I lost an hour this morning to a documentary on Liberia, which I stumbled onto through Twitter. VBS – the television and video arm of Vice Magazine (wikipedia article, official site) – has produced critically acclaimed content including “Heavy Metal in Baghdad“, a documentary about Iraqi metal band, Acrassicauda. This month, they’re releasing an eight-part series titled “The Vice Guide to Liberia”. The first seven sections are available online – the next will be released within 48 hours. I’ve just watched the first seven episodes, and I’m not at all sure what I think.

There’s no shortage of earnest, thoughtful, responsible documentaries about Liberia’s civil war and its aftermath. A partial list might include “Liberia: America’s Stepchild“, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell“, “Iron Ladies of Liberia“, “Liberia: An Uncivil War” and “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here“. Vice’s production – narrated by magazine/production company/media empire co-founder Shane Smith – is an abrupt break from the careful interviews and swelling music that accompany most of these films. Then again, what would you expect from a group “which reliably regards the world with unbridled ridicule”? (Jon Fine, in Businessweek).

Shane Smith and Vice are in Liberia expanding on an earlier Vice Magazine story – “Gen. Butt Naked Versus The Tupac Army” – which considered the civil war from the perspective of fashion, reporting the widely reported but still titillating “news” that Liberian rebels fought dressed in hiphop t-shirts, women’s wedding dresses or naked. So it’s not a big surprise that Vice’s story is designed to shock at least as much as it is to enlighten. The third of eight episodes looks at UN and international relief efforts in the country, and dismisses their failure by focusing on a neighborhood with no plumbing where residents shit on the beach. (This may be shocking to Canadian hipster filmmakers, but isn’t especially shocking to anyone who’s spent time in West Africa or any very poor parts of the world.) As the end of that episode description puts it, “From there it’s off the visit a heroin den, where we watch a twelve year-old smoke heroin and describes raping a woman at gunpoint. It gets worse.” Much of the Vice travel aesthetic seems to come from Canadian journalist Robert Young Pelton, whose “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” isn’t the world’s most helpful travel guide, but is one of the most entertaining.

Much of what seems to scare Smith and his crew – situations they inevitably describe as having “a heavy vibe” – are cases where they (a bunch of white guys with expensive camera equipment) are surrounded by poor Africans who’d like some money. It’s hard not to notice that most of the uncomfortable situations are ones they’ve chosen to put themselves in – “Hey, let’s go film inside a brothel in a tough part of town in the middle of the night – what could go wrong?” On the other hand, some of the footage that comes from these poor decisions is evocative and worth watching. Their experience trying to get a former rebel general released from a police station so they can interview him – and, predictably, getting shook down for a bribe – gave me warm feelings of familiarity as I remembered my worst experiences with law enforcement in difficult parts of the world.

Charles Taylor Jr. with Vice magazine reporter in Monrovia, Liberia

So, is this a straightforward case of overprivleged westerners making fun of the poor, a contemptible piece of exoticism? I think the filmmakers see themselves doing something different: showcasing the strange culture collisions that occur in a world as interconnected as ours. This interview with aspiring hiphop star Charles Taylor Jr. – son of the notorious warlord and former President – captures that aesthetic neatly… as does the photo of Taylor Jr. sporting a Boston Celtics throwback jersey (what does Larry Bird think about this photo?)

The cultural collision at the heart of the Vice documentary is the story of Joshua Blahyi, the aforementioned General Butt Naked. Blahyi developed a reputation as a particularly savage rebel leader loyal to coup-installed President Samuel Doe. He and his men fought naked, except for their guns and Chuck Taylor sneakers, believing the rituals performed before battle protected them from enemy gunfire. Blahyi says the rituals involved slaughtering children, eating their hearts and drinking their blood. In testimony before Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he estimates that he and his men killed at least 20,000 people during the civil war.

The TRC accepted Blahyi’s testimony, and he is a free man in Liberia – a circumstance that some point to as evidence that Liberia needs a war crimes tribunal, not just a TRC. In recent years, Blahyi has converted to Christianity and now prefers to be known as “Evangelist Blahyi”. He leads the Vice filmmakers to the abandoned hotel that served as rebel headquarters, through a malarial swamp to the mission where he shelters former combatants, to a graveyard where he talks about exhuming bodies and sleeping in empty graves. In this last scene, he and Smith are dressed in matching white suits, looking like televangelists. They discuss cannibalism in the graveyard, then proceed to a church where Blahyi takes the stage and preaches about his conversion.

Are we to take Blahyi’s conversion seriously? The pairing of the evangelist and the skeptical filmmaker in matching suits suggests that the Vice crew is having fun with the scene, looking for a laugh. But they’ve put their finger on some of the most difficult questions that face contemporary Liberia. How does a nation recover from a brutal past – does it embrace those who’ve asked for forgiveness, or turn them away? Is Blahyi genuinely repentant about his ghastly past, or has he simply adopted an identity likely to allow him to survive (and thrive, evidently) in contemporary Liberia?

It’s worth watching Vice’s time with Blahyi (in episodes 6 & 7) and then the promo for Gerald K. Barclay’s film, which also centers on Blahyi. Barclay features chilling footage of Blahyi talking about his past crime, overlaid with pieces of Peter Gabriel’s score for the film “Passion”. It embraces the conventions of the American socially-progressive documentary film: an outline of the challenges facing a group of disadvantaged people, a set of stories that illustrate those challenges, a moving story behind the making of the film. Barclay is a Liberian exile, and he returned to West Africa – first to Budumburum refugee camp outside Accra, Ghana and then to Liberia – to shoot “Liberia: The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here.”

I’m much more comfortable with the motivations behind Barclay’s work than with the newer piece from Vice. But I have no doubt that Vice’s piece – even if distributed solely online – will reach a wider audience. Smith and his crew aren’t shooting for an audience predisposed to care about Liberia – they’re making a film for an audience that’s looking for excitement, shock and the unexpected, qualities their story has in spades. This isn’t a usual documentary audience, as tweets about the series indicate:

Something about the VBS documentaries – the high quality of production, the unfamiliarity of the subject matter, the narrative of “adventure” rather than history – is generating a lot of buzz. As much as I want to object to the VBS video, which sensationalizes, uses historical footage with little context, and is a classic example of parachute psuedo-journalism, I have to admit that it’s a compelling piece of storytelling and that it caught my attention. Rather than critiquing it, I’m interested in picking it apart and starting to understand what makes it work. What could documentary filmmakers learn from VBS to generate a wider audience for their work? Is it possible to broaden your audience without playing to their desire to see something shocking and outrageous? Is it acceptable to use shock and outrage to get people to pay attention to parts of the world they know and care little about?

I’m fascinated by VBS because they appear to be getting people to pay attention to a part of the world that receives very little media attention. At minimum, Vice’s documentary demonstrates that there are stories to tell about Africa’s history that can reach an audience beyond the NPR/PBS community. The open question for me is whether the story they tell is a constructive one, one that can help Liberia move forwards, or merely a shocking, exploitative one. And, as I said 1500 words back, I’m not sure what I think – what do you think?

