Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anand Giridharadas (45 min, 27 mb mp3)

We’re getting a personal take on the New India that we haven’t heard before from New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas. When he went “home” after college, from Cleveland to the land of his ancestors, the feeling he confronted was, in effect, hey, your party in America is over, and you may be too late for the party underway in Bombay.

Born in Ohio and educated in Michigan, Anand is a child of that wave of immigration that brought India’s best and brightest out of a bad time back home in the 1970s to the land of milk, honey, high tech and opportunity in America. When Anand returned to do his bit for the mother country, as a McKinsey consultant in the mid-90s, he found not his parent’s stifled old India but rather a swarming entrepreneurial frontier more modern, more gung-ho in many ways than the American Mid-West he grew up in, but also a nation growing less “westernized” and more indigenous on a surging wave of growth.

He carried with him the story of India that his parents had given him, an image of a great civilization trapped in a box; a place where, in his words “No one questioned. No one dreamed. Nothing moved.” He begins this account of that quarter-century transformation through the eyes of his father:

AG: One of the reasons my father left — none of us leaves countries for massive geopolitical reasons, we ultimate leave for personal reasons. His personal situation was working in the 1970s for a company called Tata Motors, selling their trucks and buses in Africa. All he could do to make a judgment about whether he wanted to be in India long term was look around him at work. I will never forget the simple way in which describes why he decided to leave. He said he looked at his bosses twenty years ahead of him in line and concluded he didn’t want to spend his life becoming them.

Now fast forward a quarter century, Tata Motors is today, that same stagnant dead company that in some ways pushed my father out of the country as a whole, is today one of the most admired car companies in the world. Why? Because it no longer only sells rickety trucks and buses in Africa. It has now also made the world’s cheapest car, for about $2,000, in an engineering feat that has wowed every major auto maker.

CL: How did they do it?

AG: There are two ways to think about it. One is to say that they had consultants and advisors who had certainly come back form the West. But here’s another interpretation of what was different. the constraints were in some ways the same. They still had essentially 1 billion poor people around them; they still had engineering constraints; they still had a government that’s not particularly helpful to what business does. But in my father’s day most Indians would have interpreted that context as essentially hindering progress and being an excuse for producing sub optimal stuff. The new language is “we have unique hardships which gives us a unique opportunity to create globally competitive products that are better than anyone else’s products. Because our roads are bumpier, our suspension systems have to be even better than the Americans’ suspension systems. Because people are poor in this country, we have to work twice as hard to bring the price point of a car down to $2000.” It’s the same context, just a different way of looking at it.

Anand Giridharadas in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, March 4, 2010.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz, Jono Bacon, and Leo Laporte

CMake, the cross-platform, open-source family of tools designed to build, test and package software.

Bill Hoffman for CMake.

Shownotes

Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 56:50

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Gleason (43 min, 26 mb mp3)

Call this a musical-conversational extension on the memoir of a beloved teacher, the historian of Russia at Brown University, Abbott Gleason, known as Tom. We’re connecting dots from Tolstoy to Orwell to Louis Armstrong in a big roomful of friends at Brown’s Watson Institute.

Tom Gleason might be everybody’s dream of an intellectual mentor: there are touches of Mr. Chips about Tom, and of his friend George Kennan, and of my big brother Peter, and your big brother, too, if you’re blessed to have one. It’s my thought anyway that if you assemble a dozen or so people of Tom Gleason’s range and reading and curiosity and conversational talent, you’ve got yourself a university.

