The Democratic Republic of Congo is in the news again, and per usual, it’s not good news. The Times of London reports a new, especially sordid chapter in the ongoing scandal of UN peacekeepers sexually exploiting the young Congolese women they are charged with protecting. A French logistics expert who worked at the Goma airport was arrested in a sting operation before he could rape a 12 year old girl who had been sent to his house. When police raided his home, they found his bedroom had been turned into a photography studio, with large mirrors around three sides of the bed and a remote-controlled camera on the other side. Three home-made videos and dozens of photos were found - according to the Times, these photos and videos are also for sale in eastern DRC. (The accused paedophile has been sent back to France and is in prison, facing charges of sexually assaulting a minor.)

Abuse of Congolese girls - usually involving the exchange of sexual favors for small amounts of money or food - is reportedly widespread in the eastern DRC, where 11,000 peacekeepers and 1,000 UN-related civilians are stationed. Based on over 150 formal complaints, the UN instituted a “zero tolerance policy”, which prohibits UN employees from having sexual relations with Congolese under the age of 18, though the local age of consent is 14. But, according to the Times:

Jordan’s Prince Zeid Raad Al Hussein, a special adviser to the UN Secretary-General, who led one investigative team, said in a confidential report obtained by The Times: “The situation appears to be one of ‘zero-compliance with zero- tolerance’ throughout the mission.”

A female UN staffer, commenting on the story, reminds us that this is hardly the first time Europeans have done terrible things in the eastern Congo: ““Never forget this is Heart of Darkness country. People do things here just because they can.”

Tempting as it is to suggest that MONUC pull out of DRC, that’s probably not the right move, and certainly not the right time. According to a reportby the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region (a UK parliamentary committee), reported by the BBC, massive quantities of arms are flowing into eastern DRC. The report suggests that sufficient arms have entered the area that armed groups may be encouraged to restart violence in the region.

While it’s certainly legitimate to blame MONUC for failing to disarm militias and stop the arms trade, the problem is vastly complicated by utter governmental failure in eastern DRC. The area is vast, isolated, difficult to navigate, and only under the loosest control of the Kinshasa government - there’s almost no border control and absolutely no airspace control.

As a result, there are hundreds of “ghost airstrips” buried in the jungle, where Russian-made Antonov aircraft land with loads of small arms, usually manufactured in Bulgaria or Ukraine. The arms are exchanged for gold, rough diamonds, coltan, or other minerals. According to a 2001 report from the UN, many of the nations that border DRC are used as transshipment points for these contraband minerals - profits from this trade in minerals return to government-supported militias in eastern DRC.

What sort of evil bastard would smuggle guns into a warzone to trade them for minerals mined at gunpoint? Viktor Bout, for one. Dubbed “the merchant of death” by a British foreign minister, Bout’s life story is something out of a spy novel. Born in Tajikistan, trained as a translator for the KGB, Bout began smuggling arms in the 1990s. He gained some international attention in 1995 when one of his aircraft, loaded down with weapons for Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, was forced down by the Taliban. Sensing a business opportunity, Bout began supplying arms to the Taliban, as well as Osama Bin Laden. At the same time, Bout’s aircraft - operating under a number of African flags of convenience, and flying from Belgium’s Ostead airport, and later from airports in the UAE - smuggled arms to many of the major conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa. (The UK Parliamentary report pays special attention to a Bout-connected helicopter that crashed near Goma, overloaded with cassiterite, a tin ore.)

President Bush, noting Bout’s Taliban connections, signed an executive order last summer prohibiting Americans from doing business with Bout. Evidently Kellog, Brown and Root (everyone’s favorite Haliburton subsidiary) didn’t get the memo - until August of this year, they subcontracted business to Air Bas and British Gulf, both Bout-controlled companies. Newsweek reports that Bout-connected planes landed in Iraq 142 times last year, dropping off loads and refueling. (A similar story from the LA Times.)

Interested in learning more about mineral and gun-smuggling in central Africa? (Of course you are.) Let me recommend the following links:

Frontline’s resource page from “Gunrunners”, their documentary on Bout and other gun smugglers.

The UN’s 2001 report on the looting of the DRC.

APP Great Lakes report on recent arms smuggling in DRC.

UN introduction to “Conflict Diamonds”.

