You have got to see this. The issue of exploitation of African raw materials by the rest of the world is well known. Chocolate costs a lot in Europe and the West yet Ivory Coast, which produces 50% of the world's cocoa, gets next to nothing!! This film gives an insight into what exactly happens before you get your fix of a good chocolate bar.... its outrageous.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_65...bw=bb&mp=wm

Humphrey Hawksley reports from the Ivory Coast on...
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A Newsnight video on the health emergency in Sierra Leone. An estimated 40% of the population is traumatised but the country has just one trained psychiatrist. Watch it here. It makes you sick to see the Church taking advantage of poverty and gullibility by offering the usual medicine of preaching, miracle cures and ... healing calendars.

With regard to the psychiatric hospital featured in the video, it...
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Wanna make some nice cocaine??

Here's a recipe that shows what goes into the drug of choice for celebs and crackheads. This is quite an eye-opening video - I had no idea they used such premium quallity ingredients in making cocaine - wow!

Take some fresh coca leaves and chop 'em up (available from your...
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Amos Kimunya came with a mission to sell Kenya. Giving the keynote speech at the first ever Kenya Diaspora Investment Forum yesterday in London, the Minister for Finance delivered a 90+ minute sermon which did just that. Very articulate, he painted a rosy picture of the economy and investment climate, where practically every graph he showed was going up. According to him, even crime had gone down a lot since Kibaki came to power, and water shortages were a thing of the past (' the good...
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I normally wouldn't support South African products, especially not when it comes to tea, but I recently discovered Redbush tea and I must say, I really like it. Most people on this tea-drinking island love the bland stuff like PG Tips and other such rubbish. But I've usually gone for Kenyan tea, masala chais and now this: Redbush. The thing with this one is that not only does it have a strong, unique taste, but it's also caffeine free naturally! Which is great for me, as...
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Chinese takeaways are cheap. You don't usually pay more than £5 for sweet and sour chicken with rice. But who's getting the best deal when it comes to the Great African Takeaway?

Unless you've been sleeping under a rock, you'll know that China put on an African extravaganza last week. There was definitely a hint of envy and even concern in the Western media at how China is seducing Africa. (This was in the same week that there was also a lot of coverage in the UK of the
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And the beginning of a new one! This is the title of Gado's latest work of art, his second book of editorial cartoons from the Nation; the first one was, also hilariously, called Democrazy. You can get The End of An Error ... and the beginning of a new one! in Nairobi bookshops or buy it here online.

I've not quite finished it yet but so far its brilliantly hilarious, as you would expect from the legendary Gado wit. If there's one thing...
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Zidane - A 21st-Century Portrait. Watched this on Friday and had been looking forward to it as it seemed at the very least an interesting piece of film-making - and I'm not even a footie fan. You can't really call this a film or even a documentary, as its got no plot or event. Its basically attempting to capture the essence of one of the world's great footballers - by using 17 camera focused soley on the man, so you see great close-ups of him sweating and a lot of spitting, his...
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Well OK this is a personal judgement based only on one flight so it might have been a one-off negative experience..... But I was not impressed. After having heard so much about the renaissance of KQ, I decided to fly with them on a recent trip from Mumbai to Nairobi. It was the attitude of the staff that really annoyed me - stand-offish, abrupt, stony-faced, robotic, arrogant - you could use all these words to describe them.

I was of course in Economy. Now I can hack poor food, average...
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At £620 (or $1411) for a 12 month subscription, the highly-regarded Africa-Confidential is waaaay beyond my means. Too bad. Its always had some forthright and incisive reporting, but how the hell is an individual supposed to afford that. The magazine's been published since 1960 so I'm guessing they have a lot of corporate and institutional subscribers.

But why keep the readership like that? It could probably increase its revenues 100 fold if it had a more affordable price -...
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