Link Salad, the Bellum Africum Edition
Some of what I've been reading
— The prison where murderers play for Manchester United - David Goldblatt, The Guardian, May 28, 2015
“Prisoners have been playing football in the Boma for decades as long as anyone can remember, but inmates began to create more formal clubs with managers, coaches and fans around the turn of the century, shortly after more liberal conditions were introduced. The first club to emerge was Liverpool, which was founded around 2000 by a group of a dozen former soldiers who had turned to armed robbery. Despite being incarcerated, they were able to draw on the wealth they had accumulated outside the jail to obtain the best kit and attract the prison’s best players.”
— Soyinka in the Gazan Crypt - Richard Solomon, The Republic, Aug. 25, 2024
“Wole Soyinka is many things: a poet, playwright, a trenchant political critic, and a giant of Nigerian letters. He is also a friend of Palestine. I am an immigrant to the life-worlds of the African literary canon, still fresh off the boat, and Soyinka was a natural first harbour. But even from this one harbour, setting off into the thicket of his works (30 plays, four novels, six memoirs, seven poetry collections, fields of essays) still has me tumbling through the leafy undergrowth of the Soyinka piedmont—his late prose, his early verse. I have yet to ascend the mountain-tops: A Dance of the Forests, A Play of Giants, Trials of Brother Jero. What then can I say as tribute to the man? How do his words connect to the present conjecture in Palestine, a holy land whose people are amputated by apartheid and war? Beyond essays like ‘Beware the Cyclops’ which he wrote in Ramallah during the Second Intifada, what else can Soyinka teach us?”
— Trump Is Quitting the Paris Agreement. Poor Countries Should, Too. - Vijaya Ramachandran, Foreign Policy, Jan. 6, 2025
“Poor countries dutifully show up at the United Nations’ annual COP summits. Climate action is often justified in their name because the global poor are far more vulnerable to climate extremes than the rich. But not only have rich countries failed to deliver, they also now routinely use the specter of catastrophic climate change to deny poor countries the energy technology, infrastructure, and development aid they critically need to escape poverty.”
— Mali’s Sunshine Journalism - Issa Sikiti da Silva, London Review of Books blog, Dec. 23, 2024
“‘We have been unwillingly turned into mouthpieces for the juntas and Russian propaganda machines,’ one journalist told me as he prepared to flee the country. ‘Working as a journalist in Mali has become a matter of life and death. If the military do not put you behind bars on trumped-up charges, the jihadist groups will track you down, kidnap or even kill you if they find out that your reporting is harming their interests.’”
Currently reading: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Currently listening: This Appointed Love - Skindred