A Liberal Education is the title of his memoir. It’s the private side of a career in Russian studies coinciding with four decades of Cold War. It warms and deepens my pleasure in the book to have known Tom well from odd angles: our daughters were college roommates; we’ve listened to jazz bands many Monday nights at Bovi’s Tavern in East Providence; we read War and Peace together in a small group two summers ago, then Moby Dick last summer. The Brothers Karamazov is next, in summer of 2010…

The fun of the book is in the disgressions — to the Tolstoyan family farm in Connecticut where young Tom spent his summers, where “workhorses… and a team of massive white oxen lingered, long after tractors and hayloaders were the rule on the more serious farms in the neighborhood… The haying was all done manually, with pitchforks, and many a wobbly load slid or topped off the wagon before it could be brought home to the barn. Farm work was usually over in time for drinks at the Big House before the sun had sunk much below the yardarm…”

The fun of our conversation is in our version of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, as Tom Gleason free-associates on the music of Bela Bartok, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane and Tom’s Harvard roommate John Harbison.

Maybe the meat of things is a reflection on the academic wars that came with Tom Gleason’s job:

CL: You we born into the Cold War, in a certain sense. You kept your powder dry in it. But in the book, as in life, you observed all the high and low politics of it, the ideological and academic politics of the Cold War period. So in the end, Tom, what the hell was it all about? Over here and over there, who got it right? Who, in retrospect, had wisdom on that huge subject?

TG:  Well, I’m not sure that getting it right and being wise are exactly the same thing. As far as getting it right goes, I tend to think — and I was a sort of left center person on the Cold War — the people on the two extremes, further to my right and further to my left, got it more interestingly at least, if not absolutely more right. By that I mean people like my colleague the British historian Michael Cox, who teaches at the University of Wales, and his Trotskyite friends always had a view that the Soviet Union was conceived in sin and betrayal, and it didn’t really belong in the world and it would someday pass away — and of course from their point of view, be replaced by something that was truly revolutionary, as Trotsky had believed.  And on the other side, my more conservative colleagues Adam Ulam, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, also from a quite different point of view believed that the Soviet Union did not belong in the modern world.  They believed that any nation or any empire which denied the market and denied the economic realities of the world, would not ultimately survive.  So in a certain sense the two extremes met, behind my back, so to speak, and in many ways they were the people who were sort of least surprised – Martin Malia being another one of the conservative ones.  But I think the two extremes were not necessarily the wisest people.  I think the wisest people in dealing with the cold war were those who tried to question their own motives and tried to question themselves and tried to take it one step at a time… I think the cold war got us into places where rhetorical flights could take us out of ourselves and get us well beyond where we wanted to be.  Once in a while I would catch myself saying something and my little super-ego would sort of pick itself up and rub its eyes and say “I’ve been asleep all this time, did I hear what you just said?”
Abbott (Tom) Gleason in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, March 1, 2010.

It’s a nice Gleasonesque thought that the folks who saw the Cold War prophetically were his adversaries at far opposite ends of the argument, and the very last people you’d have asked to do something about it.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz, Jono Bacon, and Leo Laporte

Webmin, the web based administration tool to keep your system simple.

Jamie Camron for Webmin.

Shownotes

Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 47:36

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Yehudi Wyner (55 min, 33 mb mp3)

Yehudi Wyner is an approachable guy in a forbidding field: contemporary “serious” music. He gives us an opening here to ask where new sounds come from. In his case new music comes out of a sort of compost of the canon, from Bach to Bartok, and then everything else he’s heard over 80 years, from his father’s Yiddish art songs to boogie-woogie and gospel music. “Somehow it registers in the brain and has an effect,” he says of the past. The other big thing you’ll be hearing from Yehudi Wyner is that his music has its very bodily beginning in his hands. It’s a physical, almost gymnastic test of what ten fingers can do, want to do, find themselves doing.

The centerpiece here is the Pulitzer Prize piano concerto that was a Grammy finalist this year, “Chiavi in Mano” (or “Keys in the Hand”). Yehudi Wyner wrote it for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the pianist Robert Levin, “Mozart’s nephew,” as we call him here, the man who has presumed to fill in some missing elements in the “unfinished Mozart.” The one-movement “Chiavi in Mano” begins with an introspective piano solo and ends with an orchestral boogie-woogie. In between is a roaring contest of the elements. “For Bob Levin,” the composer laughs, “it’s just a skirmish, a war game with dull bayonets.” But all of it — in Yehudi Wyner’s unveiling of his process — stems from the simplest contrast of intervals between keys on the piano: the major and minor “third” between, say, C and E, then C and E-flat. It’s as simple and as grand as that: using a cellular structure to build something new and various, as different and connected in its parts as your nose and your toes.

