Linkables

Two things I found today that I thought might be worth checking out.The first one's from Rosemary Ekosso, and it's a post that provides a different take on my own post on Africa, below. Check it out — it's worth it. Here's a snippet:

Have you not met the kind of African who likes to detail the things that are wrong with our continent, how we have been raped and plundered over centuries, the sort of African who has all the details (real and imagined) of what the White man did and did not do, and who enjoys the telling? Have you not met them?They ... like being victims.

The other's a new Bajan blog, gallimaufry.ws (new to me, anyway), which I've added to my blogroll, and a post about shaving one's head for cancer and the Bajan preoccupation with "good" hair. Having been told how "good" my hair is all my life (these days it's so good people keep taking me for white) I identified.A snippet of this one:

Today, there’s a little snippet about how cancer patients are often averse to having chemotherapy, in part because they fear losing their hair, and about a woman who recently shaved her head before an audience in a show of empathy for what cancer survivors go through. Which I think is pretty cool. What irks me a little is that the newspaper says the the woman in question “shaved her full head of naturally curly hair”, and I don’t quite see why it was necessary to specify/emphasize that her hair is “naturally curly”. I don’t think it was necessary, but I have a feeling about why it was done. I think that it’s because Bajans are still the kind of people who are impressed by “good hair” and “soft hair”, i.e. naturally curly hair. That kind of hair is more valued, and therefore to give it up (via a haircut) is more striking/brave/tragic (depending on who you ask). It wouldn’t be quite as notable if the someone had shaved her “full head of naturally kinky hair” (or, as one of my aunts would put it, her “nigger knots”) or her “full head of chemically treated curly hair”, but for someone to cut off all that naturally curly, “nice, pretty hair”? Wow!

So there it is.