Just sitting in a quiet room at the end of the day- everyone else has left the office and I'm just finishing off when I am drawn to open this blog up and again drop a few lines....
Yesterday is being reported in the media as Tony Blair's black day, what with his Deputy (the linguistically challenged John Prescott) admitting to an affair with one of his secretaries.....just goes to show New Labour is just as capable of sleaze as the Tories....to Charles Clarke the Home Secretary being asked to resign because about a thousand foreign criminals have been released from prison over the last year without being deported as they ought to have.....to Patricia Hewitt....she of the hectoring, deluded "This is the NHS' best year ever" being booed and slow hand clapped out of the Nurses' conference in Bournemouth....
With the local elections coming up next week, it's not a good time for Blair or New Labour....Nor is it for his warmongering ally Dubya whose opinion poll ratings seem to have gone into free fall...perhaps there is some justice after all.....
Just finished The Next Gulf- a book about Oil, London, Washington and Nigeria, which makes pretty scary reading (if you're Nigerian). It could have been better written but the questions it raises about the US' strategic interests in Nigerian (and West African) oil merely suggests that all our agitation as Nigerians over third term is besides the point- the real script is being written elsewhere....
And we know that for the US, and the UK ...as long as the oil keeps flowing, they will shut their eyes to everything else....
I've never forgotten the Abacha days when even the "sainted" Bill Clinton announced in South Africa that the US would recognize any Nigerian leader who had emerged through a democratic process, even if they shed their military uniform to do so...I remember how depressed I was that day.....
There is much these days in Nigerian happenings to remind me of the Abacha days- amazing how human beings can literally repeat the mistakes of history step by slow, mind numbing step..... Segun Adeniyi's article today in Thisday and Chief Awoniyi's letter to Obasanjo remind me of the final last minute warnings to Abacha....
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Springtime, Place of Reeds, a clutch of new Nigerian writing & Nigerwives
Watching the trees in the square opposite blossom into frothy whiteness, combined with the warmth I feel in my winter coat(time to consign it to the wardrobe soon), together with my sneezing in the morning,all confirm that spring is here....Now I know why the English worship the sun so much- you have to live through a dank dreary winter with darkness falling at 4 to understand the exhilaration.....
Off to Spain tomorrow for a well-deserved (even if I say so) Easter break....I'm reading Caitlin Davies' Place of Reeds- she's the daughter of English novelists Margaret Foster and Hunter Davies- and the book is her account of her marriage living with her Botswanan ex-husband in rural Botswana. It's a good but not great read so far, slightly dry and somehow it seems lacking in colour and seems to skirt round issues. It's also fairly critical of her husband and his family, and I slightly wonder- what did you expect- for instance not understanding why her husband who she met in the US as an Afro-haired hippy cuts his hair the day before he goes home to Botswana because "people will talk". I suppose for someone like me living between two cultures, it isn't so surprising, but am slightly irritated by what appears to be her naivete. She refers often to racism in Botswana but does not explore these deeply enough, especially considering that her husband is the son of an Afrikaner South African and a poor rural farmer Botswana woman....anyway I'll see if it gets better as I go on...
Going back to Nigerian writing, I notice that Nigerian novelist Chris Abani, he of Graceland fame has a new novella Becoming Abigail
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/nigeria/abanic1.htm out, as does Segun Afolabi, Nigerian winner of the Caine Prize last year. Afolabi's A Life Elsewhere, a collection of short stories makes its debut this month http://snipurl.com/p4ps. Wole Soyinka treats us to another volume of his delectable memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn follows the acclaimed Ake, Isara and Ibadan this month http://snipurl.com/p4pv. And Chimamanda Adichie is set to follow the success of Purple Hibiscus with Half of a Yellow Sun http://snipurl.com/p4q4 later this summer. Early next year we can expect Helon Habila's Measuring Time http://snipurl.com/p4qd.... It's good to see new Nigerian authors moving beyond the one book stage, and wait with bated breath to see if they live up to their earlier promise....
Stumbled across this website for Nigerwives, http://www.nigerwivesnigeria.com/ an organization of foreign women married to Nigerians....growing up they always appeared slightly elitist- in that odd pathetic way in which in Nigeria, anything "white" or Western had a slight cachet attached to it...Nevertheless they did lots of great charity work especially with the blind and provided an extended family network for their members in Nigeria. Good to see they're still going strong....
