Africabeat

Shawel Hailu stands in front of Laphto, a new multi-purpose entertainment
center which will feature luxury apartments, an art gallery, bowling
alley, pool hall, arcade, night club, cafe, fusion restaurant,
shopping, swimming pool, health club, running track, movie theatre (for
indy/art house films), VIP center, rentable shopping/office space, Wifi
hotspots, a Montessori school and, eventually, a world-class pediatrics
hospital. He’s part of the wave of returned Diaspora Ethiopians driving the current building boom.

His materials?  Sourced from China, of course, via Guangzhou.  The foreman on his work site are also Chinese.

So now that I have the bandwidth back, I’m finally going to start posting TED talks!

TED, for all those of you who don’t know, was a conference I attended in Arusha in June that changed my life.

The first is a performance by South African, Vusi Mahlasela,  "a singer-songwriter who was a crucial artistic voice during the fight against apartheid."

I wasn’t familiar with Mahlasela’s work before he walked on stage at that auditorium in Arusha, and so I was completely unprepared for what I was about to hear. 

His voice made me realize that no matter what I write in this life,
I will never be able to communicate  what music can.  These words are just awkward boxes fit to carry only approximations of my meaning.  But music?

A reader recently asked for some hope.  Shot by my friend Robbie, with my camera. One possible alternative to this.

TED GLOBAL 2007, MONDAY, JUNE 4,DAY 1: The first day’s speakers–Euvin Naidoo, Andrew Mwenda, Carol Pineau, Andrew Dosunmu, Zeray Alemseged, and Newton Aduaka–took the story of Africa, the tired story of dependence, desperation, and despair, and tore it to shreds. They took the West’s gaze, and killed it, stomped on it, mocked it, burned its effigy (Joseph Conrad to be precise) so that we could start an entirely new conversation using an entirely different vocabulary.  We killed famine, death, hopelessness, hunger, tragedy, poverty and started using words like potential, opportunity, wealth, entrepreneurship, ingenuity, art, imagination, creativity, success, investment, growth, choice.

These are words the media use liberally when writing about emerging nations like India, China or Brazil, but not to describe some of the fastest-growing economies in the world when they happen to be in Africa.

Now imagine spending four days where you only use the good words to talk about Africa: words of forward motion, words of change.  I’m not talking about bringing Tony Robbins on stage and dreaming of a better future.  I’m talking about hearing from the mouths of people who are out there living it, building it, succeeding (and quite possibly getting very rich) in Africa.

It’s been thrilling.

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