So Detroit rapper, Danny Brown (remember his breakout mixtape "XXX," his video for "Grown Up" and a darling of music blogs) has new video for his song, "Black Brad Pitt."  The first things that strike any viewer of the video is the clear disconnect between the video and Brown's lyrics for "Black Brad Pitt." Brown's rap--over a beat by British DJs, Evil Nine--is basically a familiar mix of profane bragging about his sexual prowess and drug use with some misogyny thrown in; essentially NSFW (don't play it loudly in the office). Meanwhile, series of disconnected images--common to music videos nowadays--play out on screen. These include a black male in army fatigues (a soldier?) crumping through lush vegetation (a jungle?), a black (African?) "dictator" at a lectern mouthing off (though we can't hear what he says, Tom suspects he is speaking French) and a half-clad woman. In-between we see images of a smoking, crocodile head, a gold pineapple (!) and diamonds flashing on the screen. Then it ends.  Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9tQ1tDxO_U Unfortunately, with these things, the internets usual aren't very helpful and full of vague praise. Here's a representative sample: "an interesting set of visuals" (Stupiddope), "The visual is pretty out there as the main concept is a soldier break-dancing in the jungle" (Complex), and "some weird dancing-in-the-jungle fantasy involving dictators and diamonds" (Do Androids Dance). From Youtube, here's some sample comments: "so i guess they found kony crumpin in the jungle;" "i get it... kony is the black brad pitt... cause he "adopted" a lot of children;" and "Dammit Danny rap about something different." As is the custom around Africa is a Country, I asked around "the office" to hear what we made of this: Boima Tucker: "Black Brad Pitt" means that Danny Brown's a really good actor..." Dylan Valley: If he was really the Black Brad Pitt the video would be about him adopting African and Asian kids ... BTW, from a technical perspective the video is really well shot. Greg Mann: Doesnt really bear thinking about, but maybe he is trying to win that bounty down in Florida. And if he does, he should buy something nice for his mother, who must be ashamed of his mouth. But call me old-fashioned. Zachary Rosen: This video superbly captures an Africa of make-believe. Danny gives us a jungle of soldiers, dictators, women, diamonds and fetishes. With its mystical visuals and unapologetically depraved lyrics, the video's African representations are completely devoid of context or relevance, aligning them quite comfortably with many other pop culture allusions to Africa. The Africa of Danny Brown is wholly manufactured. It has been constructed on a set, with an exotic landscape and elaborate costumes. These images have been force-fed into our subconscious before, thousands of times. They are designed to bewilder us, scare us and entrance us, but never to challenge us. And yet because SPIN magazine decided Danny's XXX mixtape was rap album of the year in 2011, hipsters everywhere will continue to eat it up regardless, salivating over how Danny's music "breaks new ground".   Justin Scott: Danny Brown is someone I enjoy (especially his mixtape XXX). That said I agree the schtick is getting tiresome. But Danny has been toiling away trying to "make it" for years. He finally broke thru with his cocaine-laced high-excitement flow, mostly because it's what the white hipster blogosphere wants to see. Basically, there are market forces at work here putting a premium on the kind of rhyming we're calling out so easily in this forum. There's been some interesting writing on the fetishization of the ghetto by white rap listeners; see for example this New Republic piece. 'kola: I am amazed at uncanny resemblance between the dictator in the video and Charles Taylor, who btw was a democratically elected "autocrat."  That said, I really feel like I have been transported back to the 1990s with all this talk about rap, selling out, rap white market forces, hoes, bitches and niggas ... Wasn't all of this over-analyzed then? So what do you think, dear readers?

Stephen W Smith in The London Review of Books:

