georgeland: the blog

Originally, I’d meant to post more African & African-American content during the month of February, when by law and by custom we in English-speaking North America bother to pay attention to the accomplishments and struggles of the African Diaspora. The conspiracy-minded might point out that February is the shortest month of the year.

Anyway, I kinda screwed that up, which is embarassing, because I ran across a lot of great content that I just kept forgetting to put up. Situation remedied, starting now.

self-trained repairmen of Nigeria. I was reading something a while ago, about how cheap low-end electronics, or even much of a resale market, are a phenomenon that you just don’t see in most of Africa. People buy the best they can, so that it can last long enough to be run into the ground, rebuilt, and run into the ground again. Of course, what this means is that to capture the low-cost end of the market, a lot of people end up handicrafting their own devices, many of them to fit needs that there are no factory-made tools for. Welcome to the world of afrigadget.

Notable tinkerers of recent history include young Mr. William Kamkwamba, electrifying rural Malawi one handcrafted windmill at a time, and Dr. Cedrick Ngalande, creator of a fermentation-powered generator. Mmm, beer (but probably not).

Interesting commentary on the trendiness of biodiesel, raising an issue that even lil ol me had thought of before: like, isn’t growing crops to convert to oil to burn in your cars like, totally inefficient? Answer: yes. While it’s more efficient as a recycling measure to convert used fryer oil, etc., to biodiesel, it’s more efficient for business to simply extract it from palm oil, soybeans, etc. Which is much more inefficient (in fact, harmful) in environmental terms. Full circle.

We are so screwed.