Tecee Boley interviews rangers at Sapo National Park.

This press release comes from my friend and colleague Tamasin Ford. This really is a different model of media training, one I haven’t seen used before. It has amazing potential for the individual journalists involved in the program as well as for a broader impact on the Liberian media through raising standards and expectations.

Liberia has been chosen for the launch of a new, dynamic, media training project, the first of its kind in Africa.  New Narratives will give leading Liberian women journalists funding, training and equipment to report, in-depth, the most pressing issues facing Liberia.

New Narratives Fellows will spend 12 months with the program producing fresh, investigative stories that are balanced, objective and fair. They will travel across Liberia to report the voices and views of everyone involved in the story, from the regular Liberian right up to government ministers.  The Fellows will accept no gifts or payments for their reporting. Their work will be independent and entirely reliable.

Country Director, Tamasin Ford says, “This is an incredibly innovative project.  This sort of hands on journalism training hasn’t been done before.” She adds,“Rather than using workshops to train the reporters, New Narratives aims to replicate the traditional way of grasping journalism.  Reporters will be out on the field, interviewing and gathering stories with their trainer before returning to base to face a tough editing process.”

After a competitive application process, the following reporters have been chosen as the first New Narratives fellows.

Mae Azango FrontPage Africa

Tecee Boley Liberia Women Democracy Radio

Lady Mai Hunter Liberia Women Democracy Radio

Meata Jorkey Talking Drum Studio

Clara K. Mallah FrontPage Africa

Sonnie Morris Sky FM

Applications for an additional 4 Fellowships will open in December.

For more information or to recommend stories you would like to see covered by the Fellows, go to www.newnarratives.org.

Ethan Zuckerman has a great post up about American involvement in Somalia:

Counterintuitively, the best thing the US might do to prevent Somalia from becoming an operating base for Al Qaeda is to disengage, limit involvement to targeted strikes on international terrorist leaders and to providing humanitarian aid. That’s the case governance expert Bronwyn Bruton makes in this interview with the Council on Foreign Relations. She notes that a divided, clan-ruled Somalia was an environment Al Qaeda previously found impossible to operate in – the level of inhospitality of the clan system appeared to “inoculate” Somalia from foreign engagement. She suggests that allowing the TFG to fall and Al Shabab to rise will lead towards Al Shabab fracturing as a coalition, and eventually a return to clan politics and conflict, which is ultimately the only stable basis for a future functional Somali state.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi makes a similar case in an article in the American Thinker titled “What To Do About Somalia“. He urges a containment strategy – ensure that Al Shabab doesn’t act outside of Somalia, and cut off external supports. He also suggests the US and the international community recognize Somaliland, the comparatively stable north of the country, as an independent nation, creating another potential ally in stabilizing southern Somalia.

(Side note – while looking for Al-Tamimi’s article, I searched for “what to do about Somalia”. Google returned a wonderful result from Trip Advisor, titled “Things to Do in Mogadishu“. I love that Trip Advisor wants to find me a cheap flight to Mogadishu and to help me find a cheap Somali passport.)

What I find most interesting about Bruton’s arguments is her argument that the US is incorrectly framing the situation in Somalia as a conflict between religious ideologies. She argues that the TFG and Al Shabab are both ad-hoc, opportunistic groups looking for power, not advocating for a particular religious ideology. Because TFG is seeking funding from western governments, it argues that it’s a bulwark against terrorism. Al Shabab looks for support from Al Qaeda in the hopes of support from extremists in the Middle East. But the ideology is secondary to the search for power. (Some groups in Somalia have expressed concerns that the TFG includes a large number of Wahabbists, which seems incompatible with a pro-US orientation… and supports Bruton’s case that ideology is trumped by opportunity.)

If we take the conflict in Somalia out of the “extremist Islam versus the world” frame that the US often falls into, Bruton argues, we might be able to see that increased outside intervention will likely worsen the conflict. Perhaps then would make the decision to disengage. This doesn’t mean ignoring Somalia – it means watching borders closely, and being willing to strike against foreign fighters should they take shelter under Al Shabab. But it means giving up a failed strategy of nation building on the cheap and by proxy.

Katrina Manson has an interesting piece on the Retuers blog about the wealth of Lumumbashi, DRC.

LUBUMBASHI, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) – Membership at the governor’s new gym costs $300 a month, the gastronomic menu at the new $350-a-night hotel is going down a treat and traffic guided by lemon yellow-uniformed police runs smoothly under sunny skies.

While Congo is more often associated with rebel killings, labelled by the United Nations as the world’s rape capital, filled with red tape and river journeys into the depths of jungled gloom, Congo’s copperbelt, in the southern Katanga province, seems a world apart.

Buoyed by mining income for more than a century, Katanga’s provincial capital Lubumbashi shows little sign that nearly 80 percent of Congo’s 67 million people live on less than $2 a day.