It’s becoming clear that we won’t know the full scale of the disaster caused by the recent earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean for weeks to come. Death tolls from countries affected has now exceeded 76,000 and is expected to increase beyond 100,000. The numbers could go much higher if governments aren’t able to control waterborne diseases like cholera that are likely to break out in areas devestated by the disasters.

And then there are countries like Burma, where we may never know the consequences of the tsunami. The military government of Burma - or Myanmar, as they prefer - has said very little about the impact of the earthquake and tsunamis on their nation. I wrote a piece for WorldChanging yesterday, which included the following:

There’s two possible explanations for this story. One is that Myanmar, with 1930 kilometers of coastline, numerous fishing villages and huts on stilts along the coast, and a common border with Thailand - where over 1500 are reported dead - miraculously escaped the effect of the tsunami.

The other explanation is that Myanmar’s famously secretive military government hasn’t wanted to reveal the extent of the tsunami damage to the outside world… and especially to their own citizens. (As in many represive regimes, it’s easier to to get news from outside the country than news from within it.)

In trying to follow this story, I’m reminded of some of the challenges Rebecca faced in trying to cover the Ryongchon explosion in North Korea for NKZone. Was it an explosion? A natural disaster? An assasination attempt? Due to the closed nature of North Korean society, we may never know. As for the extent of the tragedy in Burma, we may learn more over the next few days or weeks as citizens within the country communicate with family and friends across the Thai border.

As most folks have already heard, a tsunami caused by an 8.9-richter earthquake has killed at least 20,000 people, many in Sri Lanka, but throughout the whole region and as far away as Somalia. Dina Mehta in Bombay is blogging about the tragedy on her blog, and on a group blog designed to share information and point people around the world to organizations like MSF helping with relief efforts.

Rohit Gupta, also writing from Bombay, has a moving story about how local fisherman saved many of the tourists who were visiting the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, off the southernmost tip on India.

I was researching a piece for WorldChanging when I found myself wondering how many texts are translated from Arabic into English in any given year. It’s well-documented - and much bemoaned - that there’s little translation from English into Arabic. The 2002 Arab Human Development report notes that a fifth as many books are translated into Arabic from English than there are into Greek. Tragic! How terrible that those Arabs don’t want to learn about American, Canadian and English culture. Don’t they know what they’re missing?

As I’ve been discovering with much of my media research lately, the problem cuts both ways. There’s not a whole heck of a lot of translation from Arabic to English either. And English turns out to be the language most often translated into Arabic. On the other hand, Arabic doesn’t even make the top ten of languages translated into English. So maybe we’re the ones with a problem.

All this data can be found in UNESCO’s wonderful Index Translationum, which is my favorite database of the week. (Yes, it’s unseated Overture, at least temporarily.) UNESCO asks national libraries and copyright bureaus to send them information on every book translated in a given year, and logs the metadata in a vast (1.4 million record), searchable database.

Want to know how many books have been translated from Tuvan into English? Fire up the query form and you’ll discover that a single Tuvan book - an account of the Dalai Lama’s visit to Tuva - appears in English and Russian, while 52 additional volumes have been translated from Tuvan into Russian. Is the Index perfectly comprehensive? Probably not. But it’s better than anything else I’ve found…

So how does information and translation flow between speakers of “major languages”? Well, it’s worth starting by trying to define a “major language”. It’s actually quite hard to find agreement on a list of the ten most widely spoken languages in the world. The variation has a great deal to do with whether one considers the various dialects of Chinese and Arabic as single languages, or the Malay and Indonesian languages, and what one does with primary and secondary speakers of languages. (For instance, lots of people speak English as a second language, whereas almost no one speaks Korean as a second language.) Milton Turner, a professor at Saint Ignatius High School, has a terrific page analyzing possible strategies for counting languages. Infoplease, compiling data from Ethnologue, list the following ten most-spoken languages (including secondary speakers): Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia/Bahasa Malay and French. German sneaks onto many lists, as do Japanese and Korean. (Ethnologue is a mindblowing index of 6,809 “living languages” and their geographic distribution.)

