27 juin 2006
Crocodile tastes like frog
A friend of mine recently asked me what weird/surprising/original things I had eaten since I moved to Africa. He was disappointed when I told him that most of it had been quite straightforward and risk-free.
Still, I figured I could develop a little bit. First of all Nairobi being a cosmopolitan city like Paris or New York, you can eat just about any kind of food: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, French, Italian, etc. You also have the choice between several fast food chains, many of them specialized in fried chicken. The Java House cafes are probably the most popular meeting point for lunch or coffee. Just imagine a Starbucks with food (hamburgers, sandwiches, quiches, salads, and of course brownies, muffins and bagels, everything very American). Of course, they also have coffee.
Then if you really want to eat African, you have to specifically look for it. But you can find very good Swahili food almost anywhere in Kenya and Tanzania. The dishes are usually composed of rice or ugali (maize porridge) and fish or meat, often cooked in coconut milk and curry. If you want to do things right, you should eat with your fingers. Yes, fish too. You get the trick pretty quickly though.
Finally, something that is pretty fun to try out is game meat, and then the Carnivore restaurant in 
Nairobi is the place to go. For a fixed price, waiters will come to your table carrying huge skewers of meat and serve you until you say no more. Besides traditional meat like chicken, beef or pork, you can try ostrich, crocodile, camel, and when you’re lucky giraffe (no giraffe the day I went unfortunately). Camel was not my favourite, it tasted like fatty lamb. But crocodile meat is very good I thought, kind of like frog’s legs. Of course this doesn’t help if you haven’t tried one or the other.
26 juin 2006
Cause of Concern
I just wanted to give a little update about the situation in Somalia, as many things happened in the past few days. The Union of Islamic Courts recently reorganized and renamed itself the Conservative Council of Islamic Courts. It also appointed Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys as its new chairman – a move that triggered serious concern among the US administration which suspects him of being linked to Al-Qaeda.
Aweys of course denies any ties with Bin Laden’s terrorist network. But what is certain is that his appointment underlines the power shift among the Islamic militias from moderate (headed previously by Sheik Sharif Ahmed, now chief of the executive committee) to more extreme factions.
Despite the fact that the Islamic Courts now control most of Southern Somalia, the situation stays very tense: allegations of an incursion by Ethiopian troops, more reports of cinemas being shut down… And last week, a Swedish journalist was shot dead in Mogadishu while he was covering a demonstration. 47 year-old Martin Adler was standing in the middle of the crowd, a few steps away from the other journalists. Some guy came up behind him and shot him in the back.
None of this seems like a good sign.
A couple of days ago, I interviewed a Somali analyst working for the Islamic Courts. Educated in California and after many years spent in the US, he had decided to come back to help his country. He had taken the side of the Islamic Courts because he thought they were genuinely looking for peace whereas the warlords were only pursuing their own interests. Because of his international background, he was put in charge of facilitating the negotiations with foreign diplomats and of dealing with the press.
He talked a lot and explained that the Islamic Courts were people you could speak and compromise with. When the interview was over, I asked him if he was personally optimistic, if he thought the Courts could pull it off and maintain peace. “No, I’m not optimistic” he said. He had spent about an hour talking on camera and “on the record” - as he kept saying - about the hope the new situation was bringing to Somalia. But the truth was that he knew the Islamic Courts were not more united than the warlords had been and that everything could collapse any minute. Coming from an insider, this is not particularly reassuring.
22 juin 2006
A visit to the department of education
These past few weeks I’ve been working on a story about Free Primary Education in Kenya. Free Primary Education is the name of a program launched by the government in 2003 to facilitate the access of all children to school. Before that date, parents had to pay a fee of a few hundred shillings a year to register their children, in addition to buying school supplies. Many families couldn’t afford it and as a result many children were denied an education.
Thanks to Free Primary Education, thousands of them have since enrolled in school. Classes have often doubled. But the number of teachers as well as the number of classrooms, them, have stayed the same. I wanted to have a look at how schools were coping with the situation.
