In spite Zanzibar has no electricity - no wait - that's not true, there is power, but it comes in the in the form of hungry generators which make the kind of noise that’ll eventually make you go mad. Big ones, small ones. All colours and sizes.
Exactly like the festival itself.
Everything to make this festival move.
And it moves.
Yesterday I walked with the parade all the four kilometres from Kariakoo through Darajani, Malindi up to the Old Fort. I hate to admit getting sentimental, but I must admit that the colourful explosion of Zanzibaris getting their act together in the parade and the groups of people following it really was stunning.
Traffic police stopping traffic with broad smiles. Makes this country a whole different country (at least for a short while). Surely, it made me forget that there's no electricity and that the CCM and the CUF can't agree on who should run this place.
The Sauti za Busara guy above was laughing at me while I was trying to shoot him shooting himself with the whole parade marching in to the centre of Stone Town. Obviously, if you are part of something big like this it gotta be documented.
'What makes this so special?', a Danish journalist asked me yesterday.
Somehow I feel that the answer is rather obvious, but then again this is my 3rd festival, and my 5th year in East Africa. It is easy to get excited when this kind of cultural offers doesn't come often.
To me it is a true pleasure to see how the festival has managed to create a platform in a corner of Africa, where this just doesn't happen. To see people perform with pride and enthusiasm. To create space where people will learn and be inspired.
Power is not just electricity.
All my photos from the parade here.
Make you own at www.wordle.net.
Still, the largely weak consumer purchasing power in the country - where half of the population still lives on less than a dollar a day - puts a looming ceiling over how high telecom executives can expect profits to climb.
By comparison, for example, in South Africa where the country’s GDP stands at $280billion per year, the ARPU is $40 per month.
According to a survey conducted by Tele World, across Africa, Latin America and Asia, the number of people who do not have a bank account but do have a mobile phone is set to grow from 1 billion today to 1.7 billion by 2012. These ‘unbanked mobile’ individuals represent a compelling market opportunity for operators.
Read the full article from the Guardian on Sunday here.
The situation in South Africa in regard of satellite, data, voice, internet, network solutions and LAN provisioning.- and how the government deals with it - according to Zapiro.
Wonder what Zapiro would make of our situation here in Tanzania?
Illustration borrowed from here
Lots of debate in the blogosphere on the role of social media in the Iran protests. Should we pass on information, or do we put the people in danger? Twitter is one tool, and one proposal circulating is to set your Twitter profile to 'Tehran' in order to make it harder to detect Iranian twitters. I just did.
What I think? I doubt the amount of the various kinds of information will give anyone the correct picture of the chaos in Iran now. However, the fact that the people of Iran use the social media to express their attitudes, and communicate it so massively, has an enormous impact - and send signals which are hard to misunderstand.
I also think what that would have meant 9 years ago in Belgrade, Serbia, when the Serbs went on the streets to protest against Milosevic. It might have made a difference in the way the outside world understood the Serbs as individuals.
More cartoons here.
When I was a child in the Danish 70ties we had to switch on my aunt’s TV half an hour before we wanted to watch it. It had to warm up. Sometimes we had to hit it to make the image on the screen stand still or it would flicker up and down, driving us mad.
Not a big deal, really, as there was only one Danish channel to watch anyway.
When I walked by this constellation last week at the MS TCDC I couldn’t help smiling. I was wondering what happens when they watch TV in that house...
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