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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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This is really quite funny.

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Copyright The Nation

In 1682, the French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle set out from the Great Lakes and canoed down to the mouth of the Mississippi River, claiming its great watershed for Louis XIV. La Salle, a fur trader in Quebec more concerned with his own enrichment than with the crown’s glory, returned to France and presented Louis with a false map showing the river’s mouth close to Spain’s silver mines in New Mexico, thereby winning the king’s support to establish a colony. La Salle died before he could successfully set it up. But the French crown, competing with Britain and Spain for control of North America, sponsored a series of attempts to build a foothold in the marshy swamps of the Mississippi’s delta.

Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans
by Shannon Lee Dawdy

The World That Made New Orleans From Spanish Silver to Congo Square
by Ned Sublette

It wasn’t until 1718 that a French settlement of any permanence was established in the region. In that year, La Nouvelle-Orléans was founded adjacent to a centuries- old portage site, where the area’s Houma and Choctaw people dragged canoes between the river and a large inland bay, across whose shallow waters lay the nearby Gulf of Mexico. The centerpiece of a colonial venture by which France’s ruler, the Duc d’Orleans, hoped to enrich his treasury through a newly chartered Company of the Indies, his namesake city was laid out on ambitious lines. Willing settlers were scarce, though, and no riches were forthcoming.

Effectively abandoned by the French crown in 1731, the colony was governed from that time by local elites, its levee becoming a bustling free-for-all of traders peddling everything from Mississippi furs to Martinique sugar and Mexican ceramics and maize. New Orleans’s reputation as a low swamp of race-mixing and sin was present from the start and—as Shannon Lee Dawdy shows in Building the Devil’s Empire, her penetrating study of the colony’s founding—cited frequently as the explanation for its “failure.”

In French New Orleans, “smuggling not only helped fill the gaps of collapsed mercantilism,” Dawdy writes, “it was the basis of the local political economy.” Dawdy belabors this point throughout her book, which is slowed at times by bumpy prose, but she shows clearly how Nouvelle-Orléans—with its intra-American trade and tenuous ties to the metropole—became, by the 1740s, a self-consciously Creole place. (Here, she defines Creole as a person of European or African descent born in the New World, hewing to “the eighteenth-century Louisiana meaning of ‘native born’”—as opposed to the later widespread use of the word to connote cultural mixing or hybridity.) That Creole identity informed France’s decision to let the estranged colony go, as Louis XV handed it off to his cousin Carlos III and Spain, who in 1768 encountered a Creole revolt—a sign that this “rogue colony” (Dawdy’s phrase) would not be an easy rule.

What is unique about New Orleans, as Ned Sublette recounts in The World That Made New Orleans, an absorbing history of the city’s rise, is how its identity was shaped by three colonial eras in rapid succession. As Sublette traces in his brisk longue durée account of New Orleans’s first century, the Spanish—whose era began in earnest a few months after the Creoles’ revolt—brought with them new laws, a new language and a new influx of African slaves. In the event, the Creoles didn’t do badly; intra-Caribbean trade remained their lifeblood. The colony’s permanent population, fed by an influx of German planters, Spanish merchants and French Acadians expelled from British Canada, rose from some 2,500 in 1760 to more than 8,000 in 1800, transforming a dissolute town into a bustling small city.

By the century’s last decades, New Orleans’s growth was also sustained by a burgeoning traffic of wooden flatboats from upriver, as Anglo-American settlers poured into the western reaches of Virginia and Carolina (out of whose territory were carved the new states of Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s). As these “Kaintucks” began developing the lands abutting the Mississippi, river-borne trade became increasingly crucial to the American economy. That New Orleans would become a part of the United States began to appear inevitable, as Sublette shows. The manner in which this occurred, however, was anything but predictable, and was occasioned by the United States’ entry into the kind of Great Power politics from which it had, in its revolutionary youth, claimed exception.

The story of New Orleans isn’t merely rich with the enduring tensions of American history—between Old World and New, nation and federation, slavery and freedom. It is also in many ways at the center of American history: the city’s acquisition was the midwife of American empire, and prompted the spread of a system of racial slavery whose rise led directly to one of our history’s defining events—the Civil War. New Orleans—the “inevitable city on an impossible site,” as one geographer memorably called it—has figured since 1803 not only as a crucial pivot of the US economy but also as an essential wellspring of its culture.

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Copyright Japan Today

TOKYO —

The framed certificate in Yoshihisa Shimoda’s office acknowledges his successful completion of a training program on thwarting the activities of boryokudan, or criminal organizations. Such an accreditation from the Tokyo public safety commissioner should be extremely practical given his task at hand.