The bigger question is not why France decided to intervene but why America has held off. Is it simply imperial overstretch and war-weariness? That seems a little thin, given the hue and cry in Washington about ‘ungoverned spaces’ and ‘terrorist safe havens’. After all, the Sahara is six times as big as Afghanistan and Pakistan combined. And why sink money into the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership – more than $1 billion since 2005 – or foot the bill for Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara, if at the end of it all al-Qaida is allowed to march on Bamako? Why would Obama order more drone strikes than his predecessor against the leaders of Somalia’s al-Shabaab, a group with relatively weak links to international terrorism, but not lift a finger to stop AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Maghreb) from taking over Mali? Unless, of course, in addition to a division of labour with the French, the point is to ‘disaggregate’ the multiple terrorist threats in Africa, tackling each individually rather than addressing any common denominator, and so deny jihadism a chance to coalesce. In this regard, even if the French were drawn into the quicksand in Mali, Nigeria would most likely remain the region’s focal point for the US: with 150 million inhabitants, it is the most populous state as well as the biggest oil producer south of the Sahara, and has an active homegrown salafist-jihadist group, Boko Haram (‘Westernisation Is Sinful’). When I put these thoughts to a US military staffer involved in anti-terrorism in Africa, he replied tersely: ‘What we’re doing in Africa is a sort of Whac-A-Mole’ – a reference to an arcade game in which players force moles back into their burrows by hitting them on the head with a mallet. He went on to quote the sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams: ‘America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’ Well, not any longer perhaps. But France has done precisely that.

Source.

Guest Post by Robert Nathan To be 419′ed is to be fooled. Duped. Swindled. At least that’s the meaning as far as Nigerian slang is concerned — of which this book has plenty on offer. The question is: does Will Ferguson’s Giller-winning novel deliver on the award hype, or does it 419 us? The answer is… yes. "419" begins when a hapless Calgarian falls for a Nigerian email scam (for more info, see your spam folder from ten years ago). He subsequently ruins his finances and offs himself, setting in motion a quest that will see his surviving daughter, Laura, attempt to find out who is responsible. From the beginning, the novel flits back and forth between Laura picking up the pieces in Canada and a host of Nigerian characters whose roles in the story will not become clear until the climax. With Nnamdi (a young man from the oil-rich Niger delta ), Amina (a troubled girl from the Muslim north), and Winston (an educated city boy turned scammer) we have three intertwining narratives that provide something of a portrait of contemporary Nigeria. The stark differences between north and south. The oil-slicked hellhole of the southern delta. Rural poverty. Urban chaos. More on this depiction later. This fast-paced movement is one of the novel’s strengths. It doesn’t give you time to get bored, because the scenes aren’t overdrawn — particularly at the beginning. Indeed, with 129 chapters, the average length of each is only three pages (1,000 words), and many are as short as a paragraph. One page you’re in a Calgary food court, the next you’re walking through ash under the Sahelian sun, and the next you’re motorboating through an oil-drenched mangrove forest on the Bight of Bonny. That being said, there are some slack parts. In particular, a 32-page section chronicling Nnamdi’s coming of age and the gradual environmental destruction of the Niger delta. It’s not that the topic doesn’t merit a 10,000-word treatment. A subject like that is worth a book of its own, or several. The real problem, rather, is the Nigerian narratives are slightly didactic. Ferguson has apparently never been to Africa, and quite frankly, it shows. While he has a real talent for rendering rich scenes and bringing the Nigerian environment to life, my enjoyment of the narrative was brought low by unlikely dialogue that would be more at home in a political science text than in the mouth of a real human being. Let’s look at an example. It’s taken from a section about how Shell’s local development projects were little more than cynical PR stunts:

“The health-care clinic has no roof!” people shouted at the members of the larger ibe. “How much dey payin’ you?”

“Not stolen, taken. That clinic was empty. No nurse, no doctor. Why let the roof just sit over nothing like that?”

“A nurse comes!”

“Once a year! If that. Once a year from Portako, nurse be coming to inject us with inoculate for everything except oil…” (p. 178)

