Jorn Barger, who is kind enough to regularly amplify posts on my blog on his weblog “Robot Wisdom”, wrote to me a few weeks ago with a great suggestion: An online quiz that helped readers figure out what they did and didn’t know about Africa and helped them learn more.

I shared the idea with some of the great bloggers behind BlogAfrica and the sub-Saharan Africa section of Global Voices. We spun the idea around a bit and came up with a quiz that tests your knowledge of Africa and the African blogosphere. The answers to the quiz include links to African and Afrophile blogs that have commented on key issues in 2005 – check ‘em out and find some great blogs to add to your blogroll.

Try it out! Feel free to use the comments section on this post to let me know how you did, gripe about the questions or otherwise give feedback.

If folks like the quiz idea, I’ll put together another one closer to Jorn’s original vision, which tests knowledge of African current events and links to news stories and blogposts. And perhaps other Global Voices editors will want to do similar quizzes to feature bloggers in their region – let me know, guys, and I’ll set up an instance of the quiz tool on GV.

Thanks to Sokari Ekine, Andrew Heavens, “Black River Eagle”, Ory Okolloh, Ndesanjo Macha, and “Sleepless in Sudan” for their great questions – bad questions and question selection is my fault, not theirs.

Thanks, everyone, for the great response to this post. I think we’ll be doing a variety of quizzes on Global Voices in the near future – clearly, they’re a fun way to test your knowledge. In an ironic twist, the BBC released a quiz about African news on the same day as I posted my quiz. I swear that I didn’t know about theirs, and the timestamp more or less guarantees that they didn’t know about ours. A fun quiz, if a little less blog-centric than this one. And if you do as well as I did on it, evidently you should run the AU… :-)

I’m on my winter vacation from now until January 5th, which means, according to the circular I just got in the mail from the International Bloggers Union, Local 137, I’m not required to post every day and I’m encouraged to post on topics my regular readers may not care about.

You know, like sumo.

(There’s now a sumo category on the blog, so that all those who could care less about the sport can make a point of ignoring any post on the topic.)

Like all of you (:-), I’m waiting with bated breath for the January Basho at Ryogoku Kokugikan. Will Asashoryu continue his amazing dominance of the sport, breaking more records in 2006? Will Kaio and Chiyotaikai, two of the most mediocre ozeki in history, get demoted yet again and make room for some of the young wrestlers to ascend? Just how good is Kotooshu, the new Bulgarian ozeki? Will he challenge Asashoryu? What would it mean for the sport to have two non-Japanese yokozuna?

If Japanese commentators are to be believed, Kotooshu’s success could be sumo’s downfall. If a Mongolian and a Bulgarian dominated sumo together, it’s possible that attendence at matches would fall even further from today’s disappointing numbers. A recent commentary in Kyodo News asks “Why can’t Japanese beat Asashoryu?“. The answer – because he’s really, really good – doesn’t appear to be satisfactory. Instead, there’s concern that Japanese wrestlers don’t train enough, don’t eat right, and generally aren’t offering Asa the sort of competition he would have seen a decade earlier, if he’d had to wrestle yokozuna like Takanohana and Wakanohana.

(It’s hard for me, as an unabashed Mongoliaphile, to understand how Asashoryu can be shown such contempt in Japanese sumo. Not all, but some, sumo fans have begun treating the three Japanese ozeki as yokozuna – when I attended a match this spring at Kokugikan, the smiling ladies of the sumo fan club were handing out folders emblazoned with images of ozeki Tochiazuma, not of Asashoryu. And when Asa beat ozeki Chiyotaikai to win his seventh consecutive emperor’s cup, some fans threw square cushions at the dohyo, which is traditionally done when a yokozuna is defeated.)

For anyone who’s worried about the increasing non-Japanese dominance of sumo, the event I watched on ESPN2 a few days back has to be worrisome indeed. “The World Sumo Challenge” – held on October 22nd in Madison Square Garden, New York – was advertised as “the first stop on the North American Sumo tour”. It’s unclear whether Big Boy Entertainment, the organizers of the event, were able to schedule any additional stops on the tour, or whether the 8,000 fans who watched a round-robin tournament of 24 rishiki from around the world fight have become sumo fans, or whether they simply enjoyed the novelty of big men wearing mawashi.

Some of the “additions” made to the format to make the sport more interesting to non-Japanese audiences were pretty absurd. The organizers decided to organize the wrestlers into four “timeless warrior clans” – “Black Tiger”, “Iron Mountain”, “Shadow Jin” and “Wrath of Heaven” – perhaps in the hopes of giving the audience teams to root for. The format didn’t really allow for this, though, as the playoff format forced wrestler to fight other wrestlers in their “clan”, before advancing the two most successful to the single-elimination finals round. And I’ve never seen a match in Japan begin with the announcer yelling, “Let’s get ready to sssssSUMO!”

(This wasn’t the only non-traditional aspect of the match. The wrestlers didn’t purify the ring with salt before the matches. The dohyo was a wrestling mat with a raised ridge, not straw bales and clay. I got the pretty clear sense that retired yokozuna Musashimaru, providing color commentary, thought the whole experience was a pretty pale shadow of actual Japanese sumo. Or he might just have been pissed off with his insipid co-anchor, Al Pawlowski, who appears to work as a soccer commentator most of the time.)

