Ethan Zuckerman's musings on Africa, international development
and hacking the media.
On Tuesday, I go in for long-scheduled retinal surgery. Based on the last time I had this procedure, reading will be impossible for roughly four weeks and painful for another month after that. So I’m taking August off, shutting off the computer and spending a month mostly offline.
This leads to very different time off than friends, like Aaron, who’ve simply turned off the net. While there’s a ceiling high pile of books I’d like to read, I don’t think that’s going to be the focus of the next month. Last year, I spent my convalescence playing Grand Theft Auto. (The doctor’s recommendation for recovery from this procedure is to watch lots of television. By focusing on the glowy box, your eyes lock to a point 15 feet away… and that’s good, because eye motion is the enemy. Reading doesn’t work because your eyes scan across the screen. So GTA turns out to be good therapy.)
This year, I’m going to focus on painting the baby’s nursery. And I’m looking for good things to listen to while I work through a long list of household tasks. So I went online today and started looking for audio versions of the books in my bookpile. There’s good news and bad news.
The good news is for blind, dyslexic and other print-disabled people out there. You can find an amazing number of texts online through services like Bookshare. I looked at Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic first, but they use a DRM that works only on Windows PCs. Bookshare makes texts available in DAISY, an XML-based standard supported by several free readers and multiple platforms.
But you’re probably not going to start downloading audiobooks for your commute if you’re normally sighted. To sign up for Bookshare or any of these services, you need a note from a doctor, psychologist or reading specialist who can certify that you have a disability that prevents you from reading print. Fair enough – services like Bookshare take advantage of an exemption in US copyright law that allows transformative and derivative works to be provided to people with print disabilities. They could lose that exemption if they were offering services to people who are not disabled.
(Remember the controversy over whether Amazon’s Kindle 2 would allow you to listen to books? Amazon initially argued that text to speech wasn’t a performance or a derivative work and therefore was included within existing licenses of texts. The Authors Guild was concerned that this would damage audiobook sales, and demanded that Amazon disable the functionality on some texts. Their theory is that blind and disabled people should apply to have this feature enabled as they do with Bookshare – blind and disabled advocacy groups are now protesting the Author’s Guild’s position. And thus far, it looks like Amazon has backed down and will allow publishers to disable the functionality on a text-by-text basis.)
So I’ve asked Bookshare whether my weeks of recovery qualify me to use the service. In the meantime, I’m looking for other solutions. And the pickings are pretty slim. Yes, there’s lots of entertaining stuff available via Audible and iTunes… but basically none of the books in my “to read” pile. (Dozens of them, on the other hand, are in Bookshare.) And they’re not cheap. Yes, there are free audiobooks out there, but they’re not exactly contemporary titles… though I am looking forward to Chris Anderson’s new book Free (which exists as a free download) and to Cory Doctorow reading Alice in Wonderland.
So I’ve been queueing up essays I’ve been meaning to read, like Paul Collier’s “Development in Dangerous Places“. Text to speech on the Mac is pretty damned good these days. I’ve been cranking up the speed at which the computer reads, and I can now listen to an article in only about twice the time it takes me to read it on the screen. The only problem is that I want to be able to listen to these things while I’m painting, repairing the roof, driving or generally not using my laptop.
The hack I’m currently using works like this: I set up Audacity to record using the machine’s internal mic and disable hardware and software playback of audio. I run cable from my laptop’s headphone jack to its internal mic jack. I start recording in Audacity, select a passage of text in Firefox and press the keystroke I’ve set up to start Apple’s speech synthesis. (It’s under the Control Panel, under the “speech” icon, and it’s really worth exploring if you have any problems reading a screen.) My mac reads to itself and records the track in Audacity, which I can then trim and save as an mp3, downloading it onto my phone to be heard later.
It’s not a bad system, but it’s far from perfect. It takes about 20 minutes to record an article like Collier’s, using speech synthesis on one of its fastest settings, and a few minutes more to encode it as an mp3. While it’s going on, the processors on my Mac are pretty stressed out, and I can’t run any other audio on the device.
What I really want is the ability to take an arbitrary text or HTML file and, from the Mac command line, turn it into an mp3 file. This should, technically, be possible. There’s a shell command – “say” – that generates .aiff files from text files using Mac’s speech synthesis. But it won’t handle files much longer than a few sentences long – it’s basically useless for what I’m trying to do. If anyone has ideas on how to hack it so that it will accept a couple dozen K of text… or other ideas for synthesis from text files and webpages to mp3 files… I’d be very grateful for the input.
On the list of things that doesn’t work, by the way, is asking friends to read to you. I’m grateful to the half dozen friends who read texts to me the last time I had to take time off from reading. It’s a lovely gesture, and a very pleasant way to spend time with people. But it’s a horribly inefficient way to read text, and frankly, it’s not fair to ask friends to read the thousands of pages I’d like to get through this next month.
All ideas welcome… though I can only read them on screen for the next four days or so…
Here’s a fun game to play with friends, particularly friends who work on social ventures or other world-changing projects. Ask each person what issues they’d work on if they were given $500 million, $50 million or $5 million dollars to spend. With thoughtful friends, you’ll get different answers for different funding levels. It’s not realistic to tackle huge global problems – curing malaria, building sewage and fresh water systems for villages worldwide – at the $5m level, but you often learn about fascinating problems that might be solvable with a small amount of concerted effort.
