Celia Dugger has a good piece in this morning's Times about the diamond trade in Zimbabwe. The story is, predictably, depressing.
The Thing Around Your Neck
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(Knopf, 218 pp., $24.95)
In “Jumping Monkey Hill,” the most wicked story in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new collection, a group of young writers selected from all over Africa have gathered for a workshop at a fancy resort outside Cape Town--”the kind of place,” thinks Ujunwa, the representative Nigerian, “where . . . affluent foreign tourists would dart around taking pictures of lizards and then return home still mostly unaware that there were more black people than red-capped lizards in South Africa.” The workshop is run by a white couple of a familiar type: liberal expats who proclaim their attachment to their new home a bit too loudly. (“White people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same--condescending,” Adichie writes in another story.) The wife compliments Ujunwa’s bone structure and asks if she is descended from royalty: “The first thing that came to Ujunwa’s mind was to ask if Isabel ever needed royal blood to explain the good looks of friends back in London.” The smarmy husband makes lewd remarks to the women and speaks pompously of his own authority on Africa.
I spent some time yesterday and today trying to figure out Foreign Policy magazine's ranking of failed states. Somalia, Zimbabwe, and Sudan got first, second, and third place--no surprises there. But what initially piqued my interest was the high ranking given to Kenya, a country where I just spent two weeks (on a trip sponsored by the International Reporting Project, based at Johns Hopkins).
Who’s interested in Zimbabwe, and why? How should Westerners understand the situation there? And could this all be Jimmy Carter’s fault? T.A. Frank and James Kirchick discussed the situation over IM.
Why Zimbabwe?
