Then, as now

Our country today is in a bad state for its land is full of fools---and fools in a country delay the independence of its people.

Kenyatta, speech at the Kenya African Union Meeting in Nyeri, July 26, 1952 (Transcript from the Corfield report*, presumably via the secret policemen who attended the meeting).

*Corfield, Frank D. (1960). The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau: an Historical Survey (Sessional Paper no. 5) Nairobi: Government of Kenya. ISBN 9780521130905.

Listen to the Gentiles

Many years ago, when I wrote about doing economics, one of my principles was “Listen to the Gentiles”, meaning listen to intelligent people, even if they don’t speak your analytical language.

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of A Liberal, 26.VII.2011.

These friendly skies ain't for you, they for me and mine

In 1981, Robert MacNamara, whom you may remember from hits such as the Vietnam War and Fog of War, discussed Kenya's population growth with Moi. In 1982, the World Bank imposed the following conditions on a new loan to the Kenyan government: it was to surrender control of its population policy and budget to a panel whose members, some of them drawn from NGOs, would be appointed only with donor approval; the panel would henceforth set population policy and control the budget. The Ministry of Health advised against it, as well they might.* Moi overruled his own ministry, and did the deal on the terms offered. The World Bank cash was received on the day he signed. The story, complete with footnoted evidence, is at page 349 of Matthew Connelly's Fatal Misconception. The book, if you haven't already heard about it, is the first global history of the population movement. It is this book which explains why aid needs to end.

*Not the first time the Ministry of Health did well in the Moi era. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Moi ordered AIDS patients rounded up and quarantined in some sort of camp, Cuba-style. The Ministry of Health simply refused to carry out the order. (Can't remember the page, but see John Iliffe's The African Aids Epidemic: A History.)

New Black Face

Via Typophile, an interesting history of typographic representations of blackness.

The "Neuland Question" to which Jonathan Hoefler refers involves not just Neuland, a "display" typeface hand-carved in 1923 by Rudolf Koch (Plate 1), but also Lithos, another "display" typeface digitally created in 1989 by Carol Twombly (Plate 2). The Question can be put simply: How did these two typefaces come to signify Africans and African-Americans, regardless of how a designer uses them, and regardless of the purpose for which their creators originally intended them? The investigation of this question has four parts: first, an examination of the environments in which Koch and Twombly created the original typefaces; second, an examination of the graphic culture that surrounded African-Americans prior to the creation of Neuland through a close viewing of tobacco ephemera; third, an examination of the Art Deco (French Modern) style, the graphic culture most prevalent in the United States at the time of Neuland's release; and finally, an examination of the ways designers use Neuland and Lithos today.

The rest of the piece -- which first appeared in Letterspace -- is available here.

Pan-Nigerian Alphabet

Robert Bringhurst (2004, 116) says that Hermann Zapf designed a Pan-Nigerian alphabet in 1983, which:

normalizes the mission orthographies that had been used for Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Edo, Fulfulde and several other Nigerian languages.

Wikipedia claims that Zapf finalised the alphabet in 1985, and doesn't refer, as Bringurst does, to the help that Zapf is supposed to have had from Victor Manfredi.