The privilege here is to sit at the piano with a man who can think and play and talk all at once:

CL: You were playing a Bach Partita when we walked in. What does that daily dose do for a man?

YW: It gives him the feeling that he’s in touch with the greatest possible art: physical, mental, spiritual, integrated, and above all, healthy. Bach was really, I think, the greatest artist and possibly the greatest specimen of human being and thinker who ever was conceived on earth.

CL: Does the composing happen, Yehudi, between hands and ear, or do you write it with eye and pencil?

YW: Hands and ear. Hands, ear and pencil. And instrument. I work at the piano. The model for me is the indescribable, sensuous, as well as intellectual joy of dealing with Bach or Mozart. Other composers too, of course, but they above all, where every moment at whatever level of struggle… has a satisfaction, always is nourishing. I do this at the instrument and test it and feel how durable it is, how much I can stand repeating something without finding it exhausting or boring, then I think I have achieved something, I’ve found something, I’ve stumbled on some material that’s worthwhile.

CL: Is there a gold-standard “perfect” piece of music out there for you?

YW: No. If you want to say, are there 1000 pieces from the canon that I love beyond description and can find no fault with, I would say yes. But I do not feel there is one.

CL: Yehudi, give us a report to the ancestors, so to speak. A decade into the 21st Century, what’s the state of this art?

YW: I came back from the Grammys two weeks ago feeling there is very little affirmative music in contemporary America, and has not been for the last fifty years, because what passes as affirmative is really rather imperial and militaristic. It all comes from a kind of big-band, I mean marching-band society, and it blares and it proclaims, but it doesn’t really affirm. It ascribes to the affirmation that Beethoven would have, but it fails all the time because it’s very superficial and aggressive. And that applies even to the music of people we admire, like Copland and others. But it occurred to me — with all the jazz references in “Chiavi in Mano” — that that’s where the true affirmation in American music is. It’s in popular music, it’s in jazz, it’s in gospel. That music is so self-sufficient, it never proclaims its affect, or its message. It just is the message.

The music that is being promulgated, that is being produced and broadcast most widely, is aggressive, very shiny, very egocentric, very repetitive, and noisy, busy, and in some ways, mindless. It’s very physical. The problem not that that music exists, it’s that that music has inundated our culture and our youth. When you finish being conditioned by that music, there’s very little capability of any kind of other sensibility. You’re no longer sensitive to things that move at a slower pace, things that are nuanced, things that have complication and things that have lots of reference to the past.

CL: What’s the chance that we’ll get composers’ music in the public ear again — even in the manner of Copland and Gershwin?

YW: I think for the foreseeable future the chances are very slim. In the long term, things change. Certain cultures collapse and others come up, the convention of the concert hall and the function of concert music and art music is not a permanent given. The audience is certainly shrinking and certainly aging. Those things are incontrovertible. The thing that persuades us that there are possibilities for other things is the ubiquitous presence of music: people have it on their iTunes, they have it constantly at their beck and call. There is this phenomenon… people coming out of schools and forming small groups here and there, and somehow keeping the art alive, perhaps as the monks kept ancient art alive in the monasteries, in isolation during the middle ages. But I think for the foreseeable future there is no possibility for an Igor Stravinsky or a Shostakovich, or an Aaron Copland, or even an Ives on the general public screen.
Yehudi Wyner at his piano bench with Chris Lydon in Medford, Massachusetts, February 18, 2010.

Dan and Jason discuss the latest Ruby and Rails 3 news, some jQuery, and work in some shameless self promotion.

Red Dirt Ruby Conf is a unique two-day conference that provides focused, up-to-date content and related training in four of the most important areas of active development in Ruby. Oklahoma City, May 6-7th, 2010.