Ayany Primary School in Kibera seemed like a good example as the school had been mentioned in several articles already. I requested an appointment with the director to discuss a possible tv story. I made my way to Kibera one morning at 9am and waited one hour for the director to be finished with a meeting, all that to hear after 5 minutes of conversation that I needed an authorization letter from the City Council to film in the school, and even to ask information from her. “When you’ll come back with the letter, then we’ll talk” she said. I wondered why she couldn’t tell me this on the phone.
I wrote the letter, and went to meet with M. S., the Chief Advisor for Schools. His office was on the 10th floor of the City Council building. In Kenya you can measure the level of corruption of a specific administration by the number of anti-corruption stickers on its walls. Judging by the dozens of “corruption-free zone” stickers that I counted on the 10th floor, the education department was VERY corrupt.
When I entered M. S.’s office, I found him busy doing nothing. Well, he was reading the newspaper. Like many government offices, his didn’t have a computer, nor a phone. Let’s not even talk about printers, fax or copy machines. But he did have three secretaries equipped with typewriters. Right now they were chatting and drinking tea.
I explained to him the purpose of my visit. “I’m a journalist and I’d like to film Ayany Primary School, I’ve been told I needed an authorization letter from you”. Silence and shy smile. “Yes, yes, ‘they’ ask for that”, he said, as if he was apologizing for the inconvenience. Silence again. M. S. was not in a hurry. My visit was probably going to be the only thing he would have to deal with that day and he wanted to make the moment last as long as possible. Then he glanced at me, uneasy.
- You know, ‘they’ usually ask for a fee to film.
- I’m sorry?
- Yeah, and also to do research.
- What do you mean to do research?
- Well, if you want to do research.
- About what?
- About your story.
- I don’t need to do research. How much it is to film?
- ‘They’ ask for 10,000 shillings (about 130 dollars) for 2 days.
- 10,000 shillings???
- For 2 days.
- Well, nobody has told me I was supposed to pay for that. You know, in tv news, we don’t usually pay for shoots. We don’t pay people we interview either because…
- Because then they tell you what you want to hear.
- Exactly.
- Well then… then I’ll ‘them’ it’s okay.
Wow, that was surprisingly easy. I couldn’t figure out if that guy was particularly bad at asking for a bribe or if he was doing it against his will.
I sound understood. After he had drafted the authorization on a scrap piece of paper and given it to one of the secretaries to type, he sat back in front of me and asked “How much do you know about local government in France?” “Hum, I’m not expert… Is there something specific you’d like to know?”
M. S. then explained to me that he’d recently assisted to a lecture given by a French university professor about the interactions between central and local government in France and there were some points he hadn’t got well. He was looking for some clarifications. I did the best I could and as the letter was still not coming, we chatted for a while about the problems of bureaucracy in Kenya and in France. His point of view was that when people are put in an office with no clear definition of the tasks they’re supposed to accomplish and no challenge, they soon loose their motivation and skip work to do something else, or engage in illegal practises like… corruption. He sure knew about it, I thought.
It appeared to me that M.S. was actually one of the good guys. He wanted to learn how to break the vicious circle of bad administration management in his country. He was probably under peer pressure to ask for the 10,000 shillings. I told him I would be happy to help him if he had more questions in the future and I gave him my email address. He’ll probably be too shy to use it, but for me it was a good thing to have a reliable contact at the education department so I saw it as some useful PR.
18 juin 2006
It has nothing to do with Africa...
but it's still worth mentioning: my first book just came out. It’s an analysis of the techniques of political marketing used by Bush and Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign. I wrote it two years ago while I was working for CNN in New York – it feels like it was ages ago.
Sorry for the non-francophone among you but it’s in French. The next one will be in English, I promise.
17 juin 2006
Eastleigh/Isli
On Friday I went on the most chaotic shoot since my arrival, and it took place just here, in Nairobi.
Because I haven’t been able to get to Mogadishu yet, I decided to go to LITTLE Mogadishu, which is a lot more accessible because it refers to the Nairobi neighborhood where most Somali refugees are gathered.
The place is called Eastleigh, or “Isli” for the locals. While doing some research on the internet, I found a link to the French Foreign Affairs Department website where you learn that Nairobi is okay in terms of risks as long as you avoid places like Eastleigh.