“We are proud that we are the richest province, that we have jobs and that life is much easier than in (the capital) Kinshasa,” said Kabwita Ipanga, a street vendor who sells chess boards made of polished malachite, a mottled green stone from which the copper that has made the province rich can be derived.

Katanga has rebounded since the global financial crisis saw copper prices plunge and mining operations suspended, putting hundreds of thousands out of work. Congo estimates it will double output by 2012 to 850,000 tonnes of copper and 90,000 tonnes of cobalt.

Today expatriate miners can count on swimming pools, game-watching and bowling to amuse themselves, and London-listed Lonrho said it opened its smart hotel to serve those drawn by the $12 billion being invested in Katanga’s resources.

Bombastic Element (which is one of my favorite blogs for links to interesting articles, issues, photos, music, and more) posts about a project at Luz Gallery by photographer Devin Tepleski that looks at a community in Bui, Ghana, whose residents are threatened with relocation by a new hydro dam.

Tepleski purposely situated his subjects in the very river that will flood their homes. In the photos the only discernible remnant of the river exists as a reflection of the human, a memory.

In January 1958, the New Yorker published a dispatch from Liberia:

The city [has] faded charm and color. The former American slaves who were the original settlers built Monrovia in the time-improved image of the South that they carried int heir minds. They built with a touching and preposterous affection for Greek columns, porticoes, pilasters, and decorative staircases, and a century of Liberian sun and rain has reduced their creations to splendidly theatrical shacks.

The former slaves also brought with them classism, hierarchy, and a devaluation of life. These values were the foundation of both the architecture and modern Liberian society, and these values both directly and indirectly lead to the devastating civil war in Liberia.

Most of Monrovia was destroyed during bouts of urban warfare, and buildings that were ramshackle in 1958 were gone long before 2010. But in Harper, some of them remain. The thumbprint of history is still visible, and that is part of what continues to draw me there.

I’m headed there this morning, if the rain lets up for long enough that the UNMIL plane can take off, for what is most likely my last trip to Harper for the foreseeable future. I’m going there with a bit of a heavy heart – stories like the Ducor and the residents of the King George home and this one – features from obscure places about obscure issues that feel so important to me – are especially hard to publish and fund as the media crumbles.

That may or may not change soon. But, part of my work in Harper feels like a race against the clock — I need to take these photos before the humidity and ocean air and lush jungle triumph over the few remaining foundations that can remind us where Liberia came from.

Here’s an article from AFP from last week:

ABUJA (AFP) – Nigeria’s government will buy three new jets for the president at a cost of 155 million dollars, officials said Wednesday, even as the oil-rich country seeks financing to provide adequate electricity.

And here’s a photo of what one of those jets might look like. Nick Gleis has a whole collection of  jets belonging to African heads of state that you can see here, but unfortunately because of confidentiality agreements with his clients, he can’t say which jet belongs to whom. Something about this one makes me think Angola. Any other guesses???

Kumasi, Ghana.

Finbarr O’Rielly is at it again. The last time I wrote about his excellent work, I posted a couple of his series of hair dos in DRC and suggested that they tell a similar story about war and conflict with a different visual vocabulary than run of the mill DRC misery.

Now, he’s at it again – this time with a similar method but a different result. While he did do the typical news photography that covering an election (even one with a pre-determined outcome) involves, he also took photos of Rwanda’s polling stations all dressed up. This series is more of a collection of impressions than a statement with a political slant, and maybe that’s what I like about it. In a country where you can’t really talk politics, a collection of impressions can sum up a lived experience.

So many bloggers and photography critics spend post after post lambasting the stereotypical images of Africa that make their way into the Western media. But I’ve found that photos of starving kids are less common these days than they were five or ten years ago. It’s great to see so many different types of images, with different ways of creating meaning, being published today.

The politics of the Rwandan elections are too complicated for my non-expert self to even try and write about (check here or here for great insight), but somehow, these photos give me a different kind of insight into the same topics: one with nuance, aesthetics, isolation, tradition, and plenty of pale pink.

There’s something about cloudy day cityscapes that makes me really love Monrovia. The last time I posted one of these, I wrote about how I wasn’t ready to leave Liberia. Now, I am. I’ll be gone by the end of September, moving on to new places and new assignments. But I’ll always miss this one. And I plan to come back…

Rose Skelton, who writes the lovely blog How di Bodhi, has just compiled an album called Yes We Can: Songs About Leaving Africa. The cover art is awesome, and the album is sure to be too. You can listen to an interview with Rose and some of the other artists featured on the album here.

Andrew Solomon’s pitch perfect performance at the Moth will have you laughing in no time. After facing years of depression and varying treatments with different levels of success, he heads to Senegal on vacation and ends up participating in a community ritual that makes him feel much, much better.