My $5 million answer is usually “natural-gas flaring“, a practice that’s so environmentally irresponsible and dangerous for communities that it should be a no-brainer to guilt global petroleum companies with $5 million of focused bad publicity. (Part of the fun of the game is that you can argue with your friends about how much money is realistic to tackle any of these problems.)
The best $50 million answer I heard lately came from my friend Colin McCormick, a physics and policy wonk in DC, who wonders whether you could destroy the small arms trade that enables violent insurrection around the world with $50 million worth of research on ceramics. His idea was to create a ceramic that could be placed within 7.62 shells, the ammunition used in AK-47s and other inexpensive assault rifles. When detonated, the shell would trigger a chemical change in the ceramic, causing it to expand and bond to the rifled barrel. Guns fired using these rounds would become unusable. The idea would be to mix small numbers of compromised rounds into ammo released through the global arms trade, in the hopes of making it increasingly dangerous to buy illegal ammo without risking destruction of weapons.
I have no idea whether such an idea is realistic, but it’s one of the few ideas I’ve heard that might have an impact on the global small arms trade. While controls exist to prevent the sale of ammunition to anyone other than legitimate government entities, these controls are routinely skirted, and a dealer with a small number of the right connections is able to make millions very quickly selling ammunition to forces who aren’t able to legally purchase weaponry.
The fine folks at the Small Arms Survey produce countless publications on the arms trade. But very few are as entertaining and easy to read as an 8-page cartoon they published by Robert Butler. Titled “Adventures of a Would-Be Arms Dealer“, it tells the story of an arms control inspector who flies to Rwanda, bribes an old friend to produce an end-user certificate (specifying that arms are to be sold to the Rwandan army), and then arranges a deal to purchase and transport 2 million rounds of 7.62 shells to rural Somalia. He concludes that, with an upfront investment of $500,000, he could turn a million dollar profit with little more than a trip to Kigali and a couple of phonecalls.
As I read the story, I realized I knew most of the terminology used, not from a close study of the issue, but from Frederick Forsyth’s classic novel, “The Dogs of War“. In the novel, Forsyth outlines in extremely specific detail the machinations necessary to mount a coup in a nation that sounds a whole lot like Equatorial Guinea. At least two failed coups in Equatorial Guinea – one in 1973 and the more recent Wonga Coup - have been linked to Forsyth’s novel. (Some have linked Forsyth to the 1973 coup, which he admits knowing about and researching, though won’t admit to charges he helped finance it.) The methods his characters used to obtain end-user certificates and buy ammunition in Eastern Europe are almost identical to those that Butler outlines almost 35 years later.
For me, either the suspiciously accurate novel or the eminently readable comic go a long way in turning a distant – though critical – concern into a real, tangible problem. It makes me wish that more journalists and activists would look for creative ways to tell these stories and make them more real to readers.
Along that line, I have to offer a shout-out to Wired’s recent coverage of Somali piracy. I think this is a stupid story to be following – it’s more spectacle than substance and doesn’t do much to help people understand why the situation in Somalia is so desperate – but a recent set of Wired stories does an excellent job of turning a distant story into a tangible one.
Noah Schactman and Scott Carney offer an interview with a Somali pirate that helps explain the economics of the trade. It’s illustrated with a video made by pirates aboard a ship they’d recently captured. The video is pretty remarkable – it’s the sort of braggadochio you and your friends might engage in had you just seized a multi-million dollar ship with the reasonable expectation that you’d be able to ransom it for millions of dollars.
But the piece de resistance is Cutthroat Capitalism, a flash game that invites you to man a small boat out of Eyl, pick likely looking targets in the Gulf of Aden, board them and negotiate ransom. I quickly picked up a cruise ship, fed my hostages, acted erraticly while on the satphone to the negotiator and collected a $4 million ransom. With buttons that let you beat or kill hostages, it’s one of the more cold-blooded simulations I’ve ever seen, but does an effective job of making it clear that piracy is deeply profitable for those involved.
Update, 7:04pm, July 23: Robert Mackey has been very gracious about engaging with the points I’ve raised in this post. Please make sure you read our exchange in the comments on the post, as well as the post itself. And many thanks to Robert for responding constructively to a critical post from me.
Robert Mackey of New York Times News Blog, The Lede, has been covering Iran-focused events in the citizen media space. He posts time-stamped updates to The Lede that excerpt from tweets and blogposts of people in Iran or outside the country who are writing about Iran. It’s an interesting experiment, a form of coverage much closer to what some bloggers and tweeters were doing at the height of the Tehran protests than to what the Times usually does. It’s also related to the work we do at Global Voices, filtering, translating and contextualizing citizen media as we amplify voices to a broader audience.
On Tuesday July 21 at 1:19pm, Mackey posted an update focused on the complexity of the Iranian online information environment and the possibility that Iranian authorities may be trying to disrupt online activities. The update goes on to report a rumor that Hossein Derakshan, imprisoned in Iran for the past eight months, is working with Iranian intelligence services. Mackey quotes Omid Habibinia, an Iranian blogger living in Switzerland, and a blog commenter, Javad Ghorbati, as the source for these rumors.
Let me offer some context. Derakshan is an extremely controversial character. He was one of the first people to blog from Iran, and is recognized as one of the main people who promoted the idea of blogging in Persian. Early in his career, Hoder (as he’s generally known) was highly critical of the Iranian government, closely involved with progressive Iranian bloggers, and prone to dramatic gestures, including travelling to Israel on his Canadian passport and blogging about the trip.
