38 Things for 38 Years

These kinds of posts used to be popular back in the youth of my blog so I will give it a go and see if that is still the case. They are also easier to write because they can be completely incoherent. I’m supposed to now say something like number 8 really...

Mali on the verge of liberating Africa?

Do I want to wade into these waters? Not really. I have relatively flimsy toubab-in-Mali credentials to be talking about pan-Africanist critiques of the neocolonial order. But maybe someone can help me see something that I’m missing. By now you may have heard...

Do you believe?

I don’t know how to articulate this thing that happened. My original email to the person in question may be enough. Hopefully it’s comprehensible: It’s pretty insane and probably not believable, but I will tell you what happened. The other day I was...

Adventure as an art form

“TIA” – this is Africa. Seasoned travelers, country counters and a certain class of expats adore this phrase. I regret to say that I may have used it at one point in my life. Thankfully I have suppressed those memories long enough to not know when...

Senegal on shaky ground?

It’s not lost on me that we left Mali because of all the question marks around the political and security situation and we are now getting phone calls from friends in Mali asking if we are OK over here in Senegal. We are indeed ok. In the village of Somone, you...