When disasters strike, one natural – and admirable – response is an outpouring of sympathy and support for those affected. Another natural response is more troublesome – the tendency to ask the question, “Could the same disaster befall me?”

My local newspaper, evidently short of news to report, ran this wonderful non-story two days after the tragic Haitian earthquake: “Berkshires unlikely to get major quake“. The article quoted an eminent geologist at nearby Williams College, who explained that the largest earthquake to hit Massachusetts had occured hundreds of years ago on the other side of the state, and that there’s essentially no seismic activity in our valley. I tweeted the link, noting “I understand the need to make news localy relevant, but this is absurd.”

Turns out there may be good reasons to report than an earthquake is unlikely to happen. Many Ghanaians spent Sunday night sleeping outside, for fear that a major earthquake would hit Accra, destroying vulnerable buildings and trapping their occupants. The story, coming out in blogs and news reports, reads like a textbook example of how bad information spreads and how hard it can be to contain.

Around 8pm on Sunday the 17th, people began receiving this text message: “Today’s night 12.30 to 3.30 am COSMIC RAYS entering earth from Mars. Switch off ur mobiles today’s night. NASA BBC NEWS. Plz pass to all ur friends.” As this message passed via voice and text message, it somehow morphed into a message about an impending earthquake, a message taken very seriously by Ghanaians who were watching the situation in Haiti closely. By early morning, the messages had grown more specific – some report receiving messages that the impending quake was an aftershock of the Haitian quake. David Ajao slept through much of the excitement, but woke to a pair of rumors, which he laughed off:

* an earthquake had already shook a town around Kasoa and was headed towards Winneba and Cape Coast
* an earthquake was due to shake Accra

Megan had a harder time shaking off the warning, in part because everyone around her was taking it quite seriously:

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

Frantic knocking. Check my watch. It’s 4am. Stumble out of bed to the door, and find a stranger standing there, already knocking on my neighbor’s door.

“There’s going to be an earthquake. You have to get out of the building.”

Ama and I walk outside together, confused, a little scared. Outside I see all 80 or so students who live in the ISH, milling about in their pajamas. The especially studious ones are hunkered down with flashlights reading microbiology (there’s an exam at 9am, and yes they are that intense), while the rest just mirror my own dazed look.

As she woke up, she began deciphering the rumors. “Everyone was just passing on the story they heard via cellphone from ‘a friend’ or ‘my family.’ I started to doubt the whole thing when I heard the followup rumors that ‘Cosmic rays are going to hit Earth from Mars!’ and got really upset that the person who felt the need to wake 80 students didn’t have the leadership to actually inform us of his sources, his information, or any school-wide evacuation plans.”

She explains that one of the problems was that radio stations – the most pervasive source of information in Ghana – were neither confirming or denying rumors in the early morning hours. According to BBC’s David Amanour, PeaceFM – one of Accra’s best radio stations – began calling the phone messages a hoax early in the morning, helping calm people’s fears. Unfortunately, by the time government ministers began taking to the airwaves to calm people, thousands – perhaps millions – had left their homes. Professor Stephen Yeboah paints a vivid picture:

Within minutes, the news had circulated down to even the last village you know of without proper access to telecommunication services.

Almost every Ghanaian was caught at parks, open fields and playing grounds with the notion that earthquakes are limited to houses only or less devastating in open places where there are no structures. Last prayers were said with diverse modes on biblical and unbiblical tongue speaking.

It’s unclear whether the initial message was a prank, an inside joke that got out of hand, or something more sinister. Close observers of Ghanaian politics won’t be surprised to learn that the propoganda secretary of the ruling NDC party has declared that the hoax was orchestrated by a rival political party to detract from NDC’s party congress in Tamale, the largest city in northern Ghana. Perhaps he’ll be proven right – The Ghanaian Times reports that various intelligence services are now trying to determine who started the rumors and why. Their article cites a businessman, who suggests the rumor points to a need to register all mobile phones and SIM cards. The Ghanaian Times reporter put this idea in front of a former Director of the Bureau of National Investigations, who praised the idea but made clear that it would be unlikely to pass parliament on grounds of individual privacy.

For me, the earthquake rumor is an interesting illustration of the strengths and weaknesses of various communications networks. A rumor like this one might start with malicious intent, but it’s spread by people who’ve got the best of intentions – they’re sharing critical information with friends and loved ones in the hopes of preventing disaster. The stranger knocking on Megan’s door wasn’t playing a prank – he thought he was saving her life. The pervasiveness of the message says a lot about the “we’re all in this together” nature of Ghanaian society, as well as the incredible reach of the country’s mobile phone networks.

The spread of the rumor evidently served as a stress test for mobile phone companies. David Ajao reports that the friend who reached him at 6:15 am had been trying to text and phone him since 2am – MTN’s mobile phone network had evidently prevented her from getting through, jammed with panicked phonecalls from other users trying to warn friends. If you’re a network engineer for MTN or competing carriers, this should serve as a wakeup call – a real emergency would likely unfold in much the same way, and if the networks can’t remain up in a hoax, it’s unclear they’d stay accessible in a real emergency.

I’m interested in the power of broadcast media being used to combat misinformation. It sounds like many Ghanaians didn’t realize they were in the clear until authority figures took to the airwaves to calm people down. Misinformation spread rapidly over mobile networks, taking multiple paths to its destinations, and gaining authority from the invocation of authorities like the BBC and NASA in the text messages and the imprimateur of a friend forwarding the message. Is it possible that the correct information could have spread over the mobile networks as well? Or does misinformation spread better through person to person networks and authoritative information through broadcast media? It’s an interesting thought experiment, if not something we’d want to test in the field.

Lest anyone conclude that rumors are restricted to the developing world, it’s worth looking at some of the hoaxes that sped around Twitter in the days after the Haitian earthquake struck. Twitterers shared the joyful news that American Airlines would fly any doctor or nurse to Haiti for free, and that UPS would ship up to 50 pounds to Haiti for free. Neither piece of “news” was accurate. It’s possible that someone posted a suggestion that AA should fly doctors for free, and that well-meaning retweeters turned a suggestion into fait (not) accompli. Again, it’s a demonstration of the power of well-meaning people, social media and the infinite human capacity for misunderstanding.

Hosting an international event – a conference, a sporting event – is a classic strategy for rebranding a troubled nation. Concerned that your rigged elections and abysmal human rights record makes you look a little backwards? Host an international meeting on information technology to prove you’re firmly rooted in the 21st century. (Yeah, that went well.) Concerned that you’re better known for violent civil war and land mines than for your booming oil industry and bustling capital? Host the Africa Cup of Nations!

Actually, hosting Africa’s biggest football tournament – that is, up until the World Cup later this year – was probably a good branding move for Angola, which has made vast strides since the Angolan civil war ended in 2002. The mistake was in holding one of four sets of matches in Cabinda. It proved to be a tragic, deadly mistake: Separatist guerillas attacked a convoy of team buses, led by Angolan military, as they travelled from Congo-Brazaville into Cabinda, killing three members of the Togolese national team’s entourage and wounding nine others.

