This Nando’s advert, which is no longer being broadcast, has already been done the rounds on the internetz but I couldn’t resist reposting it here. My favorite part is Mugabe and Idi Amin doing the Titanic move on a tank. Which scene is your favorite?? Does anyone find this offensive? Or is it just funny?

Makeshift is a cool new project currently looking for funding through Kickstarter. If funded, the new magazine will feature ingenious solutions often spurred by a lack of resources.

As populations explode and resources dwindle, the ability to innovate under constraints has become a more pressing competency for individuals, companies, and governments. To document resourceful production Makeshift looks to the grassroots: to the garage tinkerers and under-the-radar businesses that make up the global informal economy. This sector of primarily unprotected and unregistered businesses accounts for over three quarters of employment across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These maker-entrepreneurs are resilient, flexible, and immensely creative.

The editors of Makeshift noticed that production, more than at any point in the last century, is occurring at the grassroots. In different cultures it goes by different names: DIY in the US, jugaad in India, jua kali in East Africa, and gambiarra in Brazil. Makeshift seeks to unify these cultures into a global identity.

Makeshift is a global network of editors, researchers, journalists, photographers, and videographers uncovering stories of street-level ingenuity. The core team is based in New York, Mexico City, Singapore, and Madrid. Contributors in over 20 countries are searching for stories of street-level ingenuity.

Each quarterly issue of Makeshift will form an engaging and in-depth snapshot on a particular branch of informal creativity. The website will feature complementary media, including videos and blogs. It’s a hi-fi representation of a lo-fi movement.

The inaugural issue of Makeshift, released September 30, will be themed “Re-culture: Reuse, repair, and recycle at the grassroots,” featuring stories such as everyday product hacks in Kenya, industrial fabric recycling in India, improvised tools in Myanmar, recycled art in Colombia, and adaptive reuse of industrial sites in the United States.

Check it out and chip in a few bucks if you can.

Is Nigeria’s richest man worth $2 billion or $13.8 billion? Is that even the right question to be asking?

Loving tumblrrrrs. Try this one: awesomepeoplehangingouttogether.

In Liberia, no need for violence or outright oppression to reign in the media – lawsuits that result in millions of dollars of damage will do the trick! (Nice job Aaron and Emily.)

Finally, the most awesome gay marriage posters ever. Check them all out since the one I’m reposting here just isn’t enough.

Biggest goat scam ever.

Chris Blattman links to a paper that explains that perhaps Somaliland’s lack of donor dollars has made the government accountable and representative to tax payers.

Broadway musical Fela! makes it to Lagos.

Brendan Bannon and Mike Pflanz are the Nairobi based journalists behind Daily Dispatches, a month long documentary project that explores the ins and outs of Nairobi - a city known to some for its crime and poverty, to others for its art scene and tech bubble. This in-depth project does an amazing job contextualizing all the different ways an urban hub like Nairobi works and doesn’t work. Spend some time exploring the archives and follow along for the last couple of days. Projects like this one, with such amazing breadth and commitment, can really contribute to a more nuanced understanding of places usually only shown from one particular angle.

Tim Hetherington, Sleeping Soldiers

A lot has been written about Tim Hetherington as a war photographer. Here’s David Carr in the New York Times:

Tim Hetherington was a war photographer in every regard. Tall, brutally handsome and modest, he had a British accent plucked from a Graham Greene novel and the body fat of a Diet Coke.

I actually disagree. From my limited personal knowledge of Tim, and from extensive time thinking about and looking at his work, I don’t think he was a “war photographer in every regard.” While his photos of conflict in Liberia and Afghanistan are truly excellent examples of war photography, so many of his photographs are examples of something else. His series Sleeping Soldiers certainly isn’t straight war photography. It’s a look at the people fighting wars – vulnerable, young, human.

When I interviewed him, I specifically asked him about war photography. Here’s what he said:

I’ve never seen myself as a war photographer. This is about narrative. I’m very open to any visual conceits and any possibilities at my disposal to better explain to people the ideas I’m exploring. I like art photography, I like still life, I like war photography. I like to include everything to weave a tapestry to explain to someone, “What happened?”

A lot of the pictures are metaphorical, and the combination of pictures is metaphorical. This piece of work is almost like a novel. I use narrative book techniques, and I think they’re a more powerful approach than having a lot of war photography.

He said this type of thing other places too — he told @Zoe_Flood:

“I’m not a war junkie – I don’t go to places like Liberia because I get off on it. Whilst war photography is the most extreme in terms of it being pure photojournalism, taking place right on the edge, what I am interested is how people are touched by the story, and if they are, that they become aware of something they hadn’t previously known about.”

This is important to remember, especially now as Duckrabbit insightfully, and fearfully, points out, that the romantic myth of the war photographer is stronger than ever.

