Yesterday morning we visited the Darling Wind Farm. In addition to the three windmills in the photo, there is a fourth behind me. Those four generate enough electricity to fulfill 80% of Darling’s current energy needs.

Of course, not every community is windy enough to justify wind-powered renewable energy, but there are plenty of windy places like Darling that could meet most of their energy needs by installing just a few turbines.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago in an email to the Rising Voices mailing list, I have mixed feelings about World AIDS Day. On the one hand, it can help create the illusion that we only need to think about AIDS one day out of the year and then somehow everything will get better. On the other hand, December 1st can be an attention-grabbing starting point for sustained campaigns that advocate for the rights of HIV-positive individuals, like the AIDS Rights Congo project is doing; spread preventive education with creativity, like the REPACTED project in Kenya does on a regular basis; and amplify the voices of marginalized communities, like the Drop-In Center in Ukraine.

Here on the South Africa Bloggers Roadshow, which is meant, in the words of its sponsors, to “tell the story of South Africa,” there is no mention of HIV or AIDS at all. (Nor violence against women, for that matter.) Graeme Addison, Durban’s Dagga King and the organizer of our itinerary, apologized on the first day for the exclusion. So, let me take a few minutes to mention three relevant notes.

To Test or Not to Test: Thandanani’s Question

First, I have uploaded a video which features excerpts of a really fascinating conversation I had last Friday with Thandanani, Sinempilo, and Zwelithini. Much of the conversation was Thandanani explaining why he didn’t want to know his HIV status and Sinempilo and Zwelithini trying to convince him that he should get tested. But there are other fascinating parts as well. I learned that in South Africa low income mothers are given 200 rand a month when they become pregnant. The three felt that this policy contributes to the spread of HIV and AIDS because it encourages people to have unprotected sex as a way of generating income. All three also felt that if Black South Africans go back to their indigenous cultures rather than trying to emulate the West that HIV transmission would be reduced. For one, they’d be spending less time going out to clubs, drinking, and hooking up, but also there are parts of Zulu culture like the traditional virginity test which encourage abstinence. Enjoy the conversation:

Project Masiluleke

Second, I must take off my hat to Miss Zinny Thabethe, who I first met at Pop!Tech and then was able to see again last week in Pietermaritzburg. Zinny is used to a good deal of attention. In fact, if you open up Southern Africa’s edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine there she’ll be, one of South Africa’s “30 fun and fearless women.” You can also see her speaking at PopTech and featured in National Geographic magazine.

Zinny’s newest initiative is Project Masiluleke. As I wrote last month, PopTech is transforming from a mere annual conference to a constant social change incubator. In addition to its Social Innovation Fellows program, the PopTech group will also select inspiring projects which are ripe with potential and put them in “the accelerator,” which essentially means introducing them to all the right people in order to make the project a success.

Project Masiluleke is the guinea pig project of the Accelerator. There are two major parts to the project which will officially launch sometime this spring. In South Africa most mobile service providers offer a feature in which you can send someone a free text message asking them to call you if you are out of airtime. The message itself is only around 30 characters, which leaves more than 100 more characters of space. Rather than filling that space with advertising, as would be expected, South Africa’s MTN network will append public service messages asking its subscribers to get tested and offering counseling resources. The second major part of the project is an at-home HIV testing kit designed by New York City-based Frog Design. We saw a demo of the kit at PopTech and the thinking that went behind it is extremely impressive.

Blogging Positively

On Wednesday Serina and Daudi will be co-hosting a live chat about how citizen media can be used to supplement and improve the mainstream media’s coverage of the AIDS epidemic. Details on how to participate in the chat are on Serina’s blog. Also make sure to check out Juhie’s post on Global Voices about World AIDS Day, our special topic coverage page, and the Global Voices Google Map of HIV-positive bloggers around the world that Juhie put together with Solana.

As if staying at the Rosebank Hotel didn’t already completely spoil us, we began our blogger’s road show of South Africa with a box full of gadget goodness thanks to the kind folks at Vodacom. Included in the bag was a Vodafone E172 Mobile Broadband USB Stick with enough 3G data to keep us publishing blog posts and uploading photos and videos from the road wherever we may be. We were also given the new Samsung G810, a mean mobile media monster which will let me upload photos and videos directly to Flickr within seconds of taking them. The phones come pre-loaded with a small piece of Java software called The GRID, which I first saw on Vincent Maher’s blog a few weeks ago.