This kind of dialogue is parachuted into the narrative in such an instructional fashion that it robs the characters who speak it of any personality worth noticing. These characters’ purpose seems only to convey information about injustice in Nigeria, not to speak like normal human beings. And in a novel you must always prefer true character over information. If I want to bone up on Nigerian history, I’ll hit the library. There are a number of sections like this throughout the book that weaken the Nigerian side of the narrative. They often take the form of Character A making small talk about his people’s sacred beliefs and customs with Character B, the two of whom have just met (see sections 78 & 80). Maybe this won’t bother readers who aren’t familiar with Nigeria—you might be intrigued by the descriptions of water gods and creation myths and so forth—but Africans just don’t talk like this. Nobody does. It would be like if you bumped into someone from Finland and the first thing the two of you discussed were your cosmological beliefs. I can see the process that led to this. I can imagine exactly how it happened. Perhaps it went something like this: the writer has never been to Africa. The writer wants to do well, so he studies up—reading, talking to people, surfing the net. He accumulates a lot of information. What an interesting place, Nigeria! What fascinating cultures! What colour that would bring to the story! And how educational it will be! This is a laudable impulse. People should know more about Nigeria. But it leads to two problems. The first is that it pushes the African characters toward objectification — their role in the story is to convey difference, exoticism. And the world they inhabit is the opposite of ours: hot to our cold, polluted to our clean, impoverished to our affluent. And of course this is all true. These are, so to speak, the facts. Most Nigerians are poor. Yet as always in literature, it is a question of emphasis. And the emphasis in 419 is too often on strangeness. In that sense it parallels colonial ethnography—a catalogue of the unknown, a juxtaposition of here and there. Yet serious students of Africa have moved on. These days they’re more interested in Africans as people rather than Africans as Africans, if you see the difference. In 419, while the main Nigerian characters are multifaceted, they are too often animated by didactic tendencies that erode their position as people. They become, rather, spokespeople. This leads to the second problem, which is that this sort of writing undermines the believability of the characters. Again, people don’t neatly lay out their worldviews, philosophies, and social problems to near-strangers — unless those strangers are, perhaps, anthropologists. Not that I’m a great expert, but no African I’ve ever met talks that way. Am I being too picky? Perhaps. But this may be a good way to find out: pick up any famous Nigerian novel — Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first, Purple Hibiscus–and see if the characters speak like a drama scene from an International Development Studies class. If memory serves me right, they don’t. Predictably, this made the Canadian side of the book the most enjoyable. Ferguson’s protagonist, Laura, is likeable and well-drawn, and when she gets on the trail of the conmen responsible for her father’s death, you can’t help but smile. Pretty gutsy for a timid copyeditor from Calgary. The pace of the novel is snappy, too, and when I think of this book the phrase “Good to read on an airplane” comes to mind. Maybe it’s because it’s easily digestible — the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters are all short and clear. The story is solid. 419 is a very respectable piece of entertainment. And this brings us back to the Giller question, because winning big prizes always conjures up fun terms like “literary gravitas,” along with the question of whether the book is not just a heart-pounding thriller but also a contribution to letters. Heart-pounding thriller? Page-turner? More or less. I must admit the final fifty pages had me revved up. The story does have a kick to it. A contribution to letters? Mmm … no. For one thing, the prose isn’t what I’d call lyrical. ‘Serviceable’ is the word that comes to mind. ‘Satisfactory.’ It gets the job done—and, to be fair, it does sparkle in places. But I don’t think there is a remarkable literary voice to be found in 419. I wasn’t transported to emotional heights by Ferguson’s phraseology. I wasn’t in awe of his sentences. I didn’t feel I was swimming in his words, the way I do when reading Julian Barnes or Howard Jacobson. And whatever you might say about the subject matter or plots of these recent Booker prize winners’ novels, their mastery of prose isn’t in question. With Ferguson, on the other hand, it was hit and miss. Maybe that brings us back to the stilted dialogue. And maybe that was never Ferguson’s intention — to write a ‘literary’ novel. If so, it would be unfair to judge him by those standards. But ultimately all I have to guide me is my taste. And in my opinion, this is not an outstanding novel. Decent, but not outstanding. My sense is it will appeal more to the lover of thrillers and popular fiction than to the ‘literary’ type. If you aren’t so demanding of dialogue, and you don’t mind Ferguson’s over-exotic bent, you may really love 419. But if you’re the person who likes picking up the latest Booker and Giller winners to see what passes for literature these days, prepare to feel lukewarm. * This is an edited version of a review by Robert Nathan, a PhD student in African history at Dalhouse University in Canada. 

