting with my pen and paper, for peace till the day I cease.”

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Posted at 9:44 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Economist

WHEN Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, came to power in 1986 after a long bush war, he promised a sea change for his landlocked country: peace and security for all, democracy, prosperity and frugal governance. He made a point, then, of lambasting the “pathetic spectacle” of rotten African leaders flying to summits in executive jets. In 2001 he promised to serve only the two terms provided for by the constitution. In 2005 he reneged by changing the constitution so he could serve a third term. He is likely to run again in 2011, and win.

Judged by his original promises, Mr Museveni has been a failure. The north of the country, terrorised by the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has been a blood-spattered mess for two decades—and still awaits a real peace. Democracy has been corroded by the army’s continuing power, as well as by Mr Museveni’s refusal to relinquish office. The economy is stumbling. Frugality has been trumped by corruption.

A million-plus people, most of them resentful Acholis, still live in squalid camps in the north. The monstrous ragtag militias that drove them out of their villages are still at large; a recent military campaign against the LRA in neighbouring Congo has been indecisive. Troops from Uganda, Congo and South Sudan, backed by Ugandan air raids and American intelligence, hammered the LRA’s camps towards the end of last year. But, like mercury, the LRA fighters slipped away through the jungle in several directions, burning villages, butchering hundreds of civilians and kidnapping children to slave for it. The UN’s head of humanitarian affairs, Sir John Holmes, says the campaign’s result was “catastrophic”. The war goes bloodily on.

In the capital, Kampala, you see tell-tale signs of a country struggling to keep up. In contrast to Ethiopia, another regime run by former guerrillas, Uganda has a colourful abundance of mobile phones and banks; its economy has grown steadily in recent years. But the government’s hopes that it would grow this year by 9% look fanciful; the real rate may be closer to 4%. Uganda’s tax authorities say they are unlikely to meet targets because businesses are flagging. The country is struggling to attract foreign money. Investors often complain that Ugandans are not skilled or hard-working enough. Many of the country’s chief executive officers are brought in from Kenya.

Though Mr Museveni is more interested in cows than Bentleys, pilfering by officials has damaged his standing at home and abroad. Western aid-givers say they have lost patience yet continue to pay for a third of Uganda’s budget. Mr Museveni is said to have incensed the IMF by buying a new Gulfstream V executive jet to replace his existing Gulfstream just after the fund agreed to its latest debt-relief package.

Uganda should benefit from recent oil finds in Lake Albert, but many worry that its government may spend too much of the cash on the armed forces. That would fit a pattern of indulging the men with guns. Uganda’s army is one of Africa’s strongest. The police have tripled in size to 40,000 in recent years; the president keeps them sweet by giving recruits paramilitary training, heavy weapons included.

In the longer term, Mr Museveni has ambitions to turn the East African Community (EAC), which includes Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda as well as his own country, into a single-currency trading zone. He has rejected the efforts of the African Union’s new year-long chairman, Muammar Qaddafi, an old ally, to move towards what the Libyan leader describes as a “United States of Africa”. That would, perhaps, overshadow his own ambition of becoming the EAC’s first president.

Yet while Mr Museveni plots his future, he is oddly blasé about other challenges. He has made no effort to groom a successor from within his ruling National Resistance Movement, leaving his wife and son as front-runners. He conflates population growth with market growth. The percentage of Ugandans in poverty remains above one-third, so absolute numbers have risen. The relatively few Ugandans in paid employment are under strain. The fecundity of the land, with its plentiful harvests, may take the edge off political protest for now. But Uganda is drifting, even as its population has grown from 15m when Mr Museveni took office to 31m today.

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Copyright The Guardian

• Jiangsu residents say they were offered 1,000 yuan to answer ‘correctly’
• Pupils given day off school to memorise replies

Thursday 12 February 2009 17.05 GMT

It was an approval rate that any government would covet. The Qidong district in Jiangsu scored 94.8% in a telephone poll of residents by the province’s bureau of statistics.

But the result reflected more than the rising standard of living. Local officials had “brazenly rigged” the survey by ordering citizens to give set answers and offering them money to comply, a state broadcaster has revealed.

Cadres issued a leaflet outlining replies to 10 questions, and handed out up to 1,000 yuan (£103) for answering “correctly” – and even gave pupils the day off school so they could memorise the answers and prompt their parents during the poll, according to China National Radio.

It said it had documented similar practices across several parts of Nantong city and accused officials of turning a serious attempt to garner public opinion into a farce.

