‘“For example. In the Literature paper you complain that Yeats and Eliot... ‘in their later phases opted for the cold certainties that can work only outside the messiness of life. They prudently repaired to the artifice of eternity, etc. etc.’ This then gives you a grand-sounding line on the ‘faked inhumanity’ of the seduction of the typist in The Waste Land – a point you owe to W. W. Clarke – which, it seems, is just a bit too messy all of a sudden. Again, in the Criticism paper you jeer at Lawrence's ‘unreal sexual grandiosity’, using Middleton Murry on Women in Love, also without acknowledgement. In the very next line you scold his ‘overfacile equation of art and life.’”

He sighed. “On Blake you seem quite happy to paraphrase the ‘Fearful Symmetry’ stuff about ‘autonomous verbal constructs, necessarily unconnected with life’, but in your Essay paper you come on all excited about the ‘urgency… with which Blake educates and refines our emotions, side-stepping the props and splints of artifice’. Ever tried side-stepping a splint, by the way? Or educating someone urgently, for that matter?

“Donne is okay one minute because of his ‘emotional courage’, the way he seems to ‘stretch out his emotions in the very fabric of the verse’, and not okay the next because you detect... what is it you detect? – ah yes, a ‘meretricious exaltation of verbal play over real feeling, tailoring his emotion to suit his metrics’. Now which is it to be? I really wouldn’t carp, but these remarks come from the paragraph and are about the same stanza.

“I won’t go on... Literature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can’t just use it...ruthlessly, for your own ends...”

‘Now I s’pose I wait for them to summon me to sign some contracts and then I’m working with the editor. Can’t remember if I told you, but besides changing the title, he wants me to change a few scenes he thought too Bond-like. If they’re really going to stick me with this new title, I’m thinking of proposing ‘An Enemy of War’ instead. Even so, it’s quite forgettable.

Trying to take it easy now and celebrate but mind is mostly racing miles ahead of me. Luckily, I’ve already started the second book...

All the Best,

Quentin’

‘Have you tried Adam Diment? or James Dark (Don’t think that was his real name, but his spy is named Mark Hood). I’ve found them both pretty enjoyable, though a little light-weight. One thing I’ve found in my research is that there really aren’t that many American spy novelists who are any good. Perhaps only Charles McCarry. Though I suppose there are good American thriller writers, their prose is usually slightly awful. Take Robert Ludlum, for example.’

‘With a shout, he delivered a kick to the blond woman’s chest, knocking her back. The blow was meant to cause serious damage, but it landed too far to the left of the sternal vital-point target. Number One was momentarily surprised that she didn’t fall, but he immediately drove his fist into her abdomen. That was his first mistake – mixing his fighting styles. He’d been using a mixture of karate and traditional Western boxing, whereas the female had picked a system and stuck with it. He kept on, though, lunging away, and smelling her stinking Je Reviens perfume, but he knew these sensations were only a dream. In reality they were floating in a skiff down the Seine, listening to a tinny phonograph record of a girl singing in French. How beautifully the girl sang, how the river smelled of the flowers that turned its torpid waters into perfume, how much like his own mind and voice were the mind and voice of this chanteuse! It was uncanny.

Someone seized his lower lip and twisted. The pain changed his idea of where he was. His right eye focused, briefly, and he glimpsed the blond woman’s eyes. She was on top of him now, thrusting her forearm into Number One’s neck, exerting tremendous pressure on his larynx. With his right hand, the American fumbled in his pants pocket, attempting to get at his insurance policy. The blond managed to elbow him in the ribs, but this only served to increase his determination. She managed to get her hands around the man’s neck, but it was too late; Number One deftly retrieved the twenty-ounce Mk 2 “pineapple” fragmentation grenade from his trousers and pulled the pin.

She dived through the compartment door and fell to the floor in the hallway. Afterward, the assassin known as Snow Queen thought that she remembered the flash of the explosion lighting the flat face of the American spy and the blast lifting his thick black hair so that it stood on end. The noise was a long time coming. Before she heard the explosion, like the snap of a heavy howitzer, she saw the whole body of the train car swell like a balloon full of water. The glass blew out and the compartment door cut through the rest of the car like a great black knife.

Concussion sent blood gushing out of her broken nose. She could hear nothing except a high ringing in her ears. All around her, mouths opened in noiseless screams of terror. She lay where she was with her eyes open.

In a few hours a policeman wearing a lacquered French helmet liner leaned over her and spoke. The blond woman pointed to her ears and said, “I’m deaf.” She heard nothing of her own voice but felt its movement over her tongue. The policeman pulled her to her feet and led her out of the debris. She would have been killed by the fire truck that roared up behind them if the Frenchman had not pulled her out of the way.’

‘With a shout, he leapt in the air and delivered a Yobi-geri kick to Bond’s chest, knocking him back. The blow was meant to cause serious damage, but it landed too far to the left of the sternal vital point target. Michaels was momentarily surprised that Bond didn’t fall, but he immediately drove his fist into Bond’s abdomen. That was the assassin’s first mistake – mixing his fighting styles. He was using a mixture of karate, kung fu, and traditional Western boxing. Bond believed in using whatever worked, but he practiced hand-to-hand combat in the same way that he gambled. He picked a system and stuck with it.

By lunging at Bond’s stomach, the man had left himself wide open, enabling Bond to backhand him to the ground. Giving him no time to think, Bond sprang on top of him and punched him hard in the face, but Michaels used his strength to roll Bond over onto his back, and, thrusting his forearm into Bond’s neck, exerted tremendous pressure on 007′s larynx once again. With his other hand, the young man fumbled with Bond’s waterproof holster, attempting to get at the gun. Bond managed to elbow his assailant in the ribs, but this only served to increase his aggression. Bond got his hands around the man’s neck, but it was too late. Michaels deftly retrieved the Walther PPK 7.65mm from the holster and jumped to his feet.

“All right, freeze!” he shouted at Bond, standing over him, the gun aimed at his forehead…’

‘Patchen kept hearing Maria Rothchild’s voice and smelling the smoke from her stinking Gauloises Bleues cigarettes, but he knew these sensations were only a dream. In reality he was floating in a sampan on the River of Perfumes, listening to a tinny phonograph record of a girl singing in Vietnamese. Vo Rau translated the lyrics: “She says that God is the smallest thing in the universe, so small that he cannot be imagined; he does not wish to be imagined, so he fills the sky with the stars that are his uncountable thoughts and we look not at the place where he is, but at the places where he has never been.” Patchen nodded sagaciously; this much of the truth he had already perceived. How beautifully the girl sang, how the river smelled of the flowers that turned its torpid waters into perfume, how much like his own mind and voice were the mind and voice of Vo Rau! It was uncanny.

Someone seized Patchen’s lower lip and twisted. The pain changed his idea of where he was. Maria Rothchild said, “Wake up, David.” His right eye focused, briefly, and he glimpsed Maria’s face.’

‘Afterward, he thought that he remembered the flash of the explosion lighting the flat face of the Chinese boy and the blast lifting the boy’s thick black hair so that it stood on end. The noise was a long time coming. Before he heard the explosion, like the slap of a heavy howitzer, he saw the whole body of the car swell like a balloon full of water. The glass blew out and one door cut through the crowd like a great black knife.

Concussion sent blood gushing out of his nose. He could hear nothing except a high ringing in his ears. All around him, mouths opened in noiseless screams of terror. He lay where he was with his eyes open.

In a few moments a policeman wearing a lacquered American helmet liner leaned over him and spoke. Christopher pointed to his ears and said, “I’m deaf.” He heard nothing of his own voice but felt its movement over his tongue. The policeman pulled him to his feet and led him toward the end of the street. He would have been killed by the fire truck that roared up behind them if the policeman had not pulled him out of the way.’

One of McDonald’s most divisive products, the McRib, made its return last week. For three decades, the sandwich has come in and out of existence, popping up in certain regional markets for short promotions, then retreating underground to its porky lair—only to be revived once again for reasons never made entirely clear. Each time it rolls out nationwide, people must again consider this strange and elusive product, whose unique form sets it deep in the Uncanny Valley—and exactly why its existence is so fleeting.

The McRib was introduced in 1982—1981 according to some sources—and was created by McDonald’s former executive chef Rene Arend, the same man who invented the Chicken McNugget. Reconstituted, vaguely anatomically-shaped meat was something of a specialty for Arend, it seems. And though the sandwich is made of pork shoulder and/or reconstituted pork offal slurry, it is pressed into patties that only sort of resemble a seven-year-old’s rendering of what he had at Tony Roma’s with his granny last weekend.

These patties sit in warm tubs of barbecue sauce before an order comes up on those little screens that look nearly impossible to read, at which point it is placed on a six-inch sesame seed roll and topped with pickle chips and inexpertly chopped white onion. In addition to being the outfit's only long-running seasonal special and the only pork-centric non-breakfast item at maybe any American fast food chain, the McRib is also McDonald’s only oblong offering, which is curious, too—McDonald’s can make food into whatever shape it wants: squares, nuggets, flurries! Why bother creating the need for a new kind of bun?

The physical attributes of the sandwich only add to the visceral revulsion some have to the product—the same product that others will drive hundreds of miles to savor. But many people, myself included, believe that all these things—the actual presumably entirely organic matter that goes into making the McRib—are somewhat secondary to the McRib’s existence. This is where we enter the land of conjectures, conspiracy theories and dark, ribby murmurings. The McRib's unique aspects and impermanence, many of us believe, make it seem a likely candidate for being a sort of arbitrage strategy on McDonald's part. Calling a fast food sandwich an arbitrage strategy is perhaps a bit of a reach—but consider how massive the chain's market influence is, and it becomes a bit more reasonable.

Arbitrage is a risk-free way of making money by exploiting the difference between the price of a given good on two different markets—it’s the proverbial free lunch you were told doesn’t exist. In this equation, the undervalued good in question is hog meat, and McDonald’s exploits the value differential between pork’s cash price on the commodities market and in the Quick-Service Restaurant market. If you ignore the fact that this is, by definition, not arbitrage because the McRib is a value-added product, and that there is risk all over the place, this can lead to some interesting conclusions. (If you don’t want to do something so reckless, then stop here.)

The theory that the McRib’s elusiveness is a direct result of the vagaries of the cash price for hog meat in the States is simple: in this thinking, the product is only introduced when pork prices are low enough to ensure McDonald’s can turn a profit on the product. The theory is especially convincing given the McRib's status as the only non-breakfast fast food pork item: why wouldn't there be a pork sandwich in every chain, if it were profitable?

Fast food involves both hideously violent economies of scale and sad, sad end users who volunteer to be taken advantage of. What makes the McRib different from this everyday horror is that a) McDonald’s is huge to the point that it’s more useful to think of it as a company trading in commodities than it is to think of it as a chain of restaurants b) it is made of pork, which makes it a unique product in the QSR world and c) it is only available sometimes, but refuses to go away entirely.

If you can demonstrate that McDonald’s only introduces the sandwich when pork prices are lower than usual, then you’re but a couple logical steps from concluding that McDonald’s is essentially exploiting a market imbalance between what normal food producers are willing to pay for hog meat at certain times of the year, and what Americans are willing to pay for it once it is processed, molded into illogically anatomical shapes, and slathered in HFCS-rich BBQ sauce.

The McRib was, at least in part, born out of the brute force that McDonald’s is capable of exerting on commodities markets. According to this history of the sandwich, Chef Arend created the McRib because McDonald’s simply could not find enough chickens to turn into the McNuggets for which their franchises were clamoring. Chef Arend invented something so popular that his employer could not even find the raw materials to produce it, because it was so popular. “There wasn’t a system to supply enough chicken,” he told Maxim. Well, Chef Arend had recently been to the Carolinas, and was so inspired by the pulled pork barbecue in the Low Country that he decided to create a pork sandwich for McDonald’s to placate the frustrated franchisees.

But the McRib might not have existed were it not for McDonald’s stunning efficiency at turning animals into products you want to buy.

As McDonald's grows, its demand for commodities also grows ever more voracious. Last year, Time profiled McDonald’s current head chef, Daniel Coudreaut (I know what you’re thinking: two Frenchmen have been Executive Chef at McDonald’s? But no, Chef Coudreaut is American, while Chef Arend is a Luxembourger), whose crowning achievement so far has been turning a Big Mac into a burrito. In his test kitchen, we learn, a sign hangs that reads “It’s Not Real Until It’s Real in the Restaurants,” reminding chefs and cooks that their creations, no matter how tasty and portable they may be, must be scalable—above all else.

When the Time reporter visited the kitchen, Chef Coudreaut was cooking a dish that involved celery root—a fresh-tasting root that chefs love for making purees in the fall and winter. Chef Coudreaut proves to be quite a talented cook, but Time notes that “there is literally not enough celery root grown in the world for it to survive on the menu at McDonald’s—although the company could change that since its menu decisions quickly become global agricultural concerns.”

(Want to make enemies quickly? Tell this to the woman at the farmer’s market admiring the rainbow chard. Then remind her to blanch the stems a few minutes longer than the leaves—they’re quite tough!)

Now, take a look at this sloppy chart I’ve taken the liberty of making. The blue line is the price of hogs in America over the last decade, and the black lines represent approximate times when McDonald’s has reintroduced the McRib, nationwide or taken it on an almost-nationwide “Farewell Tour” (McD’s has been promising to get rid of the product for years now).

Key: 1. November 2005 Farewell Tour; 2. November 2006 Farewell Tour II; 3. Late October 2007 Farewell Tour III; 4. October 2008 Reintroduction; 5. November 2010 Reintroduction.

The chart does not include pork prices leading into the current reintroduction of the McRib, but it does show it on a steep downward trend from August to September. Prices for October, 2011 hogs have not been posted yet, but I suspect they will go lower than September—pork prices tend to peak in August, and decline through November. McDonalds, at least in recent years, has only introduced the sandwich right during this fall price decline (indeed, there is even a phenomenon called the Pork Cycle, which economists have used to explain the regular dips in the price of livestock, especially pigs. In fact, in a 1991 paper on the topic by Jean-Paul Chavas and Matthew Holt, the economists fret that “if a predictable price cycle exists, then producers responding in a countercyclical fashion could earn larger than ‘normal’ profits over time... because predictable price movements would... influence production decisions.” At the same time, they note that this behavior would eventually stabilize the price, wiping out the pork cycle in the process).

Looking further back into pork price history, we can see some interesting trends that corroborate with some McRib history. When McDonald’s first introduced the product, they kept it nationwide until 1985, citing poor sales numbers as the reason for removing it from the menu. Between 1982 and 1985 pork prices were significantly lower than prices in 1981 and 1986, when pork would reach highs of $17 per pound; during the product’s first run, pork prices were fluctuating between roughly $9 and $13 per pound—until they spiked around when McDonald’s got rid of it. Take a look at 30 years of pork prices here and see for yourself. Also note that sharp dip in 1994—McDonald’s reintroduced the sandwich that year, too. Though notably, they didn’t do so in 1998.

(I’m sure all the sharp little David Humes among us are now chomping at the bit—and you’re right to do so! This proves nothing. It is just correlation—and the sandwich doesn’t always appear when pork prices are low. In fact, the recent data could prove that McDonald’s actually drives pork prices artificially high in the summers before introducing the sandwich—look at 2009’s flat summer prices. Could that be, in part, because there was no McRib? On the other hand, food prices were flat across the board in 2009 so probably not. So, no, this correlation proves nothing, but it is noteworthy.)

Because we don’t know the buying patterns—some sources say McDonald's likely locked in their pork purchases in advance, while others say that McRib announcements can move lean hog futures up in price, which would suggest that buying continues for some time—and we can’t seem to agree on what the McRib is made of—some sources say pork shoulder, others say a slurry of offal—it’s hard to really make any real conclusions here.

The one thing we can say, knowing what we know about the scale of the business, is that McDonald’s would be wise to only introduce the sandwich (MSRP: $2.99) when the pork climate is favorable. With McDonald’s buying millions of pounds of the stuff, a 20 cent dip in the per pound price could make all the difference in the world. McDonald’s has to keep the price of the McRib somewhat constant because it is a product, not a sandwich, and McDonald’s is a supply chain, not a chain of restaurants. Unlike a normal restaurant (or even a small chain), which has flexibility with pricing and can respond to upticks in the price of commodities by passing these costs down to the consumer, McDonald’s has to offer the same exact product for roughly the same price all over the nation: their products must be both standardized and cheap.

Back in 2002, McDonald's was buying 1 billion pounds of beef a year. (As of last year, they were buying 800 million pounds for the U.S. alone.) A billion pounds of beef a year is 83.3 million pounds a month. If the price of beef is abnormally high or low by 10 cents a pound, that represents an $8.3 million swing (which McDonald’s likely hedges with futures contracts on something like beef, which they need year-round, so they can lock in a price, but this secondary market is subject to fluctuations too).

At this volume, and with the impermanence of the sandwich, it only makes sense for McDonald’s to treat the sandwich as a sort of arbitrage strategy: at both ends of the product pipeline, you have a good being traded at such large volume that we might as well forget that one end of the pipeline is hogs and corn and the other end is a sandwich. McDonald’s likely doesn’t think in these terms, and neither should you.

But when dealing with conspiracy theories, especially ones you aren’t quite qualified to prove, one must always consider other possibilities, if only to allow them to reinforce your nutty beliefs.

Counter Theory 1: An obvious reason that the McRib might be a fall-only product could be that people have barbecue (or at least things slathered in barbecue sauce) all the time over the summer—they would be less likely to settle for a cheap and intentionally grotesque substitute when they can have the real thing. Introduce it in the fall and you might catch that associative longing for the summer that HFCS-laden spicy sauces and rib-shaped things evoke.

To this I say: but what about winter?

Counter Theory 2: Another counter-theory comes from an online forum, where all good and totally reliable information comes from on the Internet. Here, an alleged graduate from Hamburger University claims that the McRib’s impermanence has nothing to do with pork prices, but rather that it’s a loss leader for McDonald’s—the excitement of a limited-time-only product gets people in the door, as we have noted, and they’ll probably buy the big drinks and fries with the Monopoly pieces on them because they’re, on average, impulsive and easy to fool.

To this I say: I knew that sandwich was a low margin product! All the more reason for McDonald’s to time it properly with price swings.

Counter Theory 3: The last, and most obvious, explanation is the official version of the story: the sandwich has a cult following, but it’s not that popular. Like "Star Trek," "Arrested Development" and that show about Jesus Christ returning to San Diego as a surfer, the McRib was short-lived because not enough people were interested in it, even though a small and vocal minority loved it dearly. And unlike these TV shows, which involve real actors and writers with careers to tend to, the McRib needs only hogs, pickles, onions and a vocal enough minority who demand the sandwich’s return, and will even promote it for free with websites, tweets and word-of-sauce-stained-mouth.

We’re marks, novelty-seeking marks, and McDonald’s knows it. Every conspiracy theorist only helps their bottom line. They know the sandwich’s elusiveness makes it interesting in a way that the rest of the fast food industry simply isn’t. It inspires brand engagement, even by those who do everything they can to not engage with the brand. I’m likely playing a part in a flowchart on a PowerPoint slide on McDonald’s Chief Digital Officer’s hard drive.

Ultimately what the McRib says about us as a society is perhaps worse than any conspiracy theory about pork prices. The McRib, born at the end of the Volcker Recession, a child of Reagan’s Morning in America, has been with us on and off over the last three decades of underregulated corporate growth, erosion of organized labor, the shift to an “ideas” economy and skyrocketing obesity rates. The McRib is made of all these things, too. When you think back to its humble origins, as both an homage to Carolina style pork barbecue, and as a way to satisfy McNugget-hungry franchises, it’s all there.

Barbecue, while not an American invention, holds a special place in American culinary tradition. Each barbecue region has its own style, its own cuts of meat, sauces, techniques, all of which achieve the same goal: turning tough, chewy cuts of meat into falling-off-the-bone tender, spicy and delicious meat, completely transformed by indirect heat and smoke. It’s hard work, too. Smoking a pork shoulder, for instance, requires two hours of smoking per pound—you can spend damn near 24 hours making the Carolina style pulled pork that the McRib almost sort of imitates.

And for its part, the McRib makes a mockery of this whole terribly labor-intensive system of barbecue, turning it into a capital-intensive one. The patty is assembled by machinery probably babysat by some lone sadsack, and it is shipped to distribution centers by black-beauty-addicted truckers, to be shipped again to franchises by different truckers, to be assembled at the point of sale by someone who McDonald’s corporate hopes can soon be replaced by a robot, and paid for using some form of electronic payment that will eventually render the cashier obsolete.

There is no skilled labor involved anywhere along the McRib’s Dickensian journey from hog to tray, and certainly no regional variety, except for the binary sort—Yes, the McRib is available/No, it is not—that McDonald’s uses to promote the product. And while it hasn’t replaced barbecue, it does make a mockery of it.

The fake rib bones, those porky railroad ties that give the McRib its name, are a big middle finger to American labor and ingenuity—and worse, they’re the logical result of all that hard work. They don’t need a pitmaster to make the meat tender, and they don’t need bones for the meat to fall off—they can make their tender meat slurry into the bones they didn’t need in the first place.

And unlike a Low Country barbecue shack, McDonalds has the means to circumvent—or disregard—supply and demand problems. Indeed, they behave much more like a risk-averse day trader, waiting to see a spread between an Exchange Traded Fund and its underlying assets—waiting for the ticker to offer up a quick risk-free dollar.

Witness to all this, Americans on both coasts tweet jokes about the sandwich, and reference that one episode of "The Simpsons," and trade horror stories, or play the contrarian card and claim to love it; and meanwhile, somewhere in Ohio, a 45-year-old laid-off factory worker drops a $5 bill on the counter at his local McDonald’s and asks a young person wearing a clip-on tie for the McRib meal, "to stay." The McRib is available nationwide until November 14th.

Part of the job for this officer, shown standing with a backpack, is looking for “lush workers.”

In the world of crime statistics, there is a certain subsection of victim on the city subways: a reveler who, overserved during a night on the town, nods off on a train. He wakes with a flapping, precision-cut hole in his trousers and cool, thin air where his wallet used to be.

This victim shakes his head in self-disgust, joining the besotted ranks to fall prey to a brand of criminal as old and established below the streets as a twisted root.

The police, long ago, coined a name for this criminal. The lush worker.

“Do they still exist?” said Lt. Kevin Callaghan, a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department. “Yes.”

The lush worker sounds like a monster in a bedtime story, a stooped creature with a razor blade in one stealthy hand. Don’t drink, children, or the Lush Worker will get you.

But he is actually a middle-aged or older man who has been doing this for a very long time. And he is a fading breed.

“It’s like a lost art,” the lieutenant said. “It’s all old-school guys who cut the pocket. They die off.” And they do not seem to be replacing themselves, he said. “It’s like the TV repairman.”

Lush workers date back at least to the beginning of the last century, their ilk cited in newspaper crime stories like one in The New York Times in 1922, describing “one who picks the pockets of the intoxicated. He is the old ‘drunk roller’ under a new name.” While the term technically applies to anyone who steals from a drunken person, most police officers reserve it for a special kind of thief who uses straight-edge razors found in any hardware store.

The Police Department does not have a rough estimate of how many lush workers are out working lushes.

It offers an exact number: 109.

That is far fewer than there once were. What do we know of these 109 criminals? All but two are men, and overwhelmingly middle-aged or older, some born in 1947, 1943, 1938 and even, in one case, 1931.

They have all been arrested for lush working, or “lushing,” since 2006. They are persistent. One suspect arrested last weekend had 37 previous arrests under his belt — where, by the way, these guys like to hide razors, or in their hat brims or shoes or wallets.

And they are busy. “It happens every weekend,” said Officer James Rudolph with the police transit bureau that covers Manhattan below 34th Street, where many a young man goes to celebrate the weekend to excess.

“They’ll nudge them and see how incoherent they really are,” Officer Rudolph said. Then out comes the tool of the trade. “It’s unbelievable they don’t cut the person’s leg wide open. They’re like surgeons with a razor blade, for God’s sake.”

His commanding officer, Capt. Paul Rasa, said there had been 15 arrests of lush workers in that downtown district this year, and 35 complaints, which represent 28 percent of all the downtown transit grand larcenies in 2011.

This does not count unreported thefts. Victims, after all, are perhaps understandably ashamed to come forward to report being drunk enough to not have noticed the filleting of their pants by a man born in 1931.

“I had a guy take a swing at me once,” Lieutenant Callaghan said, recalling waking a construction worker with newly ventilated jeans. “He thought I robbed him.”

The victim of the theft on Sunday was 23 years old and referred to in a criminal complaint only as “a sleeping male.” The suspect, with 37 previous arrests, Robert Bookard, 48, is accused of cutting the man’s pocket and taking cash in a subway at the Brooklyn Bridge station at 3:40 a.m. A plainclothes officer saw the act and arrested him, finding three razor blades.

And yet, as Lieutenant Callaghan put it, “the cutting is a trade that’s going extinct.” Why? Pick a theory. Today’s subway robber is of the snatch-an-iWhatever-and-run variety that has recently driven up transit crime rates. With victims displaying $500 iPads in plain view, or passed out with a phone in their hand, why bother with a razor and a wallet?

Maybe the cutting is just too difficult. Officer Rudolph believes the good ones practice at home with mannequins.

And maybe the old thieves just don’t have anyone to teach.

The police keep track of who among the 109 is in jail, and when they are released. Lieutenant Callaghan sounds almost pleased to notice a familiar face on the train.

“I say, ‘Oh, you’re back,’ ” he said. “ ‘Good to see you.’ ”

'The Soldier's Dream of Home,' a Currier & Ives lithograph produced during the Civil War, was one sign of the great attention that soldiers' homesickness received. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

A few weeks ago I found myself accidentally enacting the drama of a book I was reading. The book was Homesickness: An American History, and I was reading it on the subway, somewhat embarrassed by the title, which, held up right in front of my face, was like a sign saying: Here in New York, I can’t cut it. I comforted myself with the idea that I was only a few stops from home, where I could read safe from potential pity. But when I got to my door, I discovered that I’d locked myself out.

I looked up at my windows. I wished I could use the bathroom, foreign bathrooms costing at least a coffee. But it struck me that I didn’t long to be in my apartment. My place, with its card table in the kitchen and mattress on the floor, is unsettled—I would feel as dislocated inside of it as out. I can’t imagine what feeling settled here would look like; the only settled place I’m familiar with is the home where I grew up.

How long does it take to cultivate the feeling of home? I’ve been in New York for three years, on the East Coast for eight, and I’ve never suffered from acute homesickness. But still, when I’m called to define “home,” I think of El Granada, a town of 5,436 that staked itself twenty-six miles south of San Francisco down the coast. I mean staked quite literally: between 1906 and 1909, Ocean Shore Railway, which was building tracks from Santa Cruz to San Francisco along what is now Highway 1, planted thousands of fast-growing, blue gum eucalyptuses with the hopes of flipping El Granada into a seaside resort for train-traveling San Franciscans. The railroad company also commissioned the eminent architect and city planner Daniel Burnham (famous for the Flatiron building) to plan the streets. They go in two directions, up the hills and around them, so that it looks from above as if a four-square-mile spider web has been draped over the thousands of trees. But the dream of El Granada was not to be. Two years later the railway company collapsed. The tracks were abandoned. Some speculators bought land, but the place never really caught on until computers did in the late eighties and nineties, and intrepid commuters from Silicon Valley bought BMWs and began building houses.

I spent my youth resenting El Granada: it was not San Francisco, where I went to school and where my friends all got to go to sleep. When I go back now, I love looking over the Pacific, love the light streaming into the house from every exposure, but I am an American and so, as Susan Matt tells me, every cultural cue has lead me to deny that I might miss it. That’s the history of homesickness in America, one of increasing repression: homesickness wasn’t adaptive to a nation ever on the move to push out its borders, a place where wealth wasn’t inherited but found—so long as you were willing to look far enough.