Between 1979 and today, the Index Translationum tells us that 101,295 volumes have been translated from English into Spanish. English is also frequently translated into German (135,227), French (98,650), Portuguese (40505), and Russian (25,810). When we move east from Europe, translations from English drop off: 4,558 into Turkish, 3,984 into Arabic, 3,332 into Persian. But the drop off steepens in Asia: 852 into Hindi, 731 into Bengali… and 186 translations from English into Chinese from 1979 to the present.

Translation of languages into English is follows a similar Eurocentric pattern, but at a much smaller scale. There are 20489 translations from German to English (or roughly 15% as many as there are from English into German. By way of comparison, German has roughly 109 million speakers worldwide, while English has 408 million. Perhaps the Germans just aren’t publishing enough books worth translating…). French, Russian and Spanish follow, then Italian, Hungarian, Danish, Hebrew, Japanese and Dutch. Arabic, as mentioned before, doesn’t make the top ten - we’ve translated roughly twice as many volumes from Danish (spoken by 5,300,000 people) into English as we’ve translated from Arabic.

While there’s not many volumes translated from Arabic into English (1097), we’re still in second place, behind those damned French speakers (1159). There’s interesting regional dynamics around Arabic translation - 650 volumes have been translated into Turkish, 238 into Persian, and 518 into Indonesian, the language spoken in the world’s largest Muslim nation.

Why are so few books translated from Arabic into English? One possibility is the overall size of the publishing industry. It’s estimated that 150,000 books are published in English every year, while it’s likely that less than five thousand are published annually in Arabic. Proportionally speaking, far more Arabic titles are translated into English than English titles into Arabic. And while there’s far less information flow from the Arab world into the English speaking world than one might hope for, there’s even less flow between Arabic speakers and Chinese speakers: five volumes translated in the last 25 years.

Given English’s emergence as a language of scholarship and the preferred second language to learn for participation in the global economy, one might expect disproportionate translation from “small” languages into English. (In other words, if you’ve written a great scholarly work in Icelandic, you’ll likely want to translate it into English to put it in front of an audience of more than 250,000 possible readers worldwide.) This doesn’t seem to happen - Dutch speakers can read 50,750 English titles in Dutch, but only 1,839 are translated from Dutch to English. Denmark, Poland and Norway have similarly dismal ratios.

(Denmark 31482/2558; Poland 25860/1703; Norway 18258/658). Index Translatorium points out that roughly 50% of the translations they index are translations from English into other languages. Translations into English represent 6% of the translations they track.

The answer may be that writers who speak “small” languages choose to write in English or French to reach a wider audience. (As Icelanders have remarked to me when I’ve congratulated them on their flawless English, “If we waited for the rest of the world to learn how to speak Icelandic, we’d never talk to anyone else.”) Or, as the Index Translatorium folks speculate, it may be that US/UK publishing houses are unwilling to publish translated works… probably because they know British and American audiences don’t buy books in translation.

If I manage to get my Christmas shopping done soon, I may write a little scraper that will build a matrix showing translation flows between widely spoken languages. I’m especially interested to learn whether translations into Chinese are increasing and whether there’s similar regional flow in North Asia like we see in the Middle East.

Bonus link: Juan Cole has launched a project called the Global Americana Institute, which is translating and distributing classics of American politics - writings by the founding fathers - in the Arab world. What are the key Arabic texts we’d want to see translated and distributed in the US?

Update, 12/29: Isabelle de Pommereau has an excellent piece in the Christian Science Monitor about Arab writers at the Frankfurt book fair and increasing European interest in Arab writing.

If you missed the Global Voices conference we had at Harvard two weekends ago, there’s a great chance for you to catch up on the conversation. Rebecca Mackinnon and Ben Walker have edited hours and hours of audio from the sessions into a brief radio piece that serves as an excellent intro to the ideas we were playing with in Cambridge. Rebecca also wrote a great conference report for Personal Democracy Forum. Check ‘em out, and come join the conversation taking place on our blog and our wiki.

My friend John Perry Barlow was arrested a last September at SFO. He was flying from San Francisco to New York and was removed from a Delta flight when his bag was screened by security and a very thorough search revealed small quantities of marijuana, ketamine, ecstacy and psylocibin mushrooms. After a memorable evening in police custody, John Gilmore - co-founder, with Barlow, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation - bailed him out of jail.