Eastleigh is just one of Nairobi’s many “ghettos” and ghetto is really the right word here as the neighborhood is home to more than 50,000 Somali refugees. Most of them flew from Mogadishu and other parts of Somalia because of the civil war. Some came directly to Nairobi, others transited through refugee camps at the border between the two countries. Very few actually have papers to prove that they are refugees. They skipped the registration process and just disappeared in the jungle of Eastleigh, where some already had business interests or family.
Eastleigh is now a giant and bustling market place. Trade seems to be the main activity there, with
some of the biggest markets evocatively named “Bangkok market” or “Dubai market” – no link to the kind of products they’re selling.
My purpose was to find out what the Somali expatriates where thinking of the recent events in their country, if they were supporting the Islamic Courts and if some of them were thinking of going back home now.
Peter (my driver) and I got there at 9am, and we started our Somali search. People directed us to 
8th street. “That’s where you’ll find them”, we were told. And indeed, judging by the khat leaves (that Somalis love to chew for their amphetamines-like effects) hanging at the doors of the shops, we knew we were in the right place.
We spotted a coffee shop where a few elders were drinking tea and watching tv. One of them volunteered to be interviewed. A few seconds later, I was surrounded by a crowd 
of about 50 Somalis wanting to be interviewed also. There were the ones who would pose as translators, the ones who were politely “putting a request” to be interviewed next, the ones who “knew the cell phone number of the President” (“Oh, so can you call him now?” “Er… I forgot my cell phone at home.” “Fine, take mine.” “Er… I also forgot the number.” “Right.”), and the kids who were kicking in my tripod, forcing me to start the same interview over, over, and over again.
The crowd was pushing me and my camera so close to the interviewees that I could barely get a proper shot. I regularly had to stop to chase away a few kids and ask the others to give me more space.
I asked them what they thought of the Islamic Courts, if they thought that Somalia could become another Afghanistan (“no, never, we’re very different from the Afghans, we would fight for our rights” – well it’s true that, contrary to the Afghans, Somalis do have a lot of guns to fight with), if they would like to go back there soon. They all said they loved their country and that all Somalis should go back to Somalia. But them, right now, no. They were waiting for visas to Europe or the United-States.
After a while I had to explain to them that I had enough of interviews, that now I needed to take pictures of the streets, the shops, of them doing whatever they usually do when there is no tv camera around. “Well, we don’t do anything, we just sit around and wait”. “Alright, just do that then”. But impossible to distract them from the camera, impossible to get them to act natural, impossible to get a single shot without that kid in a red t-shirt jumping in the frame.
I had noticed that Mahmoud Yusuf, one of the young Somalis I had interviewed, was quieter and 
smarter than the others. I promoted him as my guide and asked him what he thought would be interesting for me to film. He suggested that we go to another coffee shop where Mogadishu elders gathered to talk politics. That seemed like a good idea, so we walked there, followed by a long line of curious spectators.
The coffee shop was empty when we got there, but it soon filled up with dozens of people. I set up a few chairs in the middle and selected three elders for the interviews. Mahmoud was holding the mike and translating. I was in the middle of the second interview when I noticed that my bag, which Peter the driver was holding between his legs, was shaking. Then I saw a hand swiftly making its way in and out of it. “Hey, he took my phone!! Can 
somebody catch him??”. About 10 guys immediately set off to do so. “Don’t worry Madam, we’ll bring you back your phone, you can sit down and continue the interviews”. And they indeed caught the guy and came back with my cell phone. The crowd insisted that the thief was Kenyan, not Somali. Them Somalis could never do something like this.
A little before one, we had to stop as prayer time was approaching. We made our way back towards 8th street and the mosque. But I had neglected to ask permission to film to the mosque, so I wasn’t sure what I would be able to get before being kicked out… it was too late to ask for the official authorization, so I decided to try anyway.
The muezzin started to call for prayer and 8th street filled with men setting up their carpets in the 
direction of Mecca. I managed to get a couple of shots before one of them noticed what I was doing and asked me to leave. I tried again a little further, but the same guy followed me. Mahmoud tried to convince him to let me film. The guy started to get angry. Other young men in my crowd of followers took my side and tried to make way for me to film. But I refused to do it by force, especially since more angry men were starting to converge to our spot, waving furiously at me.