The word homesickness didn’t come into use until the 1750s. Before that, the feeling was known as “nostalgia,” a medical condition. It was first identified in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss scholar, who warned that the condition had not been sufficiently observed or described and could have dire consequences. By Hofer’s description, the nostalgic individual so exhausted himself thinking of home that he couldn’t attend to other ideas or bodily needs. While nostalgia was embraced as a Victorian virtue, a testament to civility and the domestic order, extreme onsets could kill a person. And so they did during the Civil War. By two years in, two thousand soldiers had been diagnosed with nostalgia, and in the year 1865, twenty-four white Union soldiers and sixteen black ones died from it. Meantime one hundred thousand Confederates deserted, presumably motivated by memories of mom’s hushpuppies. The war just about ended what little romanticization of homesickness had survived in the wilds of early America. A sentiment that caused desertion and death could no longer pass as a force for social good. Instead it had far greater utility as a patronizing justification of racism. Some in favor of slavery began to claim that slaves loved their home more than anyone; that being the case, how cruel to then tear them from the plantation.

An immigrant seeking a fortune couldn’t afford any semblance of I can’t cut it. Nor could a pioneer moving westward, or a Yankee trudging to California with a pan in his hand. WWI’s national training programs, the first of their kind, were designed to stifle homesickness from the start. Men from the same community were deliberately assigned to different units across America, so that they couldn’t retreat into the comfort of local remembrances. The aim was to turn each unit into a national entity whose first allegiance was to the country. In the 1950s, the age of the organization man, corporations attempted the same thing. Relocations were part of the path to promotion. IBM, employees joked, stood for I’ve Been Moved. After all, in a given year during the Eisenhower Administration, roughly twenty percent of Americans had.

But the institution most successful at destroying localism, at least today, is the American college. Places like NYU, Brown, Skidmore, and Harvard draw students from across the country, from around the globe, and in four formative years remagnetize the fresh new adults to the pole of the liberal arts university. No longer are their wants local; they’re national. Lifelong friendships and rivalries persist largely between classmates rather than childhood neighbors. If there’s one locality overwhelmingly represented at these liberal arts institutions, it’s New York, wherein so many of their graduates will subsequently settle.

New York is the colonial American experiment on speed, a holding pen for immigrants. Graduates—immigrants in sweatpants with big boxes of books—arrive every summer; they try to adjust and to profit; they either adapt or return home. In the 1920s and 1930s, parents prepared their children for such moves by sending them to frontier-themed summer camps where they would play pioneer. (Although camps today tend to be more hippie than hard-scrabble, their purpose may not be much different.) And where kids have camps to build resilience, college grads turn to New York as the ultimate test, not only of resilience but of that trait resilience is supposed to serve: ambition. Certain Manhattan hard-liners, the people who announce that “New York is the only city; though Paris is pretty,” think the only reason to leave New York is if you fail out.

A successful artist friend of mine recently decided to move back home to Boston after weathering New York for four years. He hated drawing, was tired of all the parties, and his gallery job, which was pleasant enough, would never give him a good salary. What he wanted was his home city, and a well-paying office job, where at 5 P.M. he’d be released to romp around with his young nephews. Among my friends his honesty was polarizing: some, like me, admired it; while many others felt threatened by his resignation from the rat race and what was perceived as a regressive retreat into familiarity.

But the problem with homesickness isn’t just that it impedes ambition; it’s that the object of longing, home, is not as fixed as one might think. After the Civil War, for instance, “the transcontinental railroad and steam-powered ocean liners,” Matt writes, “made it easier to return to a physical home and thus, at least theoretically, easier to assuage homesickness. Upon traveling back, however, they found they had not arrived, and never could, for the same technologies that had brought them home had also disrupted traditional ways of life.” The schedules and even the clocks of hometowns had been recalibrated to train schedules and standard time; certain commodities, like ice, reshaped the diet. Traveling back revealed that “home” had been vanquished by time, and a word necessarily arose to define this longing for what was lost: nostalgia.

While homesickness was suppressed in America, nostalgia was allowed to flourish. In 1899 New Hampshire figured out a way to profit off of it, and began throwing annual “Old Home Weeks.” These festivals, wherein the town might display old photographs and antiquated town artifacts while concessionaires in old-timey clothes served up regional specialties, were conceived of as reunions, meant to draw former residents back to their birthplaces. By 1903, these weeks were attracting half a million people, and today quite a few New England towns still throw them—such as Freedom, New Hampshire, which hosts one every August. Neither early El Granada nor my El Granada of the 1980s and 1990s had enough of a community to justify an antiquarian street fair. But America’s comparative acceptance—embrace, even—of nostalgia makes sense to me. It’s safer than homesickness because it’s neutered; it can’t be realized and won’t get in the way of work; it asks you to long only for something that no longer exists.

Which brings me back to my stoop on a sunny fall Saturday. I was out there for an hour, reading, before I finally decided to retrieve a key from my roommate near Penn Station. I caught the F train above ground, and the car elbowed around Gowanus before going under. My roommate handed me his keys outside the Pennsylvania Hotel, and I headed back to my apartment.

I thought about home home as I unlocked my door. In El Granada, my father had installed wireless and the eucalyptuses were being sawed down, while our neighbors’ nasty redwood hedges were growing taller and taller, strangling out ocean from our windows. Here, though, in my apartment, everything was static. My mattress was still on the floor, my card table still in the kitchen. The only thing that had changed was the light outside.

Francesca Mari has written for The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, and other publications.

Le dramaturge camerounais Eric Essono Tsimi dresse un classement des meilleurs talents de la littérature africaine de ce début de XXIe siècle. Je reproduis ici l’article, publié sur SLATE.FR

L’objectif, en établissant ce classement, n’est pas de remettre en cause la certitude que vous avez d’avoir rencontré votre meilleur auteur, lu votre meilleur livre, pour la première décennie du siècle. De gustibus et coloribus, non disputandum! Simplement, il peut être utile d’indiquer au lecteur qui ne consomme pas énormément de littérature quelles peuvent être les plus grandes réussites littéraires de l’heure, que ce soit des succès de librairie ou des succès d’estime. Seuls les auteurs s’étant épanouis durant cette décennie (2001-2010) sont considérés. La régularité dans la production est également un critère sur la base duquel je me suis déterminé, en prenant garde à ne pas me limiter aux écrivains de langue française. Enfin, tous les auteurs retenus dans ce classement ont publié au moins un roman ou un recueil de nouvelles et ont été récompensés par des prix prestigieux.
Qu’appelle-t-on écrivain africain?

Au-delà de la sélection forcément ardue, la difficulté réside surtout dans la définition de l’auteur africain que, entre double appartenance et schizonévrose identitaire, délimitent plusieurs frontières qui se superposent et s’anéantissent. La plupart des auteurs majeurs du continent, notamment au XXe siècle, étaient édités en France, en Grande-Bretagne, aux Etats-Unis d’Amérique… Hormis les auteurs sud-africains, il y a une ambiguïté qui frappe la production de la plupart de nos écrivains, qui sont souvent appelés «écrivain français d’origine camerounaise» (Mongo Béti) ou «écrivain français d’origine marocaine» (Tahar Ben Jelloun).

Au sens du présent classement, les écrivains africains sont ceux qui se réclament du continent, soit par leur thématique soit par leurs déclarations. La production littéraire africaine «intra muros» reste outrageusement débile (au sens premier de «faible») et imbécile (au sens étymologique de «sans force»), le Nigeria s’illustrant comme un cas exceptionnel, tant en quantité qu’en qualité. L’Afrique du Sud aussi, évidemment… Comme si la littérature était avant tout un privilège bourgeois qu’on pourrait corréler aux performances économiques!

Qui va, au terme du siècle courant, succéder à Naguib Mahfouz, Farah Nurrudin, JM Coetzee, Wole Soyinka, Mariama Bâ? Ces classiques des classiques, qui ont donné leurs lettres de noblesses, passez-moi la facilité du tour de phrase, aux littératures africaines. Qui sont ceux dont on parlera encore dans 90 ans?
Les 10 que je préfère

10. Leila Abouzeid
L’auteure marocaine de Last Chapter n’est sans doute pas l’écrivaine la plus prolifique et la plus inoubliable qui soit. J’ai eu un vrai coup de cœur pour son Année de l’éléphant. Leila Abouzeid n’est pas spécialement connue parce qu’elle est surtout traduite aux Etats-Unis, où elle a connu un beau succès d’estime.

9. Unity Dow
Le Botswana ne réussit pas uniquement au plan économique et social. Unity Dow, magistrate émérite, est aussi une écrivaine de talent. Sa thématique, dans les cinq romans qu’elle a écrits à ce jour, parcourt et recouvre les problèmes posés par la mondialisation dans nos sociétés africaines, le fléau du sida, ou la condition féminine. Elle a reçu plusieurs distinctions littéraires, aux Etats-Unis notamment. Son dernier roman, Saturday is for funeral, a été publié à Harvard Press. A lire absolument: Les cris de l’innocente.

8. Ex aequo: Ananda Devi et Kossi Efoui
L’une est Mauricienne, l’autre Togolais. Tout ce que Ananda Devi et Kossi Efoui ont en commun, en plus d’être Africains, c’est d’avoir été distingués par le Prix des cinq continents. Ils restent à mon sens des espoirs plus que des talents définitivement incontournables.

7. Léonora Miano
Son style n’est pas suffisamment osé, coloré, vivant, il exhale par moments les recettes d’écriture bien assimilées. Il n’empêche, Léonora Miano écrit d’excellents livres, avec sa plume qui rappelle Hamidou Kane ou le style par trop académique de son compatriote camerounais, l’excellent Gaston-Paul Effa. L’auteur des Aubes écarlates a fait, en quatre livres publiés en l’espace de cinq ans, une entrée en fanfare dans le cercle des très grands. Si cela perdure, si elle se diversifie et réussit à se réinventer dans ses prochains textes, elle est partie pour être à la littérature africaine ce que Samuel Eto’o est au football africain: un phénomène international. Ces âmes chagrines, publié chez Plon, est présenté comme un grand cru.

6. Yasmina Khadra
En France, son succès ne se dément pas depuis de nombreuses années, mais c’est depuis les années 2000 et son ralliement à Sarkozy que de nombreux Africains ont découvert l’œuvre de cet Algérien au pseudonyme si féminin. Yasmina Khadra est le seul dans ce classement à écrire des polars haletants qui n’envient rien aux maîtres américains du genre. Depuis 2001, chacun de ses romans a reçu une distinction littéraire majeure, Les Hirondelles de Kaboul, par exemple, a été primé en Algérie, au Koweït, élu meilleur livre de l’année 2008 par le San Francisco Chronicle.

5. Noviolet Bulawayo
La compatriote de Petina Gappah a reçu en juillet 2011, le Caine Prize for african writing qui est doté de près de 8 millions francs CFA (environ 12.000 euros) et d’un mois de résidence à l’université de Georgetown (Washington, Etats-Unis). Son Hitting Budapest est un chef-d’œuvre.

4. Zukiswa Wanner
L’œuvre de sa compatriote sud-africaine Zakes Mda me parle davantage, mais celle-ci a été accusée de plagiat à plusieurs reprises. Zukiswa Wanner, en revanche, est une écrivaine pleine de promesses qui sait dire l’Afrique du Sud post-apartheid. Avez-vous lu The Madams? Amour, sexe et bonheur garantis.

3. M.G. Vassanji
Ce Kényan de naissance, qui a grandi en Tanzanie, est davantage connu au Canada. Et c’est justement sur la chaude insistance d’amis canadiens que j’ai fait sa découverte. De M.G. Vassanji, je ne connais pour l’instant que sa Troublante Histoire de Vikram Lall (Giller Prize en 2004) qui m’avait été offerte. Mais en sus de tout le bien qu’on en dit, c’est suffisant pour le faire figurer dans notre liste.

2. Alain Mabanckou
Son dernier livre, publié chez Grasset, a été assez décevant; cela goûtait du réchauffé, il y manquait la folie, la variété et l’originalité de Bleu Blanc Rouge ou des Mémoires d’un Porc-épic. Alain Mabanckou reste pourtant l’un de nos plus fiers auteurs! Le Congo nous avait donné le plus beau poète francophone (Tchicaya U’tamsi), il nous avait révélé le dramaturge le plus puissant de sa génération (Sony Labou Tansi), il nous offre à présent le romancier le plus étincelant. Enseignant aux USA, ce grand promeneur a commencé son périple littéraire dans le très prestigieux L’Harmattan. Il a flirté avec le mythique Présence Africaine, a pris du galon chez Serpent à plumes, a été confirmé au Seuil et consacré chez Grasset, en raflant au passage bien des prix littéraires les plus courus en France et dans la Francophonie. Il est sans doute l’écrivain africain de langue française le plus traduit.

1. Chimamanda Adichie
Pourquoi elle plutôt que Helon Habila ou Segun Afolabi, tous Nigérians? Parce qu’il fallait choisir, et c’est à elle que va ma préférence. Il a suffi d’un livre qui ne m’avait jamais été recommandé, au sujet duquel je n’avais lu aucune critique, pour en tomber amoureux: L’Autre moitié du soleil. Dans son recueil de nouvelles Thing around your neck, Chimamanda Adichie réussit à entremêler traditions et cultures dans des histoires très actuelles. Outre cela, celle qui fut lauréate du Prix Orange (l’un des prix littéraires les plus prestigieux au Royaume uni, doté de 34.000 euros) en 2007 est fortement engagée dans les combats de son époque. Une intellectuelle comme on les aime, qui avait reçu en 2005, le Commonwealth writers prize pour son premier roman, L’Hibiscus pourpre. Si l’on considère enfin qu’elle est la benjamine (née en septembre 1977) qu’elle a eu un parcours universitaire impressionnant honoré «des plus grandes louanges» académiques, elle est sans doute l’écrivaine de sa génération qui domine le mieux notre époque.
Sortir de la complainte et de la négritude

Les écrivains africains actuels sont souvent inaudibles, pétrifiés dans leur zone de confort, confinés dans les classes où on les programme ou chez les spécialistes qui les étudie, atones dans nos propres médias, inexistants face aux intellectuels occidentaux. Et quand, comme Gaston Kelman qui, Dieu seul sait pourquoi, n’aime pas le manioc, ou Calixthe Beyala, l’«afrofrançaise», ils donnent de la voix, c’est de manière fort sélective qu’ils s’indignent, c’est surtout qu’ils ont cassé leur plume et ont cessé de nous épater par leurs créations. Les littératures africaines sont trop jeunes pour se satisfaire de ce qui a été fait au siècle dernier. Mongo Beti, par exemple, est le bâton de maréchal de la littérature camerounaise, une espèce d’autorité de principe, un écrivain lumineux qui surclasse, depuis 1958, tous les autres écrivains camerounais; il y a lui et en deçà il y a les autres, qu’un monde sépare.

L’écrivain africain n’est-il qu’un écrivain du désarroi et de la confrontation, qui peine à séduire son monde quand il ne se complait pas dans la complainte et ne parle pas de négritude, d’anthropophagie, de violence, de traumatismes, d’exotisme et de folklore? Pourquoi la modernité, le roman psychologique, l’amour, dans un contexte de croissance économique, de décadence du fait ethnique, d’alphabétisation à grande échelle et de conjuration de malédictions millénaires, dans cette face conquérante de l’Afrique, ne trouvent-ils pas preneurs (liseurs)? L’écrivain africain, aujourd’hui, est un écrivain qui se justifie, comme hier. C’est un écrivain qui écrit pour un public occidental auquel il destine sa prose que, sur place, ne lit et ne commente qu’une certaine élite urbaine.

Au total, l’écriture a été investie par les femmes, ce n’est pas un hasard si elles sont d’une si écrasante majorité dans notre classement. Messieurs, Allah n’est pas obligé d’être juste en toutes choses ici-bas!

Eric Essono Tsimi

Source: http://www.slateafrique.com/52233/classement-meilleurs-ecrivains-africains-du-debut-du-siecle

FRIENDS and family have left touching tributes to Anthony Williams, who was stabbed in Aylesbury during a fight in Cambridge Street in September 2006.

Since the devastating incident happened, friends and family have also been leaving floral tributes at the scene.

If you would like to add your tributes to this article, and this website, please click here.

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Your comments so far...

Although i didnt know Anthony personally i know he was a really lovely young man. I would like to offer my heartfelt sympathy to Sharon, Lloyd and Luke and to all the Mould and Williams Families, my thoughts are with you at this very difficult time, from Richard MacCarthy.

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To the willams family

Our thoughts are with you at this very sad time

Remember that your loss is shared

By many friends who care

And that you're in our

Thoughts and hearts

And in our every prayer

May you find courage

To face tomorrow

In the love that surrounds

You today

May the love of friends and family

Be a source of comfort to you all

At this time of sorrow

May these truths sustain you

Your loved one will always be

As close as a memory

And the god of all comfort

Is always as close as a prayer

God bless Anthony rest in peace

Till we all meet again

Mandy Mick & boys

xxx

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blud u wer taken from us 2 soon man u had ur hole life ahead of u. u will alwayz b missed and never Forgotten fam

make sure u rest in piece and cheak on all friends from time-time. god bless

sj

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R.I.P Anthony, we will always remember you. god bless x

Kara Moore & Grant Karwacinski

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Anthony

I'M FREE

Don't grieve for me, for now I'm free

I'm following paths that were made for me,

I took a hand, I heard a call….

Then turned, and bid farewell to all.

I could not stay another day

To laugh , to love, to sing to play,

Tasks left undone that must stay that way,

I found my peace…at close of day

And if my parting left a void,

Then fill it with a remembered joy,

A friendship shared, a laugh a kiss,

Ah yes these things I too will miss.

Be not burdened…deep with sorrow

I wish you sunshine of tomorrow,

My lifes been full… I've savoured much,

Good friends good times, my family's loving touch

Perhaps my time seemed all too brief,

Don't lengthen it now with undue grief,

Lift up your hearts and share with me,

I,m wanted now …my soul is free.

With love from

Auntie Dianne xxx

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THE MOULD FAMILY of JAMES TOWN ACCRA

Chief Kojo Ababio IV, of James Town

Chief Kobina Ghartey VII of the Royal House Winneba

Chief Herman Mould head of Mould family,

Grand father Desmond Mould and Grand Mother Jessie Mould Vanderpuije, Addy, Welbeck, Tagoe, Sackey, Quartey ,Bruce, Lutterodt and

Allied families

Regret to announce the Tragic Death of Anthony Williams

son of Lloyd Williams and Sharon Mould

Uncles :

William Mould, Allan Mould , Kem Mould ,

Aunties :

Ann Mould , Jessica Mould , Phoebe Mould and Irene Korsa

Cousins :

The Okwesa brothers, Ike, Chucks,Emeka, and Chuma

Tracey and Adza Mould , Fiona Wood and Grenia Forsom,

Ian Greenstreet ,Ivor Greenstreet Barrister at law

Ken Bismarck, Koranteng Ofosu Amaah, Andrew, Michael and Richard Nartey Dr Sophia Ofosu Amaah ,Dr. Bernice Ofosu Amaah Dr Yvonne Mensah

Great Uncles :

T.A. Tagoe, barrister at Law , Ray Tagoe ,Clarence Tagoe barrister at Law Joe Quartey Pappafio, Herman Mould, Victor Mould , Dr.William Mould Sonny Mould ,Alex Mould and Jacob Mould , Francis Mould, E .Oko Allotey, E . Ate Allotey , Professor S. Ofosu Amaah former Director of Public

Health University of Ghana and W.H.O New Yok.

Professor. G .K. A Ofosu Amaah former Dean faculty of Law , University of

Ghana.

V .Ate Ofosu Amaah former Director Ghana Commercial Bank

Mr W. Ofosu Amaah chief Counsel Legal Dept.World Bank, Washington,U.S.A. James Brown , George Mould, William Mould ,in U.S.A

Thomas Mould, John Mould in U.S.A., Thomas Sawyer , Bella Sawyer and Ade

Sawyer,

Ray Sowah, Irwin Sowah

Ben Mensah, Sackitey Crabbe , Nii Crabbe, Winston Asante Barrister at Law . Fifi Asante, Mr Afla Sackey , Ampim Sackey,

Great Aunties :

Mrs Emily Afful, Mrs. Gladys Hansen Quartey Mould ,Madame Mary Mould ,

Diana Okwesa, Mrs. Vicky Mould

Mrs Frances Sam ,

Prof..Miranda Greenstreet Executive Director of African Assoc.for Health

Enviroment and Development.

Mrs Betty Mould Iddrissu, Barrister at Law , Mrs Maud Blankson Mills, Mary Chinnery Hesse, former Deputy Director General ,Internation.Labour

Organisation. Geneva ,

Mary Elizabeth Mould, Brew Mould, Doris Brown ,

Delia Davidson, Mrs . Joyce Mould Owusu, Constance Sowah , Mrs. Annabelle Bannerman ,Barrister at Law, Honora Twumasi,

I don't think it's too strident to demand at this point that David Brooks be hauled up before a jury consisting of everyone else in America and forced to defend himself against several million counts of being an insufferable twat in a public place. In today's episode of Missing the Point So I Don't Miss a Meal, Our Mr. Brooks informs us that he once again has placed us all under close inspection beneath his monocle and discovered that some of us are very angry, not because some thieves in nice suits pillaged the national economy and then held the scraps for ransom. Oh, no, that isn't it at all, and he's got some wholly arbitrary ad hoc sociological categories to prove it.

Here's one:

If you live in these big cities, you see people similar to yourself, who may have gone to the same college, who are earning much more while benefiting from low tax rates, wielding disproportionate political power, gaining in prestige and contributing seemingly little to the social good. That is the experience of Blue Inequality.

Here's the other:

Then there is what you might call Red Inequality. This is the kind experienced in Scranton, Des Moines, Naperville, Macon, Fresno, and almost everywhere else. In these places, the crucial inequality is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It�s between those with a college degree and those without. Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen. In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate, according to the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke. Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more.

Ah, you might say, this is all my balls. Shouldn't we at least mention here that many people do not go to college because they can't afford it? Shouldn't we mention that the reason they can't afford it is that nobody has any fking money anymore? Shouldn't we also mention that the reason nobody has any fking money anymore is because of economic policy that enabled unbridled corporate avarice, whereby all the jobs got shipped out of Scranton and Des Moines and off to Shandong and Inner Mongolia? This left us with a Potemkin national economy within which our primary products are new financial instruments through which the 1 percent can steal what's left, thereby further guaranteeing, again, that nobody has any fking money anymore.

Ah, but you would be wrong. The real problem is that all those undereducated poor people are humping themselves into bankruptcy and an early coronary:

In fact, the income differentials understate the chasm between college and high school grads. In the 1970s, high school and college grads had very similar family structures. Today, college grads are much more likely to get married, they are much less likely to get divorced and they are much, much less likely to have a child out of wedlock.

Yes, and college grads are far more likely to have expensive lawnmowers and the ability to hit a two-iron. What in the hell is your point here? The life of an unemployed mechanic in Macon is not unequal to that of an unemployed recent graduate of the University of Georgia, where no unapproved fornicating occurs. That kid is going to come home with his degree and talk to his old high-school football tight end, the mechanic, and they're both going to be angry because there is no work because, and I know I'm repeating myself here, nobody has any fking money anymore.

But, ah, you might say, what we have here is a great argument for vastly increasing and simplifying federal student loans, and for forgiving student debt, because what passes for data in this column clearly indicates that a college degree is critical to avoiding certain social pathologies that are at the root of our genuine inequality, and not the fact that nobody has any fking money anymore. No, you probably guessed by now, Your Honor, it's values again. And, of course, not those values that we hoped our financial barons would have that would make them realize that stealing everything that isn't nailed down is not good for America. Nope, it's all those poor people humping again:

That's because the protesters and media people who cover them tend to live in or near the big cities, where the top 1 percent is so evident. That's because the liberal arts majors like to express their disdain for the shallow business and finance majors who make all the money. That�s because it is easier to talk about the inequality of stock options than it is to talk about inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns and educational attainment. That's because many people are wedded to the notion that our problems are caused by an oppressive privileged class that perpetually keeps its boot stomped on the neck of the common man.

But the fact is that Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it's not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It's not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It's not nearly as big a problem as the nation's stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent. 

Those two paragraphs alone, Your Honor, represent the rest of the American people's prima facie against Our Mr. Books on the charges before the bar. There's the sneering at "liberal arts majors" from a guy with a degree in History from the University of Chicago. There's the usual wheedling nonsense about family structure and "stagnant human capital," as Brooks tosses out tinpot sociology like a dime to a beggar on a steam grate. We do have an oppressive privileged class. (Brooks should look around his dinner table some time.) For three decades, as the Congressional Budget Office reported last week, most of the wealth of this country flowed upwards into it. Over the past decade, that privileged class, without a peep from people like David Brooks, turned the American economy into a dog track, and it didn't matter a damn whether you went to college or didn't go to college, or whether you were having babies "out of wedlock" (Jesus, what a priss) or not. That privileged class enriched itself and to hell with the rest of us. "Disorganized social fabric"? Holy hell, people are just trying to keep from getting tossed out into the street and all he's got by way of an explanation is that too many people are getting knocked up and too few are going to college, even though we all woke up sometime in the autumn of 2008 and discovered that nobody had any fking money anymore.

Your Honor, the prosecution rests.

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.

Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.

That’s incredibly simple, but true.

He was the opposite of absent-minded.

He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.

When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.

He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.

Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.

For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.

He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.

His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.

He was willing to be misunderstood.

Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.

Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.

Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”

I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”

When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.

None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.

His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.

Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.

Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.

When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”

When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.

They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.

This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.

And he did.

Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.

Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.

Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?

He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.

With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.

He treasured happiness.

Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.

Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.

Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.

I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.

Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.

“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.

He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.

I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.

Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.

One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.

I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.

He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.

By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.

None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.

What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.

Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.

He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”

“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”

When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.

Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.

Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.

His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.

He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.

Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.

He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.

He seemed to be climbing.

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

ON June 19, 2002, I ran into a bit of a problem that turned my life upside down. It happened at the Detroit airport as I was entering the country. I realized something wasn’t right when the immigration agent at United States Customs slid my passport through the reader, then froze. “Is there something wrong?” I asked. He was still frozen. After a few moments, he said, “Follow me, please,” and I ended up at the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s airport office.

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It was a large room filled with foreign-looking people, and fear was written on all their faces; this was their first day in the United States, and things were evidently not going well. Typically, there is little overlap between the I.N.S. and American citizens like me, and when I tried to find out from one of the agents what I was doing there, he seemed just as confused as I was.

Eventually, a man in a dark suit approached and said, “I expected you to be older.” I asked if he could please explain what was happening, and he said, “You have some explaining to do yourself.”

We then entered an interrogation room, barren and stark white with a camera in the corner. He sat across from me at an L-shaped desk and asked me to retrace the path I’d taken since I had left the United States. He asked me various detailed questions for a good half hour and then, out of nowhere, said, “Where were you September 12?”

Fortunately, I’m neurotic about record keeping. I had my Palm P.D.A. with me; I looked up Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001 on my calendar. I read him the contents: “pay storage rent at 10; meeting with Judith at 10:30; intro class from 12 to 3; advanced class from 3 to 6.” We read about six months of my calendar appointments. I don’t think he was expecting me to have such detailed records.

He continued, “You had a storage unit in Tampa, right?”

“Yes, near the university.”

“What did you have in it?”

“Boxes of winter clothes, furniture I can’t fit in my apartment, some assorted junk and garage sale material.”

“No explosives?”

“I’m certain I didn’t have any explosives.”

“Well, we received a report that you had explosives and had fled on September 12.”