By Njabulo Ngidi Against expectations South Africa finished top of their group and made it to the quarterfinals. Hopefully the team and coaches will concentrate on the next match and not get carried away like the country's sports minister after the 2-0 win over Angola last week. (He railed against white supremacy, unpatriotic critics and predicted South Africa would win the tournament.) So what are the South Africans dancing to? Tumi and the Volume's "Afrique" poetically mentions all African countries, with the exception of South Sudan which didn't exist when the song was recorded, backed by 340ml in this colossal union: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a757WFnY8M Vetkuk vs Mahoota ft. Dr Malinga. "Via Orlando": This is the current anthem from clubs to shebeens with Dr Malinga's kicks, or is it dance moves, amusing all those who have seen it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_PAhN45SqA Zubz, "Premier MC": The Zambian born, Zimbabwe raised and South African-based rapper is at his creative best in this song where he compares a tight MC to a football team dropping some names in between taken from his best album Headphone Music in a Parallel World. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBeUvyJ4B1E Sifiso Sudan ft. Tumi, "Once Upon A Time in Africa": Two wordsmiths came together to offer this timeless class where they rap about an Africa of yesteryear with all eyes on the continent, it's feating to take those watching back a few years to appreciate the present even more. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-wQYFhzf3Q Spoek Mathambo, "Let Them Talk": Mathambo has turned into an international hipster superstar with his "engineered" music, infusing different genres from rap to pop to create his unique sound. The title is one Bafana Bafana players should keep in their minds and passing to detractors as they attempt to rewrite their recent history. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRBgUoy390k * Njabulo Ngidi is a Johannesburg-based football reporter.

South Africa's form has been dismal for a while now. Pre-Afcon, Elliot Ross concluded here that "they're rubbish." Johannesburg-based football writer Njabulo Ngidi basically confirmed as much in a preview for us of Bafana Bafana's chances. After the aimless goalless draw against Cape Verde on opening day, that football sage Jonathan Wilson wrote (in Sports Illustrated, not as usual in The Guardian)* that South Africans were living on past glories, just like England, that nation our footballers and fans so admire: "South Africa fans remember 1996 (the last and only time it won the African Cup of Nations) and see no reason their team can't reach those heights again, but repeated failure has made them disinclined to be forgiving, unable quite to believe things will work themselves out. A lack of coaches may be the major practical problem, but there is also the psychological aspect of yearning for past glories." It also seems their fans hardly cared as the half empty stadium suggested and as Braden Ruddy discovered during a visit to an empty Madiba Restaurant in Brooklyn on Saturday morning to watch the opener. Some people suggested they needed a good sangoma. (For a while, they had forgotten to pay one, so it seems they were cursed for goals.) As for me, I went on Facebook this morning to make a solemn vow: "If Bafana Bafana beats Angola I'll eat my hat with pepper soup." Then coach Gordon Igesund made 5 changes--most crucially he brought Dean Furman, who plays in the English League One (basically the 3rd division), along with the 2011 Swedish footballer (and separately, also athlete) of the Year, May Mahlangu, to partner in midfield. Simphiwe Tshabalala (whose reputation is undeserved; he's largely in the squad because of the memories of his glorious  2010 World Cup goal) was left on the bench. Up front, Igesund started with Katlego Mphela (from local super club Mamelodi Sundowns) and Tokelo Rantsie (who also plays in Sweden, for little known Malmö FF Allsvenskan). From the get-go it was clear. South Africa came to play.  Igesund went with four defenders, one holding midfielder and "the other five players committed to attacking." The Angolans looked harried and harassed. Before we knew it, it was 1-0. Goal from centre-back Siyabonga Sangweni. It was also the first goal scored in Group A in three matches. It looked as though I might be tucking into my hat with pepper soup after all. It stayed that way until Lehlohonolo Majoro scored a second from an acute angle in the 62nd minute: 2-0. I was now seriously dreading social network ridicule (Facebook can be an unforgiving place on matchday) and my likely fate of having to eat not one but two hats with pepper soup. Angola hardly threatened the South African goalkeeper Ithumeleng Khune. This was South Africa's first victory in an actual Afcon tournament match in a while (the country plays and wins lots of friendlies since they're always hosting). Furman, the only white guy in the team (you couldn't miss him), was named man of the match. Will I eat my hat? Like any good South African I have been spinning myself out of that one, by now offering myself as motivation for team. In the second game of the afternoon, Cape Verde was on the way to a historic first win, courtesy of a goal by Luis Soares, also known as Platini, who sprinted onto a clever through-ball that split the Moroccan centre halves and gingerly clipped his shot over the goalkeeper. It was the first goal Cape Verde had ever scored at the Nations Cup and joy was unconfined. Until Morocco's  Youssef El Arabi scored with about 12 minutes to go. Still, the tiny nation of 500,000 people is turning out to be the surprise package of the tournament, and who'd bet against them making the quarter-finals by overcoming Angola in the big Lusophone derby next week? Not us. We told you in our tournament preview that Cape Verde would make the quarter finals. You heard it here first. * It's interesting to note that within international media, perhaps the most insightful writing on the actual football at Afcon is published by betting websites, who commission respected experts like Jonathan Wilson to write for them throughout the tournament. Check out the preview he wrote for Zambia vs Nigeria here. It contains such nuggets as:

