Posts Tagged ‘Africa’
Apocalypse Africa: Made in America
Secret recordings. Once classified films. Hidden documents. From in side the archives of the United States government comes a story of racism and manipulation that reveals how the actions of a nation ultimately brought about the collapse of a continent: Africa.
It took the deaths of six million Jews before we finally said, “never again.” Yet, with at least twenty million Africans killed so far, due to wars in Darfur, Uganda, Rwanda and many, many more, the body count continues to rise.
With powerfully haunting images, this controversial new film exposes the story of Africa’s collapse and will fill you with an intense passion for the importance of human life.
“There is blood on America’s hands.”
- Randall Robinson, Former Director of TransAfrica
Will prudence help Ethiopia face the credit crisis?
Story from BBC NEWS:
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7651009.stm
With the financial turmoil affecting many of the world’s economies, Elizabeth Blunt in Addis Ababa considers how Ethiopia and other parts of Africa may escape the worst of the credit crisis.
The other evening I came home from the bakers with a couple of very small loaves of bread.My gatekeeper looked at them with disdain. The standard one birr (12 cents; 7p) loaf, once enough for two people’s breakfasts, has shrunk to the size of a large roll.
Ayele shrugged and mimed holding the bread up to the light, the way Ethiopian shopkeepers do with eggs, to check that they are fresh. Not just small, you can also see right through them.
This year Ethiopians have been left in no doubt, that their economy, once sealed in communist isolation, is now part of the world system.
The huge rise in world food prices was felt here straight away, just as it was across the whole of Africa.
Even the donkeys based at the builder’s yard a couple of streets away from my house have their own link to the world economy.
They plod up and down my lane looking positively biblical, but the cement they carry is a globally traded commodity.
The construction boom in Asia has driven up the price of cement and steel and oil, with dramatic effects for Ethiopia which has been haemorrhaging foreign exchange just to keep its economy moving.
For countries like Ethiopia, the current easing of the oil price is a great relief. If the world does go into a slump and the price of commodities drops, then Africa will have its winners as well as its losers.
Stormy future
Oil producers like Nigeria have been awash with oil money.
The former finance minister who begged and pleaded to be allowed to squirrel away some of this windfall for a rainy day was shouted down at the time with pleas that “the rainy day is now”.
But she is no longer finance minister, and Nigeria, along with Africa’s other oil producers, may now find itself facing increasingly stormy weather.
Over the past few years, Ethiopia has been having something of a boom of its own, and Addis Ababa is littered with building sites.
But a lot of these ambitious construction projects seem to have got stuck halfway. Some may have run out of cement, but others, even more of them, have probably run out of money.
Debit not credit
What Africa does not have – and what may now protect it from the worst of the crash – is easy credit.
No sign here of the junk mail that used to come pouring through my letterbox in London, begging me to borrow and offering to let me spend money I did not have.
My bank here would only let me open a savings account.
No chequebook, no overdraft, and although it boasted of having the first Visa cards in Ethiopia, they are strictly debit, not credit cards, and businesses are very wary about accepting them.
There is no stock exchange here, so businesses have to get bank loans, but procedures are old-fashioned, credit is tight and interest rates high.
Right across Africa, funds for lending are usually generated within the country, so the banks have little exposure to international money markets.
There are no mortgages for home-buyers in Ethiopia, for instance, although this is a growing sector in the countries which have the most modern and liberalised banking systems, such as Kenya, Botswana and South Africa, but sub-prime borrowers have not been welcome.
Banks usually demand a big down payment – 20% or 25% – limiting the market to a small segment of the middle class.
Saving societies
All this old-fashioned prudence means most people have to manage without formal credit.
All over Africa, getting your own house demands tenacity and creativity.
A young colleague here in Addis Ababa is a member of a savings club, with friends he has known since they were at school together.Each ones puts in so much a month, and each in turn gets to take the pot. That could be enough to pay for a wedding, for instance, or for furniture for a home, but not the house itself.
His older sister, though, is on her way to getting a house, through what is – in the real sense of the term – a building society.
She is a member of an association which has got a plot of land from the government and is developing it jointly.
In all of this, the only money coming in from outside that is a significant flow in most African countries might be remittances from workers overseas.
And it is one source of funds which might be hit by a recession. But the full impact is only likely to be felt at the highest level.
Ethiopian Airlines, for instance, one of the continent’s biggest carriers, is planning to renew its domestic fleet, and to borrow on the international markets to raise some of the money. That could get harder or more expensive.
And although it is very new, a few African governments are beginning to look beyond getting money through taxation or foreign aid and are starting to issue sovereign bonds.
Ghana was one of the pioneers, and their issue did fairly well. Now, experts here say Kenya has plans for a $300m (£171m) bond issue, but that may now prove too ambitious in the new world economic climate.
Jeffrey Sachs, An Interview – End Poverty
Rise of colonial African cities kick-started AIDS pandemic: scientists
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/10/01/aids.html
Photo of Kinshasa, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, circa 1883-1885, shortly after its founding. The growth of Kinshasa and other cities in the region may have been crucial to the emergence of HIV/AIDS, according to research published in the journal Nature. (The Royal Museum for Central Africa)
The growth of cities in colonial west-central Africa at the turn of the 20th century set the stage for the modern AIDS pandemic decades earlier than first thought, according to new viral archeology research.
The most pervasive strain of HIV began spreading among humans between 1884 and 1924 — earlier than the previous estimate of 1930 — coinciding with the rise of urban centres, says a group of international scientists.
“The founding and growth of colonial administrative and trading centres such as Kinshasa [in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] may have enabled the region to become the epicentre of the HIV/AIDS pandemic,” the authors write in Wednesday’s journal Nature.
The lead author, University of Arizona biologist Michael Worobey, and his colleagues came to the conclusion after discovering the world’s second-oldest genetic sequence of HIV-1 group M, the strain responsible for more than 95 per cent of HIV infections around the world.
The scientists recovered a 48-year-old HIV gene fragment from a wax-embedded lymph-node tissue biopsy from a woman who lived in Kinshasa. They compared it with the oldest known HIV genetic sequence from a 1959 blood sample from a man, also from Kinshasa.
Both viruses existed around 1900
Examining the same genetic region in the 1959 virus and the 1960 virus, they found significant differences. Because of the time it take for the virus to evolve and diversify, that means the common ancestor of both viruses existed around 1900.
Previous research shows that HIV spread to humans from chimps in southeastern Cameroon, about 700 kilometres away from Kinshasa. The virus most likely jumped to humans as a result of their exposure to the blood of chimps butchered for bushmeat.
An accompanying commentary in Nature suggests HIV likely traveled down rivers from Cameroon leading into Belgian-controlled Leopoldville, now called Kinshasa.
Leopoldville, the largest population centre in the region in the early 1900s, was the perfect incubator, say the commentators from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
“…As there must have been many opportunities for such transmission over past millennia, why did the AIDS pandemic not occur until the twentieth century?
“The answer may be that, for an AIDS epidemic to get kick-started, HIV-1 needs to be seeded in a large population centre.”
