Central America: notes from the road -- Palenque, old books, DNA

( posted from Guatemala / Xeni ) -- "It is by no means improbable that these fantastic forms, and others equally whimsical, were the delineations of some of their deities, to whom they paid an idolatrous worship, consistent with their false belief and barbarous customs."

Here's a post on the excellent Bibliodyssey blog that points to a collection of texts at Mesoweb about the Mayan ruins at Palenque.

Referenced publications include a scholarly work about evidence of physical deformities that may have been genetically transmitted as a result of heavy intermarriage within the god-king class in preColumbian Mayan society.

Physical Deformities in the Ruling Lineage of Palenque, and the Dynastic Implications," By Merle Greene Robertson and Marjorie S. Rosenblum Scanidizzo and John R. Scandizzo.

Central America: Notes from the road

Image: snapshot of a religious poster in Antigua, Guatemala -- blood-soaked Christ. (Link 1, Link 2 / Xeni).

I'm in Central America for a few weeks -- in Guatemala right now following up on stories I reported earlier this year for NPR, and exploring others.

Where I am right now, the coffee and wifi flow freely, wisps of smoke puff out of the volcan de fuego nearby, and all is well.

A quick skim through TV and the daily papers today (Prensa Libre, Siglo 21, and the like) shows several top stories as common themes. I'll recap them quickly here.

Much of what's in the news in Guatemala right now involves the upcoming presidential elections in September. TV and radio are saturated with campaign ads. Concerns over transparency and potential electoral fraud are high (not that we'd have any such worries in the US).

Crime is the dominant theme in the Guatemalan election campaigns, and it's a big problem here. A number of particularly violent attacks have taken place on public transportation in the nation's capital, Guatemala City, in recent weeks. People are asking if some of the attacks may have been orchestrated with political motives, because a climate of destabilization could help certain political parties running on a law and order platform. Billboards everywhere for one party promise "a strong hand" against crime. Some folks I've spoken with fear that this could presage an abandonment of human rights protections hard-won in peace accords after Guatemala's 36-year civil war. Link.

"El femicidio." The ongoing, growing problem of murder and violent sexual crimes against women. Nearly 600 killed in Guatemala in the past year, according to one source. Thousands of cases in the past few years, too few resources dedicated to investigating and punishing the crimes, and almost no criminal convictions.

Amnesty International released a statement about the widespread violence against women in Guatemala recently, and this was covered in local papers this week. More here.

Editorials in Guatemalan papers and conversations with people who work on this issue generally come down to this idea: the femicide epidemic is the direct, logical result of decades of impunity for human rights violations committed during the civil war. "The highest officials in our country got away with torture, disappearances, and murder for nearly four decades, and still walk among us as free men" one human rights worker told me, "of course impunity leads to more violence."

I haven't seen the Canadian documentary film "Killer's Paradise" yet, but it sounds like a truly worthy project. The director, Giselle Portenier, has been following the story closely for years. Here's the film's official website, and here's the trailer.

Efraín Ríos Montt, the former head of a military regime responsible for some of the worst atrocities during Guatemala's civil war, is running for office again. Several Guatemalan papers ran op-eds this week from people who are basically asking (summarizing with some editorial liberty here): "WTF? How can this mass murderer be running for office again? Are we insane, that our country could even consider this -- when he should be in jail for war crimes?" Link to related item.

Police in El Salvador this week found the corpses of two young men identified as gay, and four (or more?) women identified as sex workers, in a house near the capital. The young people who died were tortured, sexually assaulted, then killed in particularly violent ways, according to news reports here. Some of the bodies were smashed, then half-buried under large rocks. Much discussion about the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, and of sex workers. I can't find the story online, but read it in a cafe this morning. It ran with a photo of the father of one victim, crying as he recognized the body of his child.

Reports of violence, break-ins, theft, death threats, and killings of human rights workers are on the rise in Guatemala: Link. Some of the most recent victims include people who work to protect the Mayan biosphere (an ecological protection zone), others who are working for the rights of indigenous farmers/peasants, and a group that provides legal support to people seeking justice on behalf of relatives killed in massacres during Guatemala's internal armed conflict.