The mobile program automatically detects your location and allows you to upload text, photos, and videos which are then displayed on a map along with all the other user-generated content around you. In this way it is very similar to Brightkite’s iPhone application. Here in South Africa iPhones are rare, but lots of phones are able to install java apps like The GRID. The GRID also allows video uploads which are not yet permitted on iPhones.

What really has me excited about The GRID is a project they did with youth living in Soweto, South Africa’s largest township. The youth were given phones and asked to upload multimedia content about their communities. There is now a wealth of content about Soweto on The GRID and more than 20 mobile documentaries have been made. It is exactly the kind of project we like to support at Rising Voices. Here’s a trailer:

What has me excited about this new Samsung G810 is that it means that in a couple hours I can give Frerieke my Nokia N95 so that she can give it to one of her Afrigadget Mobile Reporters. I was given my N95 by the good people at Pop!Tech and I know they’ll be pleased that it will be used for such a worthy cause. And if you’re not reading Afrigadget you’re missing out.

Are you heading to South Africa and worried that you won’t be able to enjoy the very best of metrosexual hospitality. Check out the Rosebank Hotel, probably the only hotel I’ve ever been to which is much more impressive in person than on its website. It is just two blocks away from the Rosebank Mall and, for all you cyber-enthusiasts, from the offices of the African Commons Project.

The lobby has lots of smiling faces and the kind of lighting that makes everyone look pretty:

Plus there’s this underwater garden lounge type thing that looks like the perfect place to drink too many gin and tonics:

Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the official start of the South Africa Bloggers Roadshow, which means that this is my last post for the next ten days not related to the roadshow.

The young bloggers from Kwa Mashu continue to inspire me. I hung out with them all day on Friday. Once again, I expected that they would get tired after three or four hours of workshops, shooting video, and editing, but instead they were pestering me all day long to learn more skills and wouldn’t let me leave until well after 5 o’clock.

Kwa Mashu is the largest of Durban’s three townships. It’s located in the province of Kwa Zulu Natal, as in Newcastle, a smaller city about four hours away by driving. It was in the Madadeni township on the outskirts of Newcastle where in the 1970’s 16 computer terminals were installed and connected to other computers around the world on an online network called PLATO. I learned about all of this from Dave Lyons of Mutant Palm who writes, “Before Global Voices and the Internet, there was PLATO,” the world’s first online global community:

There were several other installations at educational institutions in South Africa, among them Madadeni College in the Madadeni township just outside of Newcastle.

This was perhaps the most unusual PLATO installation anywhere. Madadeni had about 1,000 students, all of them black and 99.5% of Zulu ancestry. The college was one of 10 teacher preparation institutions in kwaZulu, most of them much smaller. In many ways Madadeni was very primitive. None of the classrooms had electricity and there was only one telephone for the whole college, which one had to crank for several minutes before an operator might come on the line. So an air-conditioned, carpeted room with 16 computer terminals was a stark contrast to the rest of the college. At times the only way a person could communicate with the outside world was through PLATO term-talk.

For many of the Madadeni students, most of whom came from very rural areas, the PLATO terminal was the first time they encountered any kind of electronic technology. (Many of the first year students had never seen a flush toilet before.) There initially was skepticism that these technologically-illiterate students could effectively use PLATO, but those concerns were not borne out. Within an hour or less most students were using the system proficiently, mostly to learn math and science skills, although a lesson that taught keyboarding skills was one of the most popular. A few students even used on-line resources to learn TUTOR, the PLATO programming language, and a few wrote lessons on the system in the Zulu language.

So incredible to think that 35 years ago people were working in Kwa Zulu Natal, basically trying to do the same thing that I was on Friday: use new technologies to help a community that has long been ignored find its voice using new technologies.

When Dave emailed to let us know about the PLATO program I immediately wanted to hop in my rental car, drive to Madadeni, and do a week-long investigative report to find out what happened to the people involved in the PLATO project there. Who wrote the software programs in Zulu? Did they gain any valuable skills from the project? Was there a lasting impact?

I hope someone does eventually do the story. And, if they don’t, maybe I’ll return to Durban to do it myself.

Another interesting intersection with Friday’s workshop is a podcast I listened to this morning in the gym from Radio Lab. It’s all about the heaviness of choice - one of my favorite topics ever since reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And it features sociologist Barry Schwartz, one of my favorite commentators on the subject. Highly recommended.