It seemed like it was time to go. Mahmoud needed to go pray also. But before I left he asked for my contact, and I took his as well. As soon as I had written my name, email and phone number on a piece of paper, dozens of sheets of papers and pens materialized from nowhere and in a few seconds the crowd has copied my contact info and passed it along.
My cell phone started ringing, and ringing, and ringing. It’s been ringing since then. Even at 2:30am last night. I get text messages also. Always the same thing, coming from the same number: “Please call me. Thank you.”
When I got home – exhausted - half an hour later, I had received this email:
hey marie how are you? I'm a somali boy named XXXXXX I was staying where you were interviewing the people this day especaily 8 street, Marie can you unedrstand the boy with the blue shirt and was asking you have not interviewed me? I'm that boy, infact why I'm sending you this email is I really liked your style and how look your face i can very beautyful and never seen before, you really atracted me many things that I cant just tell u more but infact i want you to contact me and send me email also I want you to be my real freind because I felt your love suddenly, I think that you will welcome me because you are very wise as I bleave and that will help me to get your response. anyway I'm telling that when I saw you and right now I'm thinking about you and you can understand what is about. my dear morie I'm waiting your answer and and realy longing to see you again, dear marie I wish you all the best happyness and I love you very much, thank you, and I'm praying for god to get you and be your hasband, dear sis you can call me this tel; XXXXXXXX,
by XXXXXXX
I particularly like the last sentence « I’m praying for god to get you ». At least it’s straightforward. He’s the same guy who’s sending me the text messages. And if I remember well which one it is, he couldn’t be more than 17 years old.
13 juin 2006
My way or the Afghan way
I was saying in an earlier post that it was very difficult to explain who was fighting against whom in Somalia. Or not.
If you’ve been following the news this past couple of weeks, you might have seen that the Union of Islamic Courts had claimed victory in the battle of Mogadishu. The Islamic militias now control between 80 and 90% of the capital, according to witnesses. They are also very close to the town of Jowhar, where the defeated warlords have fled. One of them tried to flee to Kenya but he was swiftly arrested in the Nairobi hotel where he was probably enjoying the AC and the cold beer, and put on a flight to Dubai (he paid for the ticket himself, using some of the cash he run away with).
The Somali population welcomed the Islamic militias’ victory. In a few days, the militias managed to put an end to the chaos and anarchy that had filled the Somalis’ daily lives for 15 years … until they shut down some cinemas that had planned to show the World Cup this weekend. This the Somalis didn’t like. So now they’re not so sure about the Islamic Courts anymore. One has to admit that this move was a little suspicious.
The Union of Islamic Courts’ chief, Sheik Sharif Ahmed, said several times that he was not planning to establish Islamic law on Mogadishu and that he wanted to give the power back to the people. But then other more hard-line (or less diplomatic) Islamic leaders also said they would not accept a secular government. And none of them want to see international peace keeping troops in Somalia.
Hmm… What to believe? Who to trust? That is the question. The US realized that the “backing-secretly-the-warlords-and-then-well-hmm-we’ll-see” strategy was not really a strategy in the end. So now they’re back to the good old diplomacy and are supporting the negotiations between the Transitional Federal Government and the Islamic courts. The idea is to avoid getting the Islamic leaders angry. Nobody needs another Afghanistan.
On my side, still trying to find a way to get there…
Walking or not walking
I took up running again. There is a nice straight road right outside my building. It goes past the Ethiopian and the Serbia and Montenegro embassies, then past State House (home of President Kibaki), and the International Red Cross building. The road is quite hilly but it’s fine because it makes the way back much easier.
I try to go as often as I can, which means whenever I can get home at 5:30pm. At 6:30pm it’s already dark and it’s not safe to walk out anymore, even when you’re in a nice neighbourhood. At this time I run past many Kenyans walking home from work. Some of them are running, but not to stay in shape like me. For them it’s just a faster version of walking. They’re not motivated by a desire to stay fit, but by the will or the need to get home as fast as they can.