Shimoda is the office manager of Kabukicho Renaissance, an organization whose goals are to rehabilitate the image of Japan’s largest red-light district, located just northeast of Shinjuku station.
“At the end of the day, we want Kabukicho to be clean,” says Shimoda, who along with two other staff members began operations in April. “We want security, safety and a pleasant environment.”

For years, it was well-known that the bread and butter of a typical yakuza gangster working the darkened streets of Kabukicho has been the sale of ordinary items like hand towels and ice cubes at heavily marked-up prices to the area’s seedy bars and “kyabakura” (cabaret clubs) in exchange for “protections.” The establishment of Kabukicho Renaissance coincides with a police crackdown on sleaze that has shut a large swath of “fuzoku” (sex-related) businesses. In place of debauchery, Shimoda’s organization is promoting festivals, concerts, nighttime illuminations and patrols that perform building inspections to counter gang activities.

Perhaps assisting his cause will be this month’s closing of the Shinjuku Koma Theater, Kabukicho’s symbolic center. Should a sparkling office tower rise in its place, as many believe, the cleanup of the area could accelerate, sending many of the neighborhood’s regulars scurrying for new turf.

The 2,000-seat Koma, which opened in 1956 as a venue for kabuki and enka shows, welcomed 1 million visitors annually during its heyday. Its demise comes after film giant Toho made the company that owns the theater, Koma Stadium, a wholly owned subsidiary. In the basement of the Koma building is a Toho film theater that will also close in the coming weeks.

Toho intends to redevelop the site together with the rundown building it owns next door. A company spokesman would not comment on its plans for the property, only saying that Toho was still in the process of dealing with lease contracts for the various other tenants.

However, in a column that appeared in the Aug 27 issue of Newsweek Japan, restaurateur, author and Kabukicho guide Xiaomu Lee proposed that a “Kabukicho Hills” complex be built. But unlike the Mori Building towers that have cropped up in ritzy areas of Tokyo, Lee suggests the Kabukicho version stay close to the area’s roots and include hostess bars and sex clubs.

Such a development would clash with the recent introduction of conventional businesses and facilities that have begun to galvanize Kabukicho, which was named after a kabuki theater in the late ’40s that was planned but never built.

Conventional businesss moving in

Earlier this year, American hotel company Best Western established a franchise near the Shinjuku Ward office, and Japanese chain Hotel Villa Fontaine opened an inn near Shokuan Dori. Also this year, Osaka-based talent agency Yoshimoto Kogyo moved its Tokyo branch to a former school building, one room of which houses the Kabukicho Renaissance office.

Brochures from Kabukicho Renaissance promote the newly brick-lined sidewalks and sparkling parking barricades on Hanamichi Dori, which splits Kabukicho in half and fronts one side of a neighborhood cornerstone, the Furin Kaikan. That building’s Parisienne coffee shop, a well-known gangster meeting place, converted half of its floor space into a pharmacy following a bloody shootout that led to one death and three arrests in 2002.

Other moves included the razing of an entire block of shops peddling adult DVDs earlier this year; the site is now a parking lot. Raids on similar establishments last month netted 17 arrests for the sale of films that were not properly censored.

The host club industry has been a continual target of regulation due to aggressive street-soliciting and cases of girls being gouged for bills that ran to hundreds of thousands of yen. To show that they operate within the bounds of the law and are not at the mercy of the mob, numerous clubs banded together in 2006 to found the Shinjuku Kabukicho Host Club Anti-Organized Crime Association.

Observers have noted that the shift began with the installation of video cameras soon after a fire tore through a neighborhood mahjong parlor in 2001, killing 44 people. Yet the harshest blow has certainly been stricter enforcement of the Law Regulating Adult Entertainment Businesses, which was enacted in 1948 and requires all venues providing entertainment — of any kind — to begin removing customers at midnight and shut down at 1am. Dance halls, hostess bars and sex clubs throughout Tokyo have come under increased pressure.

Complicating matters was a 2006 amendment to the law that requires fuller disclosure on lease and registration documents for shops applying to offer “sexual services.” And more than one piece of legislation introduced over the last two years has restricted hosts from “catching” potential female clients in the street.

Closing its cabin a few months ago was “kyabakura” Sky Heart, in which ladies outfitted in stewardess uniforms were open for molestation by customers. A “new half” cabaret, in which the staff are women who were once men, has received numerous visits from law enforcement. A mama-san going by the name Akita says that the club’s floor shows, which are fully nude and showcase mind-bogglingly amazing surgery, have been reduced from roughly four to two per evening due to the crackdown. “Once they catch you going past 1 a.m., they come back again,” she says of the police presence. “It’s like baseball. One, two, three strikes and you are out.”

Crackdown linked to Tokyo’s Olympic bid

Insiders interviewed for this article almost unanimously believe that the motive behind a wholesome Kabukicho is the doing of Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, who is making a push for the metropolis to host the 2016 Olympics.

