Tag: africa

Learning to Speak Lingerie

Valentine’s Day is one of the few times of the year when most China Star customers are male. Usually, it’s only women in the shop, and often they buy the lightweight, form-fitting dresses that Chinese dealers refer to as suiyi, or “casual clothes.” No Upper Egyptian woman would wear such garments in public, but it’s acceptable at home. This is one reason that the market for clothing is so profitable: Egyptian women need 2 separate wardrobes, for their public and their private lives. Usually, they also acquire a 3rd line of clothing, which is designed to be sexy. The 2 women in niqabs quickly found 2 items that the sheikh approved of: matching sets of thongs and skimpy, transparent nightgowns, 1 in red and the other in blue. The sheikh began to bargain with Chen Yaying, who runs the shop with her husband, Liu Jun. In Egypt, they go by the names Kiki and John, and both are tiny—Kiki barely reached the sheikh’s chest. She’s 24 years old but could pass for a bookish teen-ager; she wears rectangular glasses and a loose ponytail. “This is Chinese!” she said, in heavily accented Arabic, holding up the garments. “Good quality!” She dropped the total price to 160 pounds, a little more than $20, but the sheikh offered 150.

Prison football

Within the prison there are 10 football clubs, some of them almost 20 years old, each with their own players, boards and constitutions. Alongside Moses’s old team Aston Villa, there is Liverpool and Manchester United, Everton and Chelsea, Arsenal and Newcastle United

Power Bank phone

You couldn’t be further out of touch with your “iphone”. Uhe interesting developments aren’t going to happen in the places pundits obsess about.

1 thing that quickly became clear when I spoke to people is that the number 1 reason they bought the phone is to use it as a power bank. Ghana is currently experiencing a severe power crisis — city-wide blackouts of 36 hours or more have become the norm in the capital, and a brisk business has grown around selling power banks, which are small portable rechargeable batteries that can be used to charge small electronics such as MP3 players and, yes, phones.

Boko Haram

Mike Smith’s Boko Haram: Inside Nigeria’s Unholy War is a brilliant attempt to fill this void. It is the first comprehensive book to be written about Boko Haram and offers an excellent anatomy of the group, its emergence, its activities and the havoc it has wrought on the lives of Nigerians. The book also unpacks the dysfunctional nature of President Goodluck Jonathan’s regime. The current president’s predecessors are not spared either – nor is the country’s colonial past, the legacy of which is, in part, to blame for the fractured society from which Boko Haram emerged.

Ebola

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rushed to complete a computer program it had been developing to track outbreaks; the program needed to be translated into French so it could be used in Guinea. The C.D.C. also dispatched a team, which grew to more than 12 and was led by Rollin, who arrived in Guinea on March 30. Some 3000 biohazard suits were flown in. Experts and volunteers poured in from the World Health Organization and the Red Cross.

The international health community doesn’t seem to have strong internet technologies, and wastes too much time forwarding shit to each other. In the US, there are too many dumb laws like HIPPA to make rational systems possible, but surely that’s not the case around the world?

Without additional interventions or changes in community behavior, CDC estimates that by January 20, 2015, there will be a total of ~1.4M Ebola cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone

It’s not looking good, between the rock (hard to get around, poor communications, not enough trained workers) and the hard place (religious practices that require touching the dead).
2015-05-11: That sounds like movie-plot science but is apparently real.

When he was released from Emory University Hospital in October after a long, brutal fight with Ebola that nearly ended his life, Dr. Ian Crozier’s medical team thought he was cured. But less than 2 months later, he was back at the hospital with fading sight, intense pain and soaring pressure in his left eye. Test results were chilling: The inside of Dr. Crozier’s eye was teeming with Ebola.

2015-08-13: There’s now a Ebola vaccine, which is great news. Let’s hope there’s never an outbreak in southern California with all the anti vaxxers there.

The outbreak of Ebola fever in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which has killed more than 11K people, has dropped out of the news as it has been brought under control. Although new cases are now measured in 10s, rather than 100s, a week, the disease has not been stamped out—and a new epidemic could flare up somewhere else at any time. A vaccine against the virus responsible would be of enormous value. And a paper in the Lancet suggests one is now available.

See also

Ebola is no longer an incurable horror disease. The new vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, was used in the last outbreak in the Republic of Congo. It protected over 90K. Health responders deployed it in social rings: firstly those in contact with known cases, then their contacts. It’s the same strategy used against smallpox 40 years ago. And that was wiped out.

2019-08-12:

Amid unrelenting chaos and violence, scientists and doctors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been running a clinical trial of new drugs to try to combat a year-long Ebola outbreak. On Monday, the trial’s cosponsors at the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health announced that 2 of the experimental treatments appear to dramatically boost survival rates.

Robot enforcers


In Kinshasa, traffic congestion is a serious problem. Few drivers bother to obey signs, lights, or even human traffic directors. It was a snarled free-for-all. Until the robots showed up. Isaie Therese designed and built 2 2.5m, classic Robbie the Robot-style automatons to take over traffic-directing duties, and the plan is working.

this will be interesting to watch as the novelty wears off and the robot overlord has to smash a few things for “encouragement”

Homophobic Africa

Human rights in many parts of Africa are sadly stuck in the savage stage.

Uganda’s parliament has passed a bill to toughen the punishment for homosexual acts to include life imprisonment in some cases.

the backlash is in the most primitive countries in the world, a side effect of global media.

Yet there are still parts of the world where it is not safe to be homosexual. Extra-judicial beatings and murders are depressingly common in much of Africa and in some Muslim countries. African gangs subject lesbians to “corrective rape”. In some countries persecution has intensified. Chad is poised to ban gay sex. Nigeria and Uganda have passed draconian anti-gay laws (though a court recently struck Uganda’s down). Russia and a few other countries have barred the “promotion” of homosexuality.

This is partly a reaction to the spread of gay rights in the West. Thanks to globalisation, people who live in places where everyone agrees that homosexuality is an abomination can now see pictures of gay-pride parades in Sydney or men marrying men in Massachusetts. They find this shocking.

This is why you can’t have nice things, africa. What is it with Africa and this sort of stuff? It is hard to see how the continent can go anywhere with the medieval times still going strong in the 21th century.

A Zimbabwean senator named Morgan Femai from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change has given a bizarre, misogynist speech at an African HIV/AIDS conference in which he proposes that his county’s AIDS health emergency can be solved by mandating that women must be ugly and unbathed, and be subject to genital mutilation.