Pollo Campero, the Guatemalan fried chicken franchise with an international cult following, is taking over the world. They're launching sites in China and Indonesia now, and this report says they've opened 600 sites in the past 7 years: Link. Overhead bins on the flights from Guatemala City to LAX are always packed with family-sized cartons of the stuff. To me, the stuff tastes like D-list KFC, but -- (shrugs).

Image above: from a series of Guatemalan street life photographs by Atlanta-based photojournalist Allen Sullivan.

Sandra Guamux, 21, sits with her 5 month old son, Alfredo, at an abandoned gas station in Zona 4 of Guatemala City. About 20 otherwise homeless people live inside the station and most are addicted to huffing paint thinner to numb the cold and their hunger pains. Guamux said another baby was stolen from her five days after it was born last year, and she is convinced the baby went into an illegal adoption system. She said that the police told her they would not investigate the situation since she had no photographs of the child.

Adoptions: Guatemala is one of the top "sender" countries for foreign adoptions -- 4,000 Guatemalan babies were adopted by Americans last year. Guatemala signed on to an international adoption treaty this week, committing to bring adoptions under government regulation and make sure babies are not bought or stolen:

Guatemalan law currently allows notaries to act as baby brokers who recruit birth mothers, handle paperwork and complete foreign adoptions in less than half the time it takes in other countries.

But U.S. officials have urged Guatemala to tighten up the procedure amid concern brokers were paying or threatening mothers to give up their babies.

Link. In some of the Mayan communities I've visited here -- extremely poor places where this is a big problem -- the phenomenon is known as "el robo de los ninos," the "theft of the children."

The virgin birth of a child to Cheney's gay daughter is totally weird news here. It's all over the tabloids. Guatemala is way Catholic, the Iraq war is extremely unpopular here, nobody likes Cheney, so this news is perceived as bizarre on many levels. Screenshot below.

Cloth cult: "Why Congolese men rather starve to death than look cheap."

Photo: Héctor Mediavilla Sabaté, from this Colors feature.

Serial entrepreneur and blogger Emeka Okafor, who also happens to be organizing TED GLOBAL in Tanzania next week, points us to this blog entry about Congolese "sapeurs" by Sefu Massamba Shongo Erik aka "Papa Shongo," a Congolese blogger who lives in New York City:

Hopefully you’re already familiar with the Congolese outlandish fashion sense courtesy of Koffi Olomide (expensive designer clothes, no concern whatsoever about matching colors) and Papa Wemba to name a couple.

If you thought that fashion sense (nonsense sometimes) was limited to famous Congolese artists only, you were wrong my friend. We Congolese have been so obsessed with designer clothes and looking good that over time some of us have prioritized it to the detriment of basic needs sometimes.

If you ever thought you spent more than you could afford to support a lifestyle, wait till you meet this guy I read about in a LA Times article who reported earning about $150/month but somehow was able to afford D&G, Gucci and other obscure designer accessories. That same gentleman also owned a fur coat, in an equatorial climate mind you!

Although this may seem ridiculous to most of us, showing off (which this really is) has become a religion for a lot of “Congolais” who feel that perhaps they must live up to the hype, the expectation that all Congolese must have a high fashion sense. The phenomenon can also be observed here in the US where I’ve met someone (Charlotte, NC) who was working 3 jobs (no kidding) just so he could impress his friends and family with his Mercedes-Benz.

Read the entire post on Sefu Massamba Shongo Erik's I'm an African in New York blog.

Emeka also points us to some fascinating related items about the "cult of cloth" in Congolese culture, including a Colors Magazine feature (with amazing photos), the "Chic Theory" article in the Australian Humanities Review, and a BBC video documentary.

Image, top: "A three-and-a-half-year-old sapeur — wearing an eye patch in imitation of his uncle, the famouse K.V.V Mouzieto, a grand Sapeur who lives in paris — struts down a dusty street."

Image, inset: "‘I’M A SAPE’: Papy Mosengo, 30, lives with his parents and earns $120 a month — and spends several times that each month on clothes. (Edmund Sanders / LAT)"

Reader comment: Brett Burton says,

Just saw your Boing Boing post about the LA Times' Congolese cloth cult. It reminded me of something I recently read in Vice Magazine, so I did some googling.

On the Vice web site, they mention the recent LA Times piece and point out that they covered the Congolese scene in an article four years ago: Link.

The thing I read was in last month's issue, where Vice profiled the Swenkas of South Africa. Couldn't find a link to that article, but here's one for a Swenka documentary: Link.