Given that I was very cooperative, and also had meticulous records that showed what I did when, I think he began to realize that whatever report he had was erroneous.

A few weeks later, a Justice Department official called my office in Tampa and said he wanted to speak to me about my interview in Detroit. He asked me to come to the Federal Building downtown, where he led me into a room where he and an F.B.I. agent interrogated me about where I’d been and when, and had I witnessed acts that might be detrimental to the interests of the United States or a foreign country, and had I ever met anyone from Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas or Hezbollah. The F.B.I. agent seemed to know quite remarkable details about things like the regular versus the Hezbollah bus routes in Beirut, and the person memorialized in the statue at the entrance of the American University there. His knowledge frightened me.

I COULD have contested the legality of the investigation and gotten a lawyer. But I thought that would make things messier. It was clear who had the power in this situation. And when you’re face to face with someone with so much power, you behave in an unusual manner. You dare not take any action. You rely on instincts and do what you need to survive. I told them everything.

The questioning went on for the next six months and ended with a series of polygraph examinations. I must have completed these to the agents’ satisfaction; eventually an interrogating agent told me that I had been cleared and that everything was fine and said that if I needed anything I should call him. I was planning to travel in the weeks ahead and was nervous about entering the country; I asked the agent about this, and he told me to call him with the information about my flights and said he would take care of everything.

Shortly after, I called the F.B.I. to report my whereabouts. I chose to. I wanted to make sure that the bureau knew that I wasn’t making any sudden moves and that I wasn’t running off somewhere. I wanted them to know where I was and what I was doing at any given time.

Soon I began to e-mail the F.B.I. I started to send longer e-mails, with pictures, and then with links to Web sites I made. I wrote some clunky code for my phone back in 2003 and turned it into a tracking device.

My thinking was something like, “You want to watch me? Fine. But I can watch myself better than you can, and I can get a level of detail that you will never have.”

In the process of compiling data about myself and supplying it to the F.B.I., I started thinking about what intelligence agents might not know about me. I created a list of every flight I’ve ever been on, since birth. For the more recent flights, I noted the exact flight numbers, recorded in my frequent flier accounts, and also photographs of the meals that I ate on each flight, as well as photos of each knife provided by each airline on each flight.

On my Web site, I compiled various databases that show the airports I’ve been in, food I’ve eaten at home, food I’ve eaten on the road, random hotel beds I’ve slept in, various parking lots off Interstate 80 that I parked in, empty train stations I saw, as well as very specific information like photos of the tacos I ate in Mexico City between July 5 and 7, and the toilets I used.

These images seem empty, and could be anywhere, but they’re not; they are extremely specific records of my exact travels to particular places. There are 46,000 images on my site. I trust that the F.B.I. has seen all of them. Agents know where I’ve bought my duck-flavored paste, or kimchi, laundry detergent and chitlins; because I told them everything.

I also provided screenshots of my financial data, communications records and transportation logs. Visitors to my site can cross-reference these records with my images in a way that’s similar to how the F.B.I. cross-references the very same databases. I provided information from third parties (including my bank, phone company, etc.) who can verify that I was at the locations indicated, on the dates and times specified on my Web site.

PEOPLE who visit my site — and my server logs indicate repeat visits from the Department of Homeland Security, the C.I.A., the National Reconnaissance Office and the Executive Office of the President — don’t find my information organized clearly. In fact, the interface I use is deliberately user-unfriendly. A lot of work is required to thread together the thousands of available points of information. By putting everything about me out there, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life. Despite the barrage of information about me that is publicly available, I live a surprisingly private and anonymous life.

In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up. Information agencies operate in an industry that values data. Restricted access to information is what makes it valuable. If I cut out the middleman and flood the market with my information, the intelligence the F.B.I. has on me will be of no value. Making my private information public devalues the currency of the information the intelligence gatherers have collected.

My activities may be more symbolic than not, but if 300 million people started sending private information to federal agents, the government would need to hire as many as another 300 million people, possibly more, to keep up with the information and we’d have to redesign our entire intelligence system.

East Germany tried this some decades back; it didn’t work out to be such a great plan for them. We have incredibly intelligent people and very sophisticated computer systems in various agencies in Washington, but the culture of these agencies prevents us from evolving beyond the cold-war-era mind-set. (There are people in Washington who still refer to China as “Red China.”) Fortunately, people in government have begun to see that collecting information is less useful than figuring out how to analyze it.

When I first started talking about my project in 2003, people thought I was insane. Why would anyone tell everyone what he was doing at all times? Why would anyone want to share a photo of every place he visited? Now eight years later, more than 800 million people do the same thing I’ve been doing each time they update their status or post an image or poke someone on Facebook. (Just to put this in perspective, if Facebook was a country, it would have the third highest population, after China and India.) Insane?

What I’m doing is no longer just an art project; creating our own archives has become so commonplace that we’re all — or at least hundreds of millions of us — doing it all the time. Whether we know it or not.

It has been a big month for Predator drones.

On Friday, September 30, Anwar al-Awlaki — described variously in the press as “Senior Al Qaeda leader,” “firebrand cleric,” and “Al Qaeda’s rising star” — was killed by a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone as al-Awlaki approached his Toyota Hilux pickup truck in eastern Yemen. The missile weighed 100 pounds, and the strike took place at 9:44 a.m.; al-Awlaki had just eaten breakfast. These details, and many others, were reported immediately around the world. The Guardian ran a helpful sketch of a drone, accompanied by the text, “Al-Awlaki’s position was tracked for several days before the attack on his vehicle by a drone armed with Hellfire missiles.” Page three of the New York Post was even more informative. It included a map, a timeline (“How We Got Him”), a photo of a Predator, another photo of a Hellfire missile, and some pinup-girl stats about the drone itself, including “Cost: $5M” and “Size: 27 feet long, 55-foot wingspan.”

“Start Quote

Custom demands that children bury their parent - in other words, they must pay the bills for the funeral but they have no authority over the body”

Sometime in 1947 or 1948, King Jorbie Akodam Karbo I summoned one of his young unmarried daughters to the palace at Lawra. The all-powerful ruler of the small kingdom in the far north of what is today Ghana, but was then the Gold Coast, told the girl she must go to Accra, the capital of the colony. She was to learn to be a midwife and return to teach others, so helping to prevent the many childbirth deaths that were taking place in the community.

You can imagine her trepidation at leaving. The journey of around 600 miles south would have taken many days in the weekly post bus. The girl knew no one, none of her family had ever been to a city or seen the sea, and she would have barely seen a car, let alone a white person. She stayed in a boarding house and learned to nurse at the colony's principal hospital, Korle Bu.

At around the same time, another young woman, my mother, set off on what was to be an equally adventurous journey, from Liverpool to Accra by boat. My father was to be the last in a long line of West African colonial administrators, and, like the princess, Mum knew no one in Accra. She had barely met a black person, and knew only that the Gold Coast was a dangerous place because of malaria and other tropical illnesses.

John Vidal’s mother had never told him the name of her midwife, only that he had been born with the help of the 'beautiful daughter of the King of Lawra'.

The two women struck up a friendship in January 1949 after my mother, remarkably for the time, chose to give birth not in Accra's private European hospital but at Korle Bu, the public African hospital. Mum never told me the name of her midwife, but used to say I had been born with the help of the "beautiful daughter of the King of Lawra", who "had her teeth filed to sharp points that made me think she was a cannibal". Having me at Korle Bu, she said, was not just an act of faith in the new Africa then emerging with powerful independence movements after the second world war, but also a pragmatic decision. "You got a better standard of care there!" she would say.

The women never met again. Within a few years, we had moved to Nigeria and the King of Lawra's daughter had left Accra.

With the world's population officially hitting 7 billion this week, just 12 years after reaching 6 billion, I went back to Accra to try to understand the massive explosion in human numbers that has been largely responsible for Ghana's development since I was born, and that will, for good or else, determine its future. In those 60 years, the world's population has grown by two new Chinas and an India combined; Ghana has doubled and doubled again from around 4 million people to more than 25 million. It is projected to keep growing to around 50 or even 60 million people by 2050.

How will this small country, which is seen as one of the economic and social success stories of Africa but which is in most parts still desperately poor, cope with twice as many people in just over a generation? Clutching a birth certificate, some old black and white photos of the houses we lived in, a description of the princess with filed teeth who delivered me, and a tourist map, my plan was to find my midwife's family and to trace the roots of Ghana's population explosion through the places that we knew.

Clearly, the city to which the two women travelled in the late 1940s is unrecognisable today. Accra was then about the size of Stoke or Shrewsbury. Now it sprawls 30 or more miles from the old town centre, throwing up new slums and suburbs every year. A 1948 census estimated 4,113,345 people and 3,035,125 goats in the whole country. There were fewer than 2,500 Europeans and only 84 doctors, of whom just 17 were Gold Coast Africans.

What hits you hardest, though, is not Accra's size today but the fact that everyone is young. It is rare to meet anyone over 40. Officially, 3% of Ghana's population is over 60, but these are mostly invisible people. In fact, more than one in three people are under 14, and the country is adding nearly 500,000 children a year.

My questions started at Korle Bu hospital, in 1949 a collection of quite grand, collonaded buildings, these days Ghana's premier teaching hopsital. My old maternity ward is still there, now sponsored by Latex Foam, but most births take place in a purpose-built six-storey baby factory built in the 1960s. A young Accravian mother-to-be now has a choice of giving birth in nearly 20 private and public hospitals and clinics in the city. If the family has $5,000, she can stay in what is effectively a five-star hotel. If poor, as the vast majority are, she may have to share a bed or sleep on the floor at Korle Bu. Every day 35 babies are born there.

"That's 12,000 babies a year from this one hospital," says Professor Samuel Obed, head of obstetrics and gynaecology, who says that Ghana's population explosion has been a triumph of modern midwifery, prenatal and maternal care. He puts the success down partly to people such as the young princess of Lawra who learned so well how to deliver babies and teach others. "The vast increase in the number of people in Ghana today is entirely due to the efforts made to stop birth mortalities. I put it down to better education. As more people get a formal education, so they see the need to have proper prenatal care. Many women in the past never went for prenatal care. Now 95% in Ghana do. Back in 1949, it was only available to a very few people.

Today, Korle Bu is Ghana’s premier teaching hospital, delivering more than 12,000 babies a year. The ward in which John Vidal was born is still in use, these days sponsored by Latex Foam.

"In your mothers's time here, everything was still left to nature. People used to offer a libation or they would pray when they gave birth. You lived or you died in childbirth. It was very risky. A lot of people died. That is why in Ghana new mothers wear white. Birth is seen as a victory.

"Your nurse probably came here at a very young age. She would have been one of the first generation of northerners to have a formal education."

The population explosion puts immense strains on the health service, he says, with nearly half the hospital's resources being spent on childbirth and the rest on illnesses related to malaria. "Everything comes down to money. We need to re-equip one operating theatre to take care of caesarean births. We need more nurses... The explosion in numbers is not going to go away. Women are having fewer children, but they are surviving and there are more and more families. It's cultural. If a couple have no children, you will have the in-laws round their necks. Pressure to have children is not going to abate."

"Everyone used to have big families in your mother's day," says Felicia Darkwah, a retired teacher born in 1926 and typical of the wealthy, land-owning, educated Ghanaians who took over from the British at independence in 1957.

I met her in the sitting room of 47 Seventh Avenue, the first house we lived in in Accra. Most of the other houses in the street have since been pulled down and rebuilt as embassies, banks or private executive residences. They hide behind high walls and razor wire, are guarded night and day, and can cost as much as anything in Chelsea, London. But number 47 is almost unique. Still owned by the government, its grounds have been divided up for three other houses, but it has barely changed. The rosewood parquet floors are the same but now lifting, the ceiling fans have rusted a bit and been augmented by air conditioning, but the pre-independence bungalow with its tin roof is intact, lived in for the past 24 years by Felicia, her Cambridge-educated agronomist husband and two of their children and their families. (One is now a very high-ranking government official who is fearful of being identified.)

"I am one of 13 children," Felicia says. "That was a small family for the time. My uncle's daughter, Animeh, died the other day and she had 100 children and grandchildren. I've known people with far more."

There seems to be a rule of thumb among educated Ghanaians that each generation has about half the number of children as their parents. Felicia had five children, and her children have two or three each. "I don't think anyone needs to bother about the numbers in Ghana as long as we work hard," she says. "We can produce enough food but the speed of growth is difficult."

I show her the pictures of my father's office, a young white man surrounded by more than 50 Africans. "This face looks familiar… and that one," she says.

Next week the UN will warn that the world population could spiral not to 8 billion or 9 billion people as demographers expected in the 1980s, but to 10 billion, or even 16 billion after 2100 if countries do not control their populations soon. And while it will be the rich whose consumption of goods is likely to destabilise the climate and global food supplies, it will be the very poorest countries of Asia and Africa that will be left to cope with inevitable large-scale environmental degradation, the explosion of slums, pressure on health and education services, and the reality of living in a world without enough food and water for all.

Of all the continents, Africa will see the greatest changes in the next 40 years – 11 countries in the world have fertility rates above six babies per woman and nine of them are there. Sub-Saharan Africa's population was around 100 million in 1900, 750 million in 2005 and the latest UN projections suggest it will level off at over 2 billion after 2050.

West Africa will be at the centre of this tidal wave of births. Nearby Nigeria, now with 150 million people, is expected to have 600-725 million before numbers start to tail off in 40 years. And far from reducing fertility rates, some countries', such as Mali's, are still rising.

Space is not the problem for Ghana or most other African countries. The continent is physically big enough to fit China, India and the US in its boundaries, and it can grow enough food for itself and for others. But a rapid, huge population increase linked to deep poverty in ecologically fragile, nearly landlocked countries such as Chad, Niger, Ethiopia and Mali terrifies planners and demographers the world over.

In Niger, a few hundred miles east of Ghana, two in three people are under 20, women have an average of more than seven children and only 5% of adults use any form of contraception. If its current growth rate of 3.3% per year remains unchanged, by 2050 it will have 56 million inhabitants, from under 15 million today. It is already one of the poorest countries in the world, it is intensely vulnerable to climate change and is experiencing regular food crises.

Other west African countries, such as Burkina Faso, traditionally saw their youths migrating to other countries to relieve pressure on environments, but Ghana, growing at less than 2% a year, is much better off, says Marilyn Aniwa, head of the Union for African Population Studies: "Hunger will not be the problem here. Contraception is still not widely used, but the country has land, water and space enough to double in numbers.

"But population is not about the numbers of children. It's about environment, rapid urbanisation, wellbeing and human rights. These are the areas that have not been addressed in the same way as midwifery and prenatal care. Development has not kept up with the numbers. What has been left behind is the social aspects."

You can't just pin all the problems on African governments, say demographers. Back in the 1970s, family planning was high on their and western political agendas, but in the 1980s countries such as Ghana were treated by the IMF and Britain as laboratories for enforced economic reforms and debt programmes. Contraception and family-planning programmes, just beginning to have an effect, were sidelined. The free market economy pushed on Africa may have worked for the cocoa farm and gold field owners of Ghana, but there was far less money for health and education. The result was a rapidly growing, ill-educated, fast-breeding generation living in a technically richer but more unequal country where people knew how to save children dying at childbirth but were not able to look after their long-term interests.

"The danger is that we now revert to how we were 30 or 40 years ago," says Emmanuel Ekaub, a Cameroonian demographer. "Maternal mortality is worsening across Africa again. Poverty is worsening again, and the cities and planners cannot cope."

Five minutes down the road from 47 Seventh Avenue is 9 Second Circular Road, a brutish two-storey house built by the colonial government in 1950 for my father and his young family. In those days it was exclusively for elites. Nothing changes. Now the road is reserved, it seems, for diplomats, judges, bankers, government ministers and people with £300,000 to spend on an apartment.

But number 9 stands empty behind a concrete wall. A large tree has grown right outside the front door, the gardens, laid out in the English cottage style of the 1950s, are overgrown, and a high court judge and his daughter live in what were the servants' quarters to the side.

Number 9 is still owned by the government but it hides a dark secret. No one wants to live there when they hear that, in 1982, it was the scene of Ghana's most notorious political murder. A military junta, led by Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, had seized power months earlier and there was a curfew in place, but on the evening of 30 June a death squad called on Cecilia Koranteng-Addo, a high court judge who was living here and, at the time, breastfeeding her baby. She was abducted, along with three others, and their bodies were later found riddled with bullets. The "enemies of the revolution", as Rawlings called them, were never caught.

In fact, number 9 is squatted. Two lads, who call themselves D.Jen and D.Beal from "X-tribe", have stuck their pictures to the wall of the old living room. "Fuck U Mother Fucker" someone has scrawled. There are cigarette butts, bottles of cheap South African wine, and a bedroll and TV in the old cloakroom.

"What Ghana's population explosion has done is suck young people into the city," says Aniwa. "They live in kiosks, old shipping containers, anywhere they can find. Some live in incomplete houses. New suburbs and townships like Gbawe, Sowutum amd Ashiaman are sprouting."

"Urbanisation will inevitably go to another level in the next 20 or 30 years," says Delali Badasi, a researcher at the Regional Institute for Population Studies at Accra University. "The average young person does not want to live in rural areas. They are all leaving to come to the cities. The slums will increase. We can't even house people today. The problem is the speed of change."

Opinions are sharply divided among economists about the advantage of having a younger population and youthful workforce. According to the government, 250,000 young women and men enter the job market every year, but the formal sector is able to employ fewer than 5,000 of them. "A rising population will support local firms and inspire foreign investment, but unless the youth have jobs and social betterment is achieved, the risk of social uprising is profound," says Simon Freemantle, Standard Bank Africa's senior analyst. "There is a real risk of social instability if the disgruntled youth feel left out."

We had sent a message north to tell King Puowele Karbo III in Lawra that we were trying to track down the family of the young princess who had delivered a white baby back in 1949. But that had been several weeks ago and we had received no reply. So, with a long journey ahead, warnings of bandits and no idea of what would greet us at the other end, we, too, set off in some trepidation.

It takes at least two days to reach Lawra from Accra. We flew 400 miles to Tamale, found an old banger and a driver, and travelled the last 200 miles along some of the worst roads in Africa, passing the great Bole national park with its elephants and baboons, villages with names such as Tuna and Ya, and shops called The Forgive And Forget Chemical Drug Store. The land is mostly flat and, this being the end of the rainy season, quite green.

King Jorbie Akodam Karbo I is still alive at 105. His family lost count of his offspring when they reached 70 daughters and 35 sons.

Late in the evening we presented ourselves at the palace, a rambling collection of low buildings, some built underground, a courtyard dominated by two enormous marble graves and several flagpoles. We were greeted by the king's brother, who said he knew we were coming because our car made an unusual sound. We arranged to meet the family the next day.

When you have an audience with King Karbo, you must bring libations, in this case two bottles of gin. He greeted us from his throne, animal skins strewn at his feet and pictures of his ancestors on the walls. "We believe that we have identified the woman your mother knew," he said. "She was one of the first ladies from the north of Ghana to be sent to Accra for training. My father believed we needed a trained midwife because so many children were dying under the traditional childbirth system. It was a very important mission. The whole community depended on her."

The concept of children in a place such as Lawra 60 years ago was pretty relaxed. They defined men's social standing, they were needed to increase wealth, they were assets to work the fields and fetch water, but numbers did not matter. A man did not look after them, and no one actually knew how big families were.

In retrospect, it would seem that King Karbo I, Puowele's father, was on a mission to populate Ghana singlehandedly. When he died in 1967, the family tried to count his offspring. "I did a population census of him in 1970," says the king. "We counted about 70 daughters and 35 sons. He left 39 widows. I could not count them all. Our children are many, and traditionally we don't count them. We don't actually know how many he had – he never counted them. He tried keeping records, but it didn't work."

Today, says Puowele, children are no longer seen as an asset. He has eight, his brother, an international athlete and recently retired university lecturer, five. "The trend is downwards. Nowadays the demands [on families] are great. You are in deep shit if you have too many. So you go for quality rather than numbers."

If his father had been responsible for so many births, and his relative had devoted her life to saving children as a midwife, Puowele could be said to have played a major role in Accra's rise from a small town to a megalopolis. He was national director of planning in the city, and devoted a lifetime to trying to control the tide of young people heading to the cities from places such as Lawra.

"Yes, Accra is a mess," he concedes. "We just could not control the population. We created a green belt, we planned reservoirs to stop flooding, we planned for oil, but the [politicians] refused to implement these things." He and his colleagues even considered building a new capital city to take pressure off Accra. "We looked at Abuja, the purpose-built capital of Nigeria. You can build a city from scratch, but if you do not change behaviour, it will be the same as the old one."

Lawra survived by traditionally exporting its youths to Accra and the south, to the gold mines and coffee plantations. "Women here still have eight to 10 children, but these days they are living. We are the stubborn ones, who refused to die."

Even so, Lawra is testament to what happens if people overuse resources and approach their ecological limits as is happening across large parts of west Africa. "Our environment has suffered badly from the pressure of numbers," the king says. "Our natural resources are diminishing. Our forests are being cut down. We can no longer find the herbs we used to use. The river bed is now silting up because we are farming close to the banks of the river. There used to be a gap between the villages, but now they are joining up. We cannot capture rainfall in the increasingly long, dry spells. Climate change is taking place."

But Lawra's future, he says, is not bleak at all. Like most Ghanaians, he loves children and believes that, if planned better and given a fair wind, the country's burgeoning population will be the key to its future prosperity. "We will have to diversify, yes. We will learn new things. But we are still confident in the future. Lawra will become a city, with all its social problems."

He turns the conversation back to the princess. "I can tell you she is our auntie. Your mother was very observant to see she had chiselled teeth. Her name is Stella Yeru, or Mrs Kuortibo. She had four children, two of whom are living now. The boy is a tax inspector at Tamale. She filled a void. She paid her dues. She worked in Lawra and all the other big hospitals in the region. She would have trained very many people. It was very rare in those days for a woman to work in public service like her. We can think of no other women like her. She was a pioneer. If you worked under her, you had no place if you were lazy."

Out of the blue, the king then asked if I would like to meet her. I was flabbergasted. Stella must now be in her mid-80s and I had not expected her still to be alive, let alone there. "But she is very old. She is bedridden and has forgotten everything," he warned.

We find a very frail old lady lying in her bed on the veranda of the house she had had built just outside the palace walls. She was beautifully, even ceremonially dressed, but was very weak and clearly near the end of her life. Her son, Anthony, had come to be with her.

I held her hand as her helper told her that I had come from London because she had delivered me at Korle Bu hospital in Accra all those years ago.

"Yes, I remember the white woman," she said in a thin voice that spoke loudly across the generations.

• This article was amended on 24 October 2011. The original gave the rank of the former Ghanaian leader Jerry Rawlings as sergeant, rather than flight-lieutenant.

• • reddit this

• David Hirst
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 October 2011 10.50 EDT
• Article history

Gaddafi in 2009. 'Behind the pretentious facade, his power rested on a very down-to-earth mixture of totalitarian method and tribal loyalty.' Photograph: Max Rossi/Reuters

It did not come as a complete surprise when, on 1 September 1969, members of the Free Officers movement overthrew the sick, ageing and self-effacing King Idris of Libya, that vast, underpopulated, least known of north African states. Revolutions were still very much the fashion in an Arab world still shaking off centuries of direct foreign rule, or indigenous systems installed by foreigners. And, in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the blow that shattering defeat dealt to the pride and post-independence pretensions of Arabs everywhere, there had been riots and demonstrations in his otherwise tranquil, western-protected kingdom.

Yet Arabs could expect precious little of what they saw as a uniquely uninspiring land, barren, backward and impoverished – a mere passageway between the civilisations of Egypt and the Maghreb – and could not imagine that it would ever play a decisive role in the affairs of their region, let alone the world, or even aspire to.

They reckoned without the 27-year-old signals officer who led the coup, Captain Muammar al-Gaddafi, who has has died of wounds sustained when he was captured in his ancestral home of Sirte in the so-far bloodiest uprising of the Arab spring.

Gaddafi was a volcanic child of his times, possessed, from early youth, of a mystical sense of destiny which was enhanced, not diminished, by the very humility of his origins. Born in a bedouin tent, a member of the semi-nomadic al-Gadafa clan from Sirte, on the central Libyan coast, he went to a traditional Koranic infants' school, about the only form of instruction then available to a boy such as himself, before going on to the Sirte primary school at the age of 10. In 1956 he moved to the secondary school in Sebha, capital of the remote southern province of Fezzan.

It was the year of Suez, the Anglo-French attack on Egypt which marked the emergence of the young Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had overthrown King Farouk and his decadent dynasty four years before, as the Arab champion of modern times. With Nasser as his idol – he too later titled himself colonel – the 14-year-old Gaddafi was caught up in the surging pan-Arab emotions of the time, in the ideals of Arab renaissance, unity, strength, and the "liberation" of Palestine.

Expelled from school for his political activities, he continued his secondary education at Misurata, on the coast, and there, with some of his classmates, he decided to join the army as a means of overthrowing the monarchy. In 1963 he enrolled in the Benghazi military academy, where he cultivated his group of would-be revolutionaries with himself as their uncontested chief. After a brief training interval in Britain, he was posted to Khar Yunis, near Benghazi, from where, with remarkable ease, he seized the absolute power which, through many vicissitudes, he managed to preserve until 2011.

Of all such Arab "revolutions", his was perhaps the sharpest, swiftest, cleanest break with the past, the most obviously identified with a single personality. No such leader had more vaulting personal ambitions than he. None, in the shape of a small, easily governable population, and the bonanza of immense oil wealth, should have been better equipped to achieve them. Yet none – even by his own original criteria – was ultimately to fail more abjectly. To be sure, he put his obscure country on the political map. He became a household name, a bogeyman of the western world. But as for the real, enduring achievements of his 42-year career, they were in inverse proportion to the extravagance with which he conducted it.

Nasser was a flawed and tragic idol by the time Gaddafi had acquired the means to emulate him, but an immensely potent one all the same, and had he lived, the disciple would have remained in the shadow of the master. But within a year of Gaddafi's revolution, Nasser had died after a heart attack, and the disciple appointed himself as "leader", "teacher" and "custodian of Arabism" in his place.

The existing Arab order, he preached, was replete with hypocrisy and two-faced policies, with feeble and shameful regimes who worked against, not for, Arab unity and the Palestinian cause in which they claimed to believe. But he would surely succeed where his master had failed. And already he was hinting at yet larger, visionary ambitions than that. "The Libyans," said his second-in-command, Major Jalloud, "are as nothing without Gaddafi … he is neither his own, the Libyans', nor even the Arabs' property, but the property of free men everywhere, from the Philippines to Ireland [the IRA in the 1970s and 80s], Africa to Latin America and Europe."

In this narcissism and self-aggrandisement, he was at least in some measure the child, not so much of his Arab times as of the narrow Libyan sphere which he was trying to transcend. In part, at least, they were an outgrowth of something in the Libyans' psyche, a sense of inferiority and an aggrieved conviction that their brother Arabs had never appreciated the immense scale, heroism and sacrifice of a struggle against the Italian colonists prior to being driven out by the allies in 1943 and independence in 1952, in which one-third of the population had died, including many members of Gaddafi's own family. Preposterous and neurotic they may have been, but they signified that no one believed in his own high destiny like Gaddafi himself. "He who has principles and a mission cannot be restricted by his potentials. When the Prophet Muhammad was given his Islamic mission, he called on the Persian and Roman kings to convert to Islam. Could a bedouin shepherd stand in the face of the Roman and Persian kings?"

