Away from Africa

Photo courtesy of Suzanne Lehn Boukary Konaté , 1977 (?) - September 2017 He left us much too soon. Around early 2009, as I was still new on Twitter, I looked for Africa-centric communities and found  Global Voices , and then Claire Ulrich , Anna Gueye , and finally Boukary Konaté  from Bamako, Mali. We became quite friendly - albeit online - and I admired his desire to further his own education as well as promote and safeguard Malian culture, and bring the internet to rural areas. A group of his online friends, led by First World Music 's Akenataa Hammagaadji, in New York, sent him a solar backpack for that purpose. Boukary was a teacher in a Bamako high school. He wrote one of the rare blogs in Bambara, in fact one of the rare blogs in any African language in general: Fasokan . The blog won a Bobs (Best of the Blogs) award in 2012. In 2014, he created a blog and Facebook page called " Quand le Village se réveille " (When the village awakes), that showcased t...

Thanks to the professional social networking platform, LinkedIn, I connected with Joël Roux, General Director of CFAO Technology Cameroon. Later, during a stay in Douala, I had the pleasure of meeting him in person. Many of us wonder about the information technology and especially web access capacity of Sub-Saharan Africa. A while back, I wrote about IBM in Africa but was still searching for more in-depth information. Mr. Roux kindly accepted my request for an interview. Of course, he, also, is bound by his organization's confidentiality clauses, but he offered some additional insight. Joël Roux in his Douala office First of all, what is CFAO and its history? Formerly known as SCOA, the company was founded in 1881 in St. Louis, Senegal. It used to be a trading company  between Africa and France. It was renamed CFAO in 1887. In the meantime the company grew to be a multinational conglomerate represented in 34 African countries, 7 French overseas territories, Vietnam and ...

These past months, I read five novels, all written in the last ten years by African women from different English-speaking countries/regions. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf Doubleday, 2013) Ghana Must Go  by Taiye Selasi (New York Penguin Press, 2013) Behold the Dreamers  by Imbolo Mbue (Penguin Random House, 2016) Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (Penguin Random House, 2016) The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) They were all interesting and engrossing, and cover a large swath of issues, especially the relationship between Africa and the United States of America (more directly in three of the novels).     Americanah and Ghana Must Go both feature protagonists who live and/or have lived in the United States and in their African home country, in the United States for a long enough time to have enjoyed American success stories. Americanah describes especially well the tensions in the relationships: betw...

Professor Mark DeLancey Mark Dike DeLancey is an Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Director of the Islamic World Studies Program at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois (USA). He wrote an article within the Cameroon chapter of a soon-to-be-published book about African Architecture (DOM Editions), which is how I heard of him (I had written and compiled information for the chapter). As I got to know him via Facebook, I became curious about his background, as he appeared to have extensive ties to Africa in general and Cameroon in particular, beyond his academic specialty. Dr. DeLancey was born in South Carolina, USA. His family moved to Cameroon when he was two years old, in 1975. Both mother and father were Professors of African Studies; as Dr. DeLancey recounts it: “They became interested in Africa as a result of being stationed in Buguma for 2 years with the Peace Corps.”   Sir B.M Okororie with  Virgi...