At some point after his Israel trip, Hoder became concerned that the US government was planning an attack on Iran, and worried that his online writing gave support and comfort to anti-Iranian forces. The tone of his blog changed markedly, and he began telling friends of plans to return to Iran, and his fear that he’d face arrest due to his Israel trip. He made clear to friends that he did not want a campaign for his release – especially a campaign led by Americans – as he was more concerned about potential American hostility to Iran than his own fate at the hands of Iranian authorities. This has put his friends – myself included – in an awkward position. We want to respect his wishes, but we also want to see him released from detention.
When Hoder’s politics changed, many of his old friends were upset. Some suggested that Hoder must now be cooperating with Iranian authorities and shouldn’t be trusted. When Hoder was arrested, the circumstances surrounding his arrest were very confusing – it took a long time to get confirmation from Iranian and Canadian authorities that he had, in fact, been detained. Given his changed politics, arrest didn’t seem to make much sense. This, in turn, generated more rumors – people suggested that he hadn’t been arrested but simply disappeared from view to work more closely with the government.
In other words, it’s not news that some folks on the left side of the Iranian blogosphere believe that Hoder is a spy. This isn’t a particularly good example of the point Mackey is trying to make, that the Iranian blogosphere is getting increasingly paranoid about being infiltrated – this is a rumor that has circulated since 2007. You would think that the fact that Hoder’s now been imprisoned for eight months would counterbalance this rumor. But conspiracy theorists see his long detention and the fact that President Ahmadinejad mentioned Derakshan while asking religious prosecutors to respect the rights of Roxanna Saberi as “evidence” that he must somehow be a government collaborator.
Here’s some of the context Mackey offered for the rumors he amplified:
Mr. Derakhshan mysteriously disappeared after his return to Iran from Canada in 2008. The fact that his stance had seemed to soften on Iran’s government had dismayed several of his fellow bloggers before he went missing. In 2006, he had made a point of challenging government dogma by traveling to Israel and blogging about it.
That disappearance isn’t so mysterious at this point – he was arrested. But in the context of a pair of quotes that claim that Hoder is a government agent – and no quotes that dispute this theory – suggesting that he “mysteriously disappeared” appears to support the theory that Derakshan is a secret agent, not a political prisoner.
Mackey’s update generated several sharply critical comments, including from my friend and colleague Solana Larsen, who noted that the New York Times appeared to be lending credibility to some very dangerous assertions. Mackey has ammended his post in response to these comments, and it includes two paragraphs that suggest to me his discomfort about spreading this libelous rumor. Mackey has made ammendments to his post, acknowledging the controversy. The post contains two paragraphs (unchanged by Mackey, as he clarifies in the comments below), which I believe reflect his discomfort with amplifying a rumor which I consider to be libelous.
While there is no evidence to support the rumor that Mr. Derakhshan is cooperating with the authorities in their battle against Iran’s opposition bloggers – and the people running the online campaign to free Mr. Derakhshan vehemently deny the rumor – the fact that some Iranian bloggers are again talking about this possibility seems to indicate that the “cyber army” set up by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has helped to stir up paranoia and fear in that community.
Last month we reported that a series of updates were posted on Twitter by a blogger who identified himself as a member of the Revolutionary Guard who seemed to be dedicated to finding and helping to arrest opposition protesters and bloggers. Even if Mr. Derakhshan has not defected to the side of Iran’s security forces, it is clear that some Internet-savvy people have taken the fight to suppress the opposition’s protests online.
Now, I’m not a journalist, and certainly not employed by the august New York Times, but it seems to me that when you start a sentence, “While there is no evidence to support the rumor that…” you should probably step back from your keyboard and ask yourself whether you should be writing this article.
In response, I offered my 134 characters worth of media criticism: “While there is no evidence to support the rumor that Mr. Mackey of the NYTimes manufactures stories, it IS being discussed on Twitter.” My friend Quinn Norton offered a similar, but funnier critique: “Also, I heard a rumor that NYT editorial turns into lizards at night and eats the janitorial staff. Now you have too.”
Her tweet linked to a post by David Steven, titled “The Paper of Rumor”, who feels strongly that Mackey is out of line:
Now it’s possible that Hoder has agreed to cooperate – perhaps under torture. Maybe, he even did a deal before he went home. Perhaps, too, the Times’ editor, Bill Keller, is still shagging his reporters. Point is we don’t know whether any of these assertions are true.
You have to hand it to the cowardly shits at the Times, though. If you’re going to libel someone, it makes sense to do it when your target is locked away in a jail cell. Then you can publish whatever the hell you like.
Friend and colleague Jillian York thinks Steven (and I) are taking aim at the wrong guy – we should be criticizing the bloggers spreading these claims: “Why are we blaming Mackey – a journalist with no real connection to or experience with Iran – and not the blogger he quoted.”
She’s got a point. But I think there are good reasons to criticize Mackey in this case.
Technorati ranks The Lede as the 83rd most popular blog they track. Habibinia’s blog isn’t ranked – Technorati sees only six blog links to it. In other words, The Lede is spreading Habibinia’s theory to a much larger audience. It’s also putting it under the New York Times banner. We can argue about whether Times blogs should be read the same way as news articles – they shouldn’t – but it’s certainly a concern that people will read something published by a Times employee on a New York Times website as having a level of credibility that most blogs don’t.