If the world’s media wasn’t busy asking itself, “Where the heck is Yemen?“, we’d probably be asking “Where’s Cabinda?” It’s not in Angola – at least, it’s not geographically contiguous with Angola – it’s a small enclave separated from Angola by a 60km wide strip of the Democratic Republic of Congo. About the size of Puerto Rico, it’s ethnically and linguistically separate from the rest of Angola – Cabindans speak Cabindês and French, rather than Portuguese. About 100,000 Cabindans live in Cabinda – twice as many live in exile in neighboring Congo-Brazzaville and DRCongo.

Oh, and Cabinda is very, very rich. Which is to say, it’s got 60% of Angola’s oil… and Angola is now the largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa. (According to one history, Cabinda is part of Angola through Chevron’s support of Angolan MPLA forces in 1975.) As often happens in resource-rich nations, Cabinda doesn’t see much of that oil money, a major grievance of the Cabindan people. A recent agreement invests 10% of oil profits into Cabinda. That agreement helped the Angolan government achieve a ceasefire with some members of the FLEC – Forces for the Liberation of Cabinda.

At least one faction of FLEC – the Forces for the Liberation of the State of Cabinda-Military Position (FLEC-PM) – wasn’t on board with this plan. Their general secretary Rodrigues Mingas told the media that he’d warned Cup of Nations organizers not to hold matches in Cabinda, as his faction of FLEC considered themselves to be at war with Angolan forces. Mingas went on to apologize for the loss of Togolese life:

We didn’t specifically target the Togolese. It could have been Angola, Ivory Coast, Ghana… Anything is possible,” he said. “We are at war, and it’s no holds barred.”

“We always regret the death of human beings but there are also thousands of Cabindans killed over 35 years,” he said.

Obviously, the attack by FLEC-PM on unarmed footballers is a horrific and disgusting act of terrorism. But it’s hard to imagine the Angolans screwing the situation up much more thoroughly. First, hosting matches in Cabinda was clearly a political decision designed to demonstrate Angola’s firm hold over this disputed territory. Colin Droniou, writing for the AFP, observes that police presence in Cabinda is currently higher than normal, but quips: “Normal in Cabinda means one soldier for every 10 residents.” Human Rights Watch reports that those military forces are routinely involved with the detention and torture of rebels. The Angolan government had to know that there was a risk of violence during the tournament, a risk they could have mitigated by moving matches out of Cabinda. One analyst calls the decision to host matches in Cabinda “stupid and tragic“.

Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has refused to move the matches – instead, he’s increased security. And tournament organizers have been less than accomodating towards Togo, whose backup goalkeeper is in hospital in South Africa and one of whose coaches was killed in the assault on their bus. Togo’s players returned home for three days of national mourning, and requested that the organizers allow them to return and play a delayed opening match against Ghana. The organizers refused, and Togo has evidently been disqualified for failing to arrive for their scheduled match. The other teams competing in Cabinda – Ghana, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso – all had discussions about whether to pull out of the competition, but elected to stay and play.

The results of an attack like this one are complex and far-reaching. Obviously, the attack has called attention to FLEC’s cause and the “forgotten war” in Cabinda. Whether that attention helps their cause – or causes the Angolan military to attempt to crush them once and for all – is unclear. Angola, which had been hoping to showcase its newfound stability and prosperity, has probably taken a major step in the wrong direction.

It’s possible that the attacks in Cabinda will make it significantly harder to host international football tournaments in the future. Kevin Eason, writing in the Times of London, points out that African football teams generally can’t insure their players when they travel to a location like Cabinda. Some of the stars on African sides might have anti-kidnapping coverage through their European clubs – many others don’t. It’s likely that top European sides may be more reluctant to release players like Didier Drogba or Michael Essian to play in tournaments like the Cup of Nations if they’re worried not just about injury, but about kidnapping and death.

The killings in Cabinda are also putting a dark cloud over the upcoming World Cup in South Africa… even though the countries don’t share a border. Critics of the decision to host the World Cup in South Africa suggest that the attacks in Cabinda point to the “danger” of the African continent. Danny Jordaan, the leader of South Africa’s organizing committee, responded to this suggestion angrily: “The world understands that sovereign countries are responsible for their own safety and security and to say what happened in Angola impacts on the World Cup in South Africa is the same as suggesting that when a bomb goes off in Spain, it threatens London’s ability to host the next Olympics. It is nonsensical for South Africa to be tainted with what happens in Angola…”

Nonsensical, yes, but it seems likely that the attack in Cabinda could change the travel plans of some global football fans. Perhaps they should consider the fact that the Confederations Cup, and the U-17 and U-20 tournaments all took place this year on the African continent and went without a hitch.

Meanwhile, Cabindan rebels threaten more attacks. My fingers are crossed for the Ghanaian, Burinabe and Ivorian players, the fans and everyone in Cabinda.

Stories like this one take you into some of the stranger corners of the Internet. Reading about Cabinda, I learned that the country was a member of UNPO, the Unrepresented Nations and People’s Organization, an international group for peoples, territories and groups that aren’t recognized by the UN. UNPO is able to point to four former members who’ve gone on to become recognized, soverign nations. And they’ve got fifty four members, who range from an Australian aboriginal group to Somaliland, which often functions more effectively than its nominal parent nation, Somalia. It’s fascinating to imagine the conversations at UNPO, especially given that one of the members is Freedom Front Plus, an Afrikaner group that seeks a separatist Afrikaner volkstat in the Northern Cape of South Africa. I wonder if they and the Cabindans ever meet for friendly soccer matches?

Breaking news: Pastor Warren has released a video condemning the Ugandan anti-gay legislation. (The video was released December 10th, the day after I posted this piece, and after Reverend Kaoma’s press conference.) I’m very grateful that he’s made this statement, and hope that his unambiguous statement will be heard in Uganda, influencing policy on the ground. More on Warren’s statement here.

Could Rick Warren be the man to stop pending anti-gay legislation in Uganda?

That’s the hope of Rev. Kapya Kaoma, an Episcopalian Priest from Zambia, the author of a new report from Political Research Associates, which traces a wave of homophobia on the African continent to the efforts of conservative evangelical pastors in the US. In a conference call with members of the media today, Kaoma declared that, “The US culture wars are being exported to Africa. They’re having an impact not just in the US, but also amongst African Christians.”

The culture wars Kaoma refers to have been particularly intense within the Anglican communion, his (and, as it happens, my) church. After the election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay priest, to bishop of New Hampshire, a number of bishops moved to “realign” their congregations outside of mainstream Anglican authority. Two new, more conservative Anglican groups have emerged, and some African congregations have aligned with these new groups.

Kaoma argues that, in the mainline US churches, most congregants and pastors are leaning towards progressive Christianity. The more conservative individuals – in the minority – are aligning with the fast-growing churches in Africa. “Conservatives have gone to Africa because they’re going where the numbers are, and because they’re being legitimated by associating themselves with Christians outside the US.”