On the other hand, the actual bouts were pretty damned good. Most of the folks competing are high-ranked amateur fighters in Europe. I was hugely impressed by Sydney Carty, who’s been sumo champion of the Netherlands several times, and handily won his earlier matches with flawless uwatenage (arm throws). It was a great chance to see a number of terrific wrestlers from Eastern Europe, especially Bulgaria and Georgia, which appear to have deep reserves of small (roughly 130kg), strong, fast wrestlers. Bulgarian Petar Stoyanov was extremely impressive and stayed in competition until the last bout with Mitshuhiko Fukao, a massive Japanese wrestler who offered a clinic in slapping techniques, ending most of his matches with tsukidashi victories (pushing the opponent out of the ring with repeated thrusts).

Fukao was the crowd favorite, perhaps because he looks like Americans expect sumo wrestlers to look: Asian and profoundly obese. And there’s no denying he’s extremely talented… But if you’re looking for the future of sumo, there’s good evidence that there’s talent in Bulgaria beyond Kotooshu and in Georgia beyond Kokkai.

It would be exciting to see the two major experiments in popularizing sumo in the US – the MSG event, and the Grand Sumo Las Vegas tournament, which featured most of the leading Japanese rikishi – could be combined. Would any of the amateurs featured in New York have a fighting chance against the top competitors in Japan?

And if they did, how would that change the sport? Is it possible that sumo could become truly globalized, with a regular international match that pitted the top atheletes in the sport against one another? One intriguing possibility – if sumo became a sanctioned Olympic sport, we would likely see some of the world’s best face off every four years.

And that could lead to some interesting developments. Basketball was invented in the United States and has become a religion here, at the NBA and college level. And yet America’s Olympic team (which, admittedly, didn’t include many of the nation’s best players) got clobbered at the 2004 Summer Games… shortly after getting clobbered in the 2002 World Basketball Championships. If Japan shares sumo with the world, will they face a similar fate?

I’m crossing my fingers for a chance to find out.

Two days without opening my laptop – now that’s a vacation.

Logging on again today, four Africa stories that caught my eye:

- “Ghana’s Uneasy Embrace of Slavery’s Diaspora”. Lydia Polgreen, writing in the New York Times, has a useful update on a very old Ghana story: attempts to rebrand Ghana as a homeland for Africans enslaved and brought across the Atlantic to return home to.

Ghana’s coastline is lined with European-built castles, some which preceded slavery, but nearly all of which were used in the slave trade. The well-preserved – and therefore all the more viscerally disturbing – castles at Cape Coast and Elmina are UN World Heritage sites and are widely visited by Ghanaian schoolchildren, as well as tourists around the world.

The Ghanaian government – and many Ghanaian entrepreneurs – would like to have a special relationship with African-Americans who are returning to Ghana to visit these sites, encounter Africa for the first time, and perhaps discover something about their roots. When Ghana gained indepedence in 1957, Kwame Nkrumah, who’d been educated at a historically black college in the US, reached out to the African-American community to welcome leaders, investors and artists back. But when Nkrumah was overthrown and Ghana’s economy crumbled, it became harder for the nation to try to lure anyone “home”.

Now the barriers are financial and cultural. When I walk down the street in Accra, I’m greeted again and again as “obruni” – a word that means both “white man” and “foreigner”. It’s a little disconcerting at first (it’s hard not to hear the word as “honky” the first few dozen times), but it eventually becomes clear that folks are simply looking for a way to connect with you, someone who’s clearly a foreigner in their midst. I encourage friends who are visiting Ghana to learn the Twi or Ga phrase which translates as “My name is not obruni – my name is…”, which tends to get laughter in response and often starts conversations.

But it’s obviously very different to hear yourself called “obruni” when you’re an African-American in Ghana. And it’s even harder to hear the message many of my African-American friends heard while visiting Ghana – that they were “lucky” because they “got to live in America”. While this may be an astonishingly insensitive thing to say to people looking for their ancestry after being uprooted by one of the greatest crimes in history, it makes some sense when seen from the perspective of a young Ghanaian. Many Ghanaians are desperate to emigrate to the US or the UK – it’s hard to understand, from that perspective, why people “lucky” enough to live in America would be looking back towards Africa.

Chippla’s running a series on Nigeria’s 2007 presidential elections on his blog, and offers a very helpful history lesson regarding Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s military dictator through much of the 1990s. Chippla believes that Abacha was on a path towards becoming “president for life” and thinks that Obasanjo may try for a third term, despite constitutional restrictions.

Abe McLaughlin does his best to explain the almost inexplicable conflict that threatens to restart on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. While the conflict is ostensibly about the dusty desert town of Badme – seized by Ethiopia in the 1998-2000 war, but awarded to Eritrea by a UN-sponsored boundary commission in 2002, McLaughlin makes it clear that the conflict is at least as much about two decidedly non-representative governments and their desires to hold onto power.