Off to Spain tomorrow for a well-deserved (even if I say so) Easter break....I'm reading Caitlin Davies' Place of Reeds- she's the daughter of English novelists Margaret Foster and Hunter Davies- and the book is her account of her marriage living with her Botswanan ex-husband in rural Botswana. It's a good but not great read so far, slightly dry and somehow it seems lacking in colour and seems to skirt round issues. It's also fairly critical of her husband and his family, and I slightly wonder- what did you expect- for instance not understanding why her husband who she met in the US as an Afro-haired hippy cuts his hair the day before he goes home to Botswana because "people will talk". I suppose for someone like me living between two cultures, it isn't so surprising, but am slightly irritated by what appears to be her naivete. She refers often to racism in Botswana but does not explore these deeply enough, especially considering that her husband is the son of an Afrikaner South African and a poor rural farmer Botswana woman....anyway I'll see if it gets better as I go on...
Going back to Nigerian writing, I notice that Nigerian novelist Chris Abani, he of Graceland fame has a new novella Becoming Abigail
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/nigeria/abanic1.htm out, as does Segun Afolabi, Nigerian winner of the Caine Prize last year. Afolabi's A Life Elsewhere, a collection of short stories makes its debut this month http://snipurl.com/p4ps. Wole Soyinka treats us to another volume of his delectable memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn follows the acclaimed Ake, Isara and Ibadan this month http://snipurl.com/p4pv. And Chimamanda Adichie is set to follow the success of Purple Hibiscus with Half of a Yellow Sun http://snipurl.com/p4q4 later this summer. Early next year we can expect Helon Habila's Measuring Time http://snipurl.com/p4qd.... It's good to see new Nigerian authors moving beyond the one book stage, and wait with bated breath to see if they live up to their earlier promise....
Stumbled across this website for Nigerwives, http://www.nigerwivesnigeria.com/ an organization of foreign women married to Nigerians....growing up they always appeared slightly elitist- in that odd pathetic way in which in Nigeria, anything "white" or Western had a slight cachet attached to it...Nevertheless they did lots of great charity work especially with the blind and provided an extended family network for their members in Nigeria. Good to see they're still going strong....
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Thinking of stopping, memory sticks and Tony Allen
Back again after another period away. I keep wondering whether these now infrequent visits mean I should give up on blogging entirely. There just does not seem to be enough hours in the day. I remember I used to say to people "You will always make time out for what really matters to you", and so I wonder if my inability to find time to blog (in my increasingly busy day) means that at some subconscious level, blogging's lost its appeal for me. On a conscious level I certainly miss it and wish I did it more often....
Dashing about on work, my memory stick has come in very handy. I can start a presentation or a report at work, save it to my memory stick, continue working on it on a laptop on the train, take it home and continue on the desktop, take it to a friend's and continue on their desktop.....the opportunities are seemingly endless. And to think that these small things can pack so much power.....perhaps one day we will just have minuscule memory sticks implanted into our fingers and we can take our stuff wherever we go......
Just finished Andrew Miller's The Optimists, an excellent book which I finished in one sitting. It's about a British photographer who witnesses a Rwanda-like massacre in an unnamed place and is haunted by it after returning to England.....he goes to some length to state that the story is NOT set in Rwanda and I'm not entirely sure why. In any case, I've been inspired to get his Booker Prize shortlisted first book, Oxygen which I start this week.....
This morning, quite a long segment of BBC Radio 4 Today's programme was devoted to Tony Allen, Fela's former percussionist, and the number of Western musicians who said their work had been inspired by him. Granted, I had never heard of half of them (including someone (Brian Eno? who invented something called ambient music) but they certainly seemed very well regarded by the Today programme.....it was good to wake up to some Afrobeat on a grey English April morning though.....and they plugged the Tony Allen Lagos No Shaking CD http://snipurl.com/p1bo
Dashing about on work, my memory stick has come in very handy. I can start a presentation or a report at work, save it to my memory stick, continue working on it on a laptop on the train, take it home and continue on the desktop, take it to a friend's and continue on their desktop.....the opportunities are seemingly endless. And to think that these small things can pack so much power.....perhaps one day we will just have minuscule memory sticks implanted into our fingers and we can take our stuff wherever we go......
Just finished Andrew Miller's The Optimists, an excellent book which I finished in one sitting. It's about a British photographer who witnesses a Rwanda-like massacre in an unnamed place and is haunted by it after returning to England.....he goes to some length to state that the story is NOT set in Rwanda and I'm not entirely sure why. In any case, I've been inspired to get his Booker Prize shortlisted first book, Oxygen which I start this week.....
This morning, quite a long segment of BBC Radio 4 Today's programme was devoted to Tony Allen, Fela's former percussionist, and the number of Western musicians who said their work had been inspired by him. Granted, I had never heard of half of them (including someone (Brian Eno? who invented something called ambient music) but they certainly seemed very well regarded by the Today programme.....it was good to wake up to some Afrobeat on a grey English April morning though.....and they plugged the Tony Allen Lagos No Shaking CD http://snipurl.com/p1bo
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