These conservative pastors, Kaoma argues, “need to demean the leadership of US mainline churches,” and present their views as the legitimate alternative. It’s become common to present the US mainline churches as imperialistic, and to argue that these mainline churches as trying to export non-African values. “Once you appeal to the post-colonial ethos, people are bound to overreact. The entire gay issue has been put into the post-colonial narrative.” Because the issue of gay rights has been turned into a battle about a purported recolonization of the African continent, Kaoma argues, a struggle for gay rights isn’t seen as a human rights issue, but as an attempt to export “un-African” ideas to the African continent.

Uganda has been a particular battleground for this exported culture war. The wife of President Yoweri Museveni, herself an influential MP, is a born-again Christian, and has been instrumental in bringing abstinence-focused anti-AIDS funding to the country. (Helen Epstein’s “God and the Fight Against AIDS” in the New York Review of Books is an excellent introduction to the spread and politicization of evangelical Christianity in Uganda.) And Uganda, bordering on majority Muslim countries, has become a popular venue for evangelical outreach.

Kaoma argues that conservative pastors from the US are coming to Uganda to campaign against sexual equality using tremendously deceptive materials. His key example is a set of talks given by Scott Lively, who a PRA colleague describes as a “holocaust revisionist”, based on his authorship of a book titled “The Pink Swastika“, which argues that the Nazis were closet homosexuals, that they didn’t exterminate gay people, but secretly plotted a gay takeover of the world. (Southern Poverty Law Center’s quick, but thorough, refutation of the work is a worthwhile read.) Reverend Kaoma reports that Lively came to Uganda in March 2009, spoke at a conference organized by the Family Life Network, met with Ugandan parliamentarians as well as church leaders, and warned them that homosexuality is an international, western agenda, being perpetrated by the UN and by human rights defenders as part of a gay plot to take over the world.

Kaoma has some compelling footage that demonstrates the influence Lively’s ideas are having in Uganda. In the video above, Stephen Langa, the director of the Family Life Network, offers a history of the homosexual agenda, as outlined by Lively. David Roberts, of Ex-Gay Watch, unpacks the video, pointing out that Langa quotes at length from a satirical essay, apparently unaware the essay was satire. The history offered is paranoid, false and designed to inspire a hateful counterreaction.

That part of the plan has evidently been quite successful. Kaoma draws a direct line between Lively’s appearance at the FLN conference and the proposed legislation that would sentence gay and lesbian people who’ve committed the crime of having gay sex to, at minimum, life in prison, and could subject gay people who test positive for HIV to execution. Kaoma tells us that the Christian right groups presenting this fantasy of a gay takeover to the Ugandans expressed their hope that Uganda would fight this agenda and take up the war – evidently, that message was well received. (Possibly too well – Kaoma reports that Lively now says the proposed Ugandan legislation goes to far. When a homophobic holocaust denier says your legislation goes to far, you might want to reconsider your plan…)

So how does Rick Warren fit into all this?

Well, Pastor Warren has a long history in Uganda. He’s worked closely with Pastor Martin Ssempa, a Ugandan activist who is focused on pro-abstinence approaches to AIDS treatment and on marginalizing and criminalizing homosexuality. Ssempa has led workshops at Warren’s Saddleback Church, and Warren has visited Uganda at Ssepma’s invitation, meeting with senior Ugandan officials, including the president. Ssempa is evidently one of the major figures in proposing the anti-gay legislation. And he’s willing to use virtually any tactic in fighting what he sees as a homosexual movement – in 2006, a Ugandan paper printed the names and addresses of 45 people Ssempa identified as gay, leading to threats and harrasment.

Warren has severed ties with Ssempa, but has not yet condemned the proposed Ugandan legislation. Kaoma worries that a statement Warren made in Uganda in 2008 – stating that homosexuality is not a human right – is being quoted and used to justify the current proposed legislation. “Here’s the problem I have with pastor Warren – he’s a friend of Kagame, of Museveni,” says Kaoma. “He knows the politics of Uganda, and he’s respected by the MPs
He’s the one who can influence politicians in Uganda.” While Warren has dissociated himself from one extreme Ugandan pastor, he hasn’t dissociated himself with other anti-gay activists in Rwanda and Nigeria. Kaoma hopes that Warren will realize the potential power and influence his words would have in Uganda and clearly denounce this sort of legislation. “Unless Warren tells fundamentalist groups that gays have rights, which need to be protected, theres no respected religious voice saying this. He needs to complement the voice of human rights activists on the ground.”

While I strongly agree with Reverend Kaoma, and believe the proposed legislation is abominable, I thought he was putting too much weight on international activists and not enough responsibility on people in Uganda. I asked whether it was fair to offer his interpretation, given that the majority of Sub-Saharan African countries have laws against homosexual activities – was it possible that the law in Uganda was simply a manifestation of public will and mood?

Reverend Kaoma explained that a framing of homosexuality as an attack on the family has worked extremely well in bringing activist anger to the forefront. The combination of a neo-imperial narrative, an international conspiracy and classic “the gays are out to get your children” are collectively changing attitudes on the ground in countries like Uganda, he argues. He points out that, in most countries where homosexual behavior is banned by law, very few people are arrested and prosecuted for violating those laws. He also referenced King Mwanda, a ruler of the Buganda in the 1880s, who many historians believe was gay. “Even Pastor Ssempa himself accepts this part of Ugandan homosexual history,” says Kaoma. “Gays are part and parcel of African life. What’s strange now is using the Christian religion as a foundation for persecution around homosexuality.”

While Kaoma believes that Ugandans are more liberal about homosexuality than the current bill would lead one to believe, he acknowledges that the masses are not speaking out or supporting the bill. “There’s been a call to go door to door and tell people that ‘if you love your child, then fight homosexuality’. There is a petition going around Uganda in rural areas, saying that homosexuals are recruiting young children in the schools, using money from America. The petition says that if the Americans get just get two kids per school, Uganda as we know it is gone.”

Kaoma argues that the authoritarian nature of Ugandan politics is also making it easier to carry out this sort of crusade. In his native Zambia, the Vice President urged the arrest of gays, but there were no arrests. In Ghana and Kenya, church leaders have advocated cutting ties with the Anglican communion over gay issues, but many churches have refused to comply. But in less representative societies, these crusades – with the support of political authority – have a much higher chance of success.

There are brave Ugandans standing up for gay rights. Frank Mugisha, the leader of Sexual Minorities Uganda (which uses the wonderful acronym SMUG), has been a visible opponent of the legislation, despite the fact that he will likely need to leave the country or face arrest if the bill passes. The Dean of the prestigious Makerere University has publicly opposed the legislation. Such support entails serious risks – Kaoma tells us about meeting with SMUG at a hotel in Kampala – a woman attending the meeting, who is lesbian, stepped out of the hotel as was immediately arrested, beaten and had her money stolen by the police. “And there was nothing we could do,” says Kaoma.

