MLK BLVD Project

For about five months I lived in a flat on Martin Luther King Road in Lusaka. I immediately associated it with the Martin Luther King Jr boulevards, streets and ways that I'd been to over the years: Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Oakland, New Orleans. In the US, naming a street after MLK is about creating a symbolic connection between black neighbourhoods and a city; a repudiation of centuries of apartheid policies.

In Lusaka, Martin Luther King Road is in affluent Kabulonga, home to a disproportionate number of white expats, NGO workers and upper-middle-class Zambians. Our neighbour had cousins, sons and nieces spread across the world studying or running businesses in Australia, Texas and the UK.

In the style of many southern African neighbourhoods, MLK Road Lusaka is completely surrounded by glass topped walls, heavy metal gates and underpaid security guards from nearby townships. Most of the landscaped area between the walls and the drainage ditches that abut the tarmac is kept immaculately trimmed by a squad of blue-coverall wearing young men. They cut the grass, bent over double, with blunt scythes.

The MLK BLVD project is a blog of crowdsourced photos from different Martin Luther King roads, boulevards and ways from across the US and the world. It's really worth looking at.

It's also making me really regret not taking better pictures. I basically have only a photo of my gate during a hail-storm. If anyone has better photos I suggest you upload it to the MLK BLVD project Flickr pool. Also, I seem to remember many African cities having MLK roads, photos of which would probably ad great perspective to the project.

Broadband African Internet: A Map

From Many Possibilities and Zambian Economist

My Sick Links

I've been in bed the last few days with a cold, or "flu" as it's called in Zambian, and I've been obsessively reading blogs. I'm also getting better at the internet; I learned how to do this thing called "bookmarking." Seriously, I've never done it before. The following are some awesome things I "bookmarked" while sick.


The Places We Live is a website of photos and audio from slums across the world. Part of it is interesting interactive photos of people's homes while they tell you about it. My favourite is the home built under a bridge in Jakarta. It's not what you think.

From the links section of that site I found Squatter City, a great blog about squatter and illegal settlement issues from around the world.

My housemate and ILouis have been obsessed with pirates of late. We trade news tidbits with a giddy sense of excitement. This Guardian article is one of the better ones. A straight up interview with a pirate about why and how he does what he does. Great people these pirates.

I haven't really been following Democracy Now since I've been in Lusaka but there's always some great stuff when I do go back like Mugabe vs Obiang and the double standard towards African dictators and a discussion about what's happening now that more journalists under repressive regimes are going online (hint: more journalists in jail).

The most fascinating thing that I witnessed in the last few days, however, is the Strange Maps blog. I've had a fascination with maps since I was very young, like drawing detailed fantasy maps on giant rolls of paper, and this managed to revive all kinds of super nerdy feeling that I'd forgot existed.

Zambian Media Online

I wrote this for Journalists for Human Rights' Foreign Correspondence Site.

Central Lusaka is saturated with busy internet cafes. “Business centres” advertising copying, scanning and internet can be found in many of the richer neighbourhoods and shopping areas. My office has three competing wireless networks and so did my former flat. None of them were mine unfortunately but the point remains, Zambia—or at least a specific segment of urban middle class Zambia—is online.

The increasing availability of “high speed” internet—or just internet depending on your perspective—despite prohibitively high set up charges is creating a boom in Zambian online content.

There's a large Facebook presence with plenty of groups dedicated to the silly and serious. Blogger.com lists 1,300 blogs based in Zambia using its free software. This is misleading however as most are created by international volunteers and NGO workers who often keep a blog only as long as they stay in the country. Here's a great piece with links to the best Zambian blogs covering everything from politics (well duh) to conservation, football and music.

The rise of the Zambian blogosphere is not being matched by the major newspapers. Both the state-run Times of Zambia and the Daily Mail have horribly out-dated sites replicating their printed material in a mess of oldschool design and flashing banner ads. The weekly Lusaka Times is much better than the dailies with a blog format and a healthy comments section primarily from the Zambian diaspora in the US and Britain. The Post, the most widely read newspaper in Zambia promises a slick modern news site at first glance but asks you to pay as soon as you click on an interesting headline. At ten US dollars a month and available with credit card only I'm assuming that the site is meant to target the diaspora community.

The Post has everything to lose by alienating its domestic online readers. A strange fact of Zambian life is that internet is increasingly available in places where newspapers are not distributed. According to UNESCO, only 5 out of 1000 Zambians have access to a daily newspaper. Because of the underdeveloped road system, copies of the Post reach Chipata in the afternoon and barely reach outside the main cities at all except for days or even weeks later. Cellphone networks, however, cover almost the whole country and now with new inexpensive cellular modems, and internet cellphones, Zambians can, and do, plug into the internet almost anywhere.

The threat to the Post's future online hegemony are sites like The Watchdog and The Zambian: simple sites that embody many of the values of the new web. Both sites have existed for only a matter of months but have grown considerably. The Watchdog, tied somehow to a paper version I've never seen, is most like a traditional news site. By doing breaking news, criticizing official sources and encouraging reader response through comments it keeps me checking daily. Hopefully, with their small budget and tiny (2 people?) staff they'll increase their coverage.

The Zambian is a bit bewildering, something of a blog aggregator like Afrigator.com, but also a social networking platform and a bit of a news site. They apparently have almost 800 users, though the daily activity is still low. If they can make it a bit more user friendly I'm sure it could really take off. If they can find a way to make money off their content they will be very successful.

The Congo Situation is Baffling

Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda is telling the BBC reporter that he plans to march on Kinshasa claiming that he's not an agent of Rawanda and is in fact a proud Congolese. I'd been listening to Nkunda speak for weeks on the BBC. The radio gave me the impression that he could only be reached by smuggled audio recorder in some damp jungle camp. I was surprised then when I moved into my new house, turned on Al Jazeera and there he was, all fifteen feet of him, wearing his trademark late 90s R&B glasses and confidently posing for the world's cameras and chatting with reporters.

It's strange how world media digests this new fighting. Since the Rawandan genocide, Tutsis are considered the victims and Nkunda, with his media savvy but perhaps correctly, brands himself as a Tutsi defense force. Why then are they going to march on Kinshasa? Why is the entire region so afraid of him? Can someone fill me in?

In one of Stephanie Nolan's blog posts she mentions being stuck in a remote eastern Congo village with no power, water or food, yet she could read the New York Times on her Blackberry. With that in mind, take a look at Ushahidi.com. Originally designed to monitor post election violence in Kenya, the site takes cellphone and web reports of violence and displacement and plots them on a map of the Lake Kivu region to give you a better idea of the geography of the conflict.

ps I stole that pic from the BBC website. It says Getty images on it if you look closely.

Some Afrocentric Links

Scarlett Lion is a very good blog (with photos) that I found through the Walrus website. The author takes her role as a Western journalist living in Africa very seriously; something I do not do. Maybe I should start.

A bumptious guide to book writing is an article mentioned on Scarlett Lion describing the pretentious flock of young men who aspire to write books about Africa and end up with "a manuscript that is all about you, with Africa as a picturesque backdrop to your macho derring-do." FYI I have no intention of writing a book but if I did, yeah, it would probably be as described above but weirder and not all that macho.

On that note, I genuinely enjoyed The Village of Waiting by George Packer which is a young man unashamedly writing about himself. In fact I routinely recommend this book to anyone who hasn't already been annoyed by my giddy lectures on, Darwin's Nightmare, my favourite documentary.