Location, too, is a key. With the newly opened Fukutoshin line rolling past to the east and the Yamanote line bordering on the west, Kabukicho is well situated for an influx of legitimate businesses. “Right now, Osaki and Odaiba have many office buildings,” says Masaru Jo, director of the Kabukicho Shopping Center Promotion Association, whose fifth-floor office is around the corner from the Koma complex. “But they are not convenient. There is a high demand for the Koma space as an office.” Jo predicts that, given current building laws, a structure between nine and 15 floors could rise on the site.

A report compiled by Jo’s association indicates that, each day, 250,000 people shuttle past Kabukicho’s approximately 3,500 pleasure shops, many of which are not prepared to let the demise of the Koma be the domino that quickens the cleanup movement.

Since bars and restaurants that exist exclusively for drinking and eating are exempt from the 1am law, dozens of “girl’s bars” have appeared. These are basically rearranged hostess clubs in which fashionably dressed ladies tend bar opposite the seated customer, with the crucial difference being that the pair are not elbow-to-elbow — as would be seen as “entertainment,” at least in the minds of the police.

The National Police Agency, however, understands the true nature of the bars. “We consider them to be of the same category,” said an NPA official in an interview in October. “We are not distinguishing them from other adult businesses.” To show that the authorities are indeed monitoring the situation, a 24-year-old female employee at girl’s bar Double was arrested for sitting next a male patron on a sofa just before 2am on a Saturday morning in October.

Host club magnate Takeshi Aida, who founded his first venue in Kabukicho in 1972, last year established his second onabe bar, where the staff are dressed as men. Attired in sharp white shirts and dark vests, the girls at Marilyn 2 serve drinks into the wee hours of the morning from behind a curving counter bathed in blue LEDs.

Hiroharu Kimura, chairman of sex-trade publishers Creators Company Connection, believes that Kabukicho in its old form is dead. “Right now, I think it is a great time for everyone to reflect on how we view the issue,” he explains in his office just north of Kabukicho. “The law has been in place for such a long time but enforcement has become lax. It’s like traffic laws — if the maximum speed is 40kph, people will drive 50 kph.”

Free entertainment guide Poke Para (“Pocket Paradise”) is one of Creators’ numerous titles catering to sexual services industries. Yet it is Deri Heru Manzoku, which offers ads for girls who can be ordered by phone or internet to meet at a designated location, that Kimura believes represents the future. “The shift will be to the internet,” Kimura says, adding that brick and mortar shops are not practical in the current enforcement climate. “The guide is portable and the information is accessible by a mobile phone.”

And what if fuzoku operations are shuttered entirely? “They will scatter all around the city,” he says. “I find it troubling that the general public will stumble across these places.” Kimura cites the Taito-ku neighborhood of Yoshiwara as an example of a red light district that’s easily controlled because it’s confined to a limited area.

Meanwhile, Kabukicho maintains its familiar pulse. Hosts sporting their trademark frilly hairdos and toting copies of Poke Para, open to the page where their club’s ad is located, still patrol the streets around Hanamichi Dori. Even on a typical weekday at 10am, a line snakes down the stairs leading to strip club T.S. Music, which all day features shows of ladies disrobing from schoolgirl and nurse uniforms for 5,000 yen.

Nor have the gangs left the area entirely. Renaissance’s Shimoda guarantees that gangster offices are still scattered around Kabukicho, and at any of the festivals at nearby Hanazono Shrine, where many people come to pray for prosperous business ventures, visitors with pinkies trimmed at the first joint are not an unusual a sight.

Retail association director Jo believes that regardless of what the future holds — glistening office tower or otherwise — Tokyo’s legendary red light district will retain some of its character; after all, that is why people come. “The attraction remains the same,” he says. “People come to Kabukicho because it is Kabukicho.”
This story originally appeared in Metropolis magazine (www.metropolis.co.jp).

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Copyright Studio 360

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Copyright The Boston Globe

…Many Christians are coming to terms with just how thoroughly so many of their fundamental assumptions will have to be rethought as their faith today becomes a global religion. Even modern church leaders who know how rapidly the church is expanding in the global South tend to see European values and traditions as the indispensable norm, in matters of liturgy and theology as much as music and architecture.

Yet the reality is that Christianity has from its earliest days been an intercontinental faith, as firmly established in Asia and Africa as in Europe itself. When we broaden our scope to look at the faith that by 800 or so stretched from Ireland to Korea, we see the many different ways in which Christians interacted with other believers, in encounters that reshaped both sides. At their best, these meetings allowed the traditions not just to exchange ideas but to intertwine in productive and enriching ways, in an awe-inspiring chapter of Christian history that the Western churches have all but forgotten.