In case you didn’t spend Christmas Sunday reading the NY Times Week in Review… Michael Wines has an interesting piece on the politics of aid in Africa, titled “When Doing Good Also Aids the Devil”. One of the devils in question in Wines’s piece is Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Wines is concerned that UN food aid being brought to Zimbabwe is being distributed – at government direction – primarily in rural areas, which helps cement the effects of “slum clearances” earlier this year, designed to move hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans from Harare to rural areas. Wines likens this to aid in Darfur which has helped keep refugees in camps, allowing government-supported Janjawid militants to cement their grasp on villages the refugees have abandoned.

When I link to stories on Zimbabwe either here or on Global Voices, I’m often reminded by my Zimbabwean friend Dumisani Nyoni that the situation in Harare is lots more complicated than is generally portrayed by non-African journalists. Dumi has an excellent critique of an earlier Simon Robinson piece in Time (which I continue to think is a good piece) that touches on some similar issues – I’m hoping Dumi will weigh in on the Wines piece as well, either in comments here or on his own blog.

I’ve just submitted a revision of a paper I wrote in early September for inclusion as part of an academic book. It’s an attempt to provide a basic overview of blogging – and specifically bridgeblogging – around the world and suggest some questions other scholars may want to consider as we start trying to figure out how blogging works in communities other than universe of US-centric political punditry blogs.

(The draft of the paper is here, for anyone who’s curious, in HTML and PDF. It’s not accepted for publication yet, so please ask me first if you want to cite it in an academic context. Blogging it is fine, though there’s at least one more major revision to it coming…)

In the process, I’m rediscovering one of the huge reasons I decided not to become a “serious” academic – i.e., why I decided not to pursue a PhD and focus on publishing in peer-reviewed academic journals: the stuff that I’m interested in is moving so fast that it’s very hard to write about in an academically-compatible way.

This isn’t the fault of the editors of this book – blogger/academics Henry Farrell and Daniel Drezner – it’s simply a function the amount of time it takes to compile a set of academic papers, have them peer-reviewed and edited into a larger text, typeset and published. An aggressive timetable has a book going from inception to publication in a year. (And, indeed, the review process just saved me from making a huge error in the draft I just submitted – more on that below.)

The problem: when you’re writing about blogging, an assertion you make may be out of date in three months. Here’s something I wrote in September:

“Weblog search engine Technorati maintains a rankings page which lists the top 100 weblogs, as determined by total incoming links over that blog’s lifespan. This listing is fairly static, as the least popular page in the top hundred has 2,430 incoming links – the dozen or fewer new links created each day tends not to reorder rankings radically. (By contrast, Blogpulse’s top 40 page, which ranks blogs based on incoming links discovered in the past 30 days, tends to be significantly more dynamic.) Blogs listed on Technorati’s top 100 generally have built up a substantial audience over the course of months or years.”

This, as it happens, is (now) totally untrue. I double-checked the data from September three months later, only four of the fifteen blogs I was watching – non-English or non-US blogs in the Technorati top 100 – were still in the top 100. While 11 of the fifteen blogs I was watching fell out, 20 new non-English or clearly non-US blogs entered the top 100 when I checked last week.

What happened was that Technorati changed its algorithm for generating the top 100 during the three months in question. (Thanks, Henry, for pointing this out in reading my draft.) The previous algorithm calculated ranks based on total incoming links over the lifetime of the blog. The new algorithm calculates ranks based on links in the past six months. The previous algorithm tended to favor long-established blogs, while the new one favors blogs that have been popular in the recent past.

(This time I was smart enough to save a whole data set, not just the non-US/English blogs, which means in a few months I’ll be able to report on what percent of the top 100 changes in a three-month period in the new algorithm.)

Something else happened as well. The Chinese showed up.

The new rankings, which feature recently popular blogs, have some similarities – especially at the top of the rankings. But they’re radically different outside the top 20. Of those 20 new blogs in the top 100, 11 are in Chinese. In the September figures, three of the 14 blogs (21%) I was watching were in Chinese (tied with Portuguese as the best-represented non-English language in the top 100). In December, none of the Portuguese blogs are ranked and 60% of the non-US/non-English blogs are in Chinese.

Basically, the Chinese language blogosphere appears to be exploding in popularity. And the 12 Chinese blogs listed in Technorati’s top 100 may be just the tip of the iceberg.

All 12 of the Chinese blogs are hosted by MSN. This isn’t entirely surprising – research by my friend Matthew Hurst on pingserver data suggested that a huge percentage of total blog posts are coming from MSN and that a substantial percentage of MSN Spaces blogs are being written by people in China. Using data from a paper Matthew is publishing in a few weeks, I estimate that MSN is hosting a minimum of 2m Chinese language blogs, including Chinese and Taiwanese bloggers. That’s an amazing figure, as Technorati and Blogpulse each index roughly 20 million blogs in total – MSN’s Chinese-language blogs alone might represent 10% of the blogosphere.