Though the revelations have prompted sardonic amusement among listeners, they also offer an illuminating insight into the notorious unreliability of official statistics – and the difficulties that central authorities often have in determining what happens at a local level.

The province-wide survey was intended to measure progress in meeting Jiangsu’s targets for improving prosperity. Areas require 60% public approval to reach the required standard.

But one resident told the station: “The whole thing was faked.”

According to villagers, officials issued them with leaflets containing 10 questions and standard replies during meetings and in home visits, threatening and cajoling them into using them.

Rural residents were ordered to claim that their annual net income was 8,500 yuan – far above the true figure, they said – while city dwellers were told to declare a 16,000 yuan income.

All were told to say they had social insurance and to express satisfaction with their residences, roads and environment.

The Qidong city party secretary, Sun Jianhua, told the radio station that there was no exaggeration and the survey reflected the views of a random sample of residents.

A city government official said: “There is nothing like the media have reported.

“The office in charge of the event has been disbanded so I cannot find someone to respond, but I believe it has been a misunderstanding. Our residents are not very well-educated so we have to explain [matters] to them.”

The residents are not the first in Jiangsu to express satisfaction after intensive coaching. The Nanjing Morning Post reported recently that Shiqiao, a town in Nanjing city, received a 96% rating after residents were issued with 16 answers and promised 2,000 yuan for repeating them.

One section read: “Question: If you were to measure happiness on a 100-point scale, how many points would you give yourself? Answer: Between 90 and 100.”

Village officials were told to guarantee that households under their watch supplied the standard answers, and were warned they would lose a cash deposit and even their jobs if something went wrong.

But around 100 poorer residents who had planned to comply with the scheme for the sake of the cash were foiled when their phones stopped working.

“We realised that this wasn’t a problem with our phones: someone was worried that we’d say something bad during a survey call,” one told the paper.

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Copyright The Financial Times

Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, this week told the FT it was “ridiculous” to criticise China for saving too much. If the US, UK and other westerners were foolish enough to hawk their future by spending unearned money, they need look no further than the mirror.

One can sympathise with that view even if economics dictates that China’s saving habit had to be balanced by excess spending somewhere else. Yet rather than assigning blame – although that is always fun – it is important to grasp that China and the rest of Asia cannot continue along the same road. Americans are too broke to resume their role as Asia’s demand engine.

To see why, look at US personal consumption, which hovered around 67 per cent of gross domestic product in the last quarter of the 20th century. That was already high by the standards of the previous 25 years. But from 2000 to 2008, it shot up again to an unprecedented 72 per cent. That trend has now gone into painful reverse. As Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, notes wryly: “We are already all the way down to 71 per cent.” In other words, it will be a very long time before Americans are again filling up their shopping carts.

Asians must either make less stuff and spend more time cutting each other’s hair, or they must buy more themselves. Either way, households will have to increase spending. But things have been going in the wrong direction. Assumptions about the region’s swelling middle class notwithstanding, consumption as a proportion of a fast-rising GDP has been falling – and swiftly at that.

In 1980, 65 per cent of output of developing Asia was accounted for by consumption. Today it is about 47 per cent. The main reaction to the Asia crisis of 1997-98, when economies’ vulnerability to financial flows was exposed, was to build up exports. In doing so, Asia has swapped one kind of dependence for another.

Economists have started to put forward a battery of policies to rebalance growth. Sensibly, top of the list is to string up a better social safety net so that households indulge less in precautionary saving to see them through sickness and old age. Other suggested measures include ending subsidies that encourage exports and manufacturing at the expense of services; attacking monopolies that penalise consumers; and allowing currencies to appreciate.

Something more basic is rarely mentioned. What can be done to put more money in workers’ pockets? All over Asia, workers’ pay has lagged behind growth. With less disposable income, it is hardly surprising that consumption has slumped.

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Posted at 9:40 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New Yorker

China Doubles Down in Africa

Will a weak economy dampen Beijing’s appetite for further investment in Africa? Don’t count on it. “Some developed Western countries hit by the financial crisis are reducing their investment in Africa. Objectively, this is a powerful opportunity for Chinese businesses to expand their investment and market share in Africa,” Cui Yongqian, a former Chinese ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic, told a China-Africa trade forum this month.

