Lucky Dube

For me the music of South African reggae sensation Lucky Dube will always be bathed in the nostalgia of hearing those songs over and over again in dirty, sweaty night clubs in Madagascar. He was pretty famous as far as African musicians go, but it was still a bit of a surprise to see that The Economist ran an obituary for him after he was murdered last week in a car theft. It had never really occurred to me until reading the obit how many of those songs were written when the apartheid regime was still running South Africa. They're much more provocative when you think of them that way. For some reason it always seem easy to forget that apartheid wasn't really that long ago. Neither, for that matter, was colonialism.

Incidentally, I've recently read two really good book on African history: John Reader's Africa: A Biography of the Continent and Martin Meredith's The Fate of Africa. Both were excellent, although I'd say Reader was especially outstanding.

I Hate the Bank

I've never heard of a good bank in Africa. Generally they're just varying degrees of awful. But I think I got a little bit spoiled by my regional bank in Madagascar, which was by far the least painful banking experience I've had in the developing world. No doubt that was in part because the director of that bank was a great guy and a friend, not to mention a lookalike of the "Bald Bull" character from the old Nintendo game, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out (which was later renamed Super Punch-Out after Nintendo apparently decided they didn't want to associate their product with a convicted rapist and lunatic). We'll just call him Maurice.

When I got here I was optimistic that my banking success would continue. The bank I was instructed to use here, Bank of Africa (BOA), was after all the same one I used in Madagascar. But whatever magic Maurice used to turn the tiny Fenerive-Est branch of BOA into a little slice of financial heaven is clearly missing from the Niamey behemoth of the same name. In almost three months I've probably been there 10 times now. Not once have I exited having accomplished everything I went in for. Every time I end up wandering down hallways knocking on unmarked doors asking for Madame So-and-So who's the one who's supposed to help me. Upon reaching Madame So-and-So, usually I don't get halfway through explaining my request before I'm redirected to Monsieur Such-and-Such. This usually goes on for an hour or so before they decide they've had their fun and they tell me to come back another day.

Today I found out that the application I filled out for a bank card on my very first visit back in mid-August (which would mercifully allow me to do at least some of my business through a machine rather than going inside and dealing with Mr. and Mrs. Whatever) had never been received, which is kind of funny because I filled it out right there at the counter. I don't think it got lost between my hand and the hand of the teller who took it from me. So I filled out another application and Madame happily assured me that this time they'd be sure to process it. I ought to be receiving my card in "one or two months".

DoTS

I know I've mentioned the movie Death of Two Sons to a lot of people over the past few years, and I'm about to mention it again. This is a documentary directed by a guy I went to high school with who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Guinea and produced by a guy who was a volunteer I overlapped with for just a few months in Cote d'Ivoire. It's about the notorious shooting of African immigrant Amadou Diallo by New York City police officers and the lesser known death almost exactly a year later of Jesse Thyne, the Peace Corps volunteer who lived with Diallo's family in a village in Guinea.

They're releasing the movie on DVD on October 30th, which you can buy through their website or on Amazon. It's also available on Netflix, so I'd encourage you to add it to your queue.

Update. You can read a short review of the movie from Variety Magazine here.

No, I haven't Forgotten about the Blog

Things have really picked up over the last month or so. I've been doing a lot of traveling and spending a lot of time putting a plan together for what I'm going to do over the next year and a half and how I'm going to do it. A lot of things are still up in the air, but I finally feel like I'm really getting some momentum and clarity about what I need to be spending my time on.

It looks like a big part of my project here is going to involve carrying out a survey of rural farmers. I'm sure the Sanford folks out there will envy my opportunity to return to the always fascinating questions of survey design, sampling strategy, weighting, dealing with bias, and all the other pressing concerns we dealt with under the watchful eye of P. Cook. Hopefully those lessons will be applicable to surveys that aren't about gun ownership.

In other news, Ramadan ended last week. The big thing about the end of Ramadan is that everybody has to buy new fancy clothes. Of course everybody is buying their new fancy clothes at the same time, so they all end up paying twice as much as they would have paid if they had bought them a month earlier or later. I've tried having this discussion with several people, but it never goes anywhere. Anyway, the city seems noticeably more lively now that Ramadan's over and people are all smiles strutting about in their fancy new robes and boubous.