Matthew’s analysis draws from pings sent to the weblogs.com server, where many weblogging platforms send pings whenever a blog is updated. “Many weblogging platforms” doesn’t appear to include Bokee or Blogbus, two of the most popular weblogging platforms in China. I just retrieved an hour’s worth of data from weblogs.com and did some simple searches. Of the 80,880 pings registered in that hour, MSN spaces blogs registered 9612 pings, Blogspot registered 6393 and Typepad registered 102… Neither Blogbus.com or Bokee.com registered a single blog.

Services like Technorati and Blogpulse have started sharing ping data with one another through an initiative called “FeedMesh” – if a ping is received by one of their pingservers, it gets shared with other weblog search engines. But it’s unclear to me whether any of these pingservers are seeing pings from Bokee, one of China’s largest blog hosting providers. (Recent statistics from blo.gs, a major pingserver in the FeedMesh project, doesn’t list any Chinese blog hosts other than MSN in their list of top 20 bloghosts seen on their pingserver.)

A search for the string “spaces.msn.com” on Technorati yields over 2.1 million links. Searches for “bokee.com” yields less than 3,000 links… and they all appear to be on MSN Spaces blogs, which are linking to Bokee blogs. A search for “blogbus.com” yields roughly 62,000 links, most from Blogbus blogs, but other prominent Chinese hosting sites, like Tianyablog.com or Blogcn.com, only appear on MSN Spaces blogs. (A search for “blogcn.com” gives a sense for just how big that site might be – despite apparently not indexing blogcn.com blogs, Technorati returns over 50,000 links for the search.)

A recent (and controversial) study by Baidu, a leading Chinese search engine, claims that there are 37 million blogs in China, maintained by 16 million bloggers. MSN Spaces is one of 658 blog hosting companies in China, and of the top ten companies cited in the Baidu study, at most 4 are well indexed by Technorati. (MSN is very well indexed, and Blogbus appears to be well indexed. MBlogger.cn turns up some posts, though a large number of errors, and cnblogs.com turns up a small number of posts.)

My point is not to beat up on Technorati, which has made great strides in indexing blogs in different character sets recently, but to point out that the 12% of the blogs in Technorati’s top 100 list may be an undercount. If there are some prominent, well-linked blogs on other major Chinese bloghosting providers (and it seems likely that there would be), there might be 20 or more Chinese blogs in the Technorati top 100.

This raises any number of interesting questions for folks like me who spend our free time making sweeping generalizations about “the blogosphere”. The next time I write something like “An easy route to popularity in the blogosphere is to write about US politics or about technology”, please feel free to respond by asking, “Just what blogosphere are you talking about?”

It’s not clear to me that it makes sense to use the term “the blogopshere” when talking about the set of Chinese and English bloggers. While there are some efforts out there to make the Chinese blogosphere more understandable to English speakers (notably EastSouthWestNorth) and vice versa, when I look at the links to these prominent Chinese-language blogs, they’re all in Chinese. (And when I look for links to prominent English sites, very, very few are in Chinese.) If Chinese blogservers aren’t sending pings to the same servers – and consequently aren’t getting indexed by the same search engines – we can’t even say that we’re using a common toolset.

Researchers hoping to make broad statements about weblogs are going to have to start getting profoundly polylingual. The new Technorati top 100 features several blogs in Japanese (including, intriguingly, some celebrity blogs – one by a swimsuit model, another by the catcher of the Yakult Swallows), a Spanish geek blog, an Italian political comedian, and a German journalism blog.

Monolingual idiot that I am, my best bet appears to be to hang out as much as possible with Rebecca MacKinnon, who’s fluent in Mandarin from her years in China. Thanks to her, I have an eighth of a clue about what these top Chinese blogs are about. The majority seem to be trading tips, tricks and software tools that help bloggers customize their MSN Spaces blogs.

Bloggers blogging about blogging? How very 2003!

Is the presence of all these Chinese blogs in the Technorati top 100 making English-speaking bloggers about what’s going on in the Chinese blogosphere? I remember a wonderful post by Kevin Marks, where he remarks on his frustration at not being able to understand the Persian-language weblog that used to be in Technorati’s top 100:

However, I look at blogs like this and feel like Ginger in Gary Larson’s classic What Dogs Hear.
’squiggle squiggle squiggle Blog squiggle squiggle squiggle Permalink’

Unfortunately, Google’s Chinese/English translation engine isn’t much help with those squiggles. Translating the most popular Chinese language page in the Top 100 into English begins with the lovely phrase “The hot spot pays attention to Msn splendid space wind and cloud announcement”. I’m guessing I might be missing something.

Okay, the translation gets better when you get into the body of the post. And it’s cool that locker2man is reading Slashdot and translating articles for his readers. But how much cooler would it be if someone were translating him into English as well? What do we miss if the blogosphere gets more and more culturally and linguistically diverse and idiots like me can only read a small fraction of what’s out there?

The current edition of the Economist has an interesting “special report” on “the poor” that draws some comparisons between rural Kentucky and urban Democratic Republic of Congo as a study of “relative poverty”. I can’t help thinking that the article was mostly an excuse for a “Dukes of Hazzard” inspired visit to Hazard, Kentucky and I think the (uncredited, as is the policy of The Economist) author misses a couple of useful comparisons, but there’s other bits of the story that are quite useful. (Thanks to Danny Yee for pointing me to the story.)