Indeed, Africa is a high-return investment for China. So far, the political cost has been bearable (see Sudan note below), and China has continued to win reliable friends in the United Nations, not to mention its well-documented pipeline of resources. Though China’s ties to Africa are sometimes overstated by political conservatives in Washington, its sponsorship and support has emerged as no less important to the continent than that of the United States. As if to confirm Cui’s prediction of deeper ties, China, on Wednesday, announced that President Hu Jintao will leave next week for a major Africa-and-Middle-East trip, with stops in Mali, Senegal, Tanzania, Mauritius, and Saudi Arabia. Though he is not visiting Sudan on this swing, Reuters points out that he also reiterated his support for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, despite the growing prospect of an arrest warrant issued against him for genocide.

“China is willing to make joint efforts with Sudan to carry on their traditional friendship, boost pragmatic cooperation and push friendly cooperation to a new high,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted Hu as telling Sudan President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

In July, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court asked judges to issue an arrest warrant for Bashir, accusing him of orchestrating genocide in Darfur where international experts say fighting has killed two hundred thousand people.

China has said a war crimes indictment against Bashir would have a “disastrous” impact on the Darfur conflict and has called for the case to be postponed.

Hu, who sent the message to Bashir to mark the anniversary of establishing diplomatic ties, did not mention the war crimes case specifically.

These are some of the reasons that the former New York Times Shanghai bureau chief Howard French includes two books on Africa in his list of must-read China titles for a new American President preparing for a state visit to Beijing. Helping Obama set a wise course on China is a popular project these days; watch this space for more on that tomorrow.

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Posted at 3:00 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The China Beat

Recommendations by Howard French:

Africa’s World War, by Gerard Prunier
Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, by Nicholas Shaxson

Why two books that are nominally about Africa for a conversation about China? Because unheralded though it is, Africa will be the great economic and political frontier of the next quarter century, and China, which has understood this far better than the United States and Europe, is building an immense lead in terms of its relations with the continent.

The first book paints a compelling picture of how badly wrong the U.S. has gotten Africa policy since the Clinton Administration, reaping death and destruction through reckless policies in Central Africa, and helping create the big openings China enjoys today.

The second book explains the pitfalls of the African oil sector, which has been America’s principal draw to the continent, and could help reinvent policies in ways that help African countries to use their very real wealth for development.

China: Fragile Superpower, by Susan L. Shirk
China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, by David Shambaugh

Neither Obama nor any of his top advisors seem to have any deep history of involvement with China. Shirk and Shambaugh’s books are as good a primer on the way the country’s politics work as any I’ve seen recently, and would be a very solid starting point for understanding the country.

Struggling Giant, China in the 21st Century, by Kerry Brown

In the same vein of advice, this slim volume provides a very good feel for the upside potential of China as a fast-rising world power, but also of just how creaky the whole enterprise remains.

Beijing Coma, by Ma Jian
The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up, by Liao Yiwu

When the “other half” amounts to 650-800 million people, depending on who is doing the counting, it pays to have a sense for how they live. Ma Jian, the novelist, and Liao Yiwu, the New Journalist, will place you firmly in their midst, and give you some real and unforgettable people’s history along the way.

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Posted at 10:12 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

Jeanne McManus is wondering if she should get more coffee or just slug down the lukewarm sludge at the bottom of her cup.

Jeanne is glad that January is over and now wants February out of here, too.

Jeanne has not updated her profile, her photo, her wardrobe or her hairdo in many, many months.

Stop me. Please. If I can’t stand reading about the banalities of my own daily life, why would anyone else want to? And yet the air is filled with blogging, social-network chitchat and, even worse, Twittering. In bursts of 140 characters or less, armed with nothing more than an electronic device, I can Twitter. I can provide to you, in staccato pulse, a real-time, first-person narration on an incredibly important topic: What I’m Doing Now.

Is it just me or isn’t it a bit presumptuous to think that if I’m scrambling an egg, you’ll want to know about it?

Maybe if my life were more interesting or if I were a movie star or a professional athlete, my networking and Twittering would make for more interesting reading. (Jeanne, Henry Kissinger, Amy Winehouse and Russ Grimm are now friends.) But a long time ago I gave up on the blog musings of Washington Wizard Gilbert Arenas. Hibachi! Sorry, but I don’t want to hear about how you got a bad case of athlete’s foot or learn the details of your knee being drained.

And now the whirlwind life of a newly elected, handsome and charismatic U.S. senator from Virginia is deemed Twitter-worthy. Mark Warner pollinates his constituents — or anyone else who wants to tune in — with the details of his exciting first few weeks of 2009. Consider this gem from Jan. 12: Hosting a roundtable discussion on the economy with students and business leaders at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond.

