Africa's year ends,LRA horror, and more websites of interest

On the radio today, it's the end of Britain's presidency of the EU and the G8 and they're trying to do some kind of summary- Bob Geldof and the UK Secretary for International Development trying very hard to convince listeners that progress has been made, some development activists more skeptical- with the hodge podge WTO deal that emerged in Hong Kong and the news that the IMF is putting barriers in the way of some of the poorest countries debts being written off...it's not hard to see why. I suppose it's a bit like optimism versus pessimism- do you measure on the basis of what could have been (and therefore lament the missed chance of using the renewed focus to push as far as possible) or do you celebrate the fact that there has even been renewed focus and whatever little you are able to achieve......From where I'm at right now- feeling very low and sad about Nigeria- I feel pulled towards the importance of grand gestures, even if they end up achieving very little in the long run....I've been here before but recent events in Nigeria have focused my mind........perhaps in a month or two, I'll be back to my cynicism or pragmatism (whichever you choose to call it) but for now I feel very vulnerable............I suppose the cold dark weather does not help matters....

Also on the radio- BBC Radio4 Today programme this morning, a haunting account of the atrocities being committed in northern Uganda by the Lord's Resistance Army- the report was read over the monotonously eerie song by a boy freed from the army who describes how he was made by his captors to slit the throat of another boy after attempts at beating him to death had failed....there was something about the quiet way in which he recounted the story that made me want to throw up- what sort of world is it that we inhabit where atrocities like these happen for nearly twenty years but never really make the global headlines?

Have stumbled across a few websites of interest recently- the Nigerian-Belgian writer-Chika Unigwe's http://users.skynet.be/chikaunigwe/en_main.html , a Nigerian-American online entertainment magazine http://www.nigerianentertainment.com, the Nigerian-American slam poetry artist Bassey Ikpi's http://www.basseyworld.com/