Nigeria are prone to panic and self-destruction - partly because, like England, they are tormented by the twin evils of expectant entitlement and a sense of the inevitability of their own demise. One in six Africans is Nigerian, they have produced as many top-class players as any other African nation and yet they have won the Cup of Nations only twice - half as often as the Egypt midfielder Ahmed Hassan.

We are taking a collective break from blogging until Thursday, January 10th to give us a chance to breathe and catch up with our lives. Till then feel free to read our rich archive of posts from 2012, check in with our "Best ..."-lists below and follow us on Facebook and Twitter where we may post occasionally in the interim. Happy New Year! UPDATE: Apologies, but we'll be back on Monday, January 14th.

Yesterday we tweeted my friend Herman Wasserman's guide to the media on how to cover Nelson Mandela's hospitalization (it's good advice if you're a journalist). This morning I asked Nathan Geffen, a South African media activist (and author) whether we could republish here his post on the "when Mandela goes" meme. Geffen is one of the key people behind the groundbreaking, very non-mainstream, community news portal GroundUp. He also played a leading role in South Africa's largest postapartheid social movement, the Treatment Action Campaign. Here's the post: Guest Post by Nathan Geffen Madiba is in hospital. Spokespeople assure us he is doing well. That he is old, sick and likely to die soon are avoided or dealt with euphemistically. The tip-toeing around Mandela's mortality encourages the idiotic myth-making by self-styled experts on South Africa who don't live here. Some of them are downright ridiculous suggesting that the country will unravel when Mandela dies. A version of this myth was written on Monday by David Blair in the British newspaper The Telegraph. He wrote "For as long as he is around, South Africans believe their present leaders will be slightly more likely to stick to the principles of the nation’s rebirth 18 years ago. In a way that foreigners can’t really grasp, Mandela still underwrites that settlement with all its promise and idealism." Well I'm South African and I don't believe this. Frankly, Mr Blair, I suspect you're talking nonsense. Mandela retired from politics several years ago. He has had hardly any role in recent South African politics. Our country holds together not because of the Nelson Mandela of today, but because of what he did over his lifetime which is now sadly but inevitably winding down. It also holds together because we have a more or less functioning constitutional democracy and innumerable countervailing forces: powerful unions, powerful civil society activist organisations, powerful opposition parties, some good people still left in the ANC, powerful businesses, some effective courts, a free and vibrant media. There are no guarantees: South Africa might descend into the abyss -- and another term of office for President Zuma increases the risk of this -- but I think it unlikely. Nevertheless, whether or not South Africa thrives, unravels or -- the most likely scenario -- just continues to bumble along, is not dependent on Nelson Mandela staying alive. Nelson Mandela is a great person, one of the greatest of the last 100 years. Despite growing up in a rural homestead with limited opportunities he invested heavily in his education and became the most respected African ever. He spent 27 years in prison to defend his principles but forgave his captors and used his leadership to mitigate South Africa's civil war. He helped defeat apartheid and helped South Africa become a reasonably stable albeit flawed democracy. History is not the product of a single person's actions, but it is conceivable that without Mandela, South Africa's political settlement might not have been achieved and the country would have descended into chaos. Yet Mandela is human and he has also made mistakes. As with all great people who have had to make many very difficult decisions throughout their lives, sometimes he made big and bad mistakes: his handling of AIDS in the 90s and his passing the baton to Thabo Mbeki were two of his bigger ones. He realised the former, apologised for it, and appeared to have realised the latter. He made amends by confronting Mbeki's AIDS denialism which helped change government's AIDS policies. His decision to turn the ANC to armed struggle will always be controversial. Overall his greatness far, far outshines his errors. But Nelson Mandela is mortal. He's also old. He is 94 and in obviously very frail health. It might be 10 years from now, 5 years, in 2013 or even in the next few weeks, but he is absolutely, unequivocally, unavoidably going to die, as are we all. Moreover, most very old people begin to lose their mental faculties. It's by time someone said it publicly. After all, most of us talk about it privately: Madiba is losing his mental faculties. Only those closest to him know how seriously he is losing his faculties but we all know, from several public clues, that there is some loss and it appears to be quite serious. It is sad, but there should be no shame in this and no embarrassment. It does not tarnish his legacy. What's happening to him is a natural part of life and death and it's by time we said and accepted it, openly, publicly and without euphemism. The currently living Nelson Mandela no longer has any substantial influence on South African politics. On the other hand, his lifetime's work and our memories of what he has achieved have a profound influence on South Africa and the world. They will continue to do so long after he has died. The myth-making about Mandela, the continued suggestion by the ANC that he's infallible and superhuman and the pretence by the opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, that it carries his mantle, coupled with the failure to critically discuss and debate his lifetime's ideas, actions, successes and failures, does him a disservice. It reduces his life to feel-good quotes and excuses all kinds of bad behaviour done in his name. This dehumanises Mandela and actually means we fail to learn from his achievements. It is sad when people we love become old, frail and ill. It is sad when they die, but it is an unavoidable and necessary part of life, of how the human species works. Death is tragic and inevitable but it's also ok, because there isn't an alternative. It is insulting to Mandela to suggest that his lifetime's work will unravel at the end of his lifetime. Let us give Madiba the respect he deserves by recognising his humanity, his frailty, his decline, his mortality and that life will go on when he dies. * This is republished (in slightly edited form) with kind permission from GroundUp. You can follow Geffen on Twitter @nathangeffen.