The Kenyans who walk are those who can’t afford a car. It’s a sign of their belonging to the lower class. When you have a good office job or want to show that you’re officially part of the middle class, the first thing you do is to buy a car. Owing a nice car is a real statement, especially since they are all exported and incredibly expensive. And that in most cases you have to buy them cash.
Before I got my car, I used to walk as much as I could to avoid spending a fortune on cabs or having to fight my way into a crowded matatu. I used to walk past amazed gardeners, house keepers, cooks and women carrying wood, who would give me stunned looks because I was walking like them.
In Kenya, when you’re white, you’re supposed to have money, so you don’t walk, it’s a rule. If I walk on a road outside of town, matatus will spontaneously stop to give me a ride. If I walk downtown, cab drivers will constantly call me out. That I actually WANT to walk is simply unconceivable.
03 juin 2006
Book reviews
I haven’t finished reading it yet, but I’m enjoying it so much that I couldn’t wait to recommend it. I bought The Zanzibar Chest at the airport as I was waiting for my flight to Paris. Funny how airport libraries only sell books in relation with the country you’re in and the type of traveller you’re the most likely to be. At Nairobi airport, difficult to find anything else than adventure books written by white people about the Dark Continent. In Paris Charles de Gaulle, the shelves were packed with copies of the Da Vinci Code.
The Zanzibar Chest, Aidan Hartley
Judging by its front and back covers, I was expecting The Zanzibar Chest to be the typical African adventure story. And in some ways it is. But what I didn’t expect was to find so many familiar elements in it.
The author, Aidan Hartley, was born in 1965 in Kenya into a long lineage of travellers and colonial administrators. After spending his education in British prep schools, Hartley, irresistibly drawn back to Africa, returns to Nairobi and becomes a journalist.
The book tells several stories: the one of his family and more specifically of his father, a foreign service agricultural officer, the life of his father’s best friend that he traces to the Arabian Peninsula, but more importantly of Hartley himself as he travels throughout and beyond East Africa as a correspondent for Reuters. Not surprisingly, this is my favourite part. Hartley worked in the same building where I work almost everyday, and if the people have changed, the spirit is still the same. He witnessed and reported on the forgotten wars of the 1990s, covering Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Rwanda – hooked on adrenaline.
His style is elegant and precise, and I find the whole book extremely accurate in the descriptions as well as the analysis. Hartley can also be pretty funny. I was talking about Somalia in some earlier posts – this paragraph struck me as a particularly good description of the “Somali way of life”:
“(The Somalis) showed off what devout Muslims they were if anybody was watching but when out of view of their neighbours would happily share my salami sandwich, drink beer and debauch themselves with as many women as they could lay their hands on. The Somalis were black, but I came to learn that they seemed to reject this fact and blithely called Bantu Africans “slaves”. They rejoiced in making enemies of the world and regarded themselves as nothing less than the kings of the earth, when in reality they were a nation of paupers.
As a correspondent, I suppose my job was to excite the sympathy of the world for this forgotten and reviled nation, but all I can say now is that I have felt it a privilege to observe a people who shot themselves in the foot with such accuracy and tumbled into the abyss in such style”.
Those of you who are enjoying this blog will love Hartley’s book.
While I’m at it, I figured I would also recommend other books.
White Lies, Dexter Petley
I bought this book the same day I got The Zanzibar Chest. It was shorter, so I started by this one. I have to say it didn’t leave me with a great impression. Not a priority.
White Lies weaves two episodes of Norman’s (the main character) life. In the first pages, his wife Joy walks out of their farm in northern France leaving Norman alone and confused. In an attempt to put his life back together, Norman remembers how he went to find and marry Joy in Africa after reading an article about her in a Nairobi women’s magazine. The chapters about his quest for Joy across a war torn Uganda interlock with those about France.
I found the French part of the story pretty boring, especially because Norman spends several chapters going through his house’s previous owner’s relics, photographs and documents (nothing really interesting comes out of it). The chapters taking place in Uganda are better. I particularly enjoyed the dialogues which sometimes meet the absurd – but sound also tragically true:
At some point Norman is dragged into a murder case – a prostitute he had met the night before is charged with killing a man for a few dollars. The police shows up to arrest Norman for conspiracy.