With that power to amplify and legitimate comes responsibility. We think a lot about this issue at Global Voices, as much of what we do involves amplifying voices. When we do our job well, we select a balance of voices, not just one perspective. We offer context that might help to explain why bloggers are putting forth one opinion or another. We don’t always get it right – it’s hard, and especially hard to do quickly. It’s a form of journalism – it requires journalistic values like fairness and transparency applied to a field – citizen media – that isn’t always journalistic. As I mentioned above, I don’t think Mackey does very well here at providing appropriate context, in providing a balanced perspective, or even in breaking an interesting story – instead, he gives credibility to a rumor that’s best understood in the context of Derakshan’s complex history, not the current protests.
It’s fascinating to see the New York Times needing to wrestle with the same questions we have to deal with at Global Voices. I’m glad they’re taking citizen media seriously enough to be reporting on it, but hope they’ll do a better job in wrestling with the complexity of these sorts of stories in the future.
John Palfrey introduces Alex MacGillivray as one of the first students of the Berkman Center. He’s now a major player in the world of internet law, formerly serving as Senior Product and Intellectual Property Counsel at Google. He’s represented Google in a number of key cases as one of the first lawyers to join the company. Twitter recently “stole” him away, appointing him as General Counsel, which may leave him for free to talk about the Google Book Search settlement, the conversation around our lunch table today.
Alex explains that the goal of Google Books was to make books easier to find. He references an article in the New York Times in which librarians lamented that people were only searching online materials, not printed books. He references a story in which a research assistant was asked by Larry Lessig to come back with “everything Senator X said about topic Y” and returned only with results after 1996… which is to say, only results from the web.
There’s a set of books that are “born digital” which are low-hanging fruit, as digital copies already exist. Other new books are easy to obtain and scan. Harder books include ones where rights are unclear, or public domain books, where there simply isn’t very much money available for people to scan them. It was easy, Alex says, for Google to decide to scan the public domain books. And it was easy to decide that it wouldn’t be sufficient just to do the public domain ones – it was essential to partner with people who owned and could provide these books, both publishers and libraries.
If you’re using search and getting a page from a book, you’re probably encountering a book from a publisher who’s partnered with Google. The idea is to make it easier for you to find and decide to purchase the book. If you’re simply getting a snippet, it’s probably a library book where Google doesn’t have a partnership with the rightsholder – the idea is to give you a taste of the book and send you to a publisher or a library to get the book. And in the case of public domain books, you’re able to download the book as a PDF or as text.
So far, Google has scanned more than 10 million books. That quantity of books meant that Google needed to invent a whole new technical apparatus for scanning books… and Google had to physically pick up and scan those books. More than 1.5 million are in the partner program, and a comparable amount are in public domain. There are more than 40 libraries working as partners. And Alex says that lawsuits – two in the US, one in France, and one from Germany which has now been withdrawn – haven’t slowed Google’s pace of scanning books. One US suit is a broad action from a large set of authors – another comes from five of the six largest US publishers.
Alex notes that Google usually thinks very big – this, he says, is one of the few times that other parties at the table were thinking bigger than Google was. Most parties shared Google’s excitement about making sure that more books got read. And there was widespread consensus about the importance of ensuring that people without means could access this information through libraries.
Under the settlement, any person in the US is able to get search results, locate the book in libraries (via Worldcat) and, if a book is out of print, read 20% of the book, for free. The goal there was to get the benefits that came from the publishing partner program for books that were out of print. Alex remembers checking dozens of books out of a library and scanning through to figure out which would be useful for his thesis – the goal was to create a similar mechanism online. People can also purchase full, permanent access to a book online, priced either by a copyright holder, or through an algorithm that simulates a market for these books. Over 50% of these books are $5.99 or less, while 80% are less than $15.99.
For institutions like Harvard, there are institutional subscriptions that give widespread access to the collection. Institutions pay a fee for access, and then anyone at the institution has access to the books provided. And there’s a third public-access model – any public library in the US will have at least one terminal which can access the subscription materials for free. He points out that there’s a provision for “first-class access” for making books available to people with disabilities, especially for the books that are hardest for people with disabilities to access, like old, out-of-print books.
There are exceptions to the settlement, like the owners of pictures within the books – they’re not currently included – Alex encourages people to look up the class definition of the settlement.
Palfrey suggests that Alex talk about orphan works. Alex explains that Google – or at least “the part of Google which is me” – has been fighting for access to orphan works for years. The settlement includes orphan and non-orphan works… though Alex acknowledges that there’s no clear definition of orphaned works. He offers the definition: “works where the rightsholder is really, really hard to find.” His colleague, who is responsible for much of the technology of Google Books, points out that there’s another problem – providing access to books that might not be economical to scan and offer access to online. Revenue for publishers that comes from accessing orphaned works goes to the books rights registry, which is charged with searching for publishers to compensate for use of their works. This said, Alex makes clear that the settlement is structured so that if the US resolves the status of orphaned works under copyright law, the settlement will be updated to reflect that (presumably better) law.
Unsurprisingly, there’s lots of tough questions for Alex and his colleague Dan Clancy, who was technical lead on the project.