To understand this story, we need to reconfigure our mental maps. When we think of the growth of Christianity, we think above all of Europe. We visualize a movement growing west from Palestine and Syria and spreading into Greece and Italy, and gradually into northern regions. Europe is still the center of the Catholic Church, of course, but it was also the birthplace of the Protestant denominations that split from it. For most of us, even speaking of the “Eastern Church” refers to another group of Europeans, namely to the Orthodox believers who stem from the eastern parts of the continent. English Catholic thinker Hilaire Belloc once proclaimed that “Europe is the Faith; and the Faith is Europe.”

But in the early centuries other Christians expanded east into Asia and south into Africa, and those other churches survived for the first 1,200 years or so of Christian history. Far from being fringe sects, these forgotten churches were firmly rooted in the oldest traditions of the apostolic church. Throughout their history, these Nazarenes used Syriac, which is close to Jesus’ own language of Aramaic, and they followed Yeshua, not Jesus. No other church - not Roman Catholics, not Eastern Orthodox - has a stronger claim to a direct inheritance from the earliest Jesus movement.

The most stunningly successful of these eastern Christian bodies was the Church of the East, often called the Nestorian church. While the Western churches were expanding their influence within the framework of the Roman Empire, the Syriac-speaking churches colonized the vast Persian kingdom that ruled from Syria to Pakistan and the borders of China. From their bases in Mesopotamia - modern Iraq - Nestorian Christians carried out their vast missionary efforts along the Silk Route that crossed Central Asia. By the eighth century, the Church of the East had an extensive structure across most of central Asia and China, and in southern India. The church had senior clergy - metropolitans - in Samarkand and Bokhara, in Herat in Afghanistan. A bishop had his seat in Chang’an, the imperial capital of China, which was then the world’s greatest superpower.

When Nestorian Christians were pressing across Central Asia during the sixth and seventh centuries, they met the missionaries and saints of an equally confident and expansionist religion: Mahayana Buddhism. Buddhists too wanted to take their saving message to the world, and launched great missions from India’s monasteries and temples. In this diverse world, Buddhist and Christian monasteries were likely to stand side by side, as neighbors and even, sometimes, as collaborators. Some historians believe that Nestorian missionaries influenced the religious practices of the Buddhist religion then developing in Tibet. Monks spoke to monks.

In presenting their faith, Christians naturally used the cultural forms that would be familiar to Asians. They told their stories in the forms of sutras, verse patterns already made famous by Buddhist missionaries and teachers. A stunning collection of Jesus Sutras was found in caves at Dunhuang, in northwest China. Some Nestorian writings draw heavily on Buddhist ideas, as they translate prayers and Christian services in ways that would make sense to Asian readers. In some texts, the Christian phrase “angels and archangels and hosts of heaven” is translated into the language of buddhas and devas.

One story in particular suggests an almost shocking degree of collaboration between the faiths. In 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in Chang’an, bearing rich treasures of sutras and other scriptures. Unfortunately, these were written in Indian languages. He consulted the local Nestorian bishop, Adam, who had already translated parts of the Bible into Chinese. Together, Buddhist and Christian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom. Probably, Adam did this as much from intellectual curiosity as from ecumenical good will, and we can only guess about the conversations that would have ensued: Do you really care more about relieving suffering than atoning for sin? And your monks meditate like ours do?

These efforts bore fruit far beyond China. Other residents of Chang’an at this very time included Japanese monks, who took these very translations back with them to their homeland. In Japan, these works became the founding texts of the great Buddhist schools of the Middle Ages. All the famous movements of later Japanese history, including Zen, can be traced to one of those ancient schools and, ultimately - incredibly - to the work of a Christian bishop…

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Copyright Splice Today
t was on Election Day, just six weeks ago, that I experienced the wistful, emotional sucker punch, a “holy shit!” moment if you will, that’s not uncommon among lifelong journalists of my age (53), realizing that the print media business was finished. I was in Manhattan, visiting two of my older brothers, and during lunch one of them volunteered that he no longer reads newsprint copies of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal more than two or three times a week. This was significant for a couple of reasons: one, my brother has religiously devoured both papers since the late 1950s, but now receives news on the three computers in his office, the “scroll” that Bloomberg provides along with prices of securities, bonds and stocks; two, if an older, male reader is falling by the wayside, what hope does the industry have?

None.

In the past several years, I’ve told younger colleagues that print media—and if newspapers were the story of ’08, watch as glossy magazines either fold or shrink in page count by the second quarter of next year—as we’ve known it is becoming largely extinct for the simple reason that every day another consumer dies has been lost and isn’t replaced by a person just born. When I was a kid living on Long Island, my dad used to joke at breakfast, with newspapers strewn on the kitchen table, that if you wanted to know what Times icon James Reston’s latest opinion was, simply read the first and last paragraphs of his column. My mother, nose buried in the Daily News or Herald Tribune, would chuckle, as I methodically went through the funnies and sports pages, and then we’d all continue reading until it was time to catch the school bus or go to work. That memory is now as quaint as a Norman Rockwell cover illustration for the Saturday Evening Post or an Esquire treatment by George Lois.