His first quest was to unite Libya and Egypt, combining the new-found oil wealth of the former with the large population, skills and education of the latter to make a great state to which other states would rally. In July 1973 thousands of boisterous Gaddafist youths, in buses and cars, streamed across the Egyptian frontier demanding instant merger in petitions signed in blood. It was one of at least half a dozen such unionist experiments, with a variety of partners, which foundered on the rocks of the would-be partners' infirmity of purpose, fear, suspicion and disdain of this bizarre, arrogant, impetuous upstart.

Gaddafi's pan-Arab ambitions were always closest to his visionary's heart. But, frustrated on every front, he began to look inwards, confining himself to the only arena, Libya itself, where his absolute writ ran incontestably. The long-suffering Libyan people became the only possible laboratory for his weird, utopian conceits.

In 1977 he turned Libya into the Great Jamahiriyah. In line with his Third Universal Theory, his answer to the discredited systems of capitalism and communism, the Jamahiriyah, or State of the Masses, supplanted the Jumhuriyah, or Republic, as the most advanced form of government ever known. In one volume of his famous Green Book, outlining his solution to the "political problem", he revealed how, through committees everywhere, his new system ended all conventional forms of government – "authoritarian, family, tribal, factional, class, parliamentary, partisan or party coalition" – replacing them with "direct democracy" and "people's power". Society's vanguard, the revolutionary committees, or "those who have been convinced, through the Green Book, of the fraudulence of contemporary democracy", were to incite the masses in their conquest of all bastions of "conventional" authority.

In a second volume, his solution to the "economic problem", he envisaged a society that would banish the profit motive, and ultimately money itself, and where no one would work for anyone else.

The spread of the new gospel was a historic necessity. Just as the European despots ganged together to crush the new republican order to which the French revolution gave birth, so the Arab kings and presidents would round on the Jamahiriyah to preserve their "crumbling power and apostate policies".

But this was to amount to a self-fulfilling prophecy. From being an aspirant for union, President Anwar Sadat's Egypt quickly became a mortal enemy, and waged a vicious border war against its neighbour. Libya came under such assaults not because of the power of a new idea – Burkina Faso was the only other country to declare itself a Jamahiriyah. For in practice, Gaddafi remained a very conventional ruler of a developing country. Behind the pretentious facade, his power rested on a very down-to-earth mixture of totalitarian method and tribal loyalty, with his revolutionary committees as the instrument of policies that came from the top, almost never, as under the "people's power" they should have, from below.

If he achieved anything, it was mainly because of oil – which yielded ever-increasing billions a year for a people of two to three million – and his freedom to impose his peculiar brand of Arab socialism without regard for true cost. Yet even so, he could not avert the chaos, the grim fiasco of his grandiose supermarkets' empty shelves, of stampedes – in which people were trampled to death – for basic commodities when they did arrive. He also spent huge sums on a Soviet-supplied arsenal. But neither the money nor the 8,000 Soviet technicians could hide the fact that much of it was rotting away in the desert.

No, the foreign desire to stamp out the Jamahiriyah was a self-fulfilling prophecy because, in his pan-Arab frustrations, Gaddafi turned more and more to propaganda, subversion and the patronage of every conceivable "liberation" movement, from semi-respectable Palestinian organisations to outright terrorists such as Carlos and Abu Nidal. He openly espoused revolutionary violence, and sent hit teams to assassinate Libyan "stray dogs" who opposed him from exile. In 1984, shots fired from the Libyan embassy in London killed PC Yvonne Fletcher while she was policing a demonstration, and Britain broke off diplomatic ties.

Gaddafi declared war on the American-sponsored peace process and became the US's public enemy number one. In 1981 the Sixth Fleet shot down two Libyan fighters over the Gulf of Sirte in the first military collision, in modern times, between the US and an Arab country. Then, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan sent waves of warplanes to bombard targets in Tripoli and Benghazi. One was the Aziziyah barracks where Gaddafi lived, but instead of the man Reagan called "the mad dog of the Middle East", they apparently – according to state media – killed his adopted daughter, Hanna, instead.

It took some time to appear, but this raid, and above all the attempt to kill him, had a sobering effect. Emulating President Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1988 he began a characteristically flamboyant perestroika of his own.

The revisionism was implicit recognition that the Libyan people would have been quite unmoved had Reagan's F-15s got him, that he had reached a nadir of unpopularity, the cumulative consequence of American hostility, foreign misadventures, domestic repression and the havoc wrought by his puerile Green Book socio-economic theories. He mounted a bulldozer and rammed the walls of a well-known Tripoli jail. Political prisoners clambered free from there and other places where they had been incarcerated for years, often without knowing why. Private retail trade trickled back to the long-shuttered Italianate arcades of central Tripoli, bringing with it wonderful things such as soap, razorblades and batteries, which had all but vanished in the era of "supermarket socialism".

The perestroika pleased Libyans so far as it went, yearning as they did for the day when, like any conventional leader, their's would turn his attention to the ordinary problems of a small and rather ordinary country. It also impressed western diplomats as a possible portent of a radically new Gaddafi, one readying himself to renounce his fierce and flamboyant anti-imperialism and his sponsorship of international terrorism. Yet if, at last, this really did signify the mellowing, on all fronts, of the enfant terrible of the Arab world, it was a process that was suddenly thrown into reverse by a single horrific legacy of the terrorist past which he was apparently trying to put behind him.

That was the bombing, in 1988, of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, with the loss of all 259 passengers and crew aboard, along with 11 people on the ground. After a huge international investigation, in 1991 Britain and America accused Libya of responsibility for it, and demanded that it hand over the two chief suspects, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and al-Amin Khalifa Fahima, members of Gaddafi's intelligence services, for trial.

His first instinct was to rail and abuse. It would be treason for Libya to do so, it was in an historic confrontation with the west, in the course of which, if need be, it would set fire to all oilfields. Gaddafi was afraid that to yield up those two obscure apparatchiks would be to strike at the very foundations of his tribal-cum-military power. In any case, he had already persuaded himself that it was not just the two suspects that the west was after, but his own head.

On the other hand, if he did not comply, the sanctions, mainly an air embargo, which the UN imposed in 1992 and ratcheted up a year later, were going to cripple his effort to restore his ravaged economy. He needed, above all, to placate his people, the sanctions' prime victims, who were mostly blaming him, and him alone, for them.

And he was already facing unrest enough from them. In 1993 he was deeply rattled by a tribally based military rebellion and assassination attempt that he only narrowly escaped. He was also confronting an Islamist terror campaign, in the hilly eastern regions of Libya, partly inspired by those already raging in neighbouring Egypt and Algeria. It put paid to even the pretence of perestroika. It was back to the killing or abduction of "stray dogs" – now conducted with the complicity of his fellow despot, the Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, a man with whom he was deeply at odds in almost everything else – and back to blood-curdling threats from himself: "When traitors are discovered in a tribe, the Libyan people automatically consider the whole tribe guilty and the 'people's committees' have the right to shoot them dead."

In 1996, one of Gaddafi's brothers-in-law, Abdullah Sannusi, presided over a massacre in Abu Salim prison, Tripoli, in which guards went from cell to cell with Kalashnikovs and grenades, killing 1,200 inmates. And things were apparently getting so bad on the economic front that a law was passed that widened the scope of the death penalty to include "speculation in food, clothes or housing during a state of war".

It was only in 1999, after interminable wrangling over face-saving terms and conditions, that Gaddafi handed over the two suspects for trial in the Netherlands under Scottish law. Two years later, he was outraged at the conviction of one of them, al-Megrahi, mocking it as Christian justice and a laughable masquerade. But still this was not enough for the US and Britain. They demanded a clear, official acknowledgement of responsibility for the atrocity and compensation – some $2.7bn of it – for the victims' families. With much squirming, he complied on both counts – and thereby secured the full-scale lifting of sanctions and general rehabilitation he so desperately needed.

It inaugurated what, in effect, was a third great transformation in Gaddafi's international orientation. With the first of them, he had reached a point of such disgust that he pronounced: "Arab nationalism and unity have gone for ever. May God keep the Arabs away from us, for we don't want anything more to do with them." He turned to another continent instead. "Libya," he now decreed, "is an African country." And he expounded his new vision – a United States of Africa, with Sirte as its capital, and himself as its self-anointed king of kings. But before long he was growing tired of Africa in turn, and Africa of him.

Even he could hardly have imagined that he could ever turn Europe into the arena of yet another of his grandiose moral, civilisational and geopolitical grand designs. Nonetheless, he did treat it to lectures and theories about where its future lay, or should. He already saw signs, he once told it, that God would "grant Islam victory in Europe without swords, guns or conquests", and that "the 50 million [sic] Muslims of Europe would turn it into a Muslim continent with a few decades".

And now, persona grata there himself, he visited on Rome, Paris and other European capitals all those grotesque eccentricities of personal conduct for which he had grown famous, or infamous, elsewhere. His monstrous wardrobe, his entourages of 300 or 400 ferried in four aeroplanes, his huge bedouin tent, complete with accompanying camel, pitched in public parks or in the grounds of five-star hotels – and his bodyguards of gun-toting young women, who, though by no means hiding their charms beneath demure Islamic veils, were all supposedly virgins, and sworn to give their lives for their leader.

Of course Europe was no more going to take him to its bosom than its Arab and African predecessors had. In any case, its main interest, just like his, was business – access to Libya's large reserves of oil, investment, and a role in the reconstruction of its economy. And western governments now deemed – somewhat disingenuously – that he was doing enough, in renouncing his former wicked ways, to justify this very pragmatic rapprochement.

And the rapprochement deepened beyond the merely economic. After the terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001, the one-time world leader in the export of terror was gradually elevated into a virtual western ally in the war against it. Then, in 2003, he announced that Libya had decided to get rid of any nuclear, biological or chemical weapons in its possession. President George W Bush and Tony Blair leapt to praise this "courageous and wise decision" – even as they claimed it as a great strategic consequence of their overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the fear which that had inculcated in other such despots.

But these changes, designed to please the west, were not matched by any remotely comparable ones on the home front. Ostensibly, Gaddafi did seek internal reforms of sorts. When in progressive, modernist mode at least – for he was sometimes the hidebound conformist too – his second son, Saif al-Islam, had long been openly critical of the Jamahiriyah's deep failings in governance, economic management and human rights. He even led a semi-public inquiry into the massacre at Abu Salim in which his own uncle had participated. It was he whom Gaddafi put in charge of bringing the reforms about.

However, Saif al-Islam did not get very far. For he ran into resistance, not merely from such pillars of the system as its revolutionary committees and a nomenklatura deeply wedded to the status quo, but also from Gaddafi himself. For, when it came to the crunch, Gaddafi Sr was not ready to let junior do more than tinker with the whole, bizarre edifice of power which he had created, and reminded him that the direct democracy that it embodied was the best in the world.

When it came to the economy, Saif al-Islam could not stray far from the Green Book either. Yes, his father conceded, his economic theory had meant the nationalisation of just about everything. But that, he now said, had been merely transitional. All the theory needed was elaboration and refinement for the benefit of the ordinary mortals who had to make it work, and who, in their obtuseness, opportunism or sheer malevolence, had misinterpreted or abused it.

Gaddafi had come to power as the last revolutionary of the pan-Arab nationalist Nasser generation. He eventually became the doyen of them all. None was to enjoy such absolute power for so long as he, and none had had such an opportunity to shape their systems and societies with quite such untrammelled ease. Consequently, in none had the failure of a whole generation's revolutionary expectations been more blatant than it had been in him.

The "messenger of the desert" reduced his country to a far worse condition than he found it in. Survival, for the 42 years that made him longest-serving non-royal ruler in the world, was about the only thing he could boast of. And till the eve of his fall, there was little to suggest that he could not have survived for many more years, and eventually – like just about every other leader of once-revolutionary Arab republics had already done or planned to do – perpetuate himself and his Jamahariyah in the person of his son. That son would not have been his eldest, Muhammad, from a first, short-lived marriage to Fatiha al-Nuri, but Saif al-Islam, his eldest by his second wife, Safiya Farkash. He is survived by those three and by other children from his second marriage; his sons, Sa'adi, Mu'tassim, Hannibal and Khamis; a daughter, Aisha; and Milad Abuztaia, an adopted nephew. His son Saif al-Arab from his second marriage was killed in a Nato air strike.

Gaddafi's powers of survival notwithstanding, once the hurricane of the Arab democratic revolution began to blow, nothing seemed more obvious – or fitting – than that he, cruellest, most capricious and ruinous of Arab dictators, should be among the first three to be swept away. It even looked as though he might go as swiftly as the neighbouring presidents Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak in Tunisia and Egypt.

Within days he had lost control of Benghazi, a traditionally self-willed city, as well as vast swaths of eastern Libya. The contagion spread to the west, where important towns and tribal districts fell to local rebellions. Waves of protesters were in the streets of Tripoli itself. And with panic and confusion taking hold in high places, with long-serving officials and military commanders rushing to defect, his power seemed close to crumbling before this tidal wave of pure, unbridled "people's power".

But that was not to be. Turning tanks, artillery and warplanes on civilians, Gaddafi killed and injured thousands. And then, recovering from the initial shock, he rallied what was left of his loyalist apparatus and launched a systematic, multipronged counter-offensive to reimpose his sway over the capital and retake areas lost in the east. Now, it was no longer, as in days gone by, just occasional plotters and renegades who had betrayed him. It was an entire people, "stray dogs" all, "rats, traitors, hypocrites, drug addicts – and agents of al-Qaida". Now, he and his son Saif vied with one another in warning of the "rivers of blood" to come if this aberrant people failed to make the only sensible choice available to it, between "submission – or liquidation and war until the last man and the last bullet".

As the resurgent military reappeared at the gates of Benghazi – now the rebel headquarters and seat of a rival administration – a massacre loomed. And that prospect triggered a reaction that was probably decisive to Gaddafi's ultimate undoing. With broad Arab backing, Nato forces imposed a no-fly zone over the country. Their mandate was to protect civilians only, but in due course they became a de facto instrument of regime change, in conjunction with the rebel forces on the ground.

Western aircraft steadily eroded the Gaddafi military's ability to exploit its vastly superior, and professionally delivered, firepower, targeting concentrations of artillery and armour as they lay siege to rebel-held cities. Chaotic at first, without training or any but the most rudimentary equipment, and fired only by enthusiasm and reckless courage, the disconnected groups of volunteer fighters gradually acquired sufficient military skills and improved, makeshift weaponry first to hold their own, and then to achieve minor gains here and there. After six months of stalemate, they surprised the world, and perhaps themselves, with their lightning descent on the capital and their conquest of the Bab al-Aziziya barracks – that vast, forbidding high-walled fortress, home, seat of power, and above all, crass, iconic, absurdist symbol of Gaddafi and all his works. It was only a matter of time before National Transitional Council forces took control of the rest of the country, and even Sirte finally provided no refuge.

• Muammar al-Gaddafi, politician and soldier, born 1942; died 20 October 2011

In Summary

Solr external scoring

# solr.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<solr persistent="true" sharedLib="lib">
 <cores adminPath="/admin/cores">
        <core name="test" instanceDir="test" />
 </cores>
</solr>

# Schema, a pkId (blog entry) belongs to a blogId (the blog)
<schema name="test" version="1.1">
    <types>
   	<fieldType name="string" class="solr.StrField" sortMissingLast="true" omitNorms="true"/>
    	<fieldType name="integer" class="solr.IntField" omitNorms="true"/>
    	<fieldType name="float" class="solr.FloatField" omitNorms="true"/>
    	<fieldType name="entryRankFile" keyField="pkId" defVal="0" stored="false" indexed="false" class="solr.ExternalFileField" valType="float"/>
	<fieldType name="blogRankFile" keyField="blogId" defVal="0" stored="false" indexed="false" class="solr.ExternalFileField" valType="float"/>
    </types>
    <fields>
	<field name="pkId" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" required="true" />
	<field name="blogId" type="integer" indexed="true" stored="true" required="true" />
	<field name="entryRank" type="entryRankFile" />
	<field name="blogRank" type="blogRankFile" />
    </fields>
    <uniqueKey>pkId</uniqueKey>
    <defaultSearchField>pkId</defaultSearchField>
    <solrQueryParser defaultOperator="OR"/>
</schema>

# dataDir/external_blogRank.txt
1=2.0
2=1.0
3=3.0
4=1.0

# Add doc file, save it as /tmp/add.xml
<add>
    <doc><field name="pkId">1</field><field name="blogId">1</field></doc>
    <doc><field name="pkId">2</field><field name="blogId">1</field></doc>
    <doc><field name="pkId">3</field><field name="blogId">2</field></doc>
    <doc><field name="pkId">4</field><field name="blogId">3</field></doc>
    <doc><field name="pkId">5</field><field name="blogId">4</field></doc>
</add>

# Add some data
curl http://127.0.0.1:8110/solr/test/update --data-binary @/tmp/add.xml -H "Content-Type: text/xml"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
<lst name="responseHeader"><int name="status">0</int><int name="QTime">239</int></lst>
</response>

# Commit
curl http://127.0.0.1:8110/solr/test/update -H "Content-Type: text/xml" --data-binary '<commit />'
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
<lst name="responseHeader"><int name="status">0</int><int name="QTime">6</int></lst>
</response>

• • reddit this

• Lalage Bown
• The Guardian, Tuesday 9 October 2007
• Article history

“Start Quote

Oh no! We are not accepting responsibility for this one, he might be Ghanaian born and even carry a Ghana passport but he sounds more British to me”

An abandoned children's amusement park inside Qaddafi's compound after it was overrun by rebel fighters.

On the evening of Aug. 23, during the final hours of the battle for Tripoli, a 26-year-old lawyer named Mustafa Abdullah Atiri was lying, exhausted, against the back wall of a filthy tin-roofed warehouse crammed with 150 prisoners. He had been beaten and tortured every day since Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s soldiers arrested him four days earlier. It was just after the muezzin’s first call to evening prayer — about 10 minutes before 8 — when a pair of guards walked to the door, raised their AK-47 rifles and began spraying the men with bullets. Another guard threw a grenade into the densely packed crowd. Bodies fell on top of Atiri with the first fusillade, protecting him from the blast. Then the guards opened fire again. Blood began seeping down from the bodies above, soaking his jeans. As the officers walked back across the yard to reload, a guard named Abdel Razaq, who had shown the men some small mercies over the previous days, went to the door and shouted at the survivors: “Run! Run!”

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I first met Atiri four days later. He was standing in the yard of the prison he had escaped from, a big man in a sweaty orange polo shirt with enormous, haunted eyes. It was noon under a blazing sun, and the smell of rotting corpses was stifling. Three men lay dead on the ground at our feet, their bodies bloated, dried blood pooled around them. Acrid smoke was still rising from the dark interior of the warehouse where Atiri and his fellow prisoners had been held. I walked over to take a look. I have been to a number of war zones, but nothing prepared me for what I saw. Dozens of skulls and twisted skeletons lay in a charred mound, surrounded by bones and bits of old, burned tires. There were at least 50 human remains there, and probably many more. Atiri, standing behind me, had known these men, some of them just teenagers. One was an imam who led them in prayer, he said. Atiri’s eyes roved wildly around the prison yard, his face contorted with grief. It was only after the massacre, he told me, that he realized the significance of something he saw two hours before it all began, as the guards were moving him across the prison yard. An officer had arrived at the prison’s front gate, flanked by aides. A guard whispered to Atiri that it was Khamis el-Qaddafi, the dictator’s youngest son, a military commander known for brutality. “The guard told me, ‘Khamis is signing the orders for your final release,’ ” Atiri said as we stood by the fire-blackened warehouse. “And he laughed.”

By that time, the last great battle of the Libyan civil war was over. After 42 years, the bizarre pageant of Muammar Qaddafi’s rule had collapsed quickly, in a final spasm of senseless killing. Scores of prisoners — perhaps hundreds — were executed at makeshift holding facilities like the one I saw, for no apparent reason. Many of the victims were not even rebels, just citizens picked up in random sweeps in the final days. Even the guards were killed at some jails, perhaps to silence a witness, perhaps because they refused orders. No one could say.

The end left Tripoli in a state of giddy disbelief. On the day I arrived, Bab al Aziziya, the dictator’s high-walled stronghold, lay wide open, with Libyan families strolling through and gazing wonderingly at the ruins. Outside, the vast public square was a wasteland littered with burnt-out cars, twisted metal and rags. Rebels from across Libya rode wildly through the city, firing bursts from rifles and anti-aircraft guns. Young men fanned out to trash every picture of the man known as Brother Leader and to cover the walls with triumphant, satirical graffiti. Muammar — the name is similar to a word for “builder” — was scrawled out and replaced with the rhyming Mudammer, “destroyer.”

But the celebration was tinctured with deep unease. There was still talk of snipers, of a counterattack by Qaddafi’s men, of a fifth column of “sleeper cells” lurking inside the capital. Victory had come too easily. Only weeks earlier, the rebels seemed in disarray, and Qaddafi’s forces, having withstood more than four months of NATO air strikes, seemed poised to hold out for many more. Then, on Aug. 20, a planned uprising broke out in Tripoli, as the ragged rebel army converged on the city from various directions. The final battle, expected to last weeks, was over in two days. Qaddafi and his top lieutenants fled almost immediately. Now it was hard to know who was a killer and who a mere dupe. The rumors changed every few hours: Qaddafi and his sons, who were still issuing lurid threats by satellite phone against the rebel “rats,” were hiding in the tunnels under Tripoli, people said, and might soon flood the city with mustard gas or poison its water.

Unlike Benghazi, the old opposition stronghold in eastern Libya where the rebellion began in February, Tripoli had been a relative bastion of support for Qaddafi. Even the bravest dissidents, who risked their lives for years, often posed as smiling backers of Qaddafi and his men. Now the masks were off, but another game of deception was under way. At all the military bases I visited, I found soldiers’ uniforms and boots, torn off in the moments before they had, presumably, slipped on sandals and djellabas and run back home. Even the prisoners I spoke with in makeshift rebel jails had shed their old identities or modified them. “I never fired my gun,” they would say. “I only did it for the money.” “I joined because they lied to me.”

Everyone in Tripoli, it seemed, had been with Qaddafi, at least for show; and now everyone was against him. But where did their loyalty end and their rebellion begin? Sometimes I wondered if the speakers themselves knew. Collectively, they offered an appealing narrative: the city had been liberated from within, not just by NATO’s relentless bombing campaign. For months, Qaddafi’s own officers and henchmen had quietly undermined his war, and ordinary citizens had slowly mustered recruits and weapons for the final battle. In some cases, with a few witnesses and a document or two, their version seemed solid enough. Others, like Mustafa Atiri, had gruesome proof of what they lived through. But many of the people I spoke with lacked those things. They were left with a story; and they were telling it in a giddy new world in which the old rules — the necessary lies, the enforced shell of deference to Qaddafi’s Mad Hatter philosophy — were suddenly gone. It was enough to make anyone feel a little drunk, a little uncertain about who they were and how they got there.

In a sense, the battle for Tripoli began long ago in Qaddafi’s mind and was foreshadowed in the elaborate layers of defense he built up between himself and ordinary Libyans. These were not just physical — the city within a city that was Bab al Aziziya and the underground tunnels that may have allowed him to escape — but virtual. He built an extraordinary network of surveillance and control, hiring French, Chinese and South African companies to help monitor the phones and Internet and employing a vast network of informants and contract killers who could track his domestic opponents and critics to the ends of the earth. After the rebellion broke out in February, that network flared up in a last, furious effort to monitor and neutralize the discontent.

I met one of the men who worked in this apparatus, a 27-year-old former computer hacker named Omar. He was a big man with a plump babyish face and a constant, faint smile that gave him the look of a mischievous, overweight child. We met through an acquaintance and talked several times at my hotel for a number of hours. He had worked for four years monitoring telephone and e-mail traffic in the Revolutionary Committees’ Communications Office, one of several branches of the sprawling intelligence bureaucracy. Omar (who asked me not to use his full name) told me that he never wanted to work there; the government drafted him as he was applying for a tech job at a bank and then blocked his efforts to apply for other jobs. But he conceded that it was a sought-after and cushy post. He earned 5,000 Libyan dinars a month (about $4,000) plus a car, a laptop and an AK-47.

“The serious work began on Feb. 6,” Omar said. That was when he and his colleagues began seeing Facebook pages calling for mass demonstrations, inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. He began hacking into the activists’ e-mail and monitoring Web sites. “We knew everything about the rebellion in advance, the places where people would gather, the slogans they would use, everything,” he said. His supervisors were dismissive about the threat at first, but after widespread protests on Feb. 17, they went into high gear. Omar and the 13 others in his office began working 15 hours a day and were not allowed out of the building for about a month (they slept in dormitories on the compound, located on Tripoli’s airport road). Their work went beyond surveillance: on orders from the bosses, they contacted dozens of snipers in Ukraine, Serbia and Slovenia and helped arrange for visas to bring them to Libya. The atmosphere grew tense. Omar overheard his superiors shouting, and on one occasion, one of them personally urged Qaddafi to make reforms, speaking on the single green phone that was reserved for direct conversations with him. On Feb. 20, some officers in Omar’s division were transferred to Bab al Aziziya. Later, one of them returned and said he had witnessed the execution of scores of military officers, apparently for refusing to fire on protesters.

Omar told me he was sickened by the violence, and he soon began to subvert the work his bureau was doing. He and a friend — he only trusted one other man in the unit — began subtly altering the names and phone numbers of rebels before forwarding them to the Revolutionary Guard. They would change a digit here or there, reverse a first and last name, just enough to make the information useless to the men tasked with tracking or killing the rebels. In some cases, he said, he even contacted people who were under observation, urging them to change their e-mail or phone, or to go into hiding. It was impossible to know how much of this was true. One of his friends told me Omar had given him such a warning, and several rebels said independently that they received warnings from people in the government. Omar also said he was arrested in late March, after a colleague told superiors about his subterfuge. He and all but one of his 14-member unit were jailed for a month, and then allowed to go home, thanks to a senior officer who shielded them from punishment. True or not, it was a story line that kept Omar’s hands pretty clean.

Omar seemed to relish his insider status, and it was easy to imagine that he would have happily continued in his job if not for the uprising. On the second day we met, he brought his laptop and showed me some of the files he had copied, including a long list of Qaddafi’s assassins, with their real names, cover jobs and telephone numbers. He told lengthy, detailed stories about a number of the most notorious crimes Qaddafi has been accused of, including the 1988 Lockerbie bombing (he essentially confirmed the guilt of the man convicted of the crime, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi ) and the murder of Musa Sadr, an Iranian-Lebanese cleric who disappeared in Libya in 1978. (Omar said Sadr was beaten to death after daring to challenge Qaddafi at the dictator’s home on matters of theology.) He read about these cases in the intelligence archives, he said, which were easily accessible to those working in the unit. “Security was very lax once you were on the inside,” he told me. “It was only tough on the outside.”

Later that morning, Omar offered to show me his old office. He was nervous about being detained by rebels and insisted that we take his car, a dusty Toyota sedan that he had parked across from my hotel. We got in and drove along the seafront, where huge container cranes loomed in the distance and the hot sea breeze mixed with the stench of raw sewage. We soon passed from central Tripoli into an area that had not been cleared by the rebels. There were still green flags on the road — the emblem of the Qaddafi forces — and the area was deserted, its houses pocked with bullet marks, its streets full of trash and burned-out cars. Omar turned up the volume on his car stereo, playing techno dance tunes, and seemed almost to relish my unease. When we drove up to the first building, inside a gated compound, there was a stench of rotting flesh in the air. Omar turned off the car, and suddenly it was eerily silent, with the sound of eucalyptus leaves rustling in the breeze. Inside the building, there were smashed file cabinets, with heaps of paper spilling out to the hallways and a vast, defaced poster of Qaddafi. Omar clearly knew the building well. He showed me the computer servers that stored newer records on the main floor, the old archive room and his own office in a comfortable suite with faux-leather chairs. “Everything has been stolen,” he said, as he went through the shelves above his old desk. There were personnel documents scattered over the floor and tables; one had Omar’s full name on it. Afterward, he drove us to another intelligence building, where the lights and air-conditioning were still on, as if the Qaddafi men had run out earlier that morning. The rooms were full of odd, often sinister detritus: boxes full of Libyan and foreign passports, including blanks; a blue bag full of needles with injection tubes attached; surgical masks and gloves. Soon after we arrived, the photographer that I was traveling with, Jehad Nga, recognized the place. He had been held there in March when Qaddafi soldiers detained him for three days, subjecting him to brutal beatings and endless questioning from officers who insisted he was a spy. Nga found the desk where he was interrogated for eight hours at a stretch. He traced a message in the thick dust that now covered the desk surface: “I told you I’d be back.”

