Away from Africa

Julius Essoka After a couple of years on Twitter, I started following--or did he follow me? I don't remember!--@JuliusEssoka, who seemed to be living in Douala, Cameroon, and who was up at all hours, as he'd answer my tweets when it was late evening in New York, but in the wee hours of the night in Cameroon! When I returned to Cameroon in January, I hoped to meet him. He braved the ridiculous traffic jams that are now a mainstay in Douala, to come visit us in our Deido neighborhood. Julius Essoka works for MTN, in communications, by day. By night he is a talented musician. I brought back his CDs and mailed them to another African Twitter friend, Akenaata Hammagaadji, who has a weekly African music program: First World Music  on  @ WVKR . Of course, first I listened to the CDs, and really liked some of the songs. I can't label them--some are Makossa-style, some reminiscent of African-jazzy House Music: it's quite a mix of styles. I interviewed him via email to f...

Display at R.W. King, Douala One of the first stops I made while in Douala was to buy pagne , African fabric, at R.W. King. Since a couple of years, women's clothing made with pagne is popping up in Saks Fifth Avenue and other upscale retailers' ads, at corresponding prices, in the many hundreds of dollars: Suno and Edun ; in France, Toubab Paris .* In Edun's case, it certainly helps that a celebrity ( Bono ) and his spouse, Ali Hewson--are behind it. These trademarks have one thing in common: non-African founders, which is sad, as the same thing happens in all design fields, and often not only for Africans, but all "developing" countries: if the designer is African (or Indian, or even Chinese), she/he is ignored by major Western media or trade representatives (retailers, galleries). On the other hand, when finally Africa joins the rest of the economically wealthy world, and I am convinced the day will come, this will become b...

On Friday and mostly on Saturday, April 13-14, 2012, Columbia University's School of International Policy held the 9th Annual African Economic Forum.   Nick Tattersall,  Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University, introduced t he first keynote speaker:  Sanusi Lamido Sanusi  , Governor of Nigeria's Central Bank. Mr. Sanusi hails from Northern Nigeria; on Wikipedia , he is called "Mallam" (" learned " or "teacher," from the Arabic language), as he is also an Islamic scholar---probably a rarity in the banking world! He spoke softly (a little too softly for some of us, as the microphones were not working too well on the first day of the Forum) and couched his words carefully; however, his goals for Africa in general, and Nigeria in particular were quite clear: self-sufficiency leading to prosperity, and independence from foreign economic interests. I cannot, of course, provide here the full sp...