- “Ach, he said, banging his hand on the table so the flies jumped.
- Identity, I said.
- You, for you, he said, problem money, for me problem money. This girl, you sleep with jana, very bad she, ah, shooting, for five hundred shillings, now murder case. For you, problem money suspected person wewe, for you, prison, me to prison tomorrow, you with her to killing with money…
Seemed like an open and shut case to me. Just find the missing word.
- I want interpreter, I said.
- You shoosh!
(…)
- Shooting case is prison. Witness now, you boy! Njoo!
Gosto put the shaver in his trouser pocket but it stuck out through a rip. Kianjiji started shouting in Swahili and the mafuta mingi tutted and said something. I asked Kijama the cook what was happening.
- He wants evidence from Gosto.
- What evidence?
- I do not know.
- YOU MZUNGU SHOOSH!
- I want a lawyer.
- You money in station, you prison case. Chagga prison with murder, you prison with shooting money.
- I want to telephone to the British Hish Commission.
- You station charge, wewe, bail, five hundred dollar.”
King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hothchild
In his book King Leopold’s Ghost, historian Adam Hothchild focuses on one of the most ignored crimes of the century, which today would be qualified as crime against humanity: greedy Belgian King Leopold II’s rape of Congo from 1885 to 1909. This very documented book explain how King Leopold used his mercenary army to force slaves into mines and rubber plantations, burn villages, mete out sadistic punishments, including dismemberment, and commit mass murder.
In the footsteps of Colonel Kurtz, Michela Wrong
A foreign correspondent in Congo (renamed Zaire by Mobutu at the time) for six years, Michela Wrong has plenty anecdotes to tell about the 30 years of Mobutu rule that ruined the country. She also aims at understanding the other reasons behind the economic disintegration of the most mineral-rich country on the African continent. She writes with nuance about the many internal and external players that contributed to the downfall of the Congolese State and economy: the CIA, the World Bank and the IMF, the French and Belgian governments, mercenaries, and a host of fat cats who benefited from Mobutu's largesse and even exceeded his rapaciousness.
Shake hands with the devil, General Romeo Dallaire
A detailed and horrifying first-hand testimony about the Rwandan genocide by the man in command of the U.N. peacekeeping mission. While much of the account is a thickly described I-went-here, I went-there, I-met-X, I-said-this, we learn quite a lot about Dallaire’s emotional states. Dallaire writes also extensively about the bureaucracy of the U.N. and its failure in understanding the situation and giving him the power and authority that – he claims – might have prevented the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
I met Dallaire in New York last year. You can tell, by his shy demeanour and soft voice, that he is still haunted by the memories of Rwanda. Dallaire is the highest ranked military officer to have publicly acknowledged that he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress disorder.
Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, Blaine Harden
This book inspired part of this blog's title. Blaine Harden was the Washington Post bureau chief in sub-Saharan Africa from 1985 to 1989. His book is a series of vignette-like true life examples (set in Ghana, Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya) of an imploding continent, its proliferation of "big men", and of the west's lack of understanding about the people, cultures, values, and even geography of Africa.
Instant in the Wind, Andre Brink
And finally, the first book I ever read about Africa, Instant in the Wind by Andre Brink. My literature teacher gave it for me to read when I was 11 (the title sounds even more poetic in French: Un instant dans le vent). It impacted me so much that I promised myself I would go and see this continent by myself one day.
In 1750’s colonial South Africa (which combined today’s South Africa and Namibia), a naive but spirited white woman from the Cape accompanies her Swedish explorer husband into the unmapped interior, only to find herself alone when the husband dies and the Hottentot retainers head for the hills. She is found by a runaway slave, Adam, who agrees to set off with her to the Cape. During their long walk throughout the country, they learn about each other and ultimately fall in love.
I might find the love story cliché and cheesy if I read the book again today - but what I enjoyed the most was Brink’s description of the beautiful and cruel African landscape. Just for that, the book is definitely worth reading.
01 juin 2006
Mo and Me
While I was away, the documentary "Mo and Me" premiered in Nairobi. It tells the story of Mohammed Amin, probably the most famous and fearless African journalist of the modern times.