Objectively, everyone in the business has known for several years that a tectonic change in the media world was rapidly unfolding, a process that has greatly accelerated in 2008, and most recently punctuated by Tribune Co.’s filing for bankruptcy, the Detroit Free Press’ announcement of its impending cessation of home delivery on most days, and the daily drumbeat of layoffs, buyouts and firings that are so ubiquitous that the news has all the drama of, say, the results of an NBA game.

It’s not just daily newspapers: weeklies, once known as “alternatives,” since they provided information, listings, arts criticism and the kind of long-form feature writing that the large-circulation dailies either couldn’t or wouldn’t, are in real trouble as well. Last month, when Creative Loafing Inc., a crummy mini-chain of weeklies filed for bankruptcy protection, it was likely the first major sign of serious deterioration in that print niche. The company, over-reaching, bought the Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper (disclosure: I started City Paper in 1981 and subsequently sold it in ‘87) last year and have since, through incompetence or hubris, damaged both properties, probably irreparably.

I’ve thought a lot about this, on a visceral level, since that day in New York in early November, wondering when other friends and acquaintances in the profession had the sudden flash that print was down for the count. (Not incidentally, on the Amtrak ride from Baltimore to Manhattan and back, while the vast majority of passengers were working on laptops, I wasn’t reading a newspaper, but rather re-visiting Dickens’ Great Expectations for the third or fourth time.) Michael Wolff, author of the outstanding new biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, told me his moment came, “When I realized The New York Times was probably not going to make it, I knew the newspaper business, as we know it, was over.”

Tom Bevan, co-founder of Real Clear Politics and a resident of the Chicago metro area, also had his gut-level epiphany recently. Like others, Bevan’s followed the downward trend of print media—“disastrous earnings reports, layoffs and the like”—but told me last weekend that it was a month ago that he realized, once and for all that “newspapers are dinosaurs and this is their ice age.” He continued: “A couple of weeks ago I saw a report from Reuters that the Sun-Times media group… has a market cap of $5.4 million. I just checked this morning [Dec. 13], and its market cap is $4.1 million. The stock is now worth a nickel a share… It was shocking to see that you could buy a major American daily and all of its assets for roughly the same price as a three-bedroom condo in the new Trump Tower.”

Others came to the realization earlier than me. Kurt Andersen, a journalist, author and entrepreneur in Manhattan since the mid-1970s, said, “‘All newspapers are kind of fucked,’ I told an NYU journalism class almost four years ago. The doom probably became undeniably clear when I saw that my extremely intelligent, good-grade-receiving, high-scoring teenage daughters had no inclination to read the read the physical newspapers that are delivered to our house every day.”…

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Copyright The Times

When United Nations experts revealed in a recent report the links between the Rwandan government and the forces of Laurent Nkunda, the Tutsi warlord of Eastern Congo, the Dutch government cut its direct budget support for Rwanda in protest. Should Britain do the same?

Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s clever and combative president has been a favourite of Britain’s Africa ministers going back to Clare Short and Lynda Chalker before her. Rwanda’s government receives tens of millions in direct budget support from Britain. Tony Blair is its adviser. It is not hard to see why. The previous Rwandan government organised the 1994 genocide, so when Kagame overthrew it and set up a new government in Kigali he was seen as the good guy by the US and Britain. Their guilt over the decision to pull out the UN force in Rwanda as the genocide began reinforced their moral support for Kagame.

When his fighters pursued the remnants of the old Rwandan army into Congo, Britain and the US did not ask too many questions. Nor did they question when Kagame’s army and their Ugandan allies, turned that pursuit into a full-scale attack on their vast neighbour, Congo, that ended in the overthrow of Mobutu Sese Seko, the corrupt old Congolese dictator.

Kagame, a visionary leader and a formidable man of action, is warmly welcomed in London and Washington. For them, at last, here was an African leader who spoke their language of progress and could deliver. Rwanda’s education and health systems are good. Kagame says he wants to create a new Rwanda where Hutu and Tutsi allegiances would be forgotten. Britain is prepared to pay for that.

Kagame does not, however, believe in too much democracy. Parliamentary elections last September were described by the EU observer team as lacking in transparency. There was “an absence of real political opposition”. Kagame does not tolerate one.

But it is his behaviour in eastern Congo that causes most disquiet. Kagame argues that Rwanda will never be safe as long as the genocidaires – those who killed in 1994 – are on the loose in Congo. In 1998, when the government he installed in Congo began to support them and the rump of the old Rwandan army camped there, Kagame and the Ugandans invaded again. Britain and America kept quiet.