• Africa Rising is a weekly look at business, investment, and development trends.

At least 10 African countries harbored ambitions to be the continent's newest nuclear power – until Japan's March 11 earthquake shook the idea off the shelf. Six months and roughly 16 billion barrels of consumed crude oil later, has Africa's nuclear race begun anew?

On the same Thursday afternoon last week, both the largest and second-largest economies in sub-Saharan Africa's – growing rivals Nigeria and South Africa – announced new nuclear programs. South Africa's cabinet will consider tens of billions of dollars worth of new nuclear power plants, said Energy Minister Dipuo Peters.

South Africa, Africa's top economy, holds the only set of nuclear stacks on the continent. That's why South Africa's decision renders Nigeria's – to build just one – all the more astonishing to an industry still reeling from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that broke cooling systems at Japan's Fukushima I nuclear plant and sent seething radiation floating across the Pacific Ocean.

Nigeria was among the aspiring nuclear states that dropped plans after Fukushima. But on Thursday, President Goodluck Jonathan publicly asked the country's Atomic Energy Commission to move forward with plans to become Africa's second nuclear nation.

"It's a big vote of confidence," said Dr. Kelvin Kemm, a nuclear physicist and CEO for South African energy consultancy Stratek. "We're going through an emotional phase."

When the phase ends, Africa, the world's poorest continent, could be an unlikely boom region for builders of nuclear power plants.

"I see Africa as the main nuclear growth area in the next few years," Dr. Kemm says. "Africa needs electricity fast, and therefore it's open to suggestions. There's nowhere else that's this open."

But not everyone is that open.

Strides in more environmentally friendly electric stations – particularly solar plants – have drawn international interest to Africa, a continent flush with sun, breeze, and rivers up for damming.

China, already building three hydro-dams on the continent, will start six solar plants in Africa this year, and plans to build at least one in 40 African countries. Private consumption of Chinese-built solar panels has also increased in Africa – Nigeria included.

"[Nuclear plants] are already dinosaurs," said Cape Town Branch Coordinator Muna Lukhani of South Africa's green energy advocacy group Earth Life Africa. Referring to the steam-powered turbines central to most plants, he adds: "Nuclear power is an extremely expensive and dangerous way with which to boil water."

Expensive, sure: But less expensive by the plant.

For starters, the nuclear industry has been rocked by a second quake, the global economic downturn, which has shifted interest away from US and Europe, towards developing countries that need smaller reactors, cheaper, now.

Of the roughly 60 designs for nuclear, many of the more recent blueprints envision centers a tenth of the size of the 2,000 megawatt plants of the 1970s. By 2014, Bill Gates and Toshiba Corps – the laptop company – are aiming to start production of nuclear mini-reactors compact enough to sit in a hot tub.

These safes are so safe, Kemm says, that he would gladly "live in a tent next to a nuclear reactor for the rest of my life." Many of these plants require "no more than a half dozen highly-skilled individuals" to operate, he says. Plus, "these are small nuclear reactors," he adds. "You can scatter them wherever you want."

"Any African country can do it," he says.

Certainly, physicist Imoh Obioh on President Jonathan's Atomic Energy Commission thinks Nigeria can.

"Our plan is mainly to expand Nigeria's electricity generation base from fossil fuels (oil and gas) to include renewables and nuclear," Mr. Obioh wrote in an e-mail to the Christian Science Monitor. "This is to make sure that Nigeria gradually strives to attain energy security."

For Igor Khripunov, Associate Director for the Athens, Georgia-based Center for International Trade and Security, it's less a question of could than should.

"For Nigeria, there's no compelling reason to start generating electricity by building nuclear power infrastructure," he said citing the country's oil wealth, its horrid reputation for corruption, and the fact that its grid might not easily support a plant.

"Other considerations are behind their decision," he adds. "It's prestige, that's how I can interpret it."

Apr�s les propos de l'avocat Robert Bourgi, cet interm�diaire officieux de l'ex�cutif aupr�s de plusieurs capitales d'Afrique de l'Ouest jusqu'� une p�riode tr�s r�cente, qui affirme avoir vu des valises remplies d'argent �tre remises � Jacques Chirac et � Dominique de Villepin, le terme "Fran�afrique" est revenu sur le devant de la sc�ne (lire l'article du Monde du mardi 13 septembre ).

La "Fran�afrique" est un mot-valise d�crivant la diplomatie de l'ombre entre la France et ses anciennes colonies en Afrique. S'il est une figure qui  l'incarne, c'est Jacques Foccart, responsable de la "cellule Afrique" de l'Elys�e, sous de Gaulle, puis Pompidou.

Au lendemain des d�colonisations, il met en place un r�seau important sur ce continent dont il conna�t tous les dirigeants. Robert Bourgi fut l'un des disciples de M. Foccart. Quatre affaires importantes ont illustr� ces pratiques de l'ombre.

• L'affaire des diamants de Bokassa

Le 10 octobre 1979, Le Canard Encha�n� r�v�le que Bokassa I^er, empereur de Centrafrique, aurait offert des diamants � Val�ry Giscard d'Estaing, alors qu'il n'�tait que ministre des finances et se rendait en Centrafrique pour des parties de chasse.

En avril 1979, plusieurs dizaines d'�coliers sont tu�s dans les prisons de Bangi, la capitale centrafricaine. Une commission d'enqu�te conclut � la participation "quasi-certaine" de Jean B�del Bokassa � ce massacre, et en septembre, la France fait intervenir l'arm�e pour le remplacer par David Dacko, ancien pr�sident.

Selon certaines sources, l'entourage de M. Bokassa aurait alors aid� � la r�v�lation de l'affaire des diamants, le "pr�sident � vie" esp�rant ainsi faire pression sur l'Elys�e pour retrouver son tr�ne.

• L'affaire Carrefour du d�veloppement

Christian Nucci, ministre socialiste charg� de la coop�ration et du d�veloppement, cr�e une association pour organiser un sommet de chefs d'Etat au Burundi en 1984 avec Yves Chalier, son chef de cabinet. Les subventions obtenues pour l'association serviront, entre autres, � financer les campagnes �lectorales de Christian Nucci ou � r�nover un ch�teau.

Lorsque la droite arrive au pouvoir en 1986, le nouveau ministre de la coop�ration, Michel Aurillac, s'appuie sur un rapport de la Cour des comptes pour d�noncer le scandale. Un policier de haut-rang proche de Charles Pasqua, ministre de l'int�rieur, offre � M. Chalier un faux passeport pour qu'il puisse fuir vers le Br�sil et faire des r�v�lations qui mettront en difficult� la gauche.

• L'affaire Elf

Elf, soci�t� publique jusqu'en 1994, est tr�s pr�sente en Afrique par ses activit�s p�troli�res. En enqu�tant en 1994 sur le financement d'une entreprise de textile fran�aise notamment gr�ce � des filiales d'Elf Gabon, Eva Joly, alors juge d'instruction au p�le financier au palais de justice de Paris, d�couvre un syst�me beaucoup plus vaste de corruption, o� se m�lent financements occultes de la vie politique et appuis aux alli�s de la France en Afrique.

L'affaire a conduit � la condamnation de plusieurs hauts responsables de la compagnie, dont son ancien PDG, Lo�k Le Floch-Prigent, le M. Afrique de Elf, Andr� Tarallo, et Alfred Sirven, l'ex-directeur des "affaires g�n�rales" d'Elf.

L'ancien ministre de Fran�ois Mitterrand, Roland Dumas, condamn� en premi�re instance pour abus de biens sociaux, est finalement relax�.

>> Chronologie "Elf, un dossier judiciaire qui dure depuis plus de dix ans"

• L'Angolagate

En 1990, alors que la France refuse officiellement de vendre des armes � l'Angola parce que le pays est en guerre, une diplomatie parall�le se met en place, men�e par Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, fils de Fran�ois Mitterrand et ancien responsable de la cellule Afrique de l'Elys�e. M. Mitterrand fait le lien entre les dirigeants angolais et l'homme d'affaires Pierre Falcone.

Cela aboutit � la conclusion d'un accord de livraison d'armes avec l'Angola pour un montant de 4 milliards de dollars par la soci�t� Brenco, dont M. Falcone est pr�sident. Cette soci�t� reverse ensuite r�guli�rement des enveloppes remplies d'argent liquide � diff�rentes personnalit�s et finance �galement des mouvements politiques gr�ce aux b�n�fices des ventes d'armes.

>> Lire l'article du Monde du 6 ao�t 2008  "Mieux qu'un polar : l'Angolagate"

President Goodluck Jonathan

Jonathan charges commission on timelines for atomic energy delivery

By Elizabeth Archibong September 16, 2011 10:01AM

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Ghanaian leaders and civil society groups met in the nation’s capital, Accra earlier this week to develop a plan to abolish the witches’ camps in the northern region, where over a thousand women and children who have been accused of sorcery are currently living in exile.

Deputy Minister for Women and Children’s Affairs Hajia Hawawu Boya Gariba said the ministry would be doing everything that it could to ensure the practice of families and neighbors banishing women from communities whom they suspected of being witches is abolished by developing legislation that would make it illegal to accuse someone of being a witch and gradually closing down camps and reintegrating women back into their communities.

“This practice has become an indictment on the conscience of our society,” Ms. Gariba said at the conference called Towards Banning “Witches” Camps. “The labeling of some of our kinsmen and women as witches and wizards and banishing them into camps where they live in inhuman and deplorable conditions is a violation of their fundamental human rights.”

Supreme Court Justice Rose Owusu also said that the practice violated numerous clauses in section 5 of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution. That section protects human rights and outlaws cultural practices which "dehumanize or are injurious to the physical and mental well-being of a person." Ms. Owusu also called for the development of new legislation to outlaw the camps and the practice.

The witch camps of Ghana's north

There are currently around 1,000 women and 700 children living in 6 of the witches’ camps in Ghana’s northern region.

Many of them are elderly women who have been accused of inflicting death, misfortune, and calamity on their neighbors and villages through sorcery, witchcraft, or "juju," a term used throughout West Africa.

The women enjoy a certain degree of protection within these camps, located some distance from their communities in which they could be tortured, beaten to death, or lynched, but the conditions of the camps are often poor. The "accused witches," as they are sometimes referred to, live in tiny thatched mud huts, and have limited access to food and must fetch water from nearby streams and creeks.

Forced to flee

An elderly woman named Bikamila Bagberi who has lived in Nabule witch camp in Gushegu a district in the Northern Region for the past 13 years, told the story of how she was forced to leave her village. Dressed in a headscarf, faded T-shirt, and cotton skirt, Ms. Bagberi spoke softly with her head bowed as a district assemblyman translated for the conference delegates.

Bagberi’s nephew, her brother-in-law’s son, had died unexpectedly and after the village soothsayer said she caused the death of the child her family tried make her confess to murdering him through sorcery. She said that when she refused she was beaten with an old bicycle chain, and later her nephew’s family members rubbed Ghanaian pepper sauce into her eyes and open wounds.

When asked whether she could return back to her village she said the family couldn’t bring her back into the community because of the fear that she will harm others. Bagberi said she expected to spend the rest of her life in the camp.

Catalyst for action

Human rights groups have been campaigning for the closure of the witches’ camps since the 1990s, but have had little success in abolishing the practice of sending women suspected of witchcraft into exile, in part because of lack of political will and the pervasiveness of the belief in witchcraft throughout Ghana. But the brutal murder of 72-year-old Ama Hemmah in the city of Tema in Novermber of last year, allegedly by six people, among them a Pentecostal pastor and his neighbors who are accused of dousing her with kerosene and setting her alight, caused public outrage and made headlines across the world. Since Hemmah’s death, opinion pieces and articles about the issue have featured in Ghana’s major newspapers, along with feature stores on local news programs.

Emmanuel Anukun-Dabson from Christian Outreach Fellowship, a group working with the accused witches at the Nabule camp and one of the organizers of the conference, suggested that a broader cultural shift needed to take place if the camps were to be abolished.

“In Ghana, we know that when a calamity happens or something befalls a family or a community the question is not what caused it, but rather who caused it?” Anukun-Dabson said. “We are a people who do not take responsibility for our actions; rather we find scapegoats and women are the targets.”

Chief Psychiatrist of Ghana’s Health Services Dr. Akwesi Osei, who spearheaded the conference, argued that a public awareness campaign on psychological disorders, dementia, and the mental and behavioral changes associated with menopause might help the public understand behaviors and perceived eccentricities that are often associated with witchcraft.

Belief in witchcraft and supernatural powers is common throughout Ghana, and Africa countries and is often encouraged by pastors who preach in the nation’s many charismatic churches. Supernatural themes and sorcery also feature strongly in Ghanaian and West African films and television programs.

Deputy Minister Gariba has called for another meeting to develop a more concrete road map and said that the National Disaster Management Organisation would be providing the witches’ camps with water tanks and additional food supplies.

Joojo Eenstua, another organizer of the camp who works with Christian Outreach Fellowship at Nabule, said the conference marked a new era in activism on the issue and believed that significant changes and improvements to the livelihoods of the women and children living in these witches camps would follow.

“There is more public awareness than before and there is more political will and momentum around this issue,” Ms. Eenstua says.

1. Peter Struck, the German Social Democrat parliamentary leader, pronouncing that “today we are all Americans,” and Jacques Chirac, president of France, endorsing the Le Monde headline. Alan Freeman, “‘Today We Are All Americans’: NATO Allies Pledge Support,” Globe and Mail, September 13, 2001, http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/special/attack/pages/worldreactions_article12.html; and New York Times, “Interview with Jacques Chirac,” September 8, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/international/europe/09CHIR-FULL.html. ↩
2. Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-sectional Cluster Sample Survey,” Lancet, October 12, 2006, http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2806%2969491-9/fulltext. ↩
3. Neil Smith, “Neo-liberalism—Dominant but Dead,” Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 51 (2008):155–57. ↩
4. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). ↩

Bourgi : "J'ai vu Chirac et Villepin compter les billets"

L’avocat Robert Bourgi, successeur de Jacques Foccart, révèle vingt-cinq ans de pratiques occultes sous Chirac. Pour la première fois, un homme avoue des financements occultes en provenance d’Afrique.

Below is a dispatch from western Libya by Eileen Byrne (ebyrne202@yahoo.com), a friend of the blog who writes for the Financial Times out of Tunis. It was written special to TMND.

The two thuwar (revolutionaries) stationed on the highway that runs east from the Tunisian border, skirting the Nafusa mountains, had time to chat on that bright Wednesday morning in Ramadan, four days after Tripoli rose up against Qadhafi. The more hardened fighters were still away in the capital, perhaps, leaving these two 23-year-old accountancy students to man the checkpoint by the turn-off to their village, Kabaou.

They sat on an iron bedstead beside the sentry-hut, Klashnikovs across their knees, in shirts, tracksuit bottoms, and cheap flip-flop sandals. In a Portakabin on the other side of the road the television was on Al Jazeera and a sound-bite from some Obama speech came floating out across the way.

One of the two brought over dates and milk for the visiting journalists. We couldn’t possibly eat while they were fasting, we said, so they showed us into the little sentry-hut and brought the dates and milk in on a small table.

In the capital, the air was no doubt still dark with death and violence. Through the previous night, the big guns of the international media had been moving up the highway, drawn by the ominous undertow of the front line. Three men from Kabaou died yesterday in the fighting in Tripoli, said one of the thuwar, who gave his name as Najmeddine Ayoub. And it’s not only young people who have died, he added. There have been married men with children.

He himself was just a couple of months into a post-graduate accountancy course in the Italian town of Perugia when he decided it was time to come home and defend the village from the shells that pro-Qadhafi forces were lobbing in its direction. Not that his family had dared say anything by phone — under Qadhafi the whole telecoms system was designed for easy listening. He had gleaned information from phone calls with friends who were already training with the thuwar. Once the decision was taken it was a short flight to Tunis, where a minibus was laid on to ferry him and a handful of others down to the Dehiba crossing.

The pair have Tamazight as their first language but hardly correspond to the “Berber tribes coming down from the Nafusa mountains” of some news media. And forget training camps hidden high in forested slopes; the Nafusa mountains turn out to be hot and stoney, offering little shelter. With other men from the village, the two underwent 45 days of training by a Libyan veteran of the Chad war, in a camp just beyond the village, alongside a separate group of volunteers from Tripoli.

They were well-informed about what was going on across the country that Wednesday morning, but it didn’t sound like they would need much persuading to put down their weapons. “We would have preferred to have done it with demonstrations,” said Najmeddine, “but Qadhafi would have been quite capable of bombing us from the air” in the early days of the revolution.

Waheed Burshan, another Libyan returnee, had driven along the same highway the previous day, heading for his family’s hometown of Gharyan, south of Tripoli.

At Dehiba, he had looked like a suburban American soccer dad on a family outing — baseball cap, leisure shirt, supplies of mineral water in the back of the car. But he hadn’t been back to Gharyan — liberated from pro-Qadhafi forces the previous week — for 16 years. And he hadn’t lived in Libya for more than 30.

As a teenager his rebelliousness had been directed mainly against the high-school authorities, and he was active in the students’ union. With military service looming, his father packed him off to Italy. There were reprisals against the family – travel restrictions and an uncle in prison – and threats against himself, but his activism continued and developed through studies in the US (telecom engineering), raising a family in Chicago, and project management in the Qatari state sector.

Since April, he explained, he had been “project managing” the rebel push from the Nafusa mountain area for the Transitional National Council, working between Benghazi and Tunis, with trips across the border into western Libya . Once the Americans and others had been won over to the idea of a push towards Tripoli from the west of the country, senior Libyan military figures who had defected to the rebels in Benghazi had to be persuaded to let the grassroots take the initiative, in what was a genuine popular uprising.

“A lot of the youth here in the Nafusa are very, very smart. They had no military experience, they’re not very rugged and some of them were not very strong,” said Burshan. “But they learn quick and adapt. And their heart is in the right place. They really wanted to be do something about this regime.”

He is not talking large numbers: something between 5,000 and 10,000 were trained in the area, and “sometimes we inflated the numbers just to scare the heck out of [the pro-Qadhafi loyalists]“. Women and children from the region’s towns and villages were sent over the border into Tunisia to let the men focus on their fighting.

With NATO in the air to “take out” the Grad missile launchers and other armaments used by pro-Qadhafi forces, and with weapons flown in from Benghazi to an airstrip improvised on a widened section of the highway, the rebels gradually found themselves on the offensive. The cost was maybe some hundreds of deaths among their own ranks, more on the pro-Qadhafi side, said Burshan. By May “the TNC in Benghazi was recognising the Nafusa as part of the new Libya”.

He is not very polite about the old-school military in Benghazi who felt they had “ownership” of the revolution: they were out of touch with the thuwar way of doing things and were best given offices, a salary, and consigned to “an advisory role”. Nor is he overly respectful of the few British ex-commandos whom he met on the training side of things. There were also a few Qatari instructors who arrived along with sophisticated weaponry sent by their government, he adds.

Homeward-bound via Nalut and Zintan, Burshan offers comradely greetings to the thuwar who emerge, sometimes bearded and in long gowns, from graffiti-bedecked Portakabins or tent-like shelters as the car zig-zags through the artificial sand-banks erected ahead of checkpoints. “Libya is one country and Tripoli is its capital,” reads one slogan.

He is only mildly put out when they detected something unfamiliar in his accent and asks his nationality. “Libyan of course!” he answers heartily.

In the wider Transitional National Council, he is the member for Gharyan. His grandfather, from an old Turkish family, was governor of Zintan.

“Welcome to Nalut” says an improvised sign by a car-park style barrier that is lifted up to let us pass. It soon becomes clear that each rebel brigade is operating entry and exit checkpoints to its home town — something that seems to irritate Burshan.

The rebel forces have been deliberately organised by town, so as to let brigade members vet applicants and exclude possible pro-Qadhafi infiltrators, he explains. About 50 per cent of applicants to these town-based brigades were respectfully turned down. Now the main task will be “nation-building”, though, along with “good governance, justice, equal opportunities”.

Talk of the movement disintegrating into regionalism is misguided, he says: “Tribalism, where is the tribalism? It all works on personal relations. I know each commander from here to Gharyan.”

And as for Islamist currents among fighters in the Nafusa, there is nothing there yet that makes him uncomfortable: “We are not Yemen. It doesn’t mean we don’t produce extremism, but our society will deal with it, just like any other culture that has these shades of political views. These are the complexities of open societies and open economies.”

But it was a mystery to him, and rather worrying, that Abdelhakim Belhaj had earlier that day been announced as leader of Tripoli’s military council: “I don’t know whether he put himself in that position, or whether somebody appointed him.”

Nalut, the main town of the Nafusa area, took a battering from pro-Qadhafi forces in the spring. Outside the rebels’ military HQ, a surreal sculpture of assorted metal parts stands mounted on the back of a pick-up van. It’s a section of a jet engine recycled as a rocket launcher. “You see how ingenious we Libyans are!” says Burshan appreciatively. A rectangle of chintz-covered padding borrowed from someone’s living room serves as incongruous blast protection over the back of the driver’s cab. “In the early days they even used stones” against the pro-Qadhafi forces. “Nalut was held for months with just 350 Klashnikovs. That’s all they had — it was pitiful.”

Maybe it’s an old habit, but he never refers to Qadhafi by name. “The guy made of a lot of stupid mistakes,” he says.

In Nalut, people were uneasy about the pro-Qadhafi loyalties of the villages to the north, as far as El Jamil, just south of Zuwara on the coast. “Those people were nomads who came over from Tunisia in the 1970s,” said the man in charge of the rebels’ guest house. “Qadhafi gave them land — it’s all there in his Green Book: ‘The land belongs to the user’.”

Land that had been held communally by Amazighen communities for centuries was transferred into new hands and Qadhafi got some loyal supporters, locals said.

The colourful Amazighen flag was flying from buildings and trucks, and alongside the rebels’ Libyan flag at some checkpoints. Burshan is not keen on having Amazighen cultural and linguistic rights incorporated in the new constitution that will be drafted once Qadhafi is out of the way. He prefers a minimalist document. But as a nod to diversity, we call by Nalut’s new radio station, which broadcasts in Tamazight.

Driving eastwards, we pass three ambulances travelling in the opposite direction, maybe taking wounded fighters for treatment in Tunisia.

But “people did this rebellion happily,” strange as it may sound, says Burshan. “The weight on them. The shame they’ve been carrying for all these years. These are proud people — intelligent, smart. These are cultures that are thousands of years old, and it was somebody who just came in yesterday. Some kind of an idiot. They are so embarrassed about what happened to them.”

The next day I got to meet representatives of the two new councils that run the village of Kabaou. They were used to media visits, as the village had been free of Qadhafi’s rule for some months, although shells fell worryingly close in early August.

Entering the building that houses the town’s new councils, you step on a green carpet with Qadhafi’s face on it. The president of the transitional (civilian) council, Abrahim Makhluf, is a mining engineer who before the revolution supervised infrastructure for the whole of Nalut state. From behind a desk he said the priority would be to “build up the country” with a strong civil society and institutions, an independent judiciary. Not so different, then, from Tunisia across the border.

There will be attempts to rehabilitate the Berber language. “Over the years we lost a lot of vocabulary, even before Qadhafi. Especially among the families that moved away to Tripoli,” said Makhluf. “Under Qadhafi we could only use our language at home, and he rewrote history with his Green Book to say ‘Your origin is Arab’. There was no way to express feelings and culture.”

His colleague from the village’s military council, Suliman Sharche, an affable retired airforce pilot, has for some years now has been director of the local hospital.

As a pilot through the 1980s he helped Qadhafi to “help revolutions” in Uganda, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia even Nicaragua, he recalled. It was a time of constant propaganda, with some bright new idea from Qadhafi every year.

He took us on a quick tour of the village. Among the stone buildings of the abandoned old quarter are the remains of an ancient synagogue. “In Kabaou, we started off as Jews, then became Christians, then Muslim!” he says.

The landscape is dry as a bone, apart from some long-established olive groves. Over the years many families have moved away to Tripoli.

Back at the council house, he talks of rural poverty and the need for better health services so that people will no longer have to travel to Tunisia for treatment, and of how there should be real jobs for Libyan professionals, instead of the pretend jobs they had under Qadhafi.

Dutiful representatives of the international media, we ask what should be done with Qadhafi once he is caught. Sharche cracks up. “Who cares?! Qadhafi is over and done with.” It is really the most hilarious, imbecile question he has heard in a long time, and it has made his morning.

• • reddit this

• Martin Chulov in Tripoli
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 September 2011 19.45 BST
• Article history

Gaddafi with a couple of his private guards, known as Amazons, on a visit to Italy. Photograph: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters/Corbis

In Europe they were known as the Amazons. In north Africa, they were admiringly dubbed Haris al-Has – the private guards.

They were the elite cadre of female bodyguards who surrounded Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for more than 20 years, becoming almost synonymous with his idiosyncratic dictatorial rule.

Now, nearly three weeks after Tripoli fell, the dictator's ravaged compounds are finally shedding light on the enigmatic unit. And like much else in Gaddafi's Libya, the myth of glamour and steadfast devotion is at odds with a reality of ruthless control and illusion.

Inside one building in 77 Brigade, a giant base of ruined hangars in the central city, a select group of female guards were based.

A pink petticoat in the forecourt distinguishes this two-storey heap of rubble from other more intact buildings nearby. And further inside, the shattered lives of press-ganged young women starts to emerge.

In one room, a designer desert boot lies next to a mangled wardrobe. In the next a black bra is strewn under a Mickey Mouse cutout and a blue high heel has been crushed by a timber. Further along the corridor the lighting improves, courtesy of a Nato missile that has crashed through the ceiling, and dusty wedding photos jut from a layer of concrete dust.

Down a crumbling staircase, packets of pasta spill from another ransacked room, which is now home to a cat and kittens. The building has a long-ago feel, until the last door on the left, where the reality of life in this place is both stark and recent.

This is the room of the commandant, a vehement Gaddafi loyalist named Fatima Baroud, who hasn't been seen for several months. Women who served in this unit had an abiding fear of Baroud, but were even more terrified of the small room with the rank blue carpet to the side.

"That is where I was raped," said Nisrine Gheriyanih, 19, in a prison yard this week, having been captured by the anti-Gaddafi forces. "They would come and take us by the hand and walk us down the corridor. We knew what would happen."

Several empty ointment packets lie strewn on the floor along with lentils and half eaten baguettes. Nisrine says she was assaulted here by Gaddafi's former head of internal security, Mansour Dhao, who this week fled to Niger.

But now she is facing a different plight. On the night of 20 August, as Tripoli burned, she says she was ordered by a male Gaddafi soldier to shoot dead three rebels. She said she did as she was told in order to save her own life.

"What could I do," she sobs, a rebel badge now pinned to her abaya. "If I didn't do that, I wouldn't be here now, but if I did do it, I wouldn't be here either. Which is better?"

Sitting next to her in the Jadida prison in Tripoli's east are two other women, also part of the 77 Brigade unit, known as Haris al-Shabi, with very different stories.

