Xeni in Africa ....

West Africa: three fresh posts from the road.

(1) Benin: vintage hotel radios with email indicators

I have encountered these handsome, clunky old analog radios in hotel rooms throughout Benin. Each of those numbered buttons is supposed to give you a different radio station (usually only one or two kinda work, if you're lucky). The slider thing (often missing) is volume. I do not know what that input jack is for, presumably headphones.

But the best part of this is the little envelope icon, with an associated red light.

I like to imagine that this is an email indicator.

My red email status light hasn't lit up yet, but perhaps that's just because nobody in Africa wants to send email to my hotel room radio.

(2) Sourcing "Africa's a continent. Not a crisis."

Regarding the unattributed title of yesterday's post, "Africa's a continent. Not a crisis" -- Ethan Zuckerman wrote it. He explains,

"That's me, I'm afraid, from Link. The paragraph it comes from, more or less..."

"Africa's not an issue. It's not a cause or a problem. It's a continent - a complicated, confusing, beautiful continent, with wealth and poverty, peace and strife, success and tragedy. When Africa becomes a cause, we tend to see only one side of the continent - a helpless, dependent, starving side that "needs our help"."

"The post was written during debate over the Bob Geldof Live8 nonsense - the event caused a huge debate in the African and Afrophile blogging community and this was my response to the tendency for the event to blur all the problems and hopes of the continent into a single word."

(3) East Africa: Photoblogging aid work in Kenya. Link to post.

(4) Ghana: eat Shitto. Link to post.