Facing misdemeanor drug charges, many people choose to plead guilty, pay a fine and go on with their lives. Barlow’s not one of those people. He contends that the search for drugs was a violation of his 4th Amendment rights and he’s fighting the charges on constitutional grounds. His contention is that, while he may have agreed to a search of his bags for explosives, he did not agree to a detailed general search without a warrant. As a result, while the search was legal for the purpose of discovering explosives or other materials that could have harmed the flight, it was an illegal search and seizure for drugs or other contraband.

(Barlow acknowledges that he’s lucky to be able to challenge the arrest. He’s got friends like Gilmore who are willing to pay for his defense, and he’s unlikely to lose his job(s) should he be convicted… indeed, most of his employers (one of whom is the Berkman Center) are likely to support him publicly.)

On Wednesday, Barlow’s motion to suppress evidence was denied by the California Superior Court in San Mateo. Vitanuova, who spent the day in the courtroom, has an excellent blogpost on the events that transpired. Barlow and his lawyers attempted to demonstrate that the search that revealed his contraband was not looking for explosive materials, but clearly searching for drugs. The TSA screener who found the contraband in Barlow’s bag testified that she thought the Advil bottle in the bottom of his bag might be an improvised explosive device, so she shook it, and then opened it. Barlow and lawyers brought a non-US baggage screener to the stand, who testified that shaking an opening a bottle you thought might be an explosive device would be the last thing a trained baggage screener would do.

What’s especially interesting about this hearing, according to Vitanouva, is that the attorney for the state of California was joined by a federal attorney, there to ensure that none of the “sensitive security information” related to TSA procedure was revealed in the courtroom. Every time Barlow’s attorneys asked questions about TSA procedure, the state attorney objected on the grounds of “relevance” and the federal attorney on the grounds of “privelege”. The judge granted all objections on the relevance grounds… which left Vitanouva deeply frustrated, as he hoped to see a ruling from the bench that either supported or challenged the US government’s “right” to have any of the SSI associated with the TSA revealed in court.

With the denial of this motion, the case moves to trial in the spring. Given the presence of the illegal substances in Barlow’s bags, and the failure of the judge to supress this evidence on constitutional grounds, it seems quite possible that Barlow will be convicted - he’s already vowed to appeal.

Why? Barlow sees his situation as a minor manifestation of a larger post-9/11 problem - the willingness of Americans to sacrifice civil rights in the name of safety. As he said to a reporter during a break in proceedings on Wednesday: “What the judge is saying is that when you are going to travel, you make yourself subject to any search no matter how thorough; the search can be as wide as possible.’’

In his blog post telling readers about his arrest and subsequent events, Barlow explains further: “But randomly searching people’s homes against the possibility that someone might have a bio-warfare lab in his basement would reveal a lot of criminal activity. And it is certainly true that such searches would reduce the possibility of anthrax attacks and enhance public safety. Still, I doubt you’re ready to go there. Yet. Given a few exotic outbreaks, you might be. Should that day come, would you still believe such searches should not be precisely limited? This may seem hyperbolic, and of course it is, but it’s actually a fairly short conceptual distance away from what’s going on in the nation’s airports at present.”

I find this case particularly interesting for a variety of personal reasons (which is why I’m taking a break from depressing Africa stories to post about it, despite the fact that roughly 10,000 other bloggers will probably write about it as well.) I travel a lot, and have been searched many times, both before and after 9/11. The nature of these searches clearly changed after 9/11. Shortly after 9/11, I found myself at the end of a long trip (Armenia, Vienna, DC) heading home on a one-way ticket from Baltimore to Albany and enjoyed a 90 minute public search of my luggage, which included the TSA screener disassembling my deoderant stick.

It became pretty clear to me at that moment that this had nothing to do with explosives - it was about drugs. And while I found it frustrating and disconcerting (you try having two weeks of your dirty underwear strewn on the floor of BWI in front of the ticket counter and see if you’re not disconcerted), I guess I’ve accepted the reality that I exit the United States every time I enter an airport and enter a high-security, low-rights zone governed by an opaque and unpredictable legal authority. Given that my career (such as it is) doesn’t allow me to stop flying - and, frankly, that my luggage is lots less interesting than Barlow’s evidently is - I have unhappily accepted the compromise.

