Now late blooming Dar goes online, media grasps power of social sites
“Tanzanian media houses are not dealing with social media or incorporating it well enough when it comes to breaking news,” said Gaure Mdee, an editor and writer at Fema magazine, arguably the most popular publication in Tanzania. “Why do I say that? Three examples: The Gongo la Mboto ammunition dump explosions, the Zanzibar ferry disaster and the recent Dar floods all happened last year with devastating results — and it took the mainstream [press] up to four hours to respond.”
Writer: Omar Mohammed
Length: 918 words
Source: The East African
Published:February 18th, 2012
This Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Written or Spoken About
The events that occurred in 1964 meant different things for different people. And like many politically charged events, there is no single explanation or chronicling that tells the complete story of what happened and why. In a unique way, it seems as though the collective memory of the revolution has either been suppressed or purposely forgotten. It is fascinating and intriguing to see that in Tanzania, discussing the revolution and its consequences is considered political suicide, which hints that there has never been an official attempt at truth or reconciliation. What happened? How bad did things get? This is a puzzle that is disputed, as there are a lot of conflicting accounts and narratives of the revolution. The violence sparked by the revolution marks one of the most brutal periods in Zanzibar. This may explain why the topic is so sensitive as well as why elections in the Isles have been accompanied by aggressive clashes ever since.
Writer: Ahmed Salim
Length: 2324 words
Source: VijanaFM
Published: January 27th, 2012
Al-Shabaab: Portrait of a Kenyan Jihadist
On a hot afternoon sometimes in 2007, an executive meeting at one of Nairobi’s oldest mosques, Masjid Pumwani Riyadha, was violently cut short by hundreds of youth who threw out five executive officials accusing them of corruption and mismanagement of the mosque’s development programmes. The leader of those rowdy youths was a slightly built man by the name Sheikh Ahmed Iman Ali, and his religious fundamentalism caught the eye of Somali terror organisation Al-Shabaab (Arabic for “the youth”) which appointed him the de facto leader of its Kenyan cell. That appointment, however, was not published to the world and only became apparent recently when Sheikh Iman called for a jihad against Kenya over the country’s recent incursion into Somalia. So how did a relatively quiet boy who grew up under the watchful eyes of Imams end up in the rank and file of a global terror network?
Writer: Nyambega Gisesa
Length: 1498 words
Source: Africa Review
Published: January 30th, 2012
Why Are You Here?
“Why does government ignore teachers? What is the offense of teachers?” she asked, a little dramatically, and for a moment I wished I knew the answer. “Teachers are not happy. No, no, no. There is a terrible disparity between health workers’ and teachers’ salaries. Do you know that at the same level, a health worker gets 110,000 a month [about $675] and a teacher gets 60,000. Why now? Even with the recent increase the government agreed to, so many people were short-paid. We still don’t even know what the new salary will be. It is terrible…I wish I had a teacher like you when I was in school,” I told her and meant it. When we left, she was smiling, pleased with the compliment and the chance to air her grievances.
Writer: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Length: 4028 words
Source: Guernica Magazine
Published: January, 2012
With this tendency to discard evidence and logic, we do not connect our experiences with those of other societies or history. We disregard the litany of cults and shamans promising amazing cures in Latin America, India and elsewhere. We care not that such cures flourished in Europe and America more than a century ago. We are oblivious to the fact that after the demise of the Soviet Union, the overnight impoverishment on a large scale, extreme joblessness, and the loss of a sense of direction generated an epidemic of occult beliefs and practices in that land. Ignoring the world around us, we hunker down. Our vision remains inward. We curse our fate. We angrily mouth platitudes about irresponsibility and corruption as we gobble down two mandazis and a soda, blithely nurturing the onset of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
Writer: Karim Hirji
Length: 3697 words
Source: The East African
Published: January 23rd, 2012