This time their intervention triggered a terrible war in which some say five million people have now died. They had all miscalculated the political reaction from other African rulers and the Congolese, who objected to what they saw as a Western-backed rogue state rampaging around the continent. The Rwandans and Ugandans were stopped but they set up local Congolese allies in the border zones. Most of these were Congolese Tutsis. And the genocidaires were able to recruit and rearm as well – sometimes with support from the Congolese army.

The war that had threatened to tear Congo apart has become limited to a vicious battle for the Kivus; eastern Congo and Uganda and Rwanda’s borderlands. The Tutsi population was now under threat, seen as a fifth column for the Rwandans. Its self styled protector in North Kivu is the flamboyant but murderous Laurent Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi and once a member of Kagame’s army.

In November he carried out a massacre of some 150 people at Kiwanja. Kagame denies he is a Rwanda proxy but the UN report shows he uses Rwandan banks and has had direct support from the army. It also shows how Nkunda’s forces operate out of Rwandan territory and recruit soldiers from its army.

The argument that this is about protecting Congo’s Tutsi minority is undermined by Nkunda’s grab for the region’s wealth. Local people have been forced to mine gold, diamonds, casserite and other minerals that abound in Kivu and export them through Kigali, the Rwandan capital. What had begun as an apparently defensive military operation to protect Rwanda and Uganda from genocidal gangs in Congo seemed to be turning into a violent imperialism aimed more at looting the area than bringing peace.

On paper the solution is simple. The rump of fighters who carried out the genocide now operating in eastern Congo, and Nkunda’s forces must both disarm or be disarmed. The two states – and Uganda – must make this happen and make peace. There is no major issue between the states of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, but nor is there trust between them. Outsiders must help build that trust and Britain, a medium-sized player in the region, must not been seen as backing one side or the other. It is time to tell Kagame that if he does not rein in Nkunda, Britain will not fund his government.

The writer is Director of the Royal African Society

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Copyright The Daily Beast

It was surely meant as a wry aside when, speaking about his daughters’ search for a puppy, Barack Obama observed that most shelter dogs are “mutts like me.” My first thought, however, was: “Ain’t I a mutt, too?”

In fact, of course, we’re all mutts. As humans, we’re all descended from a common African ancestor, and have been mixing it up ever since. And as Americans, we’ve been mixing it up faster and more thoroughly than anyplace on earth. At the same time, we live in a state of tremendous denial about the rambunctiousness of our recent lineage. The language by which we assign racial category narrows or expands our perception of who is more like whom, tells us who can be considered marriageable or untouchable.

The habit of burying the relentlessly polyglot nature of our American identity renders us blind to how intimately we are tied as kin, as family, and as intimates.

In the United States’ vexed history of color-consciousness, anti-miscegenation laws (the last of which were struck down only in 1967) enshrined the notion of hypodescent. Hypodescent is a cultural phenomenon whereby the child of parents who come from differing social classes will be assigned the status of the parent with the lower standing. There are many forms—most parts of the Deep South adhered to it with great rigidity, in what is commonly called the “one drop and you’re black” rule. Take for example, New York Times editor Anatole Broyard, who denied any relation to his darker-skinned siblings and “passed” for most of his adult life: There were many who expressed shock when it was uncovered that he was “really” black. Some states, like Louisiana, practiced a more gradated form of hypodescent, indicating hierarchies of status with vocabulary like “mulatto,” “quadroon,” and “octaroon.” And even today, and despite our diasporic, fragmented, postmodern cosmopolitanism, there is a thoughtless or unconscious tendency to preserve these taxonomies, no matter how incoherent. Consider Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the daughter Senator Strom Thurmond had by his family’s black maid. She lived her life as a “Negro,” then as an “African American,” and attended an “all-black” college. But in her 70s, when Thurmond’s paternity became publicized, she was suddenly redesignated “biracial.” Tiger Woods and Kimora Lee Simmons are alternatively thought of as African-American or “biracial,” but rarely as “Asian-American.”

In contrast, many parts of Latin America, like Brazil or Mexico, assign race by the opposite process, hyperdescent. That’s when those with any ancestry of the dominant social group, such as European, identify themselves as European or white, when they may also have African or Indian parents. As more Latinos have become citizens of the United States, we have interesting examples of this cultural cognitive dissonance: Just think about Beyoncé Knowles and Jennifer Lopez. Phenotypically they look very, very similar. Yet Knowles is generally referred to as black or African American; Lopez is generally thought of as white (particularly among her Latino fan base) or Latina (among the rest of us), but she is never called black or even biracial.