Here’s Sebastian Junger, remembering Tim, and deeply invested in the romance of war:

You and I were always talking about risk because she was the beautiful woman we were both in love with, right? The one who made us feel the most special, the most alive? We were always trying to have one more dance with her without paying the price. All those quiet, huddled conversations we had in Afghanistan: where to walk on the patrols, what to do if the outpost gets overrun, what kind of body armor to wear. You were so smart about it, too—so smart about it that I would actually tease you about being scared. Of course you were scared—you were terrified. We both were. We were terrified and we were in love, and in the end, you were the one she chose.

Debating his legacy is an important part of remembering him and how he contributed to the way we all understand the world.

I hope Tim isn’t only remembered as a war photographer.

***

“Could Have,” by by Wislawa Szymborska, and translated below from the Polish, via CJ Chivers.

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.

You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.

You were in luck — there was a forest.
You were in luck — there were no trees.
You were in luck — a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant …

So you’re here? Still dizzy from
another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn’t be more shocked or
speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me.

The thick mahogany doors of the mansion stand ajar as young children run in and out.

A trail of odd junk litters the yard. A small upturned table here, papers there. The walls blackened by fire. A palatial home, ransacked earlier by youths.

The police had been there already, eyewitnesses said – not to stop the theft, but to load up their vehicles with the loot.

An estimated 20 homes belonging to government ministers and their supporters were attacked last weekend in Abidjan.

The mistake these politicians made was to win November’s election, and then to insist that winning a vote meant you get to take over.

The former president did not like that. The new government may be able to shelter under UN protection at a lagoon-side hotel, but their homes, cars and families are fair game for the old government.

This was a part of Africa that did not need handouts to develop, just a few decent politicians.

That’s John James, @ourmaninafrica, in a must read from article that pulls back a little from the day to day violence and gives a bit of narrative and context to what’s happening in Ivory Coast.

More Ivorians are crossing into Liberia daily as violence intensifies and civil war becomes imminent.

Commissioned by UNHCR. See more photos at www.glennagordon.com.

Qaddafi at the opening of his mosque in Kampala, March 2008

Howard French writes about Qaddafi’s influence in Africa in the Atlantic. Worth a read:

As a deep-pocketed and sparsely populated state ever in need of labor, it has always made sense for Qaddafi to look south. Libya is far too small and peripheral for it to ever aspire to real influence in the Arab world. By comparison, the almost equally small but far poorer countries of nearby West Africa, wracked as they are with chronic misrule and instability, loom temptingly on the horizon as fruit ripe for picking.

Photo from West Africa Always Wins

Pauline, a journalist in Abidjan, posted this photo of former president, and current sorta president, Laurent Gbagbo, on state television. “One thing is clear: as long as [state media] controls the airwaves, Gbagbo controls the population,” she says. Gbagbo, who has ruled Ivory Coast for 10 years, and delayed elections umpteen times, just lost the election, but has had himself inaugurated anyway. His oponent, Alassane Ouattara, who won 54 percent of the vote, has also been inaugurated in a parallel ceremony.

This is similar to, though slightly worse than when two celebrities wear the same dress to a party.

For more on this, make sure to follow the BBC’s John James on twitter, check out this analysis of possible short term and long term outcomes of the situation from Reuters, and read all of this bit of analysis from FT (gated, but all you have to do is register to read it):

In effect, this is a coup and should be treated as such. The UN, which helped bankroll the $400m cost of the polls, has refused to accept the outcome. The African Union, regional bloc ECOWAS, France, the US, Britain and the International Monetary Fund have all recognised Mr Ouattara’s victory.

While this exceptional unanimity is to be commended, it is unlikely to be enough. Mr Gbagbo is a stubborn adversary. Events moreover are conforming to his chosen narrative: that Ivory Coast has long been victim of an international conspiracy to rob it of its sovereignty.

Western donor countries are partly reaping what they have sown. A string of dubious elections in Africa has gone unchallenged. Going through the motions may have become a pre-requisite for international acceptance, but it has rarely proved necessary to offer real democracy.

The west would do well to allow African leaders to take the lead; they have every reason to do so and have been strikingly firm in their stance so far. This fiasco carries the risk of fresh conflict and of cementing the country’s de facto partition. This is not only destabilising for neighbouring states, recovering from civil wars, but also a dangerous precedent that could, without care be replicated in other parts of Africa.

These elections are getting far more coverage in the Western media than Burundi’s pretty much widely ignored ballot experiment, or Guinea’s similarly widely ignored ballot. But as Reuters reports, at least Cluff Gold mines in Ivory Coast are still operating! This is also directly related to why anyone is reporting on this election at all. The gold, and the cocoa, that is. Production  and export of cocoa is expected to be delayed.

This may seriously impede Gbabgo’s attempt to have his (chocolate) cake and eat it too.