Der Spiegel is keen on Africa. It cites the rise of traffic jams in major cities as a sign of boom, along with glittering shopping malls, and new infrastructure like highways, railways, airports, dams, power plants, pipelines, and factories, to say nothing of industrial parks and ‘special economic zones.
The German news magazine credited greater political stability, economic reforms, and technological innovations as forming a basis for its optimism about Africa. On politics, Der Spiegel believes 25 out of 54 African countries have “halfway functional democracies”, whatever that may mean, up from only 3 twenty years ago.
And while it may not make the headlines, there has been a decline in violence, civil wars, and military coups.
Meanwhile the communications and information sector are being revolutionized by modern data transmission from Cairo to Cape Town, and points in between, with Internet and mobile phone use exploding. Local IT experts are letting Kenya skip the intermediate steps of modernization with instant digitalization. This stimulates the economy and changes society big time, the Germans think.
The result is a new middle class of 310 million Africans, about as many as the total population of the USA.
Our Zimbabwe-born reporter Martin Ferera describes the article as “somewhat breathlessly positive.”
Another Siberian day. Last night I did my religious duty, to vote in a new rabbi at Central Synagogue, a Reform temple where we belong. This required traveling 10 blocks by bus rather than using my cold feet. The bus was very crowded, not with people, but with their garments. Everyone took two seats.
The new rabbi, to take over in June, is Angela Buchdahl, not only the first woman to be named a senior rabbi at Central (which had 11 before her) but also the first of Korean Buddhist extraction on her mother’s side. This causes some difficulty with more Orthodox Jews who consider religion to be transmitted by the mother, not by the father. That doctrine is post-Biblical, as Moses’s wife Zipporah was the daughter of the Egyptian High Priest of Om.