The author interviews a disabled former truck driver in his early 60s who lives on a social security payment of $521 a month, and the head of emergency surgery at a Kinshasa hospital, who supplements his government salary of $250 a month with consultations with private patients to make about $700 a month. The Congolese doctor supports a household of 12 on his income, while the truck driver lives alone. (And anyone who’s lived an worked in Africa knows that the doctor is likely supporting an even larger network of friends and family with loans, money for school fees, etc.)

There’s a nod in the piece to the idea of “purchasing power parity”, a tool economists use to compare income in countries with radically different income levels. In personal terms, when I lived on $14,000 a year in Ghana (as I did in 1993 on a Fulbright scholarship), I was able to afford a nice apartment in Accra, eat out every night and drink absurd quantities of beer, while saving almost half the money US taxpayers paid me. On the same amount of money in the US, I’d have a hard time just paying rent and utilities, because local costs of living are so much higher.

To compare what $700 a month means in the DRC and Kentucky, you need to purchase a “basket of goods” (usually foodstuffs, fuel and rent) in both countries and adjust incomes for cost of living to get a fair comparison. In 1999 (the last statistics I happen to have on my laptop), the US GDP (gross domestic product – the total value of goods and services created) was $9.1 trillion. When adjusted in PPP terms, the GDP was $8.9 trillion, or $31,872 per capita. US GDP is adjused slightly down (96% of real dollars) because cost of living is slightly higher than the mean used by economists to calculate PPP.

DRC’s GDP in 1999 (a year where the country suffering from civil war and widespread corruption) was $5.6 billion (not trillion), and PPP GDP per capita was $38.6. In other words, DRC’s PPP adjustment is by a factor of almost 7 because cost of living is (necessarily) low. Even with this adjustment, GDP per capita in PPP terms in 1999 was $801… which means that, in real dollar terms, GDP per capita in DRC was about $116.

In other words, a PPP comparison of the Congolese doctor and the Appalachian truck driver (which the Economist doesn’t provide) is the comparison between $500.16 a month in the US and $4478.50 a month in the DRC, assuming 1999’s ratios hold true. (I’m sure they don’t, as DRC has recovered, somewhat, from 1999’s crisis state, but you go to blog with the statistics you have, not the statistics you wish you had.) It might be interesting to see a comparison between the Congolese surgeon and a doctor in rural America making $54,000 a year, for instance, or between the truck driver and a Congolese family living on $1200 a year in PPP terms.

There are two places where I think the Economist article misses the mark (other than not spelling out the PPP comparison more explicitly). The author suggests that impoverished Americans are more aware of their poverty than the Congolese because they’re comparing themselves to the wealthy in America:

For a Congolese peasant, there is no shame in living in a hut made of sticks. Everyone you know does too. In America, by contrast, the term “trailer” denotes more than a mobile home, and the people who live in one know it. They are also acutely aware of how richer folk live, because they watch so much television.

The Congolese are watching television, too – South African, European and American television. They’re comparing themselves to international standards and they’re increasingly cognisant that there are lots and lots of people in the world lucky enough not to live in “a hut made of sticks”. Comparatively wealthy Congolese are profoundly aware that people live better in Europe and North America, which helps explain why so many of them emigrate when the opportunity presents itself. There’s little doubt that the skilled surgeon profiled in this article could emigrate to the US with his skill set, as our country continues to produce fewer physicians than we need and import skilled professionals from abroad.

And that’s where I think the article misses a real opportunity. Rural Kentucky is one of the parts of the US that has a very hard time attracting and retaining physicians. The article notes that the truck driver is resentful of the South Asian physicians he encounters in local hospitals and worries they’re conspiring to give him the wrong medication. (Indeed, he threatens to “shoot them plumb between the eyes” if they do.) It’s easy to imagine the Congolese doctor emigrating to the US and being the object of the truck driver’s resentment. It would be useful, I think, to bring the article full circle by looking closely at the economic incentives the doctor has to come to the US, the damage to the Congolese medical system caused by widespread emigration, and the sorts of tensions comparatively wealthy doctors from the developing world experience living with comparatively poor patients in rural America. I’d be very interested in some interviews with the doctors and nurses who are living in Hazard, Kentucky, and sending large portions of their paychecks home to support their extended families.

But hey, the Economist fills 120 pages every week. They’ll get around to that article sometime soon, I suspect.

It’s the shortest day of the year and I’m feeling very short on time as I try to wrap up projects that absolutely, positively have to be completed by this weekend’s holiday. The two that are keeping me up at night are a book chapter on the international blogosphere, and a fireplace mantel that I’m building for my sister and her partner’s apartment. Both need a bit more sanding and touch-up painting before I’m ready to give them away.

Some quick links that caught my eye today, in lieu of a proper blogpost.