One, Nisrine Abdul Hadi, 19, says she was sent to join Gaddafi's army by her family in Bani Walid. She was arrested in the loyalist stronghold of Abu Selim in one of the last battles for the capital, accused of running supplies to loyalist soldiers.

She has the haunted eyes of a child who is utterly lost. "We had three jobs," she explains. "To support the male army, to do ceremonial things, like guarding. And to fight if necessary."

Sitting next to her is a rare woman in the new Libya – a diehard Gaddafi loyalist, who is happy to talk about her role as a leader of the 77 Brigade. "He gave us honour," said Jamila Calipha al-Arun, 52. "Yes I fought for him and I was proud to," she says, outlining how she carried and distributed guns to military units. "He was a good and noble man and I was proud to have served. I loved him. It was my duty. But now it's over and I want to go home."

The one area where Arun clearly differed from the ousted Libyan overlord was in how he chose his elite guard force. "You had to be tall, beautiful and have long hair," she said. "I was never chosen."

All three women sitting in the prison grounds wore conservative Islamic scarves, very unlike the female guards that Gaddafi used to travel with and often take abroad.

"They did not have the same rules," said Arun. "They were the elite girls. There were around 400 of them over 10 years."

Inside Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound, six low-set grey buildings with narrow slits for windows were where his private guards were based.

Everything here has been looted or burned in recent weeks, and finding remnants of the girls in uniform is difficult. Along with the odd garment or shoe lying on a filthy floor, newspaper clippings of Arab leaders and pop stars are still pasted to one wall.

But in every other building, it is like they were never there.

"They were the most important part of Gaddafi's world and they have probably gone with him," said Arun. "Go and find Salma Milad, Judia Sudani, Mabrouka al-Mashat or Howa Tuergi. They were all Gaddafi's ladies and ran the unit. His world revolved around them."

Coerced, abused, prominent

Muammar Gaddafi's practice of giving women prominent roles in his inner court was odds with social custom in Libya, where females remain firmly outside the establishment.

Although many were coerced and abused, some women occupied elevated positions. Gaddafi's private office was directed by Mabrouka al-Mashat, a loyalist of many years who tended to the family home and enjoyed her boss's patronage.

Howa Tuergi and Judia Sudani also played prominent roles in broader Gaddafi affairs. "If the family wanted girls for parties, or other things, either of them would arrange it," said Nisrine Gheriyani, one of the ousted tyrant's former female soldiers.

His guard force and female soldiers were very much his eyes and ears – in some ways equally important as the old-world male spy lords who enforced his police state.

"We were told to report to the family anything strange you see, or hear. Don't talk to anyone about it," said Nisrine Abdul Hadi, another guard. Maybe he trusted us more, or maybe he just liked girls."

“Start Quote

For years, I thought only criminals got fingerprinted and now all my 10 fingers are marked simply to enable me to travel”

ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigerian authorities said on Tuesday they had found a bomb-making factory near Abuja and had arrested six suspected members or people connected with the violent Islamist sect Boko Haram, including a foreign fighter from neighbour Niger.

Authorities are investigating a bombing of the U.N. headquarters on August 26 that killed 23 people in the Nigerian capital. Last week they arrested two suspected Boko Haram members over the attack and said they suspected a third member with an al Qaeda connection led the plot.

Department of State Services (DSS) spokeswoman Maryln Ogar told Reuters by telephone that the six detainees were not wanted in connection with the bombing of the U.N. building.

A statement from her office said the six were suspected of plotting and carrying out bombings on an electoral commission office on April 8, just before presidential elections, and of a church on July 10 -- both in the town of Suleja, just outside the capital Abuja. They were also wanted for the killing of four policemen.

"The five suspects all confessed that the main supplier of the explosive materials used for their bombing operations is a miner from Nasarawa State who the Service eventually arrested on 30th August, 2011," the statement said.

"A non-descript building where the improvised explosive devices (I.E.Ds) are assembled has been uncovered at an area popularly known as Chechnya, Hayin-Uku village," it said.

The statement listed what it called "the merchandise of death" found at the factory. It included a gas cylinder, three detonators, one attached to a battery, several pieces of detonators, shrapnel, batteries and cables.

Ogar said by telephone the suspects led authorities there.

"We found explosives at the sight as well. The suspects were the ones that took us there and showed us the things they use in putting these bombs together," she said.

Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is sinful" in the northern Nigerian Hausa language, has become President Goodluck Jonathan's most intractable security challenge.

It has carried out frequent shootings or attacks with homemade bombs against security services and civilians in the remote northeast.

The U.N. bombing marks an increase in the sophistication of Boko Haram's attacks, possibly with better explosives, and an escalation from local to international targets, analysts say.

"There's no link between these suspects and the bombing of the U.N. building, based on their confessions," Ogar said.

Erykah Badu

e is one of the greatest sirens of all time.
this is nothing new. i always joke that rapheal sadiq and i joke that we NEVER look her in the eye for more than 5 seconds.

i dont know what it is but erykah is one of the sexiest people of all time.

bob power called me in to drum on "drama" with ron carter for her debut album.

and man....she had me from the whiff of her mango oil.

i knew i was in.

she sat by my feet (ala joss in "fell in love with a boy" video)

and i knew i was in.

she took me to dinner

and i knew i was in.

she brought me a miles davis poster from bleeker bobs

oh yes nigga i was in.

she said "i want you to do a song on my album ill come to your house"

(word?!?!? arhoo?!!)

i rushed home....cleaned that shit up....


why?!?!?

i knew i was IN!!!!!

she arrives in philly and .....

the fuck is tariq doing here?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!

he NEVER comes to my sessions!!!!!

he think he tryna get in!

next night this mofo is cooking?!?!?!? and bringing his food to the studio?!?!?!

he think he in and shit!!!!

im asking erykah where her hotel is so i can call a cab for her....

she says "tariq is going out of town for a week so he left me the keys to his apartment"---

awwww HELL NO HE THINK HE IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!???

now here comes james' ass (james is the cat that would ask the teacher for extra homework and a pop quiz in school) talking about "lets make some MORE songs!!!" in the studio after 1 am...

why!?!


oh he think he is getting in......

we done worked for 6 hours already and i think we have a mighty good song in the can ("otherside") why do we HAVE to keep on working?

he thought he was in.

she all rubbing his head and shit. and he thinkin (oh yeah im in)

(this 3am recording shit will be a mainstay on every erykah album i do--she kidnapped me (made my ex angry as fuck!) on my near death bed after a show at 4am to record "neck"/"ad 2000"/"booty"/"...and on/"clever"/ and "green eyes" for a marathon swoop in time for me to make my 9am bus call.....i had a barf bucket and i even fell asleep for about 10 seconds and went on autopilot while drumming the last half of ad 2000 (on 2:56 you can hear me abruptly waking up only to drop the stick on a fill that somehow they kept in)--

sure enough.

me being the kang of snoring and all this hair has prompted erykah and james "im in!" poyser to tell the engineer to press record whilst i lay near my drumset and these two fools sing songs of my snoring and my bed head. most of which was for yalls amusement on her "afro" a real time in between songs mess around banter (most of which heavily edited to my happiness) during that week.

the next day

*knock knock knock*

*eddie murphy mr robinson voice) "WHO IS IT?!?!?!?


its yo brother...D!

--now by this point d and i realized we were brothers in arms but not the show up unannounced variety we would demonstrate 2 years later. so this shit was a shocker.....but i had my suspicions.


sup man! choo doing here?

"uh you know just uh....thought id come up and say whats up to my brother!"

(yeah ok.....i heard this before)

word?

"yep!...you know....so i hear you working with erykah...."


i knew it.

richmond to philly is a 8 hour drive and NOONE drives 8 hours just to say "whats happening brother"

that entire album we was crossing our ts
dotting our i's
cooking gourmet meals
swiping our credit cards for black erotica books (1992 cats remember that?)
dressing all headwappy
and beads
and candles
and soy
and saatan
and almond milk
and whole foods
and candles
and oils
and what the hell has my life come to?!?! i dont wear purple socks!!!!!!

very very interesting year 96 was.

she had seduced us all.

like that one female cat strutting down the street on tom and jerry and all the alley cats going apeshit.

enter andre.

enter hate.

For those who might be feeling bewildered by the news reports coming out of Libya, here are a few things to keep in mind, gleaned from observations of its evolving conflict over the past seven months.

1. Assume Nothing Is as It Seems

When the rebels swept virtually unopposed into Tripoli, Qaddafi�s son and heir apparent, Seif al-Islam, was reported to have been arrested. Within a day, we learned that this was false; not only was he not in custody, he was moving around the supposedly liberated capital, openly flaunting his freedom and taunting the rebels, saying they had been lured into a trap. His father, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen, still at large, and around the city his forces had reemerged and were fighting back�even as, the next day, rebels were entering his compound. Suddenly, Qaddafi�s endgame had acquired a postscript, and it seemed he was writing it.

How was this possible? Next rule:

2. Qaddafi Is a Desert Fox

• • Share121
  • reddit this

• Simon Tisdall
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 August 2011 23.22 BST
• Article history

Employees of the Libyan embassy in Buenos Aires burn a portrait of Muammar Gaddafi. Photograph: Marcos Brindicci/Reuters

Muammar Gaddafi, who seized power in Libya in a 1969 coup and whose Tripoli stronghold has been violently seized , was a leader with many guises. He was a Bedouin tribesman, a colonel and a self-styled revolutionary. He was an Arab and an African, a nationalist and a socialist, a Muslim, a poet and a would-be "philosopher king".

For the Libyan "masses", he was, in his own words, their Brother Leader, Supreme Guide, mentor, patriarch and uncle. But for his domestic opponents and for much of the western world, Gaddafi was something else entirely: a hubristic oil sheikh, a buffoon, a braggart, and a heartless killer.

With his overthrow as Libya's paramount chief, the international stage has lost one of its most colourful and disturbing personalities. Gaddafi had the ability to amaze and appal, to shock and amuse, simultaneously and in equal measure. This Janus-like quality, of looking both ways while maintaining contradictory views, made him both a foolish and a formidable adversary.

The Bedouin tent he insisted on pitching when visiting foreign capitals, his infamous entourage of heavily armed female bodyguards, grandiose projects (such as his $20bn Great Man-Made River through the Libyan desert) and his absurdist, finger-wagging homilies to world leaders often rendered him a figure of fun and derision.

But the darker side of his character and leadership also made him, at various times during his 42-year reign, an object of fear and hatred – a vicious, duplicitous and pitiless enemy who would seemingly stop at nothing to maintain his dominance at home and advance his eccentric, bizarrely warped view of the world.

Writing in the Times in 2009, author Amir Taheri recounted how he first met Gaddafi in 1970 during the funeral of the Egyptian president, Gamal Abel Nasser – and how, typically, all was not how it seemed. "In a room in the Qubbah palace in Cairo I found Gaddafi squatting on the floor with a number of other Libyan officers, beating their chests and weeping uncontrollably while the television cameras rolled. Once the cameras stopped, however, it became clear that there had been no tears. The colonel and his entourage rose to shake our hands, all smiles."

Taheri went on: "Gaddafi is a caricature of the Renaissance man – a pseudo-poet, pseudo-philosopher and pseudo-soldier. Without having seen a single battle he has collected more medals than generals in an operetta. He has published verse that would make a 12-year-old blush … [His] Green Book, echoing Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, [is] full of gems that would make even the Chinese Communist despot sound profound."

Thirty-seven years later, aA Gaddafi visit to Paris in 2007 at the invitation of President Nicolas Sarkozy proved that, if anything, the colonel's his eccentricities had deepened with age. While pheasant shooting at Versailles (he was refused permission to go foxhunting at Fontainebleau), Gaddafi told his republican hosts he was "a great admirer of King Louis XVI" who was guillotined in 1793. Gaddafi toured Paris in a white stretch limousine, accompanied by a procession of cars and armed female guards that clogged the traffic and closed whole neighbourhoods. He also delivered a deeply insensitive lecture in the wake of the 2005 banlieu riots, admonishing an affronted audience about France's mistreatment of North African immigrants: "They brought us here like cattle to do hard and dirty work, and then they throw us to live on the outskirts of towns, and when we claim our rights, the police beat us."

As if for good measure, Gaddafi insulted Christians – "the cross that you wear has no sense, just like your prayers have no sense" – and, reverting to another favourite theme, condemned "the tragic conditions of the European woman, who is forced sometimes into a job that she does not want". His assumed support for women's rights was intended, as ever, to disguise an almost pathological, life-long misogyny. But few, apart perhaps from Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, a one-time ally and fellow philanderer, were fooled.

But this chronic absence of honest and open government was offset by another factor: Gaddafi's well-honed ability to manipulate people and events. US state department cables released by WikiLeaks show that US diplomats, who returned to Tripoli in 2006 when relations were restored, developed considerable respect for his skill in marginalising allies and rivals alike, and thus maintaining his own position.

Gaddafi "remains intimately involved in the regime's most sensitive and critical portfolios", ambassador Gene Cretz wrote in a January 2009 cable. Gaddafi's "mastery of tactical manoeuvring has kept him in power for nearly 40 years".

Gaddafi's dysfunctional character was on full display during a 2009 meeting in Tripoli with a US congressional delegation, the Washington Post reported, quoting WikiLeaks. "The lawmakers, led by Senator John McCain, were summoned to Gaddafi's opulent tent at 11pm. Gaddafi 'appeared as if he had been roused from a deep slumber' and showed up with 'rumpled hair and puffy eyes'. Wearing wrinkled pants and 'a short-sleeved shirt patterned with the continent of Africa', Gaddafi's mercurial side seemed be in control.

"But, the cable reported, Gaddafi 'was lucid and engaged throughout the meeting', exhibiting a command of the issues at hand and a diplomatic manner. When his son Muatassim, who serves as his national security adviser, tried to interrupt the US lawmakers, Gaddafi 'shushed' him and bade the visitors continue."

All the same, the US diplomats cannot suppress a snigger about Gaddafi's vanity and hypochondria. His numerous female bodyguards had been replaced by a Ukrainian nurse, a "voluptuous blonde" named Galyna, who accompanies him everywhere, they noted slyly.

Gaddafi's other side – murderous, blood-chilling and arrogant – was on ugly display in an interview he gave to the Washington Post in 2003. He was asked about the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, which killed 270 people. By this time a Libyan national, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, had been found guilty of the crime and Libya had offered to pay $2.7bn in compensation – convincing many that Gaddafi himself was personally complicit in the plot.

Gaddafi waved away the interviewer's questions, suggesting it was time to bury the whole affair. When pressed, turned the tables, claiming Libya should be compensated too: "We hope an agreement can be reached to provide suitable compensation, which Libya alone will not pay. Perhaps Libya and the US will contribute to a compensation fund."

Why would the US contribute? he was asked. Gaddafi replied: "To compensate for the Libyans who were killed in the 1986 [US] bombing [of Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli] – as well as for the victims of Lockerbie. How much do you think the compensation should be for Gaddafi's daughter [who was one of the victims]? If a normal American needs $10m, then a daughter of Gaddafi should be worth billions."

Gaddafi was not always the foppish monster he subsequently became. Born in 1942 in the desert near Sirte to an illiterate Bedouin family, his outlook seems to have been crucially shaped during his schooldays by revolutionary upheavals in the Arab world, principally in Nasser's Egypt, and by the 1948 Arab defeat in Palestine. At the Libyan military academy, he fell in with a group of radicals influenced by their study of Greek democracy and Islamic egalitarianism.

As a young, handsome junior officer – a far cry from the bloated, Botox-scarred dictator of today – he helped lead a coup against the pro-western King Idris in September 1969 and so launched Libya into a new age of supposedly perpetual revolution. He expelled Italian colonists, closed US and British military bases, nationalised Libya's all-important oil industry and positioned Libya firmly in the anti-western camp, championing liberation struggles across Africa and central and south America. In time he proclaimed the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya – literally, "the state of the masses", and organised a system of revolutionary or people's committees in every town, village, factory and farm that became the de facto enforcers of the new regime's diktat.

Setting out his ideas (such as the mysterious Third Universal Theory) in the Green Book, the essential literary companion to his so-called Green Revolution, Gaddafi abolished formal government structures or, rather, created a more important, parallel power base that he, his relatives, and favoured tribal allies controlled. While professing his faith, he kept Islam and Islamists on a tight leash.

Relinquishing the post of prime minister in 1979, Gaddafi assumed no new formal title, preferring terms such as Brother Leader and Supreme Guide. All military ranks above that of colonel had meanwhile been abolished. Despite all his talk of rule by the people for the people, it soon became clear there was only one colonel in Libya – and only one voice, among 7 million, that really mattered.

Gaddafi was fortunate in the 1970s, in two respects. Firstly, the great powers did not consider Libya important enough – strategically, geographically or militarily speaking – to worry too much about its zany leader's ideas, at least at first. Secondly, Libya had oil – before the war it was earning about $1.6bn per annum from exports – and Gaddafi used the wealth and influence it brought to keep potential enemies at bay and the country under firm control.

Under his unlikely tutelage, Libya's population, small in comparison to countries such as Egypt, enjoyed relatively high living standards. Even Gaddafi's opponents did not deny his road, school and hospital-building programmes brought significant benefits.

Of course, much of the oil wealth – worth an estimated $1 trillion over the first 40 years of his rule – was squandered, stolen or embezzled. Gaddafi and his six sons, increasingly important props for his one-man regime, became immensely rich. Most non-oil industries and the agricultural sector wilted from neglect, lack of investment and corruption. And in terms of human rights and media freedoms, the Libyan people's state became one of the world's most repressive.

But this chronic absence of honest and open government was offset by another factor: Gaddafi's well-honed ability to manipulate people and events. US state department cables released by WikiLeaks show that US diplomats, who returned to Tripoli in 2006 when relations were restored, developed considerable respect for his skill in marginalising allies and rivals alike, and thus maintaining his own position.

Gaddafi "remains intimately involved in the regime's most sensitive and critical portfolios", ambassador Gene Cretz wrote in a January 2009 cable. Gaddafi's "mastery of tactical manoeuvring has kept him in power for nearly 40 years".

Gaddafi's dysfunctional character was on full display during a 2009 meeting in Tripoli with a US congressional delegation, the Washington Post reported, quoting WikiLeaks. "The lawmakers, led by Senator John McCain, were summoned to Gaddafi's opulent tent at 11pm. Gaddafi 'appeared as if he had been roused from a deep slumber' and showed up with 'rumpled hair and puffy eyes'. Wearing wrinkled pants and 'a short-sleeved shirt patterned with the continent of Africa', Gaddafi's mercurial side seemed be in control.

"But, the cable reported, Gaddafi 'was lucid and engaged throughout the meeting', exhibiting a command of the issues at hand and a diplomatic manner. When his son Muatassim, who serves as his national security adviser, tried to interrupt the US lawmakers, Gaddafi 'shushed' him and bade the visitors continue."

All the same, the US diplomats cannot suppress a snigger about Gaddafi's vanity and hypochondria. His numerous female bodyguards had been replaced by a Ukrainian nurse, a "voluptuous blonde" named Galyna, who accompanies him everywhere, they noted slyly.

Despite its fortunate beginnings at home, Gaddafi's revolution left the rails almost as soon as he began to dabble in foreign affairs. It was as though Libya was not a big enough stage. His ego demanded a larger audience. In time, he certainly obtained one.

Gaddafi's ideas about mergers with other Arab countries, replicated in his later enthusiasm for a "United States of Africa" - with him as president - were mostly harmless, though he did launch a nasty, expensive and largely meaningless war with Chad in 1972. But his ill-concealed backing for anti-western terrorist groups, part of his revolutionary mission to change the world, made him multiple enemies.

Libya's support, direct and indirect, was as indiscriminate as it was lavish. From the IRA, the Red Brigades in Italy, and Eta in Spain to Shining Path in Peru and the Sword of Islam in the Philippines, terror groups everywhere benefited from his largesse. Infamous individuals such as Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Nidal were given shelter. A French plane, UTA Flight 772, was blown up over Niger in 1989, killing 171 people including the wife of the American ambassador to Chad. European capitals were bombed. Assassination squads were sent around the world, targeting Libyan dissidents who Gaddafi labelled "stray dogs". Amnesty International listed 25 such killings in the 1980s.

But this chronic absence of honest and open government was offset by another factor: Gaddafi's well-honed ability to manipulate people and events. US state department cables released by WikiLeaks show that US diplomats, who returned to Tripoli in 2006 when relations were restored, developed considerable respect for his skill in marginalising allies and rivals alike, and thus maintaining his own position.

Gaddafi "remains intimately involved in the regime's most sensitive and critical portfolios", ambassador Gene Cretz wrote in a January 2009 cable. Gaddafi's "mastery of tactical manoeuvring has kept him in power for nearly 40 years".

Gaddafi's dysfunctional character was on full display during a 2009 meeting in Tripoli with a US congressional delegation, the Washington Post reported, quoting WikiLeaks. "The lawmakers, led by Senator John McCain, were summoned to Gaddafi's opulent tent at 11pm. Gaddafi 'appeared as if he had been roused from a deep slumber' and showed up with 'rumpled hair and puffy eyes'. Wearing wrinkled pants and 'a short-sleeved shirt patterned with the continent of Africa', Gaddafi's mercurial side seemed be in control.

"But, the cable reported, Gaddafi 'was lucid and engaged throughout the meeting', exhibiting a command of the issues at hand and a diplomatic manner. When his son Muatassim, who serves as his national security adviser, tried to interrupt the US lawmakers, Gaddafi 'shushed' him and bade the visitors continue."

All the same, the US diplomats cannot suppress a snigger about Gaddafi's vanity and hypochondria. His numerous female bodyguards had been replaced by a Ukrainian nurse, a "voluptuous blonde" named Galyna, who accompanies him everywhere, they noted slyly.

But when Gaddafi turned his murderous attentions directly on the US, sending agents to bomb a nightclub in Berlin packed with American servicemen, Washington and its allies drew the line. Britain had already cut diplomatic relations after the killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984. In 1986, denouncing Gaddafi as "the mad dog of the Middle East" and following aerial dogfights over the Gulf of Sirte, Ronald Reagan sent flights of sea-launched cruise missiles slamming into Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli. It was, the US later freely admitted, a deliberate attempt to kill him, echoing a similar alleged attempt by Britain's secret services. Two years later, in presumed retaliation, came the Lockerbiehorror. Ever tougher UN, US and EU sanctions and deepening international ostracism ensued. Even fellow Arab leaders, alienated by his arrogance and meddling in their affairs, kept their distance. African countries took his money as he tried to curry favour, and mostly laughed at him behind his back. By the 1990s, Libya had become a pariah state and Gaddafi its pariah-in-chief.

Isolation did not suit Gaddafi's his self-aggrandising, showman side, nor were his banknote-scattering, one-man African tours sufficient to feed his ego. But then came the 9/11 attacks and with them, an opportunity. The US was suddenly badly in need of allies. The Americans' subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 seriously spooked Gaddafi. One of his envoys asked a western diplomat: "Are they coming after us too?"

In a spectacular volte-face, the Libyan leader came over to the west. But his 2003-04 rehabilitation, lubricated by oil contracts and engineered through his surrender of his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles, his co-operation in combating al-Qaida, and his agreement to help curb illegal sub-Saharan immigration into the EU now looks, with hindsight, like an embarrassing blip – a sort of strategic con trick that only the colonel could pull off.

Tony Blair and other European leaders and diplomats, dutifully trooping down to Tripoli and grinning for the cameras with the Arab world's prodigal son at their side, tacitly agreed to turn a blind eye to the past. A host of multinational oil companies returned to the Libyan desert. Gaddafi's comeback was crowned in 2009 by his first address to the UN general assembly. Predictably he used his speech to attack the pre-eminence of the US and other permanent security council members.

But Gaddafi was still, at bottom, the same man. There was no true change of heart, only cynical political calculation in the cause of self-preservation. He admitted no fault for the terrors of the past, and his sinister menace continued to hover oppressively over his native land. Even if naive western politicians and businesses could not or would not see it, the Libyan people did. As the Brother Leader aged, as younger generations rose in search of their rights, as his rival sons fought to secure their undeserved inheritance, as tribal loyalties frayed, and as the Arab world exploded in tumult, his weakness, his cruelty, and his moral bankruptcy were plainly exposed for all to see.

Libya's Supreme Guide had lost his way. His slogan of 40 years: "God, Muammar, Libya: Enough!" had lost its power. And in the end he is being blown away as surely and as brutally as an unsuspecting airliner climbing gracefully through Scottish skies.

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My niece was fascinated by the extravagant clothes that everybody wore”

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Are all the cousins I have met really my cousins?”

Pippa Middleton's behind inspires plastic surgery boom

Americans are lining up to go under the knife to mimic the derrière of Pippa Middleton, a US plastic surgeon has said.

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• The Observer, Sunday 25 June 2006
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• The Observer, Sunday 16 July 2006
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Buy In the Country of Men at the Guardian bookshop

In the Country of Men
by Hisham Matar
Viking £12.99, pp245

The eponymous men in Libyan-born Hisham Matar's outstanding debut novel are impenetrable, austere, terrifying. For nine-year-old Suleiman, they are a flickering but potent presence: hands in smoke-filled rooms that he is instructed to kiss. But Suleiman is growing up in 1970s Libya and a far larger force looms over even these goliaths: Muammar Gaddafi, 'The Benefactor', 'The Guide'.

Oppression is with us from the opening page in the form of the relentless summer heat from which humans and ants scuttle into shady hiding. Suleiman's days lack form; school is out and he spends his time playing on the roof of his parents' house or in the streets of their affluent suburb.

Baba, Suleiman's father, disappears on various business trips. Mama dolls herself up for Baba's returns, but falls into a strange distemper whenever he is away: giggling, chain-smoking and forgetting to turn the gas off. Her medicine is procured under the counter from the local baker. It is her and Suleiman's little secret.

When Mama was 14, she was spied hanging out with boys at the Italian Coffee House. She was locked in her room for a month and forced into marriage. Suleiman is bound up in the guilt and rage that emanate from this. Baba is 'the man who was her punishment', Suleiman 'the boy that sealed her fate'.

An already mystifying world becomes markedly more so. There are strange meetings between the grown-ups and whispered words of political dissent. Suleiman spots his father crossing the street when he is supposed to be abroad. Baba is wearing shades and Suleiman is panicked by the concealment. More men turn up to ask aggressive questions and search the house. Ustath Rashid, the father of Suleiman's friend, is carted off; then Baba too disappears.

After his father's disappearance, Suleiman watches Ustath Rashid being interrogated on television. Rashid later appears on screen at the national basketball stadium, where he is harried up a ladder and hanged. When the image becomes too gruesome, the screen is washed out with images of flowers and the national anthem is played. Gaddafi, it is rumoured, controls this piece of programming with a switch in his room.

The spectacle has left Suleiman with a permanent sense of 'quiet panic, as if at any moment the rug could be pulled from beneath my feet'. As a child, he is unable to process the horror, lashing out at his playmates (and the local beggar) with a befuddled sadism. As an adult, exiled in Egypt, he is disengaged and empty. 'Nationalism,' we are told, 'is a thin thread'; but Egypt has not replaced Libya in his affections. As for men, Suleiman has gained little understanding of their ways: 'It's a sign of madness, I know, to claim to know what is in another man's heart.'

At a time when western leaders have been cosying up to Gaddafi, it is salient to be reminded of the cruelty of his reign. In the Country of Men is a powerful political novel and a tender evocation of universal human conflicts - over identity, forgiveness, love. It is due to be published in 13 languages and, despite its short length, took several years to write. It was more than worth the wait.

