Manal and Alaa's bit bucket free speech from the bletches

written for the APC blog

What do you think of Al Jazeera

On the second day of the Highway Africa conference they did a short "Hot Seat" exercise, they picked 4 journalists from different parts of the continent (no one from the north though) and asked them a bunch of questions about the state of African media.

One of the questions was "What do you think of Al Jazeera?"

Now this was a surprising question but in my opinion it was a very smart one, first it was a good test of how connected African media practitioners are with other places in the world. It seems that many didn't even know what Al Jazeera was.

But what interested me was to find out whether African journalists have some perception or opinion about Al Jazeera based on views  read more »

every time I visit an African country I find myself asking people quite rudely about their ethnic and tribal backgrounds (including the whites). being in a place where people know so much about their immediate history is fascinating, compared to Egypt where one might know loads of things about our ancient history but won't even remember where one's grandfather came from (of course this being Egypt nothing is uniform, many do know about their family trees and tribal backgrounds and all).

Now young arabs are supposed to have an identitiy crisis, we are supposed to spend the nights sweating over post modernist exestential question of belonging or not and the mere fact that we enjoy holy, boly and cairo wood at the same time is supposed to be very significant (what with haifa wahby being shiaa and nancy being  read more »

تأخير ساعتين في مطار الخرطوم، تأخير ستة ساعات في مطار نيروبي، يوم الأحد محدش شغال في المطار و محدش بيرد على الايميل، بيات ليلة اضافية في جوهانسبرج، تأخير أربع ساعات في مطار جوهانسبرج، تأخير ساعتين في مطار بورت اليزابيث، عادي أنت في أفريقيا.

يومين من غير نوم أو أكل، لكن ساعة واحدة في بالعربية من بورت اليزابيث لجراهامس تاون كافية لأني أنسي كل الملل و التعب.

تخيل معايا تلات عالية فيها أحراش و صبار و أشجار من عصور ما قبل التاريخ بتزهر ورد ملون أصغر وردة قد رأسي. تحت التلال العالية تلال ثانية كلها عشب أخضر مطعم بمساحات من الورد البري الأصفر و البنفسجي. و التلال دي مراعي خيول مفتوحة، تخيل عشرات ان مكانش مئات الخيول بتجري وسط العشب و الورد بحرية. عادي أنت في أفريقيا.  read more »