Picking up the pen again… an ongoing adventure in Africa

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.