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I've read the book which was given to me upon my arrival to Kenya by Salim Amin, his son. His life is at the same time inspiring, and scary. Mo died in 1996 aboard an Ethiopian aircraft that was hijacked by Muslim extremists. He died on his feet as he attempted to negotiate and reason with the terrorists.
Here's the press release:
Mo & Me, the documentary about Kenyan photojournalist, Mohamed “Mo” Amin - whose TV footage of starving Ethiopians first brought the country’s 1984 famine to the world has won the Silver Screen Award at the 39th US International Film and Video Festival in California.
Directed by Roger Mills (“Himalaya”, “Around the World in 80 Days”) and Murad Rayani (“Refusing To Die”) and narrated by Salim Amin, Mo & Me took the runner-up documentary prize at this year’s Awards Competition held in Redondo Beach. Now in its fortieth year, the US International Film and Video Festival attracted over 1250 entries from 26 countries to its 2006 edition.
Mo & Me’s USIFVF win follows a series of well-received and widely reported festival screenings in Los Angeles, Paris and New York of the 95-minute film which had its official World Premiere in Nairobi on Wednesday.
The unflinching and deeply personal work by Salim Amin depicts his father’s unbending, unforgiving
and unapologetically rambunctious life amid the turmoil of Africa’s passage through the twentieth century.
Underpinned by the extraordinary images from Mohamed Amin’s vast archive which is currently available at World Picture Network in New York, the man’s vivid life swirls and swoops across the screen while remaining ever-close to the brink.
In Amin, viewers see the potent mixture of talent and ambition personified. Then, as the documentary unfolds, they are left in no doubt about his immense courage and resilience as he survives incarceration, torture and, later, amputation as part of his tireless quest to observe and inform.
Commenting from Nairobi on his USIFVF award, filmmaker Salim Amin said:
“I am absolutely delighted that Mo & Me has been honored with the Silver Screen Award by the US International Film and Video Festival. On behalf of my team at Camerapix here in Nairobi and our production partners at Al-Jazeera International, I thank the festival jury for coming along with us on the journey into the life of Mohamed Amin.”
“For my father, it was never simply a case of getting the job done. Time and again, he pushed himself to new limits because he knew that his lens was a lone voice speaking for many, many more.”
Somalia for dummies
I’ve been kind of restless when in France because I was feeling that I was missing all the excitement. By excitement I mean the renewed fighting in Somalia. Violence erupted a few days only after I left Baidoa (see post “Baidoa, the City of Death”). Close to 200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in Mogadishu in a couple of weeks. Many more wounded by stray bullets or mortar shells. Thousands fled their homes on foot, carrying as much as they could on their backs.
This is the worst outbreak of violence in Somalia in years. It started last February when an alliance of Mogadishu warlords began battling Islamic leaders in an attempt to counter their influence in the capital.
It’s difficult to explain who’s fighting against whom in Somalia because of the multitude of clans opposing each other on issues of resources, land, or simply pride. But it’s also very easy: to sum up, everybody’s fighting against everybody. Alliances shift everyday, at the end of the day a Somali being only loyal to himself.
Taking advantage of the chaos to fill the void, Islamic groups sprung up and gained influence in the country. Most of them are moderate, but Somalia is also believed to shelter Al Qaeda-linked terrorists, including suspects in the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
Many African analysts believe that the US is funding the alliance of warlords fighting the Islamic groups as part of their counter-terrorism activities. Up until now the US hasn’t admitted their involvement, but its denials have become weaker and weaker over the past weeks. John Prendergast, a senior advisor at the International Crisis Group, called the American strategy in Somalia “Cold War-style diplomacy at its worst”. “It just ends up throwing gasoline on the fire.”
What is certain is that the situation is now so explosive that no news agency dares sending journalists to Somalia anymore. AFP and Reuters cover the country from Nairobi. They have one Somali reporter each and they sometimes go – but only if they feel that the risks are reasonable (which amounts to “almost never”).
But my friend Marc from the New York Times managed to go (yeah, he’s good), and came back with two very interesting articles which I engage you to read on www.nytimes.com.
