Arts & Books

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Sokari, the study of ‘mobile technology for development’ has become a new fad in the development world. But is ‘SMS Uprising’ different? And why is it an important book?

The World Cup might be just around the corner, and excitement for the first event of its kind on African soil is rapidly gaining momentum, but ordinary South Africans are finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the darker side of playing host to the greatest show on Earth.

Possibly the most dangerous pamphlet to come out of Nigeria, this is the definitive manual of how to hoodwink citizens or ‘Mugus’ (people who fall for a scam), take the elections and stay in power.

A year ago it appeared that the house of cards created by the financial elite had tumbled for the last time. Bastions of free-market ideology were pilloried for their blind devotion to complex mathematical models and a rather more selective blindness to human ‘externalities’.

I don’t like press conferences.

Organised to propagate nothing more than a particular message, they are spaces where real questions are rarely asked because there is no place for real answers.

Librarians the world over will testify that the last decade has generated a broad range of literature on the Zimbabwean question.

Slum tourism has become all the rage. There has been John Le Carré’s ‘The Constant Gardener’ that made Nairobi’s Kibera famous, Gregory David Robert’s semi-fiction, ‘Shantaram’, set in the slums of Mumbai and a host of others.