Reverend Kaoma spoke about this story in a sad but calm fashion. But he got quite agitated when I asked him about the possibility that the Anglican church – hugely influential in Uganda – would condemn the legislation. “The Archbishop doesn’t want to be seen as interfering. After the bill passes and people are getting killed, then we’ll hear his voice? Our friends are being rounded up because people think the bill has already been passed.”

If the Archbishop of Canterbury and Rick Warren won’t step up, are there other paths to leverage the Ugandan goverment? Sure – there’s always money. Up to 40% of the Uganda government budget comes from aid dollars. Kaoma tells us that Sweden has declared that if Uganda passes this bill, Sweden will sever all ties. It’s unlikely that the US would take nearly such a dramatic step. But Kaoma leaves us with a challenge: “Don’t just condemn Uganda – accept responsibility for helping start this on American soil.”

That’s tricky, of course. Gay rights groups in the US condemning the legislation simply add fuel to the fire for those who argue that homosexuality is a western plot. And that’s why the voice of someone like Pastor Warren could be so powerful in affirming the human rights of GLBT people and condeming this dangerous legislation.

It’s interesting to note that Reverend Kaoma isn’t the only one linking US conservatives with anti-gay legislation in Uganda. Jeff Sharlet links The Family, a group of politically influential conservative Christians to the proposed Ugandan legislation. I found it interesting that the figures mentioned by Sharlet didn’t come up in Kaoma’s discussion today, or in his report. Kaoma’s report focuses primarily on the Institute on Religion & Democracy. Had I the time to do some original reporting, I’d be very interested in seeing what links exist between these organizations.

Kathryn Joyce of Religion Dispatches has an excellent interview with Reverent Kaoma – very much worth reading if you’re interested in his arguments.

We’re nearing the end of our first week at home with a newborn, and he’s survived largely unscathed thus far. With a house full of extended family and nights spent sleeping in ninety minute intervals, it hasn’t exactly been the most restful or focused week in recent memory. Much as I’ve wanted to write a couple of long blog posts this week, the best I can do is offer a few links towards the pieces I’ve wanted to write about.

David Sasaki has an excellent post on MediaShift Idea Lab about the importance of mapping in marginalized communities. Referencing a number of projects designed to produce open source maps of favelas and slums, he quotes Mikel Maron, an evangelist of Open Street : “Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of [a community] it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents.”

Sasaki links to an excellent post from Mark Graham which raises another facet of geographic information – the amount of information available online about different communities and countries. Using geodata from Wikipedia, Graham makes a set of maps that display how many (English Wikipedia) articles about places are located in each of the world’s countries. Unsurprisingly, there’s much more content about North America and Western Europe than about sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia or Latin America. This isn’t a new issue – I wrote about attempts to address undercoverage in Wikipedia five years ago – but it’s extremely helpful to have Graham visualizing these disparities and challenging us to bridge some of these gaps. (Hanan Cohen was kind enough to point me towards Graham’s excellent post as well.)

I’ve been following proposed anti-gay legislation in Uganda, largely through Haute Haiku’s excellent reporting on Global Voices. It’s an absurdly ugly bill – not only does it criminalize homosexuality (which is the case in several sub-Saharan African nations), but it creates a crime of “aggravated homosexuality” that’s punishable by death and broad enough to include anyone who’s both gay and HIV+.

I hadn’t seen much coverage of the Ugandan legislation outside gay-oriented media and my faith community, which tends to follow gay issues very closely. So I was thrilled – and somewhat stunned – to hear a discussion of the Ugandan legislation on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Gross was interviewing Jeff Sharlet, author of a book about a fundamentalist political movement in the US congress called The Family. According to Sharlet, The Family practices a strange branch of Christianity which celebrates strong, charismatic leadership (including that of reprehensible dictators) and recruits adherents from the corridors of power.

In his interview with Gross, Sharlet reports that there’s a Ugandan branch of The Family and that they appear to be the core organizers of the anti-gay legislation. This isn’t quite as strange as it might sound – Uganda’s been a battlefield for American religious politics in the past. The ABC (”Abstain, Be Faithful or Use a Condom”) approach to AIDS prevention, heavily favored by US religious conservatives, was celebrated as reducing Uganda’s HIV prevalence rate. In truth, a number of different approaches were used in Uganda, and reductions in HIV prevalence may have been linked to a reduction in coffee exports, not to any particular practices. But Yoweri Museveni – the Ugandan leader, who the Family has embraced (according to Sharlet) – is a committed evangelical Christian and gave advocates of a faith-rooted approach to HIV reduction a leader to embrace and a laboratory to experiment in.

Sharlet’s connection of The Family to the proposed Ugandan legislation raises the chances that we might see a coordinated push from activists in Uganda and the US against this ugly and discriminatory legislation – see change.org for some thoughts for what people in the US could do.

I’ve opened a lot of lectures lately – presentations about our Media Cloud research at Berkman – by complaining about the New York Times’s Africa coverage. I cite the fact that Japan tends to average roughly 8-10 times as many mentions in the paper of record than Nigeria in any given year, which is odd, given their comparable population size and importance. (I also mention that the Times is not alone – all US media outlets I’ve studied closely show this pattern – and that the Africa stories the Times runs are frequently excellent.)

If the Times is undercovering Nigeria, the same can’t be said for their recent coverage of Equatorial Guinea. One of the most fascinating and dysfunctional corners of the African continent, Equatorial Guinea is a couple of tiny islands and stretch of coastline between Gabon and Cameroon slightly smaller than the state of Maryland. The country is occupied by roughly half a million people, most of them extremely poor and a small number who are obscenely wealthy, as the islands of Equatorial Guinea sit atop massive oil fields. Much of Equatorial Guinea’s oil output is exported to the US – 132,000 barrels a day – making Equatorial Guinea the third-largest sub-Saharan exporter of oil to the US (behind Nigeria and Angola).

While oil wealth may help explain the Times’s interest in Equatorial Guinea (six stories this year, as compared to two this year on its vastly larger neighbor, Cameroon) – I’ve made the case in the past that American media attention tracks national GDP more closely than population – the Times’s focus may have more to do with another natural resource: absurdity.

Equatorial Guinea is, simply put, one of the most absurd nations on the planet. It’s not just a kleptocratic dictatorship run by a man who is arguably Africa’s worst ruler – it’s a staggeringly wealthy kleptocratic dictatorship. The CIA’s world factbook estimates per capita income for 2008 at $37,300, making the average Equatorial Guinean wealthier than the average Dane.

This wealth doesn’t seem to make the lives of the nation’s citizens much better. The image above is from Hans Rosling’s amazing Gapminder, and it shows the “development” of the country over the past two decades. The nation’s gotten dramatically wealthier in those years – the GDP per capita has increased by a factor of ten – and infant mortality has increased. Generally speaking, this doesn’t happen – infant mortality is much lower in wealthy nations than in poor nations. But Equatorial Guinea isn’t rich – it’s a nation where most citizens are desperately poor and a very small number are staggeringly rich.