Chris Soghoian wonders out loud whether Google’s assurances in this agreement that they won’t be evil are sufficient. Alex pushes back and notes that these aren’t just assurances – they’re legal guarantees. Chris comes to his central concern, which is that “Google has thrown fair use under a bus.”
This contention angers Alex. “We’ve got more current fair use cases than anyone else. It’s convenient to say that we’re against fair use, but it’s bullshit.” Dan offers a more nuanced response, explaining that Google is engaged in several practices – scanning all images without getting releases, scanning unregistered books – that should clearly demonstrate that they believe in and are defending fair use.
Lewis Hyde wonders about the books registry established in the settlement. He points out that the board of directors for the registry comes from publishers and authors while the universe of people who use books includes readers. And he wonders where the money earned from orphaned works will eventually go.
Alex explains that the registry doesn’t make decisions about what users can or can’t do with works, which suggests that perhaps representing users in that process is less appropriate. (It does leave open the question of where users get represented.) As for the money from orphan works – 63% of all revenue goes to publishers, with 37% to Google. (This split is true for subscription revenue as well as for directly purchased works.) With orphaned works, the money goes to the registry in a fund that can be claimed if publishers claim their works. If the money is unclaimed for five years, it can be spent by the registry to seek out rightsholders. At a later point, the remaining money will go towards nonprofit organizations that benefit readers and writers.
Lewis objects that this doesn’t answer the key question – is it rightsholders who should actually get paid this money from orphan works. Alex offers that there are lots of ways to settle the question – give the money towards defending and enforcing copyright, towards fighting and overturning copyright, towards universities. The advantage of doing it this way is that it’s likely to encourage more rightsholders to come forward, lessening orphan works problems.
Phil Malone wonders about clauses in the agreement that give Google “most-favored nation status”. If someone else comes in with a deal to do book scanning for less money, Google gets the right to offer an equivalent deal, which takes away one of the few advantages anyone would have in competing with Google. Why should this be justified under anti-trust law?
Alex essentially acknowledges that this clause gives Google a competitive advantage. “We believe this is such a good idea, we believe others will copy it. This makes it very easy for a second entrant,” as Google has already done and published terms of a settlement with publishers and authors. He explains that Google asked for this clause for ten years because this is a fairly popular term under antitrust laws.
I asked a question about access to the Google data as a whole set, not as individual texts. I’m interested in the utility of these millions of digital documents for lexicographers, or for machine translation researchers. I pointed out that Google probably already has the largest set of translated texts in the world, which is a key step in creating parallel corpora, essential for machine translation. Dan points out two critical uses of corpora I didn’t mention – optical character recognition research, and research on new document search techniques.
The answer to the question: “no body in the current world” has access to the complete database (other than Google.) But that’s changing “Because of copyright liability, we don’t open the database to everyone else… Library partners have only subsets of that information – Stanford doesn’t get Harvard’s works.” That said, there’s a provision for two research centers at each partner institution which will have access to the entire corpus for “non-consumptive, textual, computational analysis.” (“Non-consumptive” means “for uses other than reading and understanding the work,” including the text analysis examples offered above.)
Google wants to see these centers created, Dan says, and has put up $5 million to establish them. But it’s going to be up to the libraries to run them and determine whether researchers are creating appropriate uses. Universities could sponsor any researcher – including those outside the university – to access that corpus.
No one has yet built one of these centers, in part because this access is part of the settlement, which is still being challenged in court. But Dan makes clear that Google can make no claims on intellectual property on people building new search or translation algorithms that are trained on the data.
I asked the question because I was concerned at the recent Open Translation Tools summit that innovators might stop working on translation projects believing that Google now has an insurmountable lead in machine translation and will obviate other efforts in the near future. I don’t believe that’s true and I think it would be a mistake for people to stop working on machine translation and other strategies.
What’s exciting is that some researchers will be able to access this huge corpus if the settlement goes through – that’s exciting for projects like Wordnik, as well as for anyone researching search or translation. What’s a little worrisome is that Google partners like Harvard may have liability concerns that restrict access to the corpus – if Harvard is worried about liability from me potentially releasing sensitive material, they may restrict access to this critical corpus. One path forward might be approaching Harvard – which already has access to a huge corpus of material that Google has scanned for the Harvard library – and seeing whether it’s possible to build machine translation corpora from this existing data. Think that might be something I add to my to do list.
On our final day in Abuja, my friend Juliana Rotich demanded that we visit Wuse Market so she could stock up on cloth for herself and her extended family. She came armed with a list of top textile brands her aunties had told her to look for – as it happens, all the listed labels were Ghanaian.
Since I was heading to Ghana next, I saved my fabric budget for Accra instead. There are numerous places to purchase fabric in the city, and three are worth special mention:
- Makola Market. In an episode of his television show on Ghana, roaving chef and bon vivant Anthony Bourdain introduces Makola Market by saying, “Can I get you anything? I mean, literally anything?” Vendors at Makola specialize in commodities as diverse as live snails and iron padlocks. Somewhere in the chaos that is the city’s largest market is a vast warren of fabric sellers. Many vendors sell fabric in the front of their shops and provide tailoring services in the rear – this can be an excellent way to select the right amount of fabric for a specific design, as a tailor can measure you and determine how many yards you need for that kente-printed tuxedo jacket.