ON A busy market day in the Congolese frontier town of Kamako, in the province of Western Kasai, a clutch of haggard Congolese migrants is shuffling back home under the watchful eyes of Angolan police. A high-tech remote camera, installed as part of a recent revamping of the checkpoint on the Angolan side of the border, monitors them on their way. Good fences are said to make good neighbours. But along this isolated stretch of border the incongruously modern facility’s main purpose is hardly neighbourly.

Every year since 2004 Angola has been kicking out tens of thousands of Congolese, most of them diamond diggers and their families. Angola’s GDP per person is now 24 times bigger than that of Congo at the IMF’s last count, so the Congolese keep coming over to seek a living. But the Angolans are fed up with the influx—and the loss of revenue through illegal mining, sometimes put as high as $700m.

More recently they have resorted to the most vicious of measures to get rid of the Congolese. Last year it was reported that hundreds of women were being raped along the border. During a trip to Kamako earlier this year, the UN’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict found evidence of the systematic rape of Congolese women and girls. Among some 26,000 people expelled since April, more than 21,000 cases of serious human-rights violations, including rape, beating, torture and looting, have been documented by CISP, an Italian aid agency that has a UN grant to monitor the border. “We are seeing very serious and widespread abuses committed in impunity—with one goal: to instil fear,” says Lisa Rimli of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. “While humanitarians can help deal with the fallout, putting an end to this phenomenon will ultimately require a political solution involving both Luanda and Kinshasa,” she says, referring to the governments of Angola and Congo.

But bad relations between the two have made this impossible. When Angola’s government first started expelling Congolese en masse, Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila, complained. Angola’s leaders publicly apologised, promised to stop the abuses, then carried on as before. Mindful of his need for Angola’s support on diplomatic, military and commercial fronts, Mr Kabila kept his mouth shut. After all, he owed his position to Angolan intervention in Congo’s civil war between 1998 and 2003 and during his battle for Kinshasa in 2007.

When Mr Kabila broached the subject again, in 2009, he was in a better bargaining position, since he had consolidated his own rule. But by then Angola was no longer in a mood to listen. Earlier that year, in an effort to stave off threats along his eastern border, Mr Kabila had made deals with his former enemies in charge of Rwanda and Uganda. But Angola’s president, José Eduardo dos Santos, viewed those deals with his old enemies as a betrayal.

Relations between Messrs Kabila and dos Santos then got even worse. In a submission to the UN in July 2009 over maritime boundaries, Congo in effect laid claim to chunks of Angola’s most profitable offshore oil blocks and threatened to go to international arbitration. If Congo were to win, Angola’s position as Africa’s second biggest exporter of crude oil after Nigeria might well be threatened.

Since then the two governments have barely exchanged a friendly word with each other. The hapless Congolese migrants have become pawns in a game. “It’s an expression of their bad mood,” said Congo’s foreign minister, Alexis Thambwe Mwamba, linking the offshore-oil dispute to Angola’s refusal to stop the expulsions.

More recently there have been hints of a thaw. Congo’s prime minister, Adolphe Muzito, said his government would delay arbitration of the maritime row until 2014. In June he met Mr dos Santos. And this month Angola’s oil minister for the first time said his government was ready to negotiate a production-sharing agreement along the existing maritime boundary.

Despite Congo’s huge mineral wealth, its government is so short of cash that it may welcome a deal rather than get mired in a legal battle that could be costly as well as long. And if the two countries can achieve an accommodation, the abuses against the Congolese migrants on the border might at last come to an end.

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Pre-nuptial agreements never bring equal solace to both sides.”

President Obama met with four West African presidents on Friday in the White House.

DAKAR, Senegal — President Obama hosted four recently elected West African presidents on Friday in a gesture of support for the continent’s nascent democracies. Given what they are wrestling with, they could certainly use it.

Three of the four had reason to cast anxious looks toward home as they entered the White House: a fresh assassination attempt in one case; reports of coup plotting in a second; and a marauding soldiery in a third.

The presidents — of Guinea, Niger, Ivory Coast and Benin — may be democratic exemplars in Washington, but these heroes of the ballot box maintain shaky holds on power, pointing to the tenuousness of democracy in parts of the continent.

Washington’s window for welcoming these leaders, all from former French colonies, could be strictly limited. Restive soldiers continue to plot and grumble all around them. Only President Boni Yayi of Benin, re-elected to a second term in March, appears unmenaced by rogue forces.

President Alpha Condé of Guinea narrowly survived an assassination attempt by soldiers last week. President Mahamadou Issoufou’s government in Niger arrested coup-plotting soldiers over the last week, according to a government official. Security forces and militia fighters allied with President Alassane Ouattara of Ivory Coast are intimidating and killing members of ethnic groups perceived to be against him, said a report Amnesty International released this week.

The source of the instability is a familiar one: armies that operate as laws unto themselves. The soldiers have rarely been put in check by civilian institutions that remain chronically weak, so politicians often depend on the good graces, or otherwise, of the men who carry the guns.

The new presidents of Guinea and Niger owe their positions to unusual decisions in the last year by high-ranking officers in their respective countries to relinquish power after seizing it through military coups. In Ivory Coast, Mr. Ouattara was installed in April through a combination of strikes by United Nations and French helicopters, along with an undisciplined — and in some circumstances deadly — home-grown army.

Mr. Ouattara won an election last November, but the incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo, refused to step down. Mr. Ouattara allied himself with commanders who had led a previous rebellion against Mr. Gbagbo in the north, and was bolstered by militia fighters in the west.

The partnership proved militarily successful, but it has led to a climate of insecurity in the country denounced this week by Amnesty International. Mr. Ouattara has repeatedly denounced abuses against civilians and vowed to hold anyone, including his own forces, accountable.

But what the West African military gives, it can take away.

In Guinea, mutinous soldiers last week aimed bazookas and rocket-propelled grenades at the bedroom of Mr. Condé, the country’s first democratically elected president. He escaped only because, as a precaution, he happened not to be sleeping there. Nearly 40 people have been arrested since.

Mr. Condé was elected in November after a lifetime dodging the country’s founding dictators, but after taking office he quickly angered the uniforms that have long controlled Guinea.

“Sure, there were officers who got used to pulling $40,000, $60,000 a month,” Mr. Condé told Radio France Internationale after the attack. “There was a bizarre $2 million fund I canceled. Obviously, there are some who are unhappy. But you can’t keep on killing the country.”

On Monday, his national communications council banned any media discussion of the attack on the president, a decision quickly denounced by Guinea’s press unions as crude censorship in a country with newfound democratic aspirations. The council’s president, Martine Condé (no relation to the president), said the ban was intended to promote “serenity” in a “country that is 70 percent illiterate,” but it was withdrawn Thursday after criticism at home and abroad.

In Niger, the new government of Mr. Issoufou, elected in February, made several arrests last week in connection with a coup plot, said a government official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

“There are still elements inside the army that think they can do a coup d’état and promise democracy, then fill up their pockets and go,” said the government official, dismissing the episode as “really minor.” He said that “documents” were discovered in connection with the coup plot, “a plan, the form of government.”

As in Guinea, the source of the trouble was disgruntled soldiers, the Niger government official said.

Another government official in Niger confirmed that the issue was “under investigation.”

Power has changed hands through coup plots multiple times since Niger’s independence in 1960, and the country was returned to democracy most recently by a 2010 coup leader whose subordinates boasted that the military was the country’s sole guarantor of democracy.

In Niger, “the military has been the self-anointed referee of politics for 20 years,” said Pierre Englebert, a specialist in African politics at Pomona College.

In Ivory Coast, Mr. Ouattara’s control over the forces that helped oust Mr. Gbagbo is unclear. He is trying to shape them into a new national army. But their origins as rebels who for nearly 10 years milked fiefs in the north of the country through extortion have not been erased.

In all three countries — Guinea, Niger and Ivory Coast — democracy has no chance of establishing itself without profound changes in the nations’ respective armies, analysts say.

“To help this country, you have to help it reform its army,” said Kalifa Gassama Diaby, president of the National Observatory of Democracy in Guinea, a good-governance group there, referring to his own country.

“It is not possible for the country to construct democracy unless the army is under control,” he said. “We’ve started something here. We organized a democratic election in a country that isn’t completely democratic.”

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  • The Observer, Sunday 24 July 2011
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Mobile phones in Uganda's capital, Kampala: 10 million people across the country own a phone. Photograph: Yousef Eldin

Earlier this month, on a short bus ride through the centre of Kampala, I decided to carry out an informal survey. Passing through the Ugandan capital's colourful and chaotic streets, I would attempt to count the signs of the use of mobile phones in evidence around me. These included phone shops and kiosks, street-corner airtime vendors and giant billboard ads, as well as people actually using their mobile phones: a girl in school uniform writing a text message as she hurried along the street, a businessman calmly making a call from the back of a motorcycle taxi swerving through heavy rush-hour traffic. Not only were half of the passengers on my bus occupied with their handsets, our driver was too, thumbing at his keypad as he ferried us to our final destination. After five minutes, I lost count and retired with a sore neck. There was more evidence here than I could put a number on.

My survey underlined a simple fact: Africa has experienced an incredible boom in mobile phone use over the past decade. In 1998, there were fewer than four million mobiles on the continent. Today, there are more than 500 million. In Uganda alone, 10 million people, or about 30% of the population, own a mobile phone, and that number is growing rapidly every year. For Ugandans, these ubiquitous devices are more than just a handy way of communicating on the fly: they are a way of life.

It may seem unlikely, given its track record in technological development, but Africa is at the centre of a mobile revolution. In the west, we have been adapting mobile phones to be more like our computers: the smartphone could be described as a PC for your pocket. In Africa, where a billion people use only 4% of the world's electricity, many cannot afford to charge a computer, let alone buy one. This has led phone users and developers to be more resourceful, and African mobiles are being used to do things that the developed world is only now beginning to pick up on.

The most dramatic example of this is mobile banking. Four years ago, in neighbouring Kenya, the mobile network Safaricom introduced a service called M-Pesa which allows users to store money on their mobiles. If you want to pay a utilities bill or send money to a friend, you simply dispatch the amount by text and the recipient converts it into cash at their local M-Pesa office. It is cheap, easy to use and, for millions of Africans unable to access a bank account or afford the hefty charges of using one, nothing short of revolutionary.

Safaricom didn't invent mobile banking: it existed previously in countries such as Norway and Japan, but on a small scale and with nothing like the seismic effect it had in Kenya. The established banks weren't happy at first – they tried to shut down M-Pesa soon after it started – but now they are getting in on the game, and it is estimated that by 2015 global mobile transactions will exceed one trillion dollars. According to California-based mobile-banking innovator Carol Realini, executive chairman of Obopay: "Africa is the Silicon Valley of banking. The future of banking is being defined here… It's going to change the world."

The mobile banking phenomenon spread quickly to other countries in the developing world. Uganda's largest telecom company, MTN Uganda, created its own version, MobileMoney, in March 2009. Within a year, 600,000 Ugandans had signed up. Now, thanks to aggressive recruitment drives to win more subscribers – MTN agents trolling the streets for new customers are known as "foot soldiers" – the service has more than 1.6 million users.

MobileMoney outlets are everywhere in 2011: the distinctive canary-yellow buildings and kiosks that house them are dotted around not just Kampala but the greater part of the country. The MTN network reaches 85% of Uganda, and MobileMoney is available everywhere MTN has coverage. Many of the villages I travelled through, however minor or remote, had at least one tell-tale splash of yellow.

Mobile phones carry huge economic potential in undeveloped parts of Africa. A 2005 London Business School study found that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people in a developing country, GDP rises by 0.5%. As well as enabling communication and the movement of money, mobile networks can also be used to spread vital information about farming and healthcare to isolated rural areas vulnerable to the effects of drought and disease.

Despite the proliferation of phones in Uganda, however, a digital divide persists. How can information be understood and properly implemented when more than a third of the country's adult population cannot read or write? And can complex and detailed information be managed by anything less than a smartphone, which is beyond the means of most Ugandans?

One intriguing solution to these problems is being tried out by the microfinance organisation Grameen Foundation. Seeking to establish a reliable means of interacting with farming communities in the Ugandan countryside, Grameen has started to lease smartphones to local farmers so that they can receive information – seasonal weather reports, planting advice, disease diagnostics, market prices – and pass it on to their neighbours. They also gather information from the farmers they register and feed it back to Grameen in Kampala, which passes it on to agricultural organisations and food programmes.

These intermediaries, known as community knowledge workers (or CKWs), are chosen for their command of English, community standing and entrepreneurial spirit as well as their technological know-how. After training CKWs to use smartphones, Grameen pays them a performance-based wage averaging at about $20 per month – via MobileMoney, obviously. Deductions are made to cover the lease arrangement and high-performing farmers can expect to fully own their phone, and the charging solution that comes with it, within two years.

So far, Grameen has trained 500 CKWs in 32 Ugandan districts, reaching more than 20,000 households, or 100,000 people. "We're aiming for a million," says Sean Krepp, Grameen's Uganda director, "and we're looking at scaling this to several other countries."

Before that can properly happen, the technological side of the programme needs to be developed and refined. At present, most information arrives in text form. Reports from a variety of sources, including Uganda's Department of Meteorology and its National Agricultural Advisory Services, are rewritten in clear English before being dispatched to the CKWs. Grameen has started sending images to its representatives so that, for example, a coffee plant disease can be diagnosed by visual means. The next step, according to Krepp, is video. The economist Philip Parker, in collaboration with Grameen, is currently developing a series of educational videos, presented in the style of a gameshow, to be played on CKW smartphones during village get-togethers.

There are other, more fundamental challenges. Unreliable network coverage in remote areas of Uganda is a significant problem. Keeping smartphones charged in villages that don't have electricity is another. Some ingenious solutions have been devised (see below), but low battery power remains a constant headache.

In spite of these obstacles, the programme appears to be working – and its potential for expansion, not just beyond Uganda's borders, but also into other areas, such as healthcare and education, is becoming clear. If the digital divide is being bridged in some of Africa's poorest communities, and the information is getting through, why stop at farming?

Case study 1: a mobile money micro-economy

Boat owner Allan Mukasa uses his phone to settle bills and pay local traders. Photograph: Yousef Eldin

Kasensero: Rakai district

The small fishing village of Kasensero on the shores of Lake Victoria is a 200km drive from Kampala, heading south-west towards the border with Tanzania. The final 40km takes you down a bumpy red-clay road, which on rainy days becomes a muddy assault course. When you finally reach the village, a road barrier blocks your way until an elderly guard deems you fit to enter and raises it up.

At the end of the main street is Africa's largest lake and the main source of the town's industry. Here, lined up along the shore, are hundreds of long, narrow fishing boats piled high with nets. The morning's catch is in when I arrive in Kasensero and the last of the giant Nile perch are being carted away towards the factory further down the beach, where they will be processed, packed and sent to Kampala for export.

At the end of the row of buildings overlooking the shore is a distinctive yellow facade: one of two MobileMoney agents in this village of 5,000 people. Inside, Ben Nsubuga, a fisherman, is depositing his weekly earnings.

He hands a wad of cash to the woman behind the desk who logs the deposit in a book and gives him a code, which he enters into his phone. A small fee is charged and within a couple of minutes the transaction is complete.

"Before this service came here, I was keeping all my cash with me," he says. There are no banks nearby and in the past whenever Nsubuga travelled to bring money to his family, he feared being robbed on the long road out of Kasensero. "Now I just send the money this way," he says, gesturing with his phone. The money is transferred via text and the person at the far end can cash it in at any MobileMoney agent.

The biggest problem, he says, is the network, which is patchy in these parts and often leaves customers without ready access to their hard-earned cash.

Next in line is Allan Mukasa, a boat owner and the village's vice-chairman. "Somehow, it has made life here better," he says. As well as sending money long-distance, Kasensero residents bank money on their phone and transfer it among themselves, creating a kind of micro-economy in this isolated town. "We also use it to pay water and electricity bills and school fees," Mukasa adds. But he sees plenty of room for improvement. "Before, we didn't know how to bank. Now, we want to have a proper banking system, with the possibility of making interest."

It is only after I leave Kasensero that I learn about its troubled recent history. In the early 1980s, the town was the site of the world's first community-wide Aids epidemic: a fifth of its population had died of the disease by 1986. Nearly a decade later, several thousand bodies from the Rwandan genocide washed up on its shores, carried to the lake down the nearby Kagera river. A mass graveyard a few kilometres away recalls the horror.

Today, the town is putting its traumatic past behind it and, if the queues outside the yellow-fronted offices are any indication, it is prospering. Only now, Kasensero's money doesn't end up under the mattress: it hovers about in the airwaves, to be accessed or dispatched with the touch of a button and a small charge from MTN. Signal permitting, of course.

Case study 2: farming with a smartphone

Farmer Simon Obwoya, foreground, makes notes on crop conditions and checks market prices. Photograph: Yousef Eldin

Lagude: Gulu district

Shortly after I arrive at the small cluster of mud huts that makes up the tiny village of Lagude, in northern Uganda, my host, Simon Obwoya, announces with great regret that he cannot show me his mobile phone: it was taken to Kampala for repairs two weeks ago. Without it, he is unable to access valuable information that makes farming in this difficult, drought-prone terrain more practicable.

Last December, Obwoya, who is 43 and married with eight children, was recruited as a community knowledge worker by the Grameen Foundation and trained to use a smartphone so that, as well as receiving advice about weather, plant and animal health and market prices, and dispersing it around his local area, he could gather information from the farmers he registers and send it back to Grameen.

Of all the districts that the foundation work with in Uganda, Gulu is the most problematic. For 20 years, much of northern Uganda was a war zone. Terrorised by the notorious Lord's Resistance Army, large numbers of people were forced into grim displacement camps. In the last few years, following the expulsion of the LRA in 2005, people have been slowly returning to their homes, and to normality. But two decades of conflict have taken a heavy toll – on community trust and the motivation to work as well as lives and material wealth. A wealth of farming knowledge has been lost, too, and Simon is working hard to restore that and bring it up to date.

Just before sunset, a Grameen representative arrives from Gulu town on a motorbike with Simon's HTC smartphone, fresh from the menders. Simon is delighted and immediately sets about recharging it: no mean feat in a village without electricity. As part of the lease package, Simon received a lithium-ion "intelligent battery" called a ReadySet, designed by American company Fenix International. It also powers an LCD lamp and a radio, but Simon's ReadySet is low on juice so he charges his phone in our van.

The next morning, Simon sets about addressing the ReadySet issue. He connects the battery to a kinetic generator, which he affixes to the rear wheel of his bicycle. Then he gets on his bike, which is held on a stand, and starts pedalling. The village has become accustomed to the spectacle of Simon cycling without moving, often for hours at a time, in an attempt to recharge his ReadySet.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work as well as it should and he often has to top up the battery at the local trading station, which costs money.

Undaunted, Simon takes me on a tour of his fields, where he grows maize, cassava, groundnuts and beans, and the wider area he administers as a CKW. This encompasses five villages, and Simon has registered more than 300 farmers to the programme in the last six months.

To register, a farmer must provide exhaustive details about his farm, household and income, as well as the things he needs most to improve his livelihood. Many in the area still wonder why Grameen isn't providing them with physical aid, but Simon tells me he is working to change that mindset. "Let someone give you knowledge, then you are rich. That's what I say to my farmers."

Is the knowledge he receives from Grameen actually making a difference? Simon nods. "Especially this year. We were warned there was going to be a long drought so many of our farmers took their time before putting down their seeds. That was what happened and our farmers were able to save their seeds."

Simon has also founded a farming collective and now, with Grameen's help, they are bulking their produce and selling it at a good price to the World Food Programme, which will use it for relief work in the region. The CKW programme has had a rocky start in Gulu, and challenges lie ahead, but in the fields that Simon Obwoya monitors with his treasured smartphone, it is beginning to yield tangible results.

WASHINGTON—Members of the U.S. Congress reported Wednesday they were continuing to carefully debate the issue of whether or not they should allow the country to descend into a roiling economic meltdown of historically dire proportions. "It is a question that, I think, is worthy of serious consideration: Should we take steps to avoid a crippling, decades-long depression that would lead to disastrous consequences on a worldwide scale? Or should we not do that?" asked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), adding that arguments could be made for both sides, and that the debate over ensuring America’s financial solvency versus allowing the nation to default on its debt—which would torpedo stock markets, cause mortgage and interests rates to skyrocket, and decimate the value of the U.S. dollar—is “certainly a conversation worth having.” "Obviously, we don't want to rush to consensus on whether it is or isn't a good idea to save the American economy and all our respective livelihoods from certain peril until we've examined this thorny dilemma from every angle. And if we’re still discussing this matter on Aug. 2, well, then, so be it.” At press time, President Obama said he personally believed the country should not be economically ruined.

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ALAIN MABANCKOU genially holds court at Jip’s, an Afro-Cuban salsa bar in Les Halles, central Paris. In a faded denim jacket and his signature flat cap, he modestly shares news of his burgeoning career and tricontinental travels with members of Paris’s black communities—from Guadeloupe to Guinea. Whether barmen or budding writers, they could have stepped straight off any page written by this Franco-Congolese novelist who, over the past decade, has come to be known as Africa’s Samuel Beckett.

Mr Mabanckou came to France from Congo-Brazzaville to study law in 1989, but quit as a corporate lawyer within a decade. Now 45, he talks expansively about his passion for reading and rumba music, and with disdain about President Denis Sassou-Nguesso’s “soft dictatorship” in the former French colony he revisits each year. But Mr Mabanckou’s probing thoughtfulness (and the bear hugs he offers old acquaintances) give little hint of the comic savagery of his fiction. Its exuberant satire extends to a Rabelaisian pissing contest whose participants map France in spray, and a morbid parody of the serial-killer genre that owes as much to Albert Camus’s “The Outsider” as to Bret Easton Ellis.

With nine novels to his name, along with six volumes of poetry, a biographical homage to James Baldwin, a gay American civil-rights writer, and a clutch of literary prizes, Mr Mabanckou broke new ground when he recently swapped his prestigious French publisher, Le Seuil, for the even more prestigious Gallimard. His fictionalised memoir of childhood, “Demain J’Aurais Vingt Ans” (“Tomorrow I Will Be 20”), came out under Gallimard’s august La Blanche imprint. For nearly a century, La Blanche’s distinctive cream covers have been the entry ticket to the canon of French literature. Mr Mabanckou is the first writer from Francophone black Africa to be included, and is now published alongside Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre. A Légion d’Honneur quickly followed. Presenting it in March, France’s culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, gushed over him, calling him “Mabancool” and a “shining ambassador for the French language”.

It was surely an ironic moment. For Mr Mabanckou is a subversive, who views the language he learnt aged six as a “river to be diverted”. Many of his models in breaking the “chains of ‘pure’ French”, as he calls them, are Anglophone writers, such as Nigeria’s Amos Tutuola, who have a longer history of remoulding English to their own ends. Rebelling against the rules of the Académie Française (the official authority on the French language—and one that has no equivalent in English), Mr Mabanckou’s freewheeling prose marries classical French elegance with Paris slang and a Congolese beat. It weds the oral culture of his unlettered mother (the dedicatee of all his books) to an omnivorous bibliophilia encouraged by his stepfather, a hotel receptionist in Pointe-Noire on the Atlantic coast. In “Broken Glass” (2005) a disgraced schoolteacher retells the hard-luck stories of habitués of a Congolese bar, with drunken momentum and not a single full stop. The author incorporates the titles of about 300 of the books he feels made him a writer, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “Death on Credit”, to Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

Since his first novel, “Bleu Blanc Rouge” (1998), ironically saluted the French tricolor in its title, Mr Mabanckou’s fiction has moved between the dashed dreams of migrants in Paris and the ills of post-independence Africa, with its kleptocratic dictators and fratricidal wars. Yet, insisting on laughter in the midst of desperation, he sugars the pill of criticism with humour that veers from the gently ironic to the bawdy or macabre. “African Psycho” (2003) skewers consumerism through the inept Grégoire, a deadbeat petty criminal who botches all attempts to become a serial killer. It also makes fun of rivalries between Mr Mabanckou’s “little Congo” and the formerly Belgian “big Congo”—one land carved up by European powers.

In “Broken Glass” the chronicler/narrator virtually lives in a bar that goes by the name of Credit Gone West. For the author, an African bar is an open-air laboratory crammed with the educated jobless, an inventive forum for debate. “Memoirs of a Porcupine” (2006) forms a loose sequel. Its tongue-in-cheek fable of a porcupine that has to kill for its human double is ostensibly written by the same sozzled scribe, who is himself called Broken Glass. The novel draws on oral lore and parables in its sly critique of those who use traditional beliefs as a pretext for violence.

“Black Bazar” (2009) returns to Paris, exposing prejudices between African and Antillean, or between west and central Africans, to dispel notions of black harmony. The main figure, Fessologue, is a Congolese sapeur or sharp-dresser. As a boy, Mr Mabanckou was fascinated by the dandies who returned from Paris obsessed with brand names, but the novel lampoons the idea of tailoring as a political statement.

Mr Mabanckou’s work has been translated into 16 languages, including Korean and Polish. But the English-speaking world has been slow to catch on to his cutting charm. Only three of his books have come out in English (with an English version of “Black Bazar” on the way). And they are published by small, sharp-eyed firms: Soft Skull Press in America and Serpent’s Tail in Britain. That may change, though, now that he is a tenured professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he spends eight months each year.

Mr Mitterrand may regard Mr Mabanckou as an exotic flower in France’s literary garland, but the author is convinced that metropolitan France is no longer the centre of French literature. As Gallimard has recognised, writers from outside France are the ones now snatching the prizes and carrying the influence of French abroad. Mr Mabanckou proves that.

The Love Movement

At the heart of the A Tribe Called Quest documentary is a touching story of a fraught friendship.

Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad The most transfixing moment in Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, Michael Rapaport's documentary about the epochal early-'90s hip-hop group, comes in a single shot toward the end. On the left side of the frame is Q-Tip: tall, broad-shouldered, wolfishly handsome. On the right is Phife Dawg: bug-eyed, built like Humpty Dumpty, "height of Mugsy Bogues, complexion of a hockey puck," as he once succinctly rapped. Up to this point, the two rappers have spent much of the film complaining about each other behind each other's backs—turning to the camera in separate interviews to air gripes and grievances born long ago. But here they are in a cautious détente at a Manhattan studio, practicing for a one-off reunion show. As their music plays, the pair break into a hypnotically odd synchronized dance, bopping and kicking, arms undulating in time as though borne aloft by the same current. "Like this," Q-Tip says, and Phife, glancing over at him, follows. The camera remains still and at a distance, loath to break the spell.

The sight of these physically mismatched men dancing is inherently comical, but there's also something deeply touching about it: These are two lifelong friends, putting their festering resentments on hold and swaying, goofily, as one. Like Anvil!, Sacha Gervasi's 2008 documentary about two lovable, bickering metalheads, Beats, Rhymes & Life is a music documentary with a buddy-movie heart. A Tribe Called Quest, which formed in Queens in 1988, is rounded out by the DJ and producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White (whose role, beyond spiritual mascot, has always been unclear and remains so here), but in this film Muhammad and White are innocent bystanders to the main event, which is the love-hate relationship between the guys on the mics.

A Tribe Called Quest's last album came out in 1998 and its last album truly worth buying came out in 1993, and yet Beats, Rhymes & Life, which traces the group's breakout success and slow fade into stagnation and acrimony, enjoys fairly serendipitous timing. Tribe's music has never gone out of style, exactly; it's too vibrant and sturdily assembled, and the rhymes unfold with a conversational esprit that's proven evergreen. But the black-boho aesthetic that the group exemplified—no-frills jazz loops over hard-hitting snares, lighthearted rhymes, a killer wardrobe of "Stay Black" baseball caps and day-glo kente cloth—has begun a nostalgia-driven return to vogue in hip-hop after the long dominance of gruffer, tougher styles.

