Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The Science of (Not) Ending Global Poverty

Poverty prize

Politicians and pundits in the West, observes Zarni, long ago adopted Aung San Suu Kyi as “their liberal darling — petite, attractive, Oxford-educated ‘Oriental’ woman with the most prestigious pedigree, married to a white man, an Oxford don, connected with the British Establishment.” " Burmese nobel prize winner turned an apologist for genocide " (?) Those liberals and leftists who had a brilliant analysis of the regime in Burma and knew very well that the Lady broke up with the regime or that the regime was dismanteled.  Who else is a Nobel Prize winner that comes to my mind? Sadad of Egypt and Obama.  See also Earlier this year, when a team from the  United Nations Human Rights Commission carried out research  into alleged human rights violations in Rakhine state, it refused to use any photographs or video it had not taken itself, because of the problem of authenticating such material. Their report gives meticulous details of their methodology. ...

"This is the importance of Ngugi. Born in 1938, the son of a tenant farmer in rural, British-occupied Kenya, Ngugi grew up working the pyrethrum farms that were once the property of his ancestors. He came of age during the Mau Mau rebellion, followed by the Churchill government’s violent ​response, which included​ the detention of 150,000 Gikuyu people in concentration camps where they were electrocuted, whipped and mutilated. He vividly describes this period in his novels “ Weep Not, Child ,” the first East African novel published in English, “ A Grain of Wheat ” and “ Petals of Blood .” "Such a rich body of work [Wizard of the Crow] is of potentially tremendous importance to our understanding of how the world came to be as it is. Ngugi captures the progression from the raw plunder and violence of colonialism to the corruption of national Third World elites by the predatory forces of global capitalism, which he cheekily represented in “Wizard of the Crow” by the ...