Be careful – not all vendors are selling the same quality of fabric. The colorful Dutch Wax cloth you’re seeing so many Ghanaians wear is quite expensive, and you should be able to tell the stuff made locally, as it’s fairly opaque, sturdy and often has a waxy gloss to it. If you’re handling a fabric that’s very thin, looks like it could tear or run, you’re handling a Chinese knockoff of a local design. Don’t buy it. These knockoffs are a particularly insidious form of piracy, where designs are stolen from Ghanaian factories and sold on cheap cloth around West Africa.
- Woodin. The Woodin showroom in Osu – on Oxford Street, south of Danquah Circle – is one of the temples of high fashion in West Africa. Woodin designs and prints some of the most extraordinary fabrics – some of their current lines include designs that look space-aged and feature striking shades of orange, purple and green. Woodin sells finished clothing as well as fabric. None of it is cheap, but all of it is excellent, and if you’re intrigued by the idea of designing contemporary clothing with modern African fabrics, this is a trip you need to make. Woodin also has a much smaller – but very fashionable – boutique in the Accra Mall.
- Mercy Ocansey Batik. My favorite Ghanaian cloth is batik, and my favorite batiks are made by the Ocansey family in Nunga, and sold in Osu at Mercy Asi Ocansey and Sons Batik in Osu. The shop isn’t far from Woodin – to find it, go to Frankie’s Hotel and turn onto the road that passes the right side of Frankie’s. About 300 meters, just past Revenue Tower, you’ll find the small shop on the left side of the road.
Mercy is retired now, but her family has continued her traditions, and offers dozens of fine batiks as well as tailoring services. As with all good cloth, it’s not cheap – most batiks run 5 cedis per yard (roughly $3.50) and these prices are fixed. (Don’t bother barganing here – it just doesn’t work.) The real gem of the store, in my opinion, is the patchwork (asisewa) cloth, which costs significantly more, perhaps 15 cedis per yard – it’s a riot of color and design, made from squares left over from the tailor shop.
Dan and his sister at Ocansey Batik
When looking at the batik, be sure to unfold the bolts of fabric – most have two designs on the same piece. They’re designed to complement each other – it’s common to buy equal amounts of each design and to sew clothing that uses one fabric as an accent on the other. The fashions displayed at the shop often show this technique to good effect. If you’re in Accra for a period of time, I recommend visiting the shop early in your stay, and bringing one or more favorite pieces of clothing with you. You can choose appropriate batiks, and Mercy’s family will reproduce the cut of your sample garment in their fabrics, often within a few days.
I spent over a hundred dollars at Mercy’s shop – just on the least expensive batik – this past visit and still didn’t get everything I wanted. It’s a seriously dangerous place for people obsessed with strong colors and Ghanaian designs.
Juliana, have I convinced you to visit Accra yet?
To obtain the emergency passport I needed to visit Nigeria and Ghana, I revisited my old stomping grounds in Southern Connecticut. To reward myself for a frantic day of bureacratic wrangling, I stopped by New Canaan, CT, the absurdly wealthy town across the border from the more pedestrian New York village I grew up in. I found myself eating ice cream on a park bench and trying to remember both how exciting this town was when I was eight and how stultifyingly dull it was once I was a teenager. Very little has changed – the same tasteful, expensive shops still cater to very similar clienteles. But the familiarity of the space wasn’t able to help me travel back in time, to remember what it felt like to be seven years old, with my father at the cheese shop, tasting a sharp, hard English cheese for the first time.
Visiting Accra, on the other hand, feels like time travelling. I stare out the window in my hotel room at the frenzied samba of cars, pedestrians, hawkers, merchants, children and the occasional chicken, and I’m seeing at least three streets – 1993, 2003 and 2009. There are constants, like Gokal Opticals, which fixed my only pair of glasses in 1994, carefully soldering a new hinge in place as ordering a replacement part would have taken weeks. And there’s the entirely new – a steel and glass tower where I expect to see a decrepit house, unblemished pavement where I’m expecting dirt and goat shit.
If a two-day trip can have multiple themes, my Saturday was about incrementalism, and Sunday about revolutionary change. Saturday, I walked down Mission Street Extension from Papaye Chicken (still serving ginger-coated charcoal chicken and vast piles of rice, with dark, almost sweet shito) towards my old apartment, across the street from Blue Gate (still serving huge griled tilapia and balls of banku, but now featuring seating on both sides of the road.) Side roads that were red dirt and sewage are paved and lined with elegant chop bars, designer clothing shops and a tattoo parlor.
A tattoo parlor in Osu. Hell has frozen over.
I feel as if I could recreate the past by layering a thin film on top of the current reality – a scrim that covers that new four-story shopping plaza with the disused concrete and rebar hulk that stood there a decade before. Add some burning plastic and we’d be able to take me back to a past I remember, if I squint a little bit. It’s the same place, just gentrified, in a particularly Ghanaian fashion. My friend Amos met me for lunch at Asanka Local, a deservedly popular chop bar that’s new since my last visit, and mentioned that he was looking for a house in the area to use as an office. He figured he’d need to spend at least 100,000 cedis, or about $67,000. Makes me wish I’d bought the apartment building I used to live in.
When I visited the Accra Mall on Sunday, there was no amount of squinting that could have convinced me that I was in a country I knew and understood. Ten minutes past the airport, the mall features two supermarkets, a cinema, several high-end boutiques and an excellent bookshop. It’s beautiful, as nice as its counterparts in Nairobi and Cape Town, and it’s got a steady buzz of people, tourist, Filipino overseas workers, Lebanese traders and lots of middle-class Ghanaians.
