The Yale Globalist Blog

I came to Nigeria in the morning, before the sun had risen, and when the haze still gathers over the covered hills. It’s the kind of haze that the occasional palm tree can break, between the shadows of rolling ups and downs in the earth. The airport was quiet, but not in a way that matches the skies. The airport is quiet in an empty way—the way that guards are kept late into the night and the customs officials are scraping the sleep off their eyes as they hassle the incoming passengers.

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Americans’ ignorance of African affairs has long been a common complaint among Africanists in academia. The Onion takes on the subject:

Nation Of Andorra Not In Africa, Shocked U.S. State Dept. Reports

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For a more serious look at Africa, Josh Ruxin from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health writes in the Huffington Post today about the Bush administration’s remarkable commitment to development aid in the region. Ruxin highlights the accomplishments of PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The U.S.’s habit of throwing money at the Africa’s social and economic problems has rarely resulted in sustainable growth. But Ruxin may have a point: development economists have noted that public health metrics do tend to respond positively to massive aid infusions.

Image details: Rioting Continues In Kenyan Election Violence served by picapp.com

My sister and I, along with seven other Yalies, served as student monitors for the Kenyan elections on December 27. Mostly for the catharsis of it, we wrote a short piece about our frustrations with international coverage of the post-election violence. Warning: since I’m a blog-noob, I haven’t figured out how to manipulate those essential elements of formatting like paragraph indentations. Apologies!

What We Saw in Nairobi: Student Election Monitors On the Ground for the Kenyan Elections

As the tragic violence unfolds following Kenya’s presidential and parliamentary elections, the prevalent images in the media are of mobs wielding machetes and burning cars. The emphasis on this post-election violence is inevitable, but it overshadows the integrity of millions of Kenyan voters on election day.

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