But I’m passionately glad that Barlow has not. He’s being extremely transparent with the web as a whole about the situation, posting all the documents associated with the case online (including his arrest records - the checkboxes on Barlow’s booking sheet describe him as “calm” (though not “cooperative”) and acknowledge that his dress was “casual”, rather than “neat”, “unkempt”, “dirty” or in “disguise”. That sounds like Barlow to me.) When I saw Barlow a few weeks ago - immediately before the 2004 election - I got the sense that he was grateful for the chance to directly challenge emergence of an American security state, fighting it hand to hand rather than dancing in its general direction.

God bless you John, and good luck.

Added:

The brilliant and wonderful danah boyd was in the courtroom to show her support - she blogs about the experience.

Well, that could have been really good news. Yesterday, BBC ran a story celebrating the arrival of a ship at Mogadishu’s main port for the first time in several years, under the headline “Rare Ship Docks at Somalia Port”. By midday today, the story had changed headlines: “Rare Ship Forced to Leave Somalia”. The earlier BBC headline is currently listed by Google News, but has been removed from the BBC - Reuters Alernet has a similarly optimistic story on their site.

Somalia has been without an effective government since Siad Barre’s overthrow in 1991. Since then, the country has been dominated by competing heavily armed warlords. These warlords have been competing for the control of Mogadishu’s port, hoping to tax the goods entering the country. A standoff between three rival warlords has prevented anyone from using the deep-water Mogadishu port - instead, goods are routinely offloaded at El Ma’an, a smaller private port to the north of the city, where goods are transferred to small boats and offloaded on a beach.

A Somali businessman chartered a large ship, filled it with food and fuel and sent it from Dubai to Mogadishu, hoping to offload goods at the Mogadishu port. His associates spent several days cleaning and preparing the port for the arrival of the ship… which was greeted with gunfire by one of the warlords. It was able to dock later in the day, when gunfire died down, but lifted anchor when warlords began lobbing mortar shells at it. As the BBC reports, “…local warlord Abdulkadir Bebe told the BBC the dispute over the port, which led to its closure following the departure of UN peacekeepers, had not been resolved.”

(BBC, incidently, has done an excellent job covering Somalia in depth, including stories on the remarkable growth of the telecom industry, stories about the ease of purchasing Somali passports, and profiles of average Somalis surviving in the absence of a government. A typical excerpt of one of these profiles: Mahamut explains his occupation as a metalworker: “I spend all day smashing the foundations of the wall around what was the United States embassy in Mogadishu in order to retrieve the steel rods used to reinforce the concrete. I sell the rods to people who are building new houses. It’s really hard work - and very hot - but it’s the only way I can support my family at the moment. I have been doing this for about three years and have gone 3km around the wall.”)

My personal nightmare scenario for our modern world? A couple more Somalias. As much as oppresive autocracies like North Korea, Zimbabwe and Myanmar scare the crap out of me, they’re not nearly as scary as the total anarchy that happens in the absence of central government where the power goes to the guys with the most guns… or mortars.

There are some points I’m happy to concede to Dr. Thomas Barnett - that disconnection from the global economy and media leads to danger, for instance. And then there are others where my strong temptation is to dig in my heels and fight his implications: that the US is the only country willing to intervene in many global conflicts and that, therefore, we should periodically be prepared to intervene unilaterally, as we did in Iraq.

But then he goes and says something persuasive and I’m forced to take him seriously, unpleasant implications and all. Tom recently blogged a Washington Post op-ed titled “Darfur: Where is Europe?” It’s a damned fine question and a pretty good editorial, which points out that the EU hasn’t mobilized any troops to intervene in Darfur and seems to be hamstrung both by the UN and by internal forces that make it easier to talk about military involvement than to actually get involved.

Tom points out that the US won’t intervene in Sudan until we’ve extricated ourselves, at least somewhat, from Iraq and Afghanistan. He then makes a statement I have some trouble with: “Simply stated: if the American military doesn’t show up, there is no multinational party.” Hence, Tom thinks the key is to get more local ownership of situations in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as creation of a global sysadmin force) so we’re able to intervene in Darfur.

It’s not that I have a clear counter-argument to him… it’s that the implications of the statement for Darfur are pretty dire. I think it’s unlikely that Iraq or Afghanistan are going to stabilize to the point where we’ve got the political will for a major intervention in Darfur. And the situation appears poised for a turn for the worse - Nigerian peacekeepers report that “astronomical” quantities of arms are pouring into the region.