Because there’s so much oil money in Equatorial Guinea, people periodically have the clever idea of overthrowing the government and installing a new one that would, gratefully, share future oil profits. Frederick Forsyth wrote a gripping novel that reads, more or less, as a blueprint for overthrowing Equatorial Guinea with a small force of professional missionaries. Some have alleged that Forsyth’s book was the result of his involvement in planning an attempted coup in 1973 – Forsyth admits he knew the coup plotters and that he passed money to them, but claims that his involvement with the plans were merely “research”. A more recent coup – The Wonga Coup in 2004 – allegedly used Forsyth’s novel as a planning document. The Wonga Coup involved South African mercenaries, Zimbabwean arms dealers and Mark Thatcher, the son of Britain’s former prime minister. It was one of the more absurd stories of the past decade, and it’s possible that we’ll finally get the complete story of the coup attempt now that the organizer, Simon Mann, was released from an Equatorial Guinean jail. (Not all the coups are quite this literary in nature. There’s no evidence that the 16 coup plotters arrested earlier this year were Forsyth fans – more likely, they were members of the Niger Delta resistance movement, MEND.)

A rich country with radical underdevelopment, a country so ripe for plunder that people read novels to plan coups? Not absurd enough for you? Okay, so here’s this – Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue is Britney Spears’s neighbor. Mr. Obiang is the son of the aforementioned kleptocratic dictator, and his shrewd management of his $4000 a month salary as Equatorial Guinea’s minister of agriculture and forests has allowed him to purchase a $35 million estate in Malibu, California, a Gulfstream V jet and a fleet of luxury cars and speedboats. The US Justice department reports that Obiang the younger pilfered an estimated $73 million from the EG treasury between 2005 and 2006 and moved it into the US.

As the New York Times reported this weekend, the strong evidence that Obiang is systematically looting his nation’s treasury hasn’t prevented him from getting US visas and visiting his estate several times a year. So why does Obiang get to play in Malibu while Robert Mugabe is forced to live it up in Hong Kong? According to the US State Department officials quoted in Ian Urbina’s New York Times story, the answer is simple: Zimbabwe doesn’t have oil, while Equatorial Guinea does.

Urbina’s story is an example of advocacy journalism at its best. Armed with research conducted by Global Witness, a leading pressure group focused on increasing transparency in resource-rich countries, Urbina points to rules bent or ignored by two US government departments, the possible complicity of two US oil companies and the role played by a prominent Washington PR firm as the EG government’s paid apologists.

So what?

When I started working with Open Society Institute, I was introduced to the phrase “theory of change” by a colleague who persistently (and, usually, very helpfully) insisted we unpack the logic behind any project we were considering funding. What did we want to accomplish, in the long run, and how would this project advance those goals?

So what’s the theory of change behind Urbina’s story? There may not be one – Urbina saw a fascinating and provocative story and used the platform provided by the New York Times to share the tale. Even if that’s true, the folks at Global Witness who provided Urbina with the documents to make this case had a theory of change – a belief that a story in a prominent newspaper would lead towards a policy change in the US government, or increased support for their campaigns for transparency in resource-extracting nations.

Perhaps the US State Department will be sufficiently embarrassed by the Times story to change their visa issuing practices. Perhaps some of the readers of the Times story will be grateful for Global Witness’s research and support their work. (You should – they’re an extremely responsible and credible organization doing important work.) I’m interested in the question of how a New York Times reader, agitated and motivated by Urbina’s story, would take the information she received in the story and move towards constructive action.

Global Witness doesn’t make it especially easy for individuals to involve themselves with campaigns, except as donors. Their webpages on corruption in oil, gas and mining and on banks and corruption include lists of the organization’s laudable achievements, their publications and their partners in advocacy. They don’t include a call or action or participation beyond encouragement to donate.

Would Global Witness benefit from a Facebook group dedicated to convincing Secretary Clinton to deny Obiang a visa? A petition demanding that Equatorial Guinea hold free and open elections? Probably not. They’re making a bet that the way to influence a government like Obiang’s is to operate at intergovernmental levels, providing actors within the State department with information and impetus to act.

Here’s the rub: information alone is insufficient to provoke action. In “A Problem from Hell“, Samantha Power unpacks the history of genocides in the 20th century and the reaction of governments to these systematic mass killings. Pointing out that Clinton administration wasn’t unaware of the genocide taking place in Rwanda, just unwilling to act, Power argues that governments only act to prevent genocide in reaction to consistent, relentless citizen pressure. Given the reasons not to act against Equatorial Guinea (the fear of driving EG to oust US oil companies and invite in Chinese ones, for instance), it’s reasonable to believe that merely informing and embarrassing the State Department won’t accomplish anything, without building accompanying citizen pressure.

So let’s reexamine the idea of the anti-Obieng Facebook group. My friend Evgeny Morozov argues that a great deal of online activism can be best characterized as “slacktivism” – it’s a symbolic gesture, a fashion statement, not an action that could lead towards real change. The examples he offered at a talk at Ars Electronica were, to me, compelling ones – a Facebook group dedicated to “saving the children of Africa” with 1.5 million members and a total of $8,449 in donations; a psychology experiment in Denmark that demonstrated people’s willingness to sign onto an online protest against an imaginary injustice. Evgeny worries that such online activism isn’t just ineffective – it leads to social loafing, where people get less involved with actually saving the children of Africa because they see a group of likeminded individuals and assume the collective effort will solve the problem.

While I find Evgeny’s argument compelling, I’m starting to wonder whether there’s countervailing dynamic at work. During the June 2009 protests over the Iranian elections, there was a burst of online activity as people moved by accounts of the protests looked for ways to offer solidarity and support for the activists on the ground. Twitter users turned their avatars green and changed their location information and time zone to suggest that they were in Tehran. They joined Facebook groups, shared links to the Neda Agha-Soltan video, donated USB keys to load with censorship circumvention software and send to activists, and opened proxy servers to offer Iranians an uncensored path to the internet.

These efforts weren’t effective in overturning the Iranian election results or leading to a popular revolution in the country. That might reflect their ineffectiveness – it’s unclear that the greening of Twitter would strike fear into Ahmedinejad’s heart – or the fact that the current Iranian state is powerful, well-organized, controls an experienced security apparatus, and has support from many Iranian citizens. I’m wondering if they were effective in another way – they allowed people with no personal connection to Iran to feel like they were part of the events. This feeling, in turn, may have encouraged individuals to pay closer attention to the news in Iran than if they’d been non-participants.

I’ve got no data to support this theory, just an anecdote or two about friends who compulsively aggregated Iran information on twitter, and a quote from Susan Sontag’s recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others:

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do – but who is that “we”? – and nothing “they” can do either – and who are “they” – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.

If the inability to act makes us bored, cynical and apathetic, is it possible that doing something – even something that’s ultimately ineffective – could keep us engaged and compassionate? If so, is there an interplay between action and information-gathering that could turn a story into a movement that builds public will?