If you speak Zulu, then one of the things you’ll hear in the video at the bottom of this post is two janitors describing how greater freedom since the end of apartheid has corrupted South Africa’s Black communities. Ever since Nelson Mandela won the presidential election in 1994 ‘freedom’ has been interpreted as what car you can buy, which clubs you can go out to, what type of liquor you want to drink. Young people today aren’t grateful for the struggle of their parents before apartheid, they don’t understand what they were fighting for, the janitors say.

It’s a topic that gets picked up again in an amazing conversation among Thandanani, Zwelithini, and Sinempilo that I’ll post tomorrow or the next day. Anyway, I highly recommend watching both the video that they produced and the episode of Radio Lab about choice. It’s an hour very well spent.

Greetings from Cape Town, South Africa. I am here thanks to a blog post by Matthew Buckland, a comment left by Mohamed Nanabhay, and the kind invitation of Simon Barber of the International Marketing Council of South Africa. Starting on November 30 I will be part of a ten-day “bloggers roadshow” in which bloggers from the U.S. will join their South African counterparts and tour the country’s hotspots of technological innovation and tourism.

I’ll be joined by fellow American bloggers Renee Blodgett and Ray Lewis of down the avenue, Zadi Diaz of Epic Fu, Mona Gable from the Huffington Post, John Gartner of Matter Network, Chris Morrison of Venture Beat, Eliane Fioret of Uber Gizmo, and Graeme Wood of The Smart Set and The Atlantic.

Also present will be South African bloggers Simon Barber of Brand South Africa, Nick Haralambous of SA Rocks, and Ndumiso Ngcobo, irreverent author of “Some of My Best Friends are White” (which I hope to pick up and read).

All of our blog posts during the 10-day trip will be aggregated and featured on We Blog the World.

I have finally added a disclosure page to this here blog so that it is completely transparent whenever I get any perks for what I write about. Which begs the question, why is the International Marketing Council of South Africa inviting a bunch of bloggers to come tour and write about their country? According to their website:

Blogging is one of the most powerful forms of communication today. Top bloggers are global opinion-formers, read widely by media and decision makers in the public and private sectors. Because blogging features direct personal opinion, there is no sense of mediated messages - the writer tells it like it is.

They aren’t the only ones who think that bloggers are serious influencers. A couple months ago a few of my friends were kicking it with Bill Clinton the evening before his foundation’s big annual meeting. It has always been standard procedure to call a press conference before such an event to help attract attention, but this time around, one of Clinton’s adviser’s must have convinced him that it was more worthwhile to invite bloggers instead of traditional journalists. Whether this is because bloggers are more likely to repeat talking points instead of asking hard-hitting questions or because some bloggers have actually become more influential than their mainstream counterparts is something I’m still trying to figure out.

Trade Versus Aid

Do I have any problems getting carted around in luxury with the expectation that I will have nice things to write about a country positioning itself to receive more foreign investment? Not so much. First of all, I write what my eyes see not what’s expected of me (which has lost me a few small battles, but I still think it is the way to go). Second, I have no problem with showering some deserved attention on Africa’s first all-electric car or the region’s impressive open source software community. Other topics might be more sensitive - like discussing Soweto’s history without getting into contemporary South African race relations or weighing out the pros and cons of modern mining. But what I am sure about is that the world would not be worse off with some more positive coverage of a country like South Africa.

At TED Africa the main discussion thread could be summed up with three little words: trade versus aid. Many of the attendees argued that development aid is paternalistic, often ends up doing more harm than good (funding corrupt regimes), and creates an unhealthy post-colonial dependence in which only certain communities learn the NGO parlance and therefore benefit from its money. These laptop-toting tech savvy critics argued that rather than giving money away to inefficient development programs, well-meaning foreign governments and philanthropists should be investing in Africa’s up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

The counter-argument is that great ideas don’t always lead to sustainable companies, or even great products. Good accounting, robust marketing, multiple channels of distribution, and efficient business organization are all parts of the picture and they are the skills that development programs try to instill in their participants.

One of my guiding questions throughout the South Africa Blogger’s Roadshow will be, Should the international development community focus its priorities and budgets on traditional USAID-style development programs or should it be investing - through low interest loans - in the kinds of technological and scientific start-ups that we’ll be getting to know on the tour? Also, as a leader in Southern Africa, how can South Africa’s business community spread entrepreneurialism throughout the region without having a negative impact on local cultures, sovereignty, and the environment?