“The quantity of arms and ammunition brought into Darfur to meet the present build-up of troops in the region is (so) astronomical that the issue is no longer whether there will be fighting or not, but when fighting will start.” That’s the prediction of Nigerian Major-General Festus Okonkwo, who heads up the AU forces stationed in Darfur. While the AU has stepped up and provided troops to the region, their mandate doesn’t allow them to meaningfully intervene - they’re in place as monitors. And the EU is going to need to provide some serious logistical support if the forces in place are to have any effect if the “bomb” Okonkwo is talking about is to be defused.

The folks in the US working on preventing genocide in Darfur have been good at getting the US government to say the right things, but pretty unsuccesful at provoking action. It’s possible that hoping for action from the US is wholly unrealistic given US entanglement in southwest Asia. Is it time for us to shift the focus of activism towards getting the EU and UN to pick up the slack from the US?

I was driving home from the Albany train station last night at 2am, feeling grateful that our local NPR station becomes (for all practical purposes) the BBC from 1am - 5am, when I heard a great story about Ghana’s olympic ski team. That ski team, at the moment, is skier Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong and David Jacobs, his Scottish coach (and president of the Ghana Olympic Skiing Federation).

Before you make the predictable Cool Runnings Jamaican bobsled joke, you should know that Nkrumah-Acheampong (could there be name more laden with Ghanaian history than that?) is a huge fan of the movie and finds it inspiring. You should also know that he was born in Glascow and has spent the last few years as the assistant manager of the Xscape Snowzone in Milton Keyes, one of the rare UK ski venues to feature real snow (though the mountain is artificial and indoors). And, according to stories in the Guardian and the Telegraph, our man can ski.

So despite the fact that the UK media has taken to calling him “the Snow Leopard” and the BBC story led off with the reminder that Ghana is hot, dusty and flat (except for the places where it’s hilly, green and cool, I guess), we’re not talking about a guy who’s never seen snow, but about an expat Ghanaian who’s going to face the challenges any Briton would have competing at an international level.

This, to me, is what’s really interesting about the story. There are dozens of nations like Ghana that have large, wealthy and politically influential diasporas. It’s a mistake to think of these countries as existing solely geographically. There’s a virtual Ghana that includes huge populations in the US, UK, Netherlands and Germany. This virtual Ghana includes not only brilliant footballers and boxers, but skiers as well. And god bless them if they’re good enough to make it to Turin.

Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong won’t be the first African on skis at the Olympics. Kenya’s Philip Boit skied the 10km in Nagano, and he and Cameroon’s Isaac Menyoli competed in Salt Lake City in 2002, beating a number of skiers. (Okay, one of the guys they beat was Thai, but one was Irish, and might well have seen snow before…) Anyone know if Boit was the first African to compete in an Olympic skiing event, or if some globetrotting South Africans beat him to it?

My fingers are crossed for Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong… and for any athletes helping challenge our understanding of what nationality means in a globalized world.

Matt Yanchyshyn is a Canadian reporter for the Associated Press, living in Dakar, Senegal and, apparently, having the time of his life in a town renowned for its live music scene. (I get the sense that Matt generally has a good time in Africa - there’s a very funny article on his site about Nigerians being baffled by his fondness for akpu (fermented casavva flour)…)

Matt is a serious crate-digger, an afficionado of African music old and new, and he’s publishing his best finds on his musicblog, Benn loxo du taccu. Recent posts have featured Ethiopian funk from the late 60’s and 70’s - “Leisure suits, afro cuts and guys running around screaming “baby, why dontchyou come back to me now, you know you want it, baby, you NEED me!” in Aramaic” - and Lee Scratch Perry’s dub collaborations with Zairean musicians Seka Molenga and Kalo Kawongolo.

My favorite posts are the ones on Senegalese rap, including an overview of the 2004 Senegal rap awards. The Dakar sound is pretty amazing - while there’s a heavy dose of American influences, a lot of the best tracks feature kora and hand-drumming, giving Senerap a far more interesting feel than, say, Hiplife, Ghana’s synth-heavy local hiphop. Great stuff, very much worth a listen.

Matt, if you end up finding this post, please consider registering Benn loxo du taccu with BlogAfrica - we’d love to have you as part of the site.