I read Urbina’s story. I get pissed off, and start researching other articles on Equatorial Guinea, which I post to Twitter and Facebook under the #eqguin tag. I encourage others to do likewise and to propose actions we might take to persuade the State Department to ban senior Obiang regime officials from traveling to the US. We start online petitions, a postcard campaign to the State Department and keep twittering links to the #eqguin tag… which becomes a trending topic, prompting journalists to declare a Twitter revolution in Equatorial Guinea. Witnessing our vast public will, Secretary Clinton declares that the State Department will enforce anti-corruption legislation and stop issuing visas to Obiang’s family. We promptly start a campaign to pressure CNOOC not to take over the leases that Obiang cancels with Exxon and Marathon in response to Clinton’s decisions.

A blueprint for turning knowledge into action and into will, or a fantasy? I’m not sure. (I am sure that it’s a blueprint that smart advocacy organizations are starting to try to implement, which makes the efficacy of the strategy an important topic to study.) I’m watching a debate between Evgeny and academic/activist Patrick Philippe Meier on this topic, centering around Evgeny’s recent article in Prospect magazine, “How dictators watch us on the web“. Evgeny makes the case that the rise of participatory web technologies has benefitted repressive governments as much as activists, who often aren’t able to use these technologies effectively; Patrick respondsby repeatedly asking “so what?”, arguing that Evgeny doesn’t have the data to prove that online activism is effective or ineffective. (Evgeny’s response to Patrick seems to agree on only one point – no one’s got the data to answer these questions effectively.)

Here’s my question: does it matter if action is effective or ineffective if we can demonstrate that action leads to more interest in a topic and more knowledge acquisition? I’ve been making the case for years that Americans (and likely people in many developed nations) don’t get enough information about the developing world, and that this lack of attention has consequences for developed and developing nations. If Americans don’t hear about an economic boom in Ghana, they don’t invest… which slows the boom, costing Ghanaians growth and costing Americans business opportunities in a growing economy. Similar dynamics apply around aid, humanitarian and security intervention, export of physical and cultural products.

A couple of years back, I realized that this was a supply problem, as much as a demand problem – journalists want to write about the developing world, but they and their publications have little evidence that their audience wants to hear these stories. Without evidence of reader interest in the developing world, it’s hard for most publications to support the research and travel that goes into creating these stories. If action (useful or otherwise) and newsseeking behaviors are linked, starting a movement may be a way to aggregate demand for a story, and encourage more reporting like Urbina’s story.

So get pissed off and start a Facebook group. Launch a Twitter hashtag. Translate compassion into action. But realize that the most effective action probably involves aggregating and disseminating information, building knowledge and awareness that’s an asset even if it doesn’t lead directly to political change.

And help us – me, Evgeny, Patrick, the Berkman Center, and everyone else studying this phenomenon – think about how we can bring data to the table and test some of these questions. Is online activism effective in bringing about political change? What mechanisms and tools are effective? Does the ability to take action increase and sustain interest in a topic? Does action need to have political effect to sustain interest? Does increased interest lead to increased media attention, and does that attention lead to real-world change? What sort of data and experiments do we need to move these questions beyond anecdote and theory and into testable propositions?

Brian Lehrer, the moderator of WNYC’s excellent morning show, has been kind enough to invite me onto his show all month long, appearing every Thursday morning. It’s been a somewhat insane month for me to participate. As Rachel explained on her blog, the last few weeks of her pregnancy have been a little tricky and scary, and I ended up doing one of our interviews from the parking lot of the local hospital. Rachel’s well and home today, and I have high hopes of broadcasting shows with Brian today and this coming Wednesday before she goes into labor!

When we discussed what we might want to cover in our segments, we outlined half a dozen topics in international development. But as we’ve started talking on air, we’re hovering around my topic du jour – how the Internet can help make the world a smaller place. After looking at Meedan, a wonderful project designed to enable conversation between English and Arabic speakers (disclosure – I’m an advisor to the project) during last week’s show, we’re going to look closely at Roland Soong’s EastSouthWestNorth blog today and how Obama’s visit to China was covered in the Chinese blogosphere.

Eldoret, Kenya at night. Photo by Joshua Wanyama

Brian has asked me to give his listeners homework assignments, asking them to look at sites before the next show. Next week’s conversation is going to be about dialogs regarding rebranding Africa, and the homework assignment will be Joseph Wanyama and Sheila Ochugboju’s remarkable site, AfricaKnows.com. Joseph is a brilliant photojournalist and many of his photos of contemporary life in Kenya are complemented with poems from Sheila. Collectively they give a picture of Africa that’s likely to surprise and challenge people who don’t know the continent well.

Hope you’ll tune in. And thanks for the opportunity to engage with your listeners, Brian.

Ghanaians have lots to celebrate. The football team defeated Brazil in a dramatic final of the under-20 World Cup, that featured a 0-0 tie through overtime and a 4-3 win on penalties, and fans danced in the streets. (Ghana played a man down through much of the match, and goalkeeper Daniel Aygei was extraordinary.) A new fiber optic cable offers the promise of reduced internet rates and the possibility of more business process outsourcing contracts. And there’s oil off the coast, prompting a bidding war between CNOOC and Exxon.

But it’s big news that former president John Kufuor isn’t celebrating this week. Kufuor was the favorite to receive the third Mo Ibrahim prize for African leadership. It’s a big prize – $5 million over 10 years and $200,000 annually for life thereafter – designed to recognize democratically elected former African leaders who’ve stepped down in the past three years after compiling a record of good government. Kufuor was the prohibitive favorite this year – Thabo Mbeki had been forced to resign from his post, while Olusegun Obasanjo is widely viewed as having rigged an election to appoint his succesor. Kufuor, by contrast, saw his party ousted in an election viewed (rightly or wrongly) as being free, presided over dramatic economic growth and was active in international peacekeeping efforts. Ghanaian media outlets were announcing Kufuor’s victory before it happened... and were stunned when the Ibrahim foundation decided not to award the prize this year.

Reactions to the non-award have been mixed. Kufuor’s party is, predictably, furious. The man himself has been gracious, expressing gratitude at being considered for the award. And Ibrahim has taken pains to point out that the decisions aren’t his personally, but those of an advisory board that he doesn’t even sit on. On the other hand, there are legitimate critiques of Kufuor’s presidency – corruption may have increased during his time in office and the former President’s retirement package was excessive.

Peter Guest, writing in the Guardian, suggests that Kufuor didn’t win the prize because it’s unclear whether his economic policies will help Ghana in the long run – he’s run up a substantial deficit, waiting for oil revenues to come online. Guest thinks this is a reason to celebrate the Ibrahim foundation, because they’re raising the standards for African leadership: “Rather than despairing of the plight of African governance, we should be heartened by the decision not to award Kufuor the prize, not because he was explicitly a failure, but because in thinking he automatically deserves it we have once again fallen victim to low expectations and judged him on an archaic understanding of what constitutes African leadership.”

Fair enough. But it’s worth asking whether the Ibrahim prize was designed to recognize the most exemplary leaders in African history or to honor and recognize leaders who took steps in the right direction. When the prize was introduced, the logic for the large financial reward and ongoing revenue stream was that the prize could serve as an alternative pension for leaders who hadn’t enriched themselves by emptying national coffers or remaining in power indefinitely. In a recent article, Ibrahim emphasized that aspect of the prize: “But what do decent, hard-working African leaders have to look forward to once they retire? This is part of the importance of our prize. It provides African leaders with the option of continuing a life in public service.”