Ory Okolloh of Kenyan Pundit let me know about a fantastic issue of literary journal Granta titled “The View from Africa”. The majority of contributions are from Africans, and the two that I’ve had the chance to read are excellent. Ory pointed me towards a piece by Binyavanga Wainaina, a Nairobi-based author who offered the satirical and very challenging “How to write about Africa”. (Pieces like this are great when, like me, you complain about how other people write or report on Africa… and you realize that you’re using cliches and sloppy generalizations as well…) I also enjoyed Lindsey Hilsum’s “We Love China”, which takes a close look at China’s increasing influence in Africa. It’s not a new story, but Hilsum tells it well, talking to Chinese entrepreneurs about why it’s a great time to be in business in Sierra Leone.

Ory’s also engaged with a great debate on her blog about the future of Kenyan journalism – she’s now three posts into a series, and her thoughts – and those of her commenters, are an interesting addition to the ideas Wainaina puts forward in Granta.

I went to Jamaica (for 36 hours…) a couple of months ago to lend a hand with a benefit for “Students and Staff Expressing Truth”, a computer-education and personal growth program based in Jamaica’s prisons, led by the remarkable Kevin Wallen. Wallen, with encouragement from my collegue Charlie Nesson, has started posting on Charlie’s blog. It’s a little odd to read Charlie’s blog and not know whether to expect Harvard’s most exciting law professor or a brilliant young social activist… but I suspect that’s how Charlie likes it. Kevin’s recent post about his “Unchained” radio show, which broadcasts songs requested by family on the outside for inmates, was especially moving to me.

It was amazing to watch people meet each other at the Global Voices conference earlier this month – David Sasaki and Georgia Popplewell, for instance, who’ve become a dream team covering the Americas, but hadn’t met face to face before coming to London. (BTW, don’t miss David’s excellent recent post on translation and language…)

I knew the meeting between Haitham Sabbah, a Jordanian of Palestinian heritage living in Bahrain and Lisa Goldman, an Israeli of Canadian extraction, would be an important one. It was, though, not an easy one for either participant – Lisa called it “difficult” and “cathartic” – Haitham tells us the talk caused him three sleepless nights. It also led him to post an amazing piece, called “Should We?”, where he makes a brave commitment to building bridges between Palestinians and Israelis.

It’s not a surprise to me, reading back on Lisa’s blog, that talking with her could inspire one to commit to building bridges. A beautiful piece from a few weeks back – “Fear and loathing in the Middle East” – is one of the best meditations I’ve seen on the human tendency to fear that which we don’t know about… especially things we think we know about and absolutely don’t.

Back to work. Happy solstice, everyone.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf would have a tough path ahead of her even if George Weah would get out of her way. Governing a nation without running water, widespread electricity, navigable roads outside the capital or a functioning economy would be a challenge most leaders would run away from. Johnson-Sirleaf seems to be taking the right first steps, travelling to New York and Washington for medical appointments and preliminary meetings with US officials, whose support will be critical as Liberia seeks to rebuild. Her trip has already been rewarded with a laudatory editorial in the New York Times… which doesn’t guarantee the US will keep paying attention, but is a nice first step.

Her challenger, football star George Weah, on the other hand, is making all the wrong moves. Last weekend, he made a set of inflammatory speeches that led to rioting in the streets of Monrovia. Returning from trips to meet with Ghana’s President Kufour and South Africa’s President Mbeki (two countries likely to be critical economic and security partners to Liberia in the future), Weah declared that he was the lawful president of Liberia and that the recent elections had been fraudulent. Unfortunately for Weah, the Liberian electoral commission has dismissed Weah’s charges of widespread fraud. They acknowledge that there were “errors”, but argue that these errors had “negligible effect” on the election outcome, where Johnson-Sirleaf took almost 60% of the run-off vote against Weah.

Weah certainly isn’t the first poor loser in West African politics. But he’s got a somewhat unique position. An internationally-famous football star, he’s probably the world’s most famous Liberian. And he’s unambiguously a hero to many of the thousands of unemployed – and armed – former combatants in Liberia’s long civil war. UNMIL (the UN peacekeeping Mission in Liberia) has reacted swiftly and decisively to end rioting precisely because they’re worried that any violence could spiral out of control closely. UNMIL has 15,000 troops in Liberia – the UN’s largest and most expensive peacekeeping operation – and Johnson-Sirleaf, in an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel, says she believes they’ll need to remain in place for at least three more years.

Sirleaf and Weah met on Saturday and shook hands, which is a step in the right direction. But until Weah agrees to give up his increasingly desparate-looking campaign and join Sirleaf’s government, a lot of Liberia-watchers are going to be holding their breath as January 16th – Sirleaf’s scheduled inauguration – draws closer.

Christian Science Monitor has two excellent West Africa stories today. One comes from my friend Abe McLaughlin in Nigeria, where he talks to some of the “yahoo-yahoo boys” – kids who make their living sending millions of advance fee fraud (419) scam emails. While there are several internet sites dedicated to making fun of the “stupidity” of 419 fraudsters, McLaughlin points out an uncomfortable truth: 419 continues to exist because greedy Westerners continue to fall for the pitches.

“You have no idea where Nigeria even is – you’re just greedy and want the money,” says Sonny, a former yahoo-yahoo boy who became a middle manager in a scam ring, speaking of the foreigners he targeted. He singles out Americans for special disdain. Canadians or Europeans tend to be cautious, but when Americans get e-mails promising millions, if only they’ll pay a small up-front fee, “They just say, ‘Send the money quickly,’ ” he says laughing.