South Florida Rails developers: I know a company looking for Rails developers around Miami. Ping me if you're interested.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz, and Leo Laporte

Symbian and the Bergamot Project.

Sebastian Brannstrom, the founder of the Bergamot Project, producing popular open source tools for Symbian.

Shownotes

Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 57:16

In this episode Dan and Jason go over Rails 3 at length and also discuss the right occasion for gems in a box (every single holiday).

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mike Serwornoo (15 min, 9 mb mp3)

An underlying question through this experimental week in Ghana is: what more would it take to podcast conversations as direct as these from India, or Israel, or the West Bank? Or China, or Congo, for that matter?

Mike Serwornoo, in our exchange here about radio in Ghana, strikes me as the sort of modern practitioner I’d want to engage with almost anywhere to enlist the Web’s boundary-jumping tools in service of “that fabulous instrument,” as Studs Terkel used to call it, the human voice.

Mike Serwornoo is the ambitious young general manager of ATL-FM, the multi-purpose radio voice of the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. It’s one of the scores of community radio stations working like democratic yeast for a decade now in West Africa generally, not Ghana especially. Mike’s boast to me is that popular trust in radio is now so powerful that the rule in a street emergency is “don’t call the police, call the radio station.”

ATL-FM carries news, talk, music and the Voice of America. In the local politics of Cape Coast, my impression is that ATL-FM vents the views more of the mainstay fishermen (for public pensions, for example) than of college students and teachers. We’re talking — Mike Serwornoo and I — about ways to combine some flavors of their gab with some of ours.

One thing most of us in Ghana don’t want is Euro-centric or American-centric solutions to Afro-centric problems. We don’t want a solution brewed in the United States. We want solutions brewed in Ghana, in Africa, with the guidance of someone who has been through our experience… The dream here is that the great things we do in Ghana can get to the people in the diaspora… that we converse with the world at large, without boundary, without color.
Mike Serwornoo with Chris Lydon, at ATL-FM in Cape Coast, Ghana, January 27, 2010.

Sounds astonishingly like my dream, too.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz, Jono Bacon, and Leo Laporte

Python and the upcoming annual Python Community Conference.

Guest: Henrique Bastos for Python and PyCon 2010

Shownotes

Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 1:00:29

Click to listen to Chris’s visit with Koo Nimo (60 minutes, 36 meg mp3)

It is 7:30 a.m. on the last Saturday in January, a warm winter morning in Ghana, and we are privileged to be hanging out for an hour of music and a few well-chosen words with a aristocrat of sound and four accompanists in his studio in Kumasi, the old Ashanti tribal capital.

Ghana’s guitar treasure Koo Nimo has the air, it’s been well said, of an “Ashanti Segovia, proud of his heritage and of the instrument he has adopted.” He also reminds you immediately of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. He smiles warmly with the simplicity of the infinitely accomplished — the disarming modesty of ultimate celebrity. These charismatic string-players both have a way of telling you that, in truth, they are humble heirs of ancient musical cultures and disciplines. Both embody the highest refinement of music at its widest reach — Yo-Yo in his Silk Road Project linking North Africa to East Asia; Koo Nimo in representing the circular Gulf Stream of musical influences from West Africa to Brazil, the Caribbean, Havana, New Orleans and New York — and endlessly back and around.

Koo Nimo is a peculiarly Ghanaian figure, in that he’s a musical child of the royal Ashanti court, who came of age as a public performer at precisely the moment in the late 1950s when newly independent Ghana was searching for a nation-building sound.

He’s the personification, at the same time, of “world music,” in the way he encompasses all. In his conversation and his playing, you can hear that nothing human is foreign to Koo Nimo.

Among the names respectfully dropped in an hour’s rambling talk of friends and inspirations are: Fela Kuti, as in the current Broadway show celebrating the late great Nigerian Afrobeat star; Hugh Masakela of South Africa; Ghana’s late “