Monday mbalimbali
27 April 2015
I Was Raped in Burkina Faso and My Rapist’s Trial Will Take 10 Years — an account of a Peace Corps volunteer
#BlackLivesMatter, the international papal edition — a brief explainer about the first genocide of the 20th century, of the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia
At Sea, Devoured by Our Indifference — Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego on the inequalities in migration
International Political Economy and the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak — my article with Adia Benton in the African Studies Review is available for free download until May 15
Why does Africa have so many languages?
Happy Meb Crush Monday.
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haba na haba 
In reference to “Devoured by Indifference,” it is well written and the migrants certainly deserve our empathy but I wonder if this is the best way to show solidarity. Certainly unintentionally it simply reinforces the tired trope of desperate Africans escaping their dark continent and being shut out cruelly from Camelot by an indifferent, or worse, West. We can do better and such a trope has always been and is even more so now simply untrue. Political aslyum seekers aside, the migrants on these boats are by and large, and certainly relative to their countrymen, well-off. They had to be to pay the smugglers. Most of them are driven, intelligent, brave, and wholly aware of what they are getting themselves into. This does not make the deaths any less tragic or deserving of our empathy but it should impact how we write about them. By portraying them as the wretched of the earth we run the risk of flattening their stories and removing their agency. Poverty Porn because Migrant Porn.