The bookshop left me babbling. In 1993, the only bookstores we had in Accra were the university shop in Legon, which featured required reading texts, Akan-English dictionaries, and the occasional heavily used Mario Puzo novel, for $5. The Methodist bookshop in Accra had less, with a stronger emphasis on devotional literature. We treasured books, trading them back and forth until everyone in a circle of friends had read all the literature each had brought. Guests were interrogated about what they’d brought and sent home empty-handed – we seized the airplane copy of Granta and it would pass through a dozen hands in the next month, emerging with smear marks on the pages and a cracked spine.
There’s Mario Puzo at the new bookshop, but there are also an excellent selection of local authors, fiction as well as histories, rich, colorful books about Ghana’s rich, colorful culture. There are racks of non-pirated Ghanaian CDs and used US ones, DVDs that include a Dizzy Gilespe concert as well as the latest Bruce Willis shoot-em-up. I thought of my friend Teju Cole and his anecdote in his beautiful memoir “Every Day is For the Thief”, where he finds a jazz record store in Lagos and feels like he might actually be able to live in his home city… until he discovers that the store only sells bootlegs of these CDs, as the originals are too precious to part with. It’s time to bring Teju to Accra, and let him pick up some Ornette Coleman albums, because – unbelievably – they’re in stock and reasonably affordable.
And then there’s the grocery store. When I first came to Accra, I asked the bartender at the hotel where I was staying where I should shop for food. “All the obruni go to Danquah Circle. You can get anything you imagine there.” I walked around for a couple of hours, visiting the handful of western-style food shops and discovering that my imagination now needed to be limited to canned corned beef, canned mackerel, dried beans and pasta. Add in the amazing fruits and vegetables on sale on almost every corner, and we had a perfectly servicable diet, but one light on the comfort food that everyone needs now and again. My family and friends ended up feeling like they were supplying a prisoner, sending me letters that included packets of dried orange cheese mix so I could buy pasta, oil and a little milk and make macaroni and cheese. A letter from Rachel included sheets of nori, which led to a sushi party, using soy sauce bought from one of the Chinese restaurants in town. I almost got into a fistfight with a housemate about his incursions into my most prized posession – a jar of Skippy peanut butter.
And now there’s a supermarket, and it has cheese. A whole cold case full of it. Apples aren’t luxury items sold for a dollar a piece by roadside hawkers – you can buy them by the kilo. I looked like a madman, walking through Shoprite with my camera, snapping photos of remarkable, miraculous sights – chickens, already gutted and plucked, frozen and in bags! – that looked completely ordinary to everyone around me.
When Rachel took her first trip to Ghana with me, in 1999, I wanted her to get a feeling for what my year in the country had been like five years prior. That meant staying in a $10 hotel, taking bucket baths, wondering if the power would keep the fan on, and generally suffering. I think I wanted her to understand why that year had been so difficult – why I was sick so often, why accomplishing one thing during the day felt like such an achievement. So we were sweaty, dirty and sick together for a wonderful two weeks, and she was a good enough sport to enjoy both that trip and a later one, where we stayed in hotels with aircon, televisions and much smaller insect populations.
The bar at Citizen Kofi
I don’t know that one could come to Accra and pretend that it’s 1994 anymore. If the mobile phones don’t give it away – with phonecard sellers, repair shops and charging stations on every corner – the architecture does. Towering over Danquah Circle is a new orange and purple tower, a vast nightclub and restaurant called Citizen Kofi. Amos took me there, and we sat on the fifth floor, the Atlantic visible a mile to the south, cool breezes blowing our hair and cooling our $5 cappuchinos. It’s elegantly designed, beautifully executed, and it wouldn’t be out of place in Ibiza or Beverly Hills. And it’s Ghanaian-owned, and filled with wealthy Ghanaians dressed to the nines. It simply doesn’t seem possible to me, and looking down on the rusting sheet metal roofs of the neighboring houses, it’s not hard to imagine those humble dwellings being torn down and cinemas, steakhouses, nightclubs and spas opening in gleaming new buildings.
These consumer paradises, of course, are a lousy way to judge the success or failure of an economy. The first time I travelled to India, I found the gap between rich and poor disconcerting because it was so much larger than anything I’d seen in Africa. It wasn’t that Indians were poorer than Tanzanians, for instance – just that desperately poor Indians were across the street from five-star hotels filled with absurdly wealthy Indians. I kept waiting for class warfare to break out on the streets, not able to believe that such levels of inequality could be sustainable. Now I find myself wondering if we’ll soon being asking similar questions in Ghana.
My friends who support the NDC – the party that regained control in the most recent election – tell me that NDC won because people felt like eight years of NPP government had resulted in a lot of developments that looked like Citizen Kofi and not much improvement of schools or infrastructure. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair – driving throughout the city, I saw roads I knew to be almost impassible that are now paved and smooth. I ask about whether a particular neighborhood is still plagued by traffic jams and learn that a two-lane road has been replaced with a six-lane carriageway with two flyovers.