I have listened to this 13 minute segment of audio three different times now. Each time I hear something different - either a detail that I missed or a tone in her voice revealing the emotion that makes audio such a powerful medium.

The excerpt from a recent episode of This American Life is an interview that Studs Terkel did with Peggy Terry in 1971 about her experience in the 1929 depression as part of his Hard Times collection.

“Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange. February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. [Source.]

Peggy Terry whose formal education ended in sixth grade, who was married at 15, who hitchhiked around the country as a teenager with her husband while she was pregnant, picking fruit and cotton to get by. Peggy who tells Studs “it’s a really good life if you’re poor and you can manage to move around.”

What was immediately apparent to me after hearing Peggy talk is that she’s a great storyteller, the type of person that journalists want to get in front of a microphone. When we first started Rising Voices I figured that our biggest challenge would be technical. That is, teaching the technical skills of how to start a blog, how to record a podcast, and how to produce a video. But before you can even start those workshops, you need to talk about something else first: how to tell a story. As Elizabeth Daley, the dean of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, puts it:

From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It’s the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only.

Once you’ve found your story, it’s a matter of deciding which medium you want to work in. I have always been a lover of the written word, but lately I’ve been especially drawn to photography and audio. There is something about a good photograph which leaves me more empathetic and reflective than a two-hour movie.

But there is also an obvious problem about photography - it’s so open to interpretation.

The above photographs were taken by Russian photographer Irina Popova as part of her “Different Family” project which was brought to my attention by Veronica’s post on Global Voices.

What fascinated me just as much as the photographs themselves are the different interpretations they received. (Many of which are translated into English by Veronica.) This is what I love about conversational media - it breaks down truth so that the photographs themselves don’t become the authoritative view; they are a starting point for a conversation.

Today is one of those days: typing as furiously as possible to get through what Things tells me to.

But, then a ray of sun poked out, shining through the orange-tinged chlorophyll of the maple tree right outside my window. A glistening reflection off of a wee spider’s recent creation. Maybe the same spider that I lovingly flicked outside two nights ago while my sister screeched, ‘don’t kill it, don’t kill it.’

And iTunes, with its genius mind of its own, decided to put on DNTEL’s Rock My Boat featuring Mia Doi Todd. Everything came together for three minutes: the sun’s skirt-raising flirtation, Mia Doi Todd’s sensuous voice, the wonders of nature and her patterns. So here, in the spirit of honoring cottage spider webs, is my homage to those three minutes.

Remember Taslima from the Nari Jibon project in Dhaka?

Isn’t she sweet? Now she has her own domain, Taslima.net. Go on and visit and say hello.

Yesterday she led a workshop at Nari Jibon to train the other bloggers there how to publish in their native language, Bangla. It’s not so easy.

Jus eeemajin haveeen to tipe owt ur langwej funeticullee in order for a software program to convert each of those phonetic syllables to proper roman script? What a pain in the ass right? That is exactly what a large chunk of the world must do. In China, for example, you must type in Pinyin, a phonetic, romanized version of Mandarin and use software which converts those syllables into Chinese characters. In fact, Chinese computer users have gotten so used to typing this way that many of them are forgetting the actual Chinese characters.

Similarly, to type in Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh (also called Bengali), you must type phonetically and use a program like Avro to convert the romanized text to proper Bangla script. Worse, many computers still don’t support Bangla unicode, which means the characters won’t show up on your computer screen, unless you install the proper font files.

Despite all of these obstacles, the Nari Jibon bloggers are still forging ahead so that they can write in their native language.

There is historical importance here: in a few months it will be International Mother Language Day, which not only serves to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism, but also commemorates the deaths of a number of Bangladeshi university students on February 21, 1952 when Bangladesh was considered East Pakistan. Pakistan had ruled in 1948 that Urdu would be the official language of both East and West Pakistan and the university students were campaigning for Bangla to be recognized as one of the official state languages when they were killed by police officers.

Today it is economic rather than political realities which force many young people across the world to give up their mother language and concentrate on English. I would never dissuade anyone from learning English as it does immediately create many more opportunities throughout one’s life. But I am encouraged when I meet young people like those at Nari Jibon who understand the importance both of learning English, but also perserving their native tongue and all the culture embodied within it. Congrats Taslima and everyone else at Nari Jibon.