Africa Is A Country on Ramadan traditions.
Tom Boylston on “Ethiopian Orthodoxy in post-Imperial times and…the emergence of a competitive religious public sphere.”
Ty McCormick writes about the recent Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, noting that “China has taken measures to rebalance trade ties with Africa, including the elimination of tariffs on certain African products.”
Baobab on banking in Somalia:
The doors at the aptly named First Somali Bank (FSB) opened in May. More than 100 customers have opened accounts. Some did so by bringing in sacks of Somali shillings, worth 22,000 to the dollar, while others opted for accounts in American greenbacks. Mr Egal recently set up a TedX conference on the “Rebirth of Mogadishu”. Even for an entrepreneur who took his first steps in finance with a cheque-cashing business in a rough neighbourhood of Baltimore in America, Mogadishu is a challenge. No one has seen a chequebook here since the cold war, when Somalia was in the Soviet orbit. Mr Egal, who is waiting for the still fragile government to give him a banking licence, admits that conditions are “not yet right” for ATM machines.
Jason Stearns flags a US State Department announcement on a reduction in military aid to Rwanda. Stearns writes, “It’s a symbolic amount of $200,000, but I think this is the first time Washington has cut aid to Kigali for political reasons.”
Dr. Bruce Whitehouse on Aikido in Mali:
Back in the 1960s Bamako was briefly a node in aikido’s nascent global network. Three Soviet aid workers learned the art, then unknown in their homeland, at the Bamako Judo Club from one master Van Bai, a Frenchman of Vietnamese origin. (Malians sometimes recall his name as “Henri Wambaye”.) A few years later these Soviet students brought aikido from Mali to the USSR — illustrating the unpredictable pathways of the transnational diffusion of culture.
Dr. Kim Yi Dionne marks the one-year anniversary of major protests in Malawi.
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