McLaughlin points out that some of the people involved with the 419 “industry” see a certain poetic justice in using advance fee fraud to “punish” the US for its past role in slavery and its current role in exploiting Niger Delta oilfields. Popular songs in Nigeria – “I Go Chop Your Dollar” (Quicktime Movie) and “419 State of Mind”, make it clear that there’s a certain pride and joy in screwing foreigners out of their cash:

“Some call it 419 or advance fee fraud
I say it’s getting dough from greedy victims abroad
Without pulling the trigger, contact,
slash ‘em with my sword, Lord,
Go-getters make their life better
By sending a letter…”
- Mode 9, “419 State of Mind, Part II”

(Thanks to Obie from South London of Soul on Ice – for the links.)

(Update: the webmaster of the Riverside Rugby Blog evidently has a good command of Nigerian pidgin and has a helpful translation of “I go chop your dollar” for all us Oigbos who’d otherwise miss some of the jokes.)

While these “go-getters” aren’t physically harming the vast majority of their victims, they’re causing huge harm to anyone trying to do legitimate business in Nigeria. Ask the US State Department for advice on business travel to Nigeria, and they’ll send you this handy brochure complete with warnings that the US Embassy will help you get out of a bad Nigerian business transaction in one piece, but that “To date, however, the U.S. Embassy has never been able to recover a scam victim’s money.”

According to McLaughlin, the Nigerian authorities are starting to get better at catching the scammers and paying the money back. The newly formed Economic and Financial Crimes Commission recently repaid $4.4 million to an elderly Hong Kong man and $17 million (of a total $242 million loss) to a Brazilian bank. But these anti-corruption efforts are only going to go so far in changing the public perception of a nation currently in the news for a cross-dressing, money-laundering corrupt state governor.

Three nations west of Nigeria, Ghana is nowhere near as criminally colorful as Nigeria, but it’s often held up as an example of regional financial success. But an article on Ghana’s chicken industry reveals just how fragile that success can be. While US poultry producers aren’t subsidized in the insane way our cotton and sugar producers are, subsidies help keep the cost of poultry feed low. This, combined with the efficiency of factory farms that raise tens of thousands of chickens at a time, make imported frozen chicken more affordable in Ghana than locally grown chickens.

Ghana responded to the cries of a domestic poultry association by raising tariffs on imported poultry to 40% in an attempt to protect 10,000 domestic farmers. But emergency legislation this March reversed that tariff decision – poultry farmers believe the reversal was due to pressure from the IMF and other international donors.

The hope that I, and other free trade proponents, hold is that actual free trade – the kind where developed as well as developing nations lower their tariff barriers and phase out agricultural subsidies – will help poor nations make money. But situations like the Ghanaian chicken scenario give me some pause. Even without feed subsidies, US chicken farmers are going to run vastly larger chicken farms than their Ghanaian competitors – will local chicken ever be cost-competitive in west Africa?

Driving home from Cambridge last night, I had the chance to catch up on back episodes of “This American Life”. The middle act of a show titled “David and Goliath” was a brilliant story from Rachel Louise Snyder about the Cambodian garment industry. Cambodia has risen to power as a major garment exporter by doing everything right: passing strict labor laws, giving workers liveable workplaces, annual vacations, maternity leave and paid overtime, and courting retailers concerned with corporate social responsibility.

It worked pretty well, especially before the elimination of the Multifiber Agreement, a vast package of tariffs and quotas that had the effect of keeping China’s garmnent industy in check. Now Cambodian factory owners are finding their sweatshop-free labor is very expensive in global terms, and are looking for legislative help from the US Congress in protecting an industry that brings in an enormous percentage of Cambodia’s foreign exchange earnings.

It seems to me that Cambodia needs to do some work branding their nation as a provider of fair-labor goods, getting people interested in checking the “made in” labels and choosing goods with an origin that makes them feel good. But this is probably wistful thinking on my part – despite the popularity of anti-China rhetoric in the popular press, WalMart still seems to be doing okay stocking its shelves with 70-80% of its inventory from Chinese factories.

What’s a small nation to do when a big nation doesn’t pay attention to the consequences of its actions? Do you hope that American consumers will wise up and choose to pay a small premium for goods sewn by unionized labor in Cambodia? Or should we expect more nations to give up on the straight and narrow and get more excited about finding ways to “go chop your dollar”?

President Bush’s statement acknowledging 30,000 civilian casualties in the war in Iraq has been, predictably, getting a great deal of play in the blogosphere today. I’m not a regular reader of US political blogs, so my apologies if I’m making a connection that’s been made elsewhere.

30,000 civilian casualties seems like a very low number. It’s close to the number being offered by the website Iraq Body Count, which takes reports from the press, the US military and the Red Cross, adds them up and reports the numbers. While this sounds like a reasonable way to count war dead, it’s a really, really bad method for getting a comprehensive count of people dead as a result of the US invasion of Iraq.