On the one hand, an elected official wants to communicate with the people who elected him. Good. But how much substance can be conveyed and what kind of meaningful dialogue can be provoked in a mere 140 characters, all likely to be void of context? (Jeanne has measured out her life with coffee spoons. Huh?)

And of Twitterers in general, would it be too existential to ask: Which comes first? The Twitter or life itself? Are we writing about what we’re doing or are we writing about what we’re going to do or are we doing it because we need something to write about? (Jeanne is hacking the last of the ice off the driveway with her right hand and writing this with her left.)

Or are we writing because otherwise no one is paying attention to us? (Jeanne wonders if Twittering increases or decreases the need for group therapy.) And if we’re writing so much jibber-jabber all the time, are we also thinking, creating, introspecting, contemplating, meditating, dreaming or imagining? Composing quatrains or drafting the next Voting Rights Act? What has happened to our minds?

Technology — computers, cellphones, PDAs — has given us the tools to overcommunicate a lot of uninteresting stuff. Just because we have these tools, do we need to yammer and hammer unrelentingly?

Jeanne’s scrambled eggs are ready.

Jeanne McManus, a former Post editor, is an occasional contributor to the op-ed page.

Posted at 3:20 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

…Parts of Africa, we agree, between mouthfuls of tagliolini, have begun to turn the corner. It is not that poverty has been falling in any way fast enough to merit champagne (she settles for a glass of chardonnay and I order rosé), nor that its causes and symptoms have shown signs of going away. But as China and other emerging powers have competed for opportunities and resources overlooked by former colonial powers, the price for the commodities on which many African economies depend began to rise. In turn this revitalised the interest of European and American investors. Africa – or parts of it – was looking like the last great frontier market, and private capital from across the world started responding – albeit in amounts that only scratched the continent’s needs.

There is, also, a hopeful generation of younger Africans, Moyo among them, who straddle many worlds – Kenyans call them “Afropolitans.” Some of them have seized the opportunity to become intermediaries, harnessing both foreign and local capital and putting it to productive use.

All this has begun to provide African countries with financing alternatives to what Moyo sees as the deadening inefficiency of money-for-nothing western aid. “Africa has new trading partners. It doesn’t have to grovel to the west,” she says, bluntly.

Her book contains a damning assessment of the failures of 60 years of western development programmes, but also focuses on an alternative path. This blends micro-finance and changes to property laws with a grasp of the immense opportunity and freedom that shifting global trade patterns, Chinese investment in infrastructure and bond markets could represent for Africa.

“There has been more private capital coming into Africa; more African countries have been issuing bonds. There are the Chinese … Africa has turned a corner. Now it’s about closing the deal,” she insists with characteristic optimism and a slice of Parma ham, delivered as an amuse-gueule between courses.

Even so, despite hopes that many African economies are better-prepared to weather this global recession than recessions past, recent signs have hardly been encouraging. Mines are closing, markets crashing and foreign money has been reversing out. Even the Chinese, whose appetite for African resources and markets seemed set on accelerating auto-pilot, are slowing down. The most cynical theory I’ve come across in London is that the exuberance about Africa last year was itself the surest warning that investors had overshot the mark and the great global bubble was about to burst.

I suggest to Moyo that it is hardly realistic at this point for African governments to tell their foreign donors to get lost, and go courting international bond markets – a key component of the world without aid that Moyo outlines in Dead Aid.

She is unfazed, her belief in the ultimate power of free markets apparently unshaken by the prevailing gloom. I’m also stirred from darkening thoughts by the arrival of the second course – I chose John Dory, one of the more outlandish-looking fish in British waters. It comes with “a thyme chicken reduction”, which sounds like a discount but must, on reflection, have been a stock or a sauce (there was certainly no sign of a discount – the bill was equal to the per capita gross domestic product of Congo). She has the line-caught sea bass, with white beans, spiced tomato sauce and chipirones.

Moyo’s optimism is counterintuitive and starts with the credit crisis itself – “a great opportunity for Africa,” she says. Yes, there are real and worrying problems emerging, she agrees, and she has just returned from Zambia, where state revenues have been hit by the collapsing price of copper, the country’s main export…”

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A Glimpse of the World is a hirefrank production using Moveable Type and Gallery with XHTML and CSS. Design consulting by pixelflexmedia.

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