Is this just benefitting the comparatively wealthy who are lucky enough to live in the capital city? No idea – I was there for 51 hours, and I didn’t get outside Greater Accra. And I know it’s a mistake to characterize the direction of a country based on half a dozen long walks and conversations with a dozen old friends. But I felt like I was catching glimpses of a future Accra, the stylish capital of a middle-income nation. And I wonder if the Citizen Kofis are less an invitation to class warfare than they are aspirational reminders that a poor country can build institutions that are world-class… and that fellow Ghanaians might support these sorts of places.
My friend Georgia is predicting that Cuba will open to US tourism in the next couple of years and has been planning to spend as much time as possible there, enjoying the current beauty and decay before Hilton and others transform it. I’m too late to drag those I know and love to Accra to see the place I fell in love with in 1993. It’s a happy coicidence that I find the Accra of 2009 inspiring, challenging, welcoming and beautiful, or this would have been an alienating two days, instead of inspiring ones.
President Obama’s poll numbers may be slipping in the US, but he’s certainly popular in Accra. I missed the chaos of his visit, but have been enjoying the aftermath – countless billboards featuring the President, his family, Obama and Ghanaian President Atta Mills together. At the beautiful new Accra Mall, the bookshop was filled with Obama-focused titles, and a special gave you a signed CD by a local artist with any purchase of an Obama book.
One newspaper was attempting to stir up controversy with the allegations that the President didn’t cry when visiting Cape Coast Castle. Another featured a reclining woman wearing traditional dress, captioned “I was waiting for Obama” – to me, the headline and picture suggested a hint of scandal. Had the Government of Ghana filled his suite at the Holiday Inn with attractive women in traditional dress, lounging on various soft surfaces? Alas. The “story” inside offered the breaking news that a businesswoman from Takoradi had hoped to meet with Obama and discovered that it wasn’t possible given his schedule… which gives her something in common with roughly every I saw in Ghana, including my friends who work in the US embassy or in the Government of Ghana.
(The one exception is my dear friend Bernard, featured in the header of this blog. He was invited by the US embassy to teach Michele, Sasha and Malia how to play drums and xylophones during a brief cultural visit they had within the Holiday Inn. So now I can claim that I’ve studied music with the same teacher as our First Lady.)
While approximately no one got time with the US President, approximately everyone has an opinion about the real rationale for his visit. One theory offers that it was a Michele visit, based on a deep desire to see Cape Coast Castle and confront the legacy of slavery – in this theory, Ghana’s politics are almost an afterthought to a presidential family roots tour. Another theory posits that the visit is purely economic, an attempt to ensure that US companies will be the lead investors in Ghana’s newly developing oilfields. While some forum posters hint that the Obama visit is a sinister plot to ensure a US military base in West Africa, that idea carries basically no weight with the people I’ve visited with – even with increasing violence in Mali and the emergence of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, US strategic interests on the continent are a lot closer to Somalia and Sudan and pretty far from the Gold Coast.
While there’s no shortage of pride over the Obama visit, there’s a darker tone as well to many of these conversations. This is the third US presidential visit to Ghana, and while Obama is a rock star to an extent that George W. Bush never was, there’s a sense of inevitability to some of these visits. Some friends have reflected, “Where else can he go?”, noting that many stable states on the continent are functionally one-party states. If the visit is a gift offered to Ghana to congratulate it for stable, multiparty democracy with a dual alternation of power, some Ghanaian insiders wonder whether the wider world knows of all the accusations (in both directions) of vote rigging, or the contained but disturbing violence that affected some party activists. In other words, if this is the best we’ve got, we’ve got larger African problems that demand addressing.
E. Gyimah-Boadi, the executive director of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, offers this sort of cautionary response to the Obama visit in a piece titled: “The Best Worst Country In Africa”. While he avoids the election fraud theories that I’ve been hearing the past few days, he makes a solid case that Ghana’s democratic institutions aren’t as strong as we might want them to be, especially inasmuch as power is still overly concentrated in the executive, a legacy of the “big man” past of the country, when it was ruled by a coup government which devolved to democratic leadership.
“President Musugu Babazonga”, the creation of a Ghanaian satirist, is concerned about Obama’s distinction between strong men and strong institutions. In an editorial offering his reactions as “Musugu Babazonga – President-for-Life of the Coconut Republic of Tonga in the Gulf of Guinea”, he notes:
I have been democratically elected several times and have handed over peacefully – to myself. I have been in power for 30 years, so we have stability too. Isn’t that important for development? Obama doesn’t know what he is talking about.
He said this: “Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.” He must be smoking something again. Who is going to build the strong institutions? It takes strong leaders to build strong institutions, stupid.
Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda is almost as angry about Obama’s speech as President Babazonga, but I think Mwenda’s not writing parody… though I admit I find his argument both hard to follow and to swallow. He suggests that Obama should “Stop telling Africa what to do. Lectures are part of the problem.” But the heart of his argument appears to be a criticism of the American model of democratic governance combined with economic growth. He suggests that authoritarian Rwanda is doing a better job of eliminating corruption than democratic Uganda and wonders whether we should be promoting African Singapores rather than democracies. Possible, but what do we do when the former continental Singapores – Zimbabwe, for instance – can’t recover from systematic authoritarian mismanagement?
My friends at Global Voices feature dozens of posts weighing in from Africa and the diaspora with opinion, speculation and celebration of the visit. It’s hard to map their overall trajectory beyond a sense that an Obama visit is helping bring some of the most difficult and challenging conversations we have about Africa to the forefront of discussion, which can only be a good thing.
My Heart's In Accra by Ethan Zuckerman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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