Carry on up the Amazon, slowly

The appeal of taking slow boats up the Amazon While still young children we must all have learnt that the Amazon is the biggest river in the world, along with Everest being the highest mountain and that bears shit in the woods. But once you’re on a boat in the middle of it, you soon realise that big is too small a word to do justice to its awesomeness: at times you struggle to even see the other side, that’s…

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In the shadow of Thomas Sankara

Why Burkina Faso’s revolutionary president still matters Under the full moon glow in the warm Ouagadougou night, to the thud of ominous beats, the Congolese rapper strode onto the stage, declaring, “I may be from Congo Brazzaville but tonight, on the anniversary of the death of Thomas Sankara we are all Burkinabe”. For the first time in the night the previously subdued crowd roared in appreciation, from then on he could do no wrong. But why, twenty-nine years after he…

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The heroes of Samarinda

Samarinda, on the east Kalimantan coast is never going to win any prizes, unless there is a competition for  pavement obstructions in SE Asia. Its general air of tattiness, wafted by the fumes of sluggish traffic would prompt the less charitable to describe it as a bit of a shithole. Warranting special mention is its drainage system, which valiantly performs several tasks, such as removing rainwater, sewage and the rubbish, that those of the more bone-idle residents, who decide they don’t…

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Sarawak: village of the damned

“We’re going to visit the old village”, said Penghulu Sagan cheerfully, as he loaded another box of fishing equipment onto the small boat. The matter of fact statement disguised the real nature of the expedition, which was perhaps more evident in the thin, sun etched face of his uncle, who sat quietly waiting: eyes lost in the distance, speaking of a longing, a sadness? Lost in thought, remembering. The reality was that to actually visit the village they would have…

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Town on the edge of nowhere

On a wall in the Savitsky Museum of Art in Nukus, NW Uzbekistan, hangs a modest landscape painting from 1976 depicting the Moynaq fish canning factory. The factory itself is a relatively unobtrusive part of the scene and probably served more as a means of keeping the authorities from shipping the artist off to the gulag for the crime of rejecting the absurd values of Soviet Realism, as had happened to others. Art could not function as a means of…

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