Hello everyone,
After a hiatus of about a year and a half, I have started feeling the urge to blog again. As some of you know, I have been working in three African countries — Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana, since the start of 2014. I started learning and absorbing all manner of interesting ideas, concepts, and folklore from the very beginning, and I suppose I could have started blogging from the outset, but for some reason I held back. Lots of people write about Africa and what goes on here, and I didn’t feel qualified or informed enough to do anything but add to the noise. But after half a year of being here, I am starting to feel like I do have something to say. The reality on the ground here is a lot more nuanced that reading international news sources would have you believe, and I’d like to give you all a view of
- How things are on the ground here, as compared to how they are written about
- How the same events you read about are perceived by people who live here, and finally
- How the context for what happens here is framed by a history that is far richer than the post-colonial vacuum that most international news analysts have trouble seeing past
As before, I’m not interested in creating another business/politics/history blog. There lots of excellent examples of these out there already. I just want to give a personal narrative of my adventures here and what I have discovered as a result.
Talk to you all soon.
wonderful! i’m looking forward to the views — what you see and how you see it.
write write and send it over!!! back in germany we see everything with different eyes – and could not agree more about your comment, “a history that is far richer than the post-colonial vacuum that most international news analysts have trouble seeing past” – the west still gets morally bribed by that colonial complex we seem to have just as well…. many regards! uta