Before the intra-group beefs take center stage, there's plenty in Beats, Rhymes & Life to sate nostalgists. Rapaport—a character actor and longtime Tribe fan making his unexpectedly assured directing debut—weaves a mini-history of hip-hop's boisterous infancy into his history of Tribe's genesis. Muhammad recalls sitting on his fire escape as a kid and hearing "this roar" from the park across the street: one of the hip-hop parties annexing schoolyards, recreation centers, and other public spaces across the city in the late '70s and early '80s; elsewhere, Q-Tip talks about listening to tastemaker radio DJs Red Alert and Mr. Magic, and bright, hand-drawn flyers for early rap shows fill the screen. In one scene, Rapaport follows Q-Tip and Muhammad back to Manhattan's Murry Bergtraum High School, where Q-Tip (who's known Phife since grade school) first met Muhammad. They hug faculty members, pause to chuckle at Q-Tip's yearbook photo (dashing, unsurprisingly), and wind up in the auditorium, where Q-Tip demonstrates the unique acoustics of a school desk when repurposed as a drum.

In moments like this, Rapaport captures the deep joy these guys brought to their music. We watch as Q-Tip sits in a home studio and recounts the creation of one of Tribe's most beloved beats: He marvels at the babe-and-a-hot-car cover art that led him to purchase Lonnie Davis' 1970 jazz LP Drives ("He's got the fuckin' Lincoln!" "Chick is bad!"), cues up a track, and recreates the epiphanic moment when he first looped the drums for the group's "Can I Kick It?" Rapaport bolsters such music-geek manna with lively interviews with Tribe fans and friends including Monie Love, Pharrell Williams, Questlove, and the Beastie Boys.

The exact reasons Phife and Q-Tip fell apart—their tensions climax here with a 2008 backstage eruption shot, handheld and in low light—are ultimately left vague, perhaps because the reasons are vague even to them by now. But the split seems to have stemmed from Tip's trying perfectionist streak and the simple fact that he has always been the group's star despite Phife's abundant talent. Tribe's debut album is for long stretches a solo showcase for Q-Tip's free-floating brags, yarns, and meditations; Phife, excitable and jocular, didn't come into his own until album No. 2, 1991's The Low End Theory, delivering a stunning opening verse on "Buggin' Out" that earns its own little chapter here.

Q-Tip is a consummate dandy, posing for interviews in a fedora, scarf, and modified baseball jacket/overcoat here, a shiny bomber festooned with an excess of pockets and straps there. He doesn't come off as vain, exactly, but he radiates the unmistakable pridefulness of a lead singer: He's a charming, smart, and funny raconteur who seldom allows himself to be anything other than cool. At one point, recalling an early bone of contention with Phife, he narrows his eyes as though he's about to tear up—in a flash, it's clear how much he cares for his friend—but he quickly glances downward and, with a tiny gesture, adjusts the drape of his coat just so, armoring back up.

Phife, jesterish and verbose, was Tribe's sleeper star, and he is this movie's, too. Whereas Q-Tip is smooth, magnanimous, and defiant ("I didn't single myself out to be fucking ginsu master of this shit," he says), Phife is aggrieved and vulnerable (his eyes get watery in several scenes, and he wept outright at the film's premiere). He also delivers many of the film's biggest laugh lines, as in the scene when he goes on a colorful rant, profanely refusing to play Tito Jackson to Q-Tip's Michael—"no disrespect to Tito." Phife's struggle with diabetes and 2008 scramble for a kidney donor (which ends, sweetly, when his wife is discovered to be a match) only deepens our sympathies for him, even if at times he comes off stubborn and overly sensitive in his own right.

This could all veer into Behind the Music territory, but it doesn't. Rapaport deserves credit for making a movie that's neither exploitative nor puffy, and in which we find ourselves rooting for these two friends to get over themselves and work things out—not because we'd like to fantasize that some return-to-greatness comeback album is possible (that'd be nice, but unlikely), but because their relationship is rendered so affectingly, even at its pettiest. Beats, Rhymes & Life ends on a hopeful high note, although there's little to guarantee that it's anything but temporary. But A Tribe Called Quest's body of work is permanent, and as the credits roll, so does a video clip for "Buggin' Out," in which Phife, Q-Tip, and Muhammad horse around, circa 1991, wearing fluorescent sweatshirts and plastic novelty eyeballs. It's a transmission from a bright, prelapsarian moment, and the music sounds as exhilarating today as it did back then.

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“Start Quote

To say it is unusual is an understatement”

The members of the band P.M.E.R. taking a break from packing in Bedford-Stuyvesant. From left are Andrew Downs, Ian Harris, Joseph Davis and Zayd Brewer, who lost a tooth when he was pistol-whipped by a robber. More Photos »

Two weeks later, still out thousands of dollars’ worth of musical equipment, a recording of five or six new songs, an apartment of their own and one tooth, the guys from the band called P.M.E.R. thought about whom to blame.

Multimedia

Craigslist? The landlord who told them the apartment was safe? Or themselves?

“This is not the kind of neighborhood people like us move into,” said Zayd Brewer, known to friends as Spaceman, the 19-year-old lead singer of the band. “Call it naïveté or whatever. ‘We can defend ourselves.’ ”

The story of what happened in that apartment on a corner of Bedford-Stuyvesant on the morning of June 13 is a cautionary tale about too-good-to-be-true dwellings in unfamiliar neighborhoods, and a reminder that not all of Brooklyn is a red carpet for the young and aspiring.

The members of P.M.E.R. — a “psychedelic punk-rap” outfit that stands for Power.Music.Electric.Revival. — are black and white, locals and transplants who know one another from Brooklyn College. They finish each other’s sentences and each other’s cigarettes. They’d lived in the school’s unvarnished surrounding neighborhoods. This gave them a street-wise confidence — as Andrew Downs, 20, from Chicago, put it: “We had lived in the ’hood” — that would prove misplaced.

It was late May, and they were looking for a place to live together and concentrate on making music. Mr. Downs found a second-floor, four-bedroom apartment on the corner of Bainbridge Street and Howard Avenue, with another room where they could play music, for $1,850 a month. The guys ran over and liked what they saw of, as they called the area, “the Stuy.”

In hindsight, there was much they did not see: they were a block from Chauncey Street, nicknamed “Chancy” among neighbors, where a police officer is parked 24 hours a day to deter gunfights. A woman who lives nearby giggled as she recalled a recent morning when she was late to work because there were too many bullets flying to cross Chauncey.

Hindsight: “A guy asked me, ‘What do you think of it here?’ ” Mr. Brewer said, “and I was like, ‘It’s cool, there’s a lot of cultural pride.’ And he just laughed.”

Hindsight: “We were reading and listening to Pink Floyd on the stereo,” Mr. Downs said, “and they were having a gun battle out there for like 15 minutes.”

Still, everything was pretty great for two weeks. There was nothing much to do in the neighborhood, so they just wrote and played songs. “The house was like a muse,” said Joseph Davis, of nearby Brownsville, the manager and old man of the group, age 21.

After midnight on June 13, the guys heard a call from the street below: “Yo, white boy!” They ignored it. Then Mr. Davis looked out a window and saw a stranger running from the building. He was carrying the band’s bass guitar. Just moments before, it had been in the apartment, in another room.

“I was like, ‘Yo, we’re getting robbed,’ ” Mr. Davis said, turning back to his band mates, “and then the door flew open and this gun is in my face.”

The robber turned on Mr. Brewer: “He leans into my face and he’s like, ‘Do you see me? Do you see my face?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah,’ and — bam! — he hits me in the face.” Mr. Brewer felt a tooth pop out.

Mr. Downs was outside: he had gone to move his car before morning. He was returning when he saw “a whole bunch of dudes overrunning the house,” he said. He hid and feared the worst for his friends: “I thought they were all dead.”

Up in the apartment, the robber gave orders: “Take all this downstairs. I’m moving you out.”

The band mates complied, hauling a desktop computer, four laptops and several other tools of their trade down to the bottom steps of the building. Strangers were taking the stuff away. The robber with the gun smacked the guys around with the pistol. Shell-shocked, the bass player, Ian Harris, 18, walked into the bathroom to clean off blood. The robber yanked him out.

“He took us all into Andrew’s room,” Mr. Harris said. The robber ordered them to strip naked and lie face down. Suddenly, from below, there were shouts: “Police!”

The robber was trapped upstairs with the naked musicians, his path blocked by all the stuff he’d ordered them to pile on the steps. He jumped out a window and stayed where he landed, hurt. The police arrested him, DuJuan Marshall, 23, and charged him with more crimes than the band had songs. A week later, a second man was arrested, Danel Nichols, 22, but other accomplices remain at large.

The musicians high-tailed it out of the Stuy that very night. They chipped in for a new bass, and are scheduled to perform at the club Cin-M-Art Space 43 in Manhattan next Friday.

They revisited the apartment on Tuesday to clean it up, as the landlord threatened to keep their security deposit, 300 bucks they badly needed. There was blood on the floor and fingerprint dust on every doorknob. They are looking for new digs, undeterred. Maybe Bushwick.

Mr. Harris hails from a town in Virginia of 432 people. “My mom was like, ‘Do you want to come home?’ ” he said. “I was like, ‘Nah.’ ”

I don’t remember exactly when I learned what type of work my father did. As a child, I thought Democracy is what he did for a living, because whether he was speaking Kikuyu, Luo, Kiswahili or Luhya, my father always said the word Democracy in English. Democracy filled our house nightly with red eyed men who gesticulated wildly as they lectured on the finer points of politics. Like my father, these men were misunderstood geniuses. Democracy made my father set his wristwatch ten minutes ahead of time even though he was always running ten minutes late for everything. It made him part his curly shock of black hair just like Nelson Mandela, carry his black leather briefcase everywhere and hire a Kalenjin man called Ruto to chauffeur him around town in his white Peugeot 404 sedan. He rode back-left.

These were the years of the Moi regime and Democracy was in short supply. For instance, in 1992 when president Moi was on a tour of Western province, a rumor came through the grapevine that the old man had keeled over and become past tense. Our town broke into an impromptu party: businesses closed for the day, hens’ lives were cut short, bars filled to capacity. My father hoisted me onto his shoulders and we walked to the Africana Bar where a waitress with a hair weave and a bleached face welcomed him with an all too familiar hand on his shoulder. He ordered a beer and let me sip the foam off the top of the glass, then told me to go home. On my way out, I turned and looked at him. The Africana Bar had this effect on him: his shoulders sank, he gesticulated less when he spoke and his cheeks grew chubby as he smiled. There were few women at the Africana. They wore miniskirts and too much make up, sat on men’s laps and threw their heads back when they laughed. In the evening news bulletin, president Moi reasserted his continued existence in the present tense. Turns out he’d just fainted, or maybe it was heat exhaustion. Whatever it was, he was still going to occupy three quarters of TV airtime planting and watering trees; stashing cash into baskets at village fundraisers; laying down stones to build gabion dams; and waving his ivory scepter right before setting fire to ivory tusks seized from poachers.

As with all misunderstood geniuses, my father ended up in prison. I was in the second grade back then. I thought they put him there because of Democracy, but they said it was because of Sedition. Most of his friends — all of them misunderstood geniuses — also ended up in prison. The sedition charges didn’t stick, so they reduced it to tax evasion. That didn’t stick either: no one was paying taxes in Kenya back then. In the end he was acquitted. He literally ran out of the court so the guards wouldn’t detain him and allow the prosecutor to bring new charges against him — citing “fresh” evidence. That’s how it was back then: if you saw someone burst out of the courts running, you knew he’d been acquitted.

We never talked about what it was like for him in prison. Misunderstood geniuses didn’t stop by anymore — some of them were disappeared, the rest became even more misunderstood. One of them sat on the pavements downtown and used colored chalk to write equations on the concrete. He also claimed he’d found a cure for malaria. My father grew quiet, he gesticulated less, and started keeping chickens. During the post-election violence of 2007/8, some marauding youths were planning on attacking Kikuyus in my parents’ district. Together with others, my father armed himself with a machete and formed a protective force. They stood guard at the homes of Kikuyus to make sure no harm came their way. I was scared for my father — I even tried to talk him out of it — but I was also proud of him. Kikuyus were killed elsewhere in town, but not in my parents’ area.

Now I clearly know what my father does for a living.

I am at work on a book about Lagos, a non-fictional narrative. Why Lagos? It is the biggest city in Africa, and the fastest growing in the world. And it was my home for seventeen years, from infancy until I finished high-school. But the most important reason for writing about Lagos is that far too little has been written about it, and as a result, far too little is known about it. And what there is to know about a city, beyond the statistics, beyond population, tallest buildings, GDP, is individual human experience.

As I began work on this project, and was paying more and more attention to daily life in Lagos, a peculiar thing happened. I found myself drawn to the “small” news. I began to read the metro sections of newspapers, and the crime sections. In Lagos itself, where there is a thriving newspaper culture, I bought several papers and went through them each day. In Brooklyn, I rely on the internet, through which I have access to some dozen Nigerian papers each day: Daily Times, NEXT, Vanguard, Punch, This Day, National Mirror, Tribune, PM News, Guardian, and so on. What I found in the metro and crime sections of these papers was a different quality of everyday life. It was life in the raw, as one might find in the Daily News or the New York Post, but not in the Times. A lot of this material does not have direct bearing on the book I am working on. It is too brief, too odd, and certainly too sensational for the kind of writing the book requires. The material needed another outlet.

That outlet turned out to be a form of writing for which there is no exact English term: fait divers. This is a French expression, in common use for centuries, for a certain kind of newspaper piece: a compressed report of an unusual happening. What fait divers means literally is “incidents,” or “various things.” The nearest English equivalent is “news briefs” or, more recently, “news of the weird.” The fait divers has a long and important history in French literature. Sensationalistic though it is, it has influenced the writing of Flaubert, Gide, Camus, Le Clézio and Barthes. In Francophone literature, it crossed the line from low to high culture. But though a version of it was present in American newspapers, it never quite caught on in the English language as a literary form.

This is what a fait divers looks like:

Raoul G., of Ivry, an untactful husband, came home unexpectedly and stuck his blade in his wife, who was frolicking in the arms of a friend.

Here is another:

A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frérotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.

These examples show what the fait divers is about: an event, usually of a grim nature, animated sometimes, but not always, by a certain irony. A fait divers is not simply bad news. It is bad news of a certain kind, written in a certain way. The two examples above were written around 1906 by the French journalist Félix Fénéon, for Le Matin.

Fénéon, who wrote his pieces anonymously, was probably the greatest practitioner of the form. He gave it more wit and bite, more emotional unease and formal perfection, than it had had before. In his hands, it became a modernist form. His collected fait divers, published in English as “Novels in Three Lines” (a beautiful translation and introduction by Luc Sante on the NYRB Classics imprint), inspired me to try to do the same for the current news from Nigeria. I felt the form would migrate well from one language to another, and from one social context to another. In order to acquire an audience for this daily practice, I began to post the pieces on my Twitter account.

In Ikotun, Mrs Ojo, who was terrified of armed robbers, died in her barricaded home, of smoke inhalation.

“Nobody shot anybody,” the Abuja police spokesman confirmed, after the driver Stephen, 35, shot by Abuja police, almost died.

Knowledge is power. He graduated in business administration in Calabar,and Charles Okon has since administered sixteen armed robberies.

To signal certain differences between my writing and that of the French journalists, I call my take on this form “small fates.” I like the near-rhyme of fates and fait, though they have nothing to do with each other. Since it is a French form, and the French love theory, there is a theory of the fait divers. In a 1962 essay, for example, Roland Barthes cites the following:

A train is derailed in Alaska: a stag had tripped the switch.

And:

An Englishman enlists in the Foreign Legion: to avoid spending Christmas with his mother-in-law.

Barthes goes on to say that the rule is “minor causes, great effects” and that the fait divers is about instances where the causes of things are “deranged.” In other words, what happens usually doesn’t happen due to this particular cause.

But, following the example of Fénéon, I try not to define my small fates so narrowly. Although in most of them there is some form of irony at work, there isn’t always a punchline or “aha” moment. The stories I tell in the small fates are more tightly compressed than most fait divers(thanks to the limitation of length Twitter imposes) and often more laconic. I like to flirt with straight reportage, or the appearance of straight reportage. Each tells a truth, a whole truth, but never the whole truth (but this is true of all storytelling).  Details are suppressed, secondary characters vanish, sometimes the “important” aspect of the story is sidestepped in order to highlight a poignant detail.

Children these days. Frank Oriabure, son of the deputy superintendent of police in Onitsha, would rather be a robber.

In something like this, the joke is obvious. Same with:

As the deeds of the former Speaker of the House were being brought to light at the Federal High Court, there was a power outage.

Or:

Joining the fight against AIDS, armed men in Edo carted away a shipment of anti-retroviral drugs.

It is beautifully absurd, charged with a nice and meaningless symmetry. A news report collapses into syllogism. In some others, the inflection is more subdued.

A satellite built by Nigerian engineers, the first such, will be launched into space in July.

Which, koan-like, feels like the first-half of a joke. Or:

The three bodies found after the Ibadan floods, a woman and two girls, had traveled far from home and couldn’t be identified.

These small fates, even though they are not witty or especially ironic, they draw on a similar sort of response. There is the satisfaction of the epigram, and the ambiguity about why what happened should have happened at all.

Two women threshing corn. Two babies strapped to their backs. Lightning descended in Bauchi, and took all four.

I think what all of these have in common, whether they are funny or not, is the closed circle of the story. Each small fate is complete in itself. It needs neither elaboration nor sequel. The small fates, I feel, bring news of a Nigerian modernity, full of conflict, tragedies, and narrow escapes. Similar to the French papers’ fait divers, they work in part because whatever that strange thing was, it didn’t happen to us. They are the destiny that befell some other poor soul, which we experience from a grateful distance.

The responses of the people who read these each day (a few hundred, at this point) have been instructive for me. “Why is he writing bad news?,” someone would say. Or, “God, this is so depressing.” But, strangely enough, they keep reading, and in time, something of the dark humor catches them. They then retweet to their friends and say, “You have to follow this guy. He makes me laugh at the most awful things.” Most of my readers are Nigerian. They see the darker things of their society reflected in a sly way that they might not be used to, but which they instinctively recognize from the impish aspects of Nigerian performative cultures. For these Nigerian readers, I sometimes embed local references.

For instance, in:

Pomp, pageantry, and tears of joy. A ceremony was held for graduates of the entrepreneurial training program at Kirikiri Prison.

—a Nigerian reader would know that Kirikiri is Nigeria’s most notorious prison.

Pastor Ogbeke, preaching fervently during a storm in Obrura, received fire from heaven, in the form of lightning, and died.

The irony here is enriched by the knowledge that in the Nigerian version of Pentecostal Christianity, there’s an emphasis on calling down Holy Ghost fire.

When police interrupted a meeting of the Eiye Confraternity in Alakuko, the cultists flew the coop. But one wingless bird was caught.

This one depends on some knowledge of the Yoruba language. “Eiye,” the totem of the fearsome cult in question, means “bird.” Coincidentally, the neighborhood in which the meeting took place, “Alakuko,” translates as “owner of the rooster.” I took that as an opportunity to extend the avian imagery.

But, for non-Nigerian readers, the vast majority of these are perfectly legible. I indulge in some wordplay, some alliteration, and other strategies that are dependent on the English language. Some of the stories depend on an adverb that arrives in last place. Others are about making a list of related things, as though it were a news round-up, to create an absurd effect:

Cholera, a bus crash, and terrorists, have killed 30, 21, and 10, in Adamawa, Ondo, and Borno, respectively.

But the key aspect of the experience for the non-Nigerian is the cascade of names and places, both the names in traditional Nigerian languages, or the unexpected incursion of English-language names. Some of these “English” names would not be borne by anyone in England: Miracle, Precious, Gift, Sunday. The non-English names, on the other hand, place you deep inside a world that might, at first, feel hard to understand, or even to pronounce. But even for those who can’t tell an Igbo name from a Yoruba one, or what makes the culture of Bauchi state different from that of Edo, the stories remain poignant. They are human stories. There are crimes of passion, inexplicable murders, courtroom outbursts, and moments of greed.

In a 1993 interview in the Paris Review, Toni Morrison talks about the beginnings of jazz, and how unhappy the material of that music is. Someone’s always leaving, someone’s always losing something. But, she says, there’s a grandeur and satisfaction in that, because these are people who, until recently, were in a constricting and limiting situation. Then freedom came. “The whole tragedy of choosing somebody, risking love, risking emotion, risking sensuality, and losing it all, didn’t matter, since it was their choice. Exercising choice in who you love was a major, major thing.”

Fifty years after British colonialism, ten years after military rule, Nigerians are free. Not economically free, not yet, and we see the effect of that lack of economic freedom in the kinds of crimes that are committed. But they are free in important ways. You can live where you want, associate with whom you want. You can sue people in court, gather to practice your religion, under the leadership of whichever holy man or charlatan you prefer, and you can marry and divorce as you please. This is a major thing. This is modernity, and to tell these stories, to give the protagonists of these losses even that little bit of attention, is to honor the fact that they are there, that their life goes on. It’s not depressing at all, just as reading the Brooklyn Eagle and New York Herald from a hundred years ago is not depressing, though just about the only mention of blacks was as protagonists in crime reports. The fact is: they were there. And fate arranged a small form of immortality for them in that crime report.

These pieces are generally not events of the kind that alter a nation’s course. They are not about movie stars or, with exceptions, famous politicians. They are about the small fates of ordinary people. The idea is not to show that Lagos, or Abuja, or Owerri, are worse than New York, or worse than Paris. Rather, it’s a modest goal: to show that what happens in the rest of the world happens in Nigeria too, with a little craziness all our own mixed in. In this odd sort of way, bad news is good news because these instances of bad news reveal a whole world of ongoing human experience that is often ignored or oversimplified.

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Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah kindly sent me a link to this article by Ben Hyde:

I once had a web product that failed big-time. A major contributor to that failure was tedium of getting new users through the sign-up process. Each screen they had to step triggered the lost of 10 to 20% of the users. Reducing the friction of that process was key to survival. It is a thousand times easier to get a cell phone or a credit card than it is to get a passport or a learner’s permit. That wasn’t the case two decades ago.

…

Public health experts have done a lot of work over the decades to create barrier between the public and dangerous items and to lower barriers to access to constructive ones. So we make it harder to get liquor, and easier to get condoms. Traffic calming techniques are another example of engineering that makes makes a system run more slowly.

I find these attempts to shift the temperature of entire systems fascinating. This is at the heart of what you’re doing when you write standards, but it’s entirely scale free… In the sphere of internet identity it is particularly puzzling how two countervailing forces are at work. One trying to raise the friction and one trying to lower it. Privacy and security advocates are attempting to lower the temp and increase the friction. On the other hand there are those who seek in the solution to the internet identity problem a way to raise the temperature and lower the friction. That more rather than less transactions would take place.

The idea of ‘process friction’ which is especially pertinent as applied to architectures of control. Simply, if you design a process to be difficult to carry out, fewer people will complete it, since – just as with frictional forces in a mechanical system – energy (whether real or metaphorical) is lost by the user at each stage.

This is perhaps obvious, but is a good way to think about systems which are designed to prevent users carrying out certain tasks which might otherwise be easy – from copying music or video files, to sleeping on a park bench. Just as friction (brakes) can stop or slow down a car which would naturally roll down a hill under the force of gravity, so friction (DRM, or other architectures of control) attempts to stop or slow down the tendency for information to be copied, or for people to do what they do naturally. Sometimes the intention is actually to stop the proscribed behaviour (e.g. an anti-sit device); other times the intention is to force users to slow down or think about what they’re doing.

From a designer’s point of view, there are far more examples where reducing friction in a process is more important than introducing it deliberately. In a sense, is this what usability is?. Affordances are more valuable than disaffordances, hence the comparative rarity of architectures of control in design, but also why they stand out so much as frustrating or irritating.

The term cognitive friction is more specific than general ‘process friction’, but still very much relevant – as explained on the Cognitive Friction blog:

Cognitive Friction is a term first used by Alan Cooper in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, where he defines it like this:

“It is the resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules that change as the problem permutes.”

In other words, when our tools manifest complex behaviour that does not fit our expectations, the result can be very frustrating.

Going back to the Ben Hyde article, the use of the temperature descriptions is interesting – he equates cooling with increasing the friction, making it more difficult to get things done (similarly to the idea of chilling effects), whereas my instinctive reaction would be the opposite (heat is often energy lost due to friction, hence a ‘hot’ system, rather than a cold system, is one more likely to have excessive friction in it – I see many architectures of control as, essentially, wasting human effort and creating entropy).

But I can see the other view equally well: after all, lubricating oils work better when warmed to reduce their viscosity, and ‘cold welds’ are an important subject of tribological research. Perhaps the best way to look at it is that, just as getting into a shower that’s too hot or too cold is uncomfortable, so a system which is not at the expected ‘temperature’ is also uncomfortable for the user.

1. 

   Notice that the WD-40 can doesn’t say “lubricant”. If you want your moving parts to /stay/ squeak-free, you’ll want to add a lubricant after cleaning with WD-40.

   Posted by Matt Platte | May 30, 2007, 1:09 am
   Reply to this comment
2. 

   Thanks – I did think someone might just call me out about that, but the WD-40 can was more iconic as a ‘freer of sticky mechanisms’ than a bottle of Halfords’ cycle oil (which was the next closest thing to hand). I know WD-40′s mostly for driving out water, but surely it has some lubrication ability?

   Posted by Dan | May 30, 2007, 6:12 am
   Reply to this comment
3. 

   Oh, thanks!

   Interesting point about cold/hot. I use the term condense as short hand for progress where-by a set of diverse practices around some activity settles into very standardized practices. Some see the process of standardization as efficiency creating while others see it as driving out diversity. Of course once you get things standardized then the volume of activity is easier to scale up; and that certainly seems like heat. I’m more fixated on how the killing off of the diversity and the frictions around that diversity are part of the standardization process; that I see as chilling – freezing out the variability. Driving out the water?

   I just love this blog’s title! I guess I’ll need to poke around and see what there is to see here. Standardization and it’s complement regulation are certainly about controlling behaviors; and all the talk of safety and efficiency, best practice found around them are all well and good but not to be taken without a grain of salt. We tend to have a fetish about efficiency.

   Koranteng’s the bomb! Ain’t he?

   Posted by Ben Hyde | June 1, 2007, 1:39 pm

• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.

With Palestinians still pursuing a statehood bid at the United Nations in September, one West Bank resident has taken matters into his own hands. Standing outside the Israeli-controlled Qalandiya checkpoint, where most foreigners and Palestinians enter the West Bank, Khaled Jarrar offers a passport stamp to those arriving.

“It’s making people aware of our right of freedom,” Mr. Jarrar says, adding that the stamp is part of a wider art project called Live and Work in Palestine. “In Palestine we have no right to decide who we let enter. The Israelis decide, though it’s our land.”

Bearing the words “State of Palestine” in English and Arabic – as well as a Palestine sunbird feeding on flowers – the stamp symbolizes national aspirations. Two decades of foreign-backed peace talks have failed to produce an independent Palestinian state. Leaders in Ramallah indicated they will go directly to the United Nations in September to ask for statehood. President Obama warned against such a move, saying negotiations are the only way.

“But while we negotiate, they build the settlements,” says Jarrar, echoing the complaint of many residents here.

In the meantime, Jarrar is offering the stamp to those arriving to the West Bank, as well as via a local listserv used by foreigners.

“I can stamp your passport with the State of Palestine stamp as a symbol of having independence for the Palestinians,” he offers. “With this stamp you can tell your friends and have your first stamp from Palestine.”

Since he marked the first passport in April, he says 25 foreign nationals and one Palestinian have taken him up on his offer in a show of solidarity.