Ben Frazier says:

Regarding your post on the Congolese men who would rather starve than look bad — as usual, the Onion beats everyone to the punch by commenting on the phenomenon (albeit using a Westerner as the subject) in this article, which is now over seven years old: Link.

Correction: I goofed when I first posted this, and attributed the body of that "sapeur" post to Emeka Okafor -- my apologies! The prolific Mr. Okafor has so many projects going on -- TED Global, plus he authors at least two excellent blogs, and he is an African entrepreneur living in New York (from Nigeria, specifically). But he is not the author behind I'm An African In New York. Here's an interesting profile piece about his work, from The African Executive: Link.

Clarification: Many BoingBoing readers wrote in to ask if the Emeka Okafor in question is this Emeka Okafor, listed by Wikipedia as an pro NBA player. No.

Wikipedia, disambiguate thyself!

PBS "Now": Can US entrepreneurial know-how save lives in Africa?

PBS "NOW" new media producer Joel Schwartzberg says,

On Friday, May 25 at 8:30 pm (check local listings), NOW travels to Kenya to investigate an enterprising idea: franchising not burger and donut shops, but health services and drugs in rural Africa. American businessmen are teaming with African entrepreneurs to spread for-profit clinics around the country in the hopes of providing quality, affordable medical care to even Kenya’s poorest people. But can they overcome obstacles like extreme poverty, corruption, cheaper fraudulent services, and long distances to establish a sustained solution to a chronic problem?

“If we had as many franchise outlets delivering health care in developing countries as Subway has sandwich shops, we've estimated that we could serve about 120 million people a year,” Businessman Scott Hillstrom, who conceived the idea, told NOW’s David Brancaccio.

This is part of a new beat on NOW and NOW Online called “Enterprising Ideas” that focuses on innovative solutions to social problems around the world. For the next two years, NOW will devote time to examining how people are applying business skills toward a new kind of bottom line: making the world a better place.

Link to video preview (on YouTube, which is a first for these guys), and Link to website launching Friday which will include "more innovator stories, tools and tips for starting new programs and a contest to find a social entrepreneur for special NOW coverage."

Smorgasbord of vintage African TV ads

I recently spent about a month in several West African countries (I'm typing this now from Central America). During my short stay on the continent, I became obsessed with local TV commercials. I believe you can learn a lot about any culture through its ads. I taped a bunch of stuff in hotel rooms, and will blog clips sometime soon -- but for now, I wanted to point to some super cool vintage African TV ads I found online, from the '60s and '70s.

You can find some great classic 1960s TV commercials from Africa on sites like YouTube and Africahit.com, but all of that stuff appears to originate from one source: the amazing Africa archives at Adeater.com. About a dozen MPEG files there, and products include everything from perfume to cool old cars to booze to cigarettes (add it up, you got a recipe for the good life). You can't link directly to the index of Africa commercials, or to any individual videos therein -- the site navigation kind of stinks. But if you search for "Africa" you'll find the stuff.

Here are a few favorites that originated in Adeater's archive: a retro hair product commercial (Petrole Hahn, screengrab above), Omo washing powder (I wonder if the boxer was a famous fighter at the time?), Ploum Ploum men's cologne, An Ivory Coast bank ad from 1967.

And here's a wild 1976 spot for Gauloises cigarettes (screengrab below), presumably for French-speaking West African audiences. Dig the sweet cha-cha-cha score. Includes kung fu fight scene with vigorous chair-tossing and bottle-breakage over heads. "Gauloises, the cigarette of a strong man."

Design Made in Africa: traveling exhibition

"Design Made in Africa" is described as the world's first major traveling exhibit of contemporary African design. The show opened in New York a few weeks ago at 4 World Financial Center, and includes the work of 30 designers from 14 African countries. Works on display range from useful to ornamental: chairs, wall hangings, graphic design, jewelry, lighting, and more. If you happen to be reading this blog post from Morocco, you can check out a companion exhibit at the Batha Museum in Fes.

Either way, hurry: both the New York and the Morocco exhibitions close this weekend, on May 27.

There's a website with more amazing images from Design Made in Africa, but I'm afraid the site was Made In Hell. First Flash, then a popup window, then a video that won't play unless you have DivX installed. Argh. (via Urban Congo, thanks Emeka Okafor!)