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Sounds trite, perhaps? Sophocles in an African village. The end of cultural sovereignty comes to a corner of West Africa. As smart and poignant as just about anything you can read on the continent. I’ve just re-read it for the third or fourth time.

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Buy it. Read it. I’m going to teach it. First 100 or so pages is as good an introduction to the last 25 years in China as just about anything I’ve read.

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Copyright The Washington Post

The advancement of human rights around the world was a cornerstone of foreign policy and U.S. leadership for decades, until the attacks on our country on Sept. 11, 2001.

Since then, while Americans continue to espouse freedom and democracy, our government’s abusive practices have undermined struggles for freedom in many parts of the world. As the gross abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were revealed, the United States lost its mantle as a champion of human rights, eliminating our national ability to speak credibly on the subject, let alone restrain or gain concessions from oppressors. Tragically, a global backlash against democracy and rights activists, who are now the targets of abuse, has followed.

The advancement of human rights and democracy is necessary for global stability and can be achieved only through the local, often heroic, efforts of individuals who speak out against injustice and oppression — endeavors the United States should lead, not impede. If the early warnings of human rights activists had been heeded and tough diplomacy and timely intervention mobilized, the horrific, and in some cases ongoing, violence in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan’s Darfur region and the Democratic Republic of the Congo might have been averted…

…In the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo, rights defenders under daily threat hope the United States will pressure its allies in Rwanda and Uganda to withdraw support from proxy forces that continue to wreak havoc there. All agree that the United States should reengage with agencies of the United Nations to make that body a more effective tool to protect human rights, knowing that this must be a global effort…

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

Beijing — In its drive to avoid a sharp economic downturn, China plans to spend four trillion yuan ($581 billion) on a stimulus package that focuses on railways, airports and other hard assets. But just 1% of that sum is going to increased social services.

That balance needs to be corrected, many scholars say, if China is to keep growing rapidly and improving living standards in the years ahead. More spending by its own consumers would both support growth and reduce reliance on exports, but that isn’t going to happen unless the government eases the burden on families to provide for education, health care and old age. A healthier and better-educated populace should also be more productive.

[China Hits Snag on Social Safety Net]

“You need investment in human capital to produce high growth rates in the future,” says Khalid Malik, head of the United Nations Development Program in China.

It’s easy to understand why China is investing so heavily in infrastructure. Construction is the part of the economy that has slowed most sharply, and thus is most in need of support. Putting money into infrastructure has a quick payoff and is a tested strategy that China employed in 1998 to pull out of the Asian financial crisis.

But improving infrastructure may not be enough to support long-term growth — especially in China, which already has one of the highest investment rates of any major economy. Some worry that China could eventually go down the same road as Japan, which kept spending even after officials ran out of worthwhile projects.

Yet weaving a social safety net has proved a particularly tricky task in China. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have made social programs a higher priority, but spending has usually lagged behind government promises. In 1997, the government said it would spend 4% of China’s annual gross domestic product on education by 2000. The goal was never reached. Last year spending totaled 2.8% of GDP.

“We have no shortage of goals and targets. What we lack are specific policies and measures to achieve these targets,” Zhao Dianguo, director of the department of rural social security at the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, said at a recent U.N. forum.

In the U.S., expansion of social programs is a conventional part of measures to cope with economic downturns. Congress has already passed an extension of unemployment benefits, and more measures are likely in the stimulus package President-elect Barack Obama has promised to push through after he takes office in January. Options being discussed include increasing support for lower-income families’ health-care costs, expanding food stamps and college grants, and further extending jobless benefits.

Earlier, the administration of President George W. Bush offered tax rebates to boost consumer spending. But fiddling with personal taxes wouldn’t help as much in China. That is because the country’s nascent tax system covers so few people to begin with.

And increasing social spending is surprisingly difficult in China because it is often unclear which parts of government are responsible for funding and operating the programs. China is a huge country with a bureaucracy to match: It has 31 provinces, 333 municipalities, 2,859 counties and 694,745 rural villages. For decades, there has been little direction on this issue from Beijing, which generally lets local governments fend for themselves financially.

Local officials are often more interested in supporting industrial projects that boost their tax revenue than in expanding social programs that only cost them money. For instance, the program to support incomes of the worst-off — the urban minimum living allowance, often known by its Chinese shorthand dibao — reaches only a fraction of the people who are eligible for it, and its rolls haven’t significantly expanded in recent years.

Posted at 8:32 PM · Comments (0)

An excellent video feature on the Congo tragedy.

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Posted at 10:09 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal

Reports on the latest batch of President Richard Nixon’s White House tapes.

As interest groups do what they can to influence President-elect Barack Obama’s picks for a diverse cabinet, newly available archives from the Nixon Presidential Library put the politics in sharp historical relief.