Ibrahim ends his article by explaining, “The foundation wants to help restore proper balance to perceptions of Africa, showing the world that our continent is as much about Mandela as it is Mobutu.” Kufuor isn’t the next Mandela, but he also isn’t Mobutu. And if the purpose of the prize is to keep decent, hard-working leaders focused on public service, I think they may have missed the mark here.

I’m reading Paul Collier’s controversial new “Wars, Guns and Votes” (NYTimes review), where the brilliant development economist addresses the uncomfortable question, “What if democracy doesn’t bring prosperity to very poor nations?” Collier’s research suggests that autocracies are more likely to protect citizens from political violence up to an income level of $2700 per capita, at which point democracies function better. I’m not deep enough into Collier’s book to address concerns about his thesis or suggested interventions – though I’m looking forward to reading these responses from Mutuma Ruteere in Kenya and from a team of development economists writing in the Boston Review - but I’m already struck by the power of Collier’s core argument.

Collier posits that what we see in many underdeveloped nations isn’t democracy but “democrazy”, an adoption of some of the most visible trappings of democracy (most notably elections) without the underlying structures (free press, independent electoral commissions, educated electorate, post-ethnic political structures) that make it possible to have functional elections. By overemphasizing the importance of elections (remember the Bush administration’s drive towards elections in Iraq, or the Obama administration’s push towards the deeply flawed Afghan election?), we may nurture political structures that aren’t democratic and which reward certain types of electoral fraud and abuse.

I was thinking of this as I looked at a project launched by my friend and colleague, Sami ben Gharbia. Sami is the head of Global Voices Advocacy, the free speech arm of Global Voices, and he’s a passionate advocate for political and human rights reform in his homeland, which he’s been exiled from. In anticipation of Tunisia’s presidential and parliamentary elections on October 25th, he’s launched Babtounes.com, a lovely tool to aggregate and visualize online conversations – most notably Twitter conversations – about the Tunisian elections. The tool uses a Wordpress blog and Juitter to aggregate several searches against the Twitter database and give a one-stop shop for watching that online conversation.

Sami knows full well who’s going to win the election. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has held power since 1987, when as prime minister, he impeached Habib Bourguiba, the first president of an independent Tunisia. (Wikipedia uses the wonderful term “a medico-legal coup,” as Ben Ali had Bourguiba declared medically unfit to serve.) Ben Ali has “won” “elections” in 1999 and 2004, with margins of 99.66% and 94.48% of the vote, and his victory in 2009 will likely be by a similar majority.

An essay in the Arab Reform Bulletin by Hamadi Redissi helps explain why the election outcome isn’t much in doubt. The country’s electoral system gives 75% of parliamentary seats to a party that wins a simple majority in elections. Since Presidential and parliamentary elections are held simultaneously, you need only rig one election every five years and you’ve got unrivalled control of the country. You can use that control to limit candidate lists (Socialist challenger Dr. Mustapha Benjaafar was excluded from the 2009 election through interpretation of a requirement that a candidate be the elected leader of his party for two years before elections) – there are only three candidates running against Ben Ali, and two have made it clear that they’re not interested in being president, simply in demonstrating support for the electoral system. Being in power also gives you control of the state media, and allows you to oversee the election through the Interior Ministry – there is no independent electoral commission.

So, if the election is fait acompli, why watch? My guess is that Sami is watching so that we understand precisely how the election was stolen, so that activists can challenge the legitimacy of Ben Ali for another five years, and so that they can demand a reform before Ben Ali’s successor runs in 2014, or the old man changes the constitution to allow a sixth term. But the other reason might be to try to maintain interest in politics in the face of an electorate that has become – understandably – cynical and disinterested. Magharebia writes about the use of Facebook in Tunisian elections – that Ben Ali’s Facebook group has received only 6,000 members seems remarkably low to me. Perhaps it reflects the sort of disinterest expressed in this (deeply sarcastic) poem by Nakhlet Oued el-Bey (Translation by Mona Yahia for Magharebia):

The nation cast their votes transparently and with freedom of speech
Having discussed programs and issues of destiny.
Results were soon announced with no cheating or forgery.
Having gone through ballots,
It turns out that people’s main concern is bills
And their only wish is to save some dinars.
They are after a life with no thought or debate,
Except about the championship and who the Cup will go to.

Fair enough. There’s a lot more drama in the World Cup than there will be in the upcoming Tunisian elections. But that doesn’t excuse people who care about the future of human rights and democracy in North Africa from watching.

Not many Afrophiles shed tears when Lansana Conté, Guinea-Conakry’s long-time strongman, died. But the military coup that followed his demise promised to pile more hardship upon one of the world’s poorest countries. The African Union – rightly – has refused to recognize military governments, which should push those governments to conduct elections sooner, rather than later… but which seems to further disconnect and isolate governments from the family of nations.

Shortly after seizing power, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara pledged to return the country to civilian rule within 60 days. He extended the timelines, promising free elections by the end of 2010, but assured citizens that this move wasn’t intended to let military officers consolidate power – instead, no one in his ruling council would run for office. Surprisingly approximately no one, that decision has been reversed, and council members have been announcing their intention to run for President. When Dadis, the coup leader, began hinting that he would run for President, many Guineans had enough. Up to 50,000 people participated in a banned protest today, which was savagely put down by military forces, who killed dozens of people. (BBC reports “at least 58″, while Bloomberg reports at least 69.) Blogger Oumar of Konngol Afrik pins blame for the violence on the “red berets”, an elite corps of Presidential guards who he reports were involved in violence against the public in 2006 and 2007.

There’s not a ton of citizen media to supplement the wire service reports. Global Voices, covering the coup earlier this year, leaned on MINSA – Missionary International News Service Agency - which reported on demonstrations in Labé last week, and today reports on demonstrators waiting in fear to be arrested at their homes. I suspect we’ll have a roundup of blogger voices as those reports come in.

What’s been interesting for me, in the short term, is watching the few comments mentioning #Guinea on Twitter are focusing on media coverage. Nasser Weddady, outreach director for HAMSA and well-known MENA activist, offered this tweet a couple of hours ago: “In plain English: screw #Polanski, I am more interested in what’s happening in #Guinea than that fugitive pervert.” It’s been retweeted several times, reflecting either a frustration at media coverage, or simply that lack of any other news out of Guinea at this point.

I enjoyed this article in Workers World (not exactly my usual read, but totally worthwhile in this case) by Abayomi Azikiwe of Pan-African News Wire. Azikiwe’s analysis focuses on Guinea’s past as part of a Ghana/Mali/Guinea socialist alliance that sought to develop independently of western (and particularly French) influence. While his recipe for a worker’s revolution sounds like a poor one to my unrepentant capitalist ears, his story of how Guinea could have emerged as a major power based on its mineral wealth is a sad, familiar, important and insufficiently understood story.