African Bullets and Honey | Martin Kimani’s Blog

CHOCQUIBTOWN - Somos Pacifico. How amazing is this group?

is Palenque San Basilio in Colombia. In the midst of the massive love affair I am having with Colombia at the moment, and so getting to learn more about AfroColombia is way up on the list.

Colombia is a revelation. Let us start with the central bank webpage advertising an art collection open to the public. Where else is that done?
“Exhibits Permanent Banco de la República Art Collection consisting of nearly 3,000 paintings, sculptures and assembly of Colombian and Latin American masters from the XVI century to our days. [...]

can Kenya get Moi’s? The Swiss Federal Council has prolonged the freezing of Mobutu’s assets “until the supervisory authority has ruled on the complaint it has received but at the latest until 30 October 2009″. But strangely, it is a Swiss professor apparently leading the charge to keep the money away from Mobutu’s [...]

This week I have a piece in the East African from my recent trip to Central America. Visiting Colombia is the only time this past few months I have felt hopeful in a practical way that there is a way to bring Kenya back to some semblance of function.

Uribe’s style

Freedom is an unstoppable force. It may be delayed or diverted, blocked or shunted down dark alleyways but it emerges always to strike down tyranny. This, I think, is worth remembering because I forget it too often. Striking down tyranny is no guarantee of final victory: there is always the need for [...]

You know, Obama did not get into the White House for nothing. The US blockade of Cuba is one of the most truculent, cruel and ineffective policies of the last 50 years and now Obama is headed toward changing it. The idea that Cuba is poor because of its economic system is undermined [...]

Mass murder and the American Dream. It turns out that a lot of what was said in the media about the Columbine shootings was simply wrong according to this story by Andrew Gumble in the Guardian. It turns out that the killers were not resentful nerds out to punish jocks, their aim was [...]

One of the key outcomes of the London G20 summit - perhaps even more important than Michelle Obama’s hug for the Queen - was the allowance for the IMF to allocate $250 billion worth of Special Drawing Rights. This could be the basis of a future global reserve currency outside the sovereign control of [...]

The Chinese call for the creation of a new global reserve currency is a sign of weakness and not strength - according to the man with the op-ed momentum: Paul Krugman (link)
By the way, does anyone know what Samir Amin of ‘delinking’ fame is writing about the present crisis? I have not read much [...]

Just the other day China’s central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, was calling for the creation of an alternate global reserve currency. Now the Russians are suggesting a partial return to the gold standard. In practical terms, this is all a stretch but it reflects the jockeying for position that will be with us [...]

Who would have guessed that the good Dr. Kevin M. De Cock, director of H.I.V./AIDS for the World Health Organization, would have been so presciently named? A study in Kenya and Uganda by the National Institutes of Health has found evidence that circumcision might reduce a man’s risk of contracting HIV from heterosexual sex [...]

Two thousand years ago, Hermann a chieftain of the Cherusci tribe led his troops in the massacre of three Roman legions. This act is dated as the birth of the German nation and is being quietly celebrated after a century in which it was the rallying cry of the Hitlerite…(more)

If you are interested in the intellectual grounding of the Harlem Renaissance - and really how is it possible not to be? - then here is a good review of Alain Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher by Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth. Locke’s most famous essay, “The New Negro”, written in 1925 can [...]

Here is a clip of the fascinating and timely California Newsreel hour-long documentary on Melville J. Herskovits, the pioneering anthropologist of African and African-American studies.