Basically, the IBC number is the “reported dead”. According to their methodology page, the staff of the Iraq Body Count project take reports of civilian dead in the mainstream press, check to ensure the reports appear in two media sources, and record the numbers of dead reported.

But not every death in a war zone gets reported. If a bomb hits a building and people die, but journalists don’t see it, there’s a good chance those deaths don’t get added to the totals. And these numbers don’t include civilian deaths from less direct causes – an increased number of murders in a post-Saddam Iraq, deaths from illnesses caused by disrupted food and water supplies, etc.

The way you get a comprehensive death toll from a war is to do an epidemeological survey, choosing households at random and interviewing them to see who died in a period before the war and in a period after the war, and what the causes were. Dr. Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University used this method to count war dead in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and came up with the stunning figure of 1.7 million deaths in two years, only 200,000 from violence. This figure was widely reported and cited as evidence that the bloodiest war since World War Two had been largely ignored outside of Africa.

As it turns out, Dr. Roberts also conducted the same sort of study in Iraq, in the summer of 2004. Surveying 988 Iraqi households (7,868 people in 33 neighborhoods around the country) carefully chosen to provide a statistically significant random sample, Dr. Roberts and his team came up with the stunning news that the death rate in Iraq shot up from 5% before the war to 7.9% in the eighteen months after the war. This rise in death rate implied roughly 100,000 civilian casualties in the war in Iraq.

The respected British medical journal, The Lancet, reported the results of the study, which were picked up by a few US newspapers, but largely didn’t enter the national debate. The timing of the announcement was fairly poor – the numbers were released just before the US presidential election and it’s hard to avoid the perception that Dr. Roberts wanted his results to affect the outcome of the 2004 elections. Right-wing pundits seized on the small sample size of the survey and the long error bars (because the survey relies on statistical extrapolation, the figure of 98,000 dead is the top of a bell-curve distribution of possible accurate figures). Worried the study was partisan and biased, Rob Stein, reporting on the story for the Washington Post, called a military expert at Human Rights Watch, Marc E. Garlasco, who declared, “These numbers seem to be inflated.”

“This American Life” ran an excellent hour-long radio show on the Iraq extrapolation a few weeks back, where they interviewed Garlasco, who admitted that, when asked for comment by Stein, he hadn’t read the study and was giving a “snap reaction” to the figure of 98,000 dead. Since reading the study, Garlasco admits that Roberts methods appear to be sound.

Why does it matter whether there are 30,000 dead or 98,000 dead?
Or 196,000 dead? When Dr. Roberts released his study, estimating 98,000 deaths, the Iraq Body Count site estimated 15,000 dead – using a crude extrapolation forwards, perhaps Roberts’ study, conducted today, would show a doubling in body count.

It’s not just a matter of justice or respect – it’s also a matter of how policy gets shaped in the future. As the US looks into strategies of pulling out of Iraq, it’s possible that, as reported by Sy Hersh in the New Yorker, US troops will be replaced with an increased use of air power.

While I’d be very glad to see our troops come home, increased air power has a price. According to the Lancet study, 84% of violent deaths were due to actions of coalition forces – 95% of those deaths were the result of airstrikes, missles or helicopter gunships. In other words, when we fight the Iraq war from the air, civilians die, and we don’t hear about all those deaths. And if we don’t hear about them, we don’t make plans for troop pull-out with those future deaths in mind.

My friend David Weinberger wants to know why we don’t want to know how many died in Iraq. Part of what’s so moving about the This American Life radio piece is that Garlasco (the guy who trashed Roberts’ study before reading it) joined Human Rights Watch precisely so he could ask the Pentagon that question. His previous job? He was the guy who identified precision bombing targets for the Pentagon. In other words, he had to calculate whether a target could be bombed with a minimum of civilian casualities, which is hard to do when the military doesn’t try to count casualties after a bombing.

It’s hard to have a debate about what to do about the morass we face in Iraq. But it’s lots harder to have it if the numbers we’re working with may be low by a factor of six.

I had the great good fortune to participate in the second annual Weblogging Ecosystem workshop earlier this year at the WWW 2005 conference in Chiba, Japan – it was a terrific day-long meeting filled with interesting papers and gave me a much better sense for the state of the art in scholarly writing about the blogosphere.

This year, I’m serving as part of the program committee for the third Weblogging Ecosystem workshop, which will be held in Edinburg, Scotland on May 23rd, in conjunction with the 2006 WWW conference. Researchers working on visualizations and analysis of information flow in the blogosphere are invited to participate, and there’s a team of smart people reviewing papers and inviting the best presenters to speak at the meeting. Drafts are due by March 10th if you’re interested in being a part. My friends Matthew Hurst, Natalie Glance and Eytan Adar do an excellent job of finding some of the best and brightest doing work in this field, so I’m hugely looking forward to the upcoming meeting.

Update: one interesting bit of the conference is a “data challenge” – do something interesting with a data set provided by the nice folks at Intelliseek. It’s a comprehensive set of blogposts put onto the net over the course of two weeks in July, available as a set of XML files. Once the world stops spinning quite so fast, I’m looking forward to thinking up something interesting to do with the data.