The nearly 200 hours of President Richard Nixon’s White House tapes released today include a particularly telling conversation that took place after Nixon’s 1972 re-election. In planning selections for his second cabinet that November, Nixon, known for using “expletives” and his hard-nosed chief counsel, Charles Colson, provide a glimpse into the identity politics of the day:

Nixon: Well if you’ve got a candidate, what we need there… Godammit Chuck, we haven’t got an Italian yet. I can’t find any…

Colson: Did Bob mention the [foreign adviser John] Scali idea to you? …Could be at the U.N.

Nixon: Instead of the black?

Colson: Instead of the black. Who the hell cares about the blacks? Scali would love the U.N. That would give you an Italian in the cabinet. At least it’s a thought. And he’s a legitimate Italian. A good Italian…

Nixon: You know, basically, we don’t owe the blacks a damn thing anyway.

Colson: Oh hell, no. As a matter of fact, I think it’s a bad signal to put a black in the Cabinet… The people that voted for us– (Laughs)

Nixon: …And after all, this pampering of blacks isn’t a good idea. I think you’ve got a good point there…

Colson: If we appoint a black in the cabinet in the second term and we didn’t have one in the first term, people are going to say, “My God, they’re moving–

Nixon: That’s right.

…

Nixon: But I think your idea about the U.N. makes a hell of a lot of sense.

Colson: Well, it’s just a suggestion.

Nixon: No, but why put a black in there? Why do it? Why?

Colson: I wouldn’t do it. I would deliberately not put a black in a position that–

Nixon: As a matter of fact, I don’t see any reason– We’ve got our black in– Keep– Keep a few in the administration– You can’t– You can’t be in position where you just turn your backs on them, totally.

Colson: Oh no no. But I think this much, Mr. President: You were just elected with one of the biggest landslides in history. But with no better participation from the blacks…

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Copyright The Washington Post

This should be China’s time to shine. The country is sitting on almost $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves and may post a 9 percent growth rate this year, probably the highest of any nation. In the midst of a global financial crisis, the world has come to China’s doorstep seeking leadership. Yet China’s leaders have largely kept the door shut, arguing that Beijing can do the most good for the world by putting its own house in order. China wants to be a responsible partner, not a global leader.

Many in the United States have assumed that China wants to ascend to superpower status; and what better time for Beijing to step up? China matters more to the world every day — not just on trade and finance but on climate change, food safety, nonproliferation and other global challenges. Yet China’s leaders are right: They need to focus on the home front before they extend themselves globally, for their own sake and for ours.

Above all, China’s leaders need to sort out where they are going politically. It is hard to lead globally when your domestic political system is in massive transition — or, worse, turmoil. Beijing faces more than 90,000 protests annually as a result of endemic corruption and ongoing crises in public health and the environment. Exports, the lifeblood of the Chinese economy, are falling; layoffs are already in the tens of thousands, and China’s stock market has lost two-thirds of its value over the past year. Chinese media report daily on a stream of new regulations — to limit the ability of factories to fire workers, to manage state-run reporting or to restructure the public health bureaucracy. Yet all this tinkering at the margins has failed to reassure the Chinese people, or many outside the country, that the government has a clear plan for its political and economic future.
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And until China’s leaders address their domestic issues, we don’t want them playing a larger role abroad. Their political system is in desperate need of transparency, official accountability and the rule of law. Before China’s political institutions are in good shape, Chinese leadership abroad would probably introduce as many problems as it solves. The global financial crisis, for example, has sparked calls for Beijing to take a greater stake in the International Monetary Fund. On its face, given China’s impressive balance sheet, this makes sense. Yet Premier Wen Jiabao’s calls for IMF reform may signal a challenge to the fund’s efforts to promote transparency and accountability in the countries to which it lends; China has routinely resisted calls for its foreign assistance to be managed in a transparent manner…

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Copyright AFP

Uganda’s police warned male bar-goers to keep their noses clean after a probe found a gang of robbers had been using women with chloroform smeared on their chests to knock their victims unconscious. Skip related content

“They apply this chemical to their chest. We have found victims in an unconscious state,” Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) spokesman Fred Enanga told AFP.

“You find the person stripped totally naked and everything is taken from him,” he said. “And the victim doesn’t remember anything. He just remembers being in the act of romancing.”

Enanga, who explained that several types of heavy sedatives had been used, said he first came across the practice last year when an apprehended thief named Juliana Mukasa made a clean breast of the matter.

“She is a very dangerous lady,” the official said.

While early investigations suggest that the gang may consist of dozens of members, the source of the sedatives remains unknown.

“We don’t know exactly how they get these materials,” Enanga added. “That is something that our investigations must crack.”

He called on men, particularly travelling businessmen who tend to carry a lot of cash, to take caution.

“It’s a serious situation and people have to be aware.”

Posted at 5:28 PM · Comments (0)

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