Results of today's parliamentary and presidential elections in Ghana are expected at the earliest by Sunday. (BTW, in areas where "the biometric verification machines did not work" voting has been extended till tomorrow.) Once you've checked out our elections preview (yes, our Dennis Laumann predicts incumbent President John Dramini Dramani Mahama will win a tight election), keep up with the elections through this bunch of sources: Al Jazeera English; the BBC (check out their Ghana elections FAQ); the crowdsourced (Ushahidi-clone) Ghana Votes 2012, which provides raw reports from polling stations; and the consortium of bloggers at Ghana Decides (though their site can take a while to load; they're also posting videos on YouTube). Someone even created an exit poll on Google docs. If this is all too much work, just follow the #GhanaDecides hashtag on Twitter or befriend a Ghanaian on Facebook. Oh, and we have a playlist of fifteen songs (link below) to keep you occupied while waiting for the result. Here.  

TIME Magazine has copied what The Economist did in 2011, and decided "Africa is Rising." Again. This week's European edition is taken over by stories on this theme. Alex Perry, who writes for TIME from Cape Town (remember his style) has a piece where, despite the cover title, he does not come to any real conclusion. We've written about this meme and its various iterations on film, at TED conferences and on blogs before (it will also be the focus of a--hopefully critical--conference at Harvard next April by super anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff; they're already teaching a course by the same name) and we are not sure what is gained by all this hot air. Whether it is "Hopeless Continent" or "Africa Rising," these kinds of totalizing narratives of the continent are banal and outdated. Of course it is easier to write yet another new beginning for the continent (or rebrand it, if you prefer), than to offer substantial engagement with the current situation. Perry and co really to need to beef up on their history if they are to cut it as serious commentators and reporters. Take for example:

As Africa marks half a century since it began to free itself from colonialism, its future lies in the hands of hundreds of millions of young Africans who, like [Kenyan photographer Boniface] Mwangi [featured in Perry's article], must choose between Africa rising and Africa uprising.

What a choice. If you're talking about, say, South Africa or Nigeria (and I bet Kenyans would agree), I think we'd take uprising, thank you very much. Anyway, for it what it's worth, TIME ran the same headline in 1998, with these tired old lines: "Hope is Africa's rarest commodity. Yet buried though it is amid the despair that haunts the continent, there is more optimism today than in decades ..." * Elliot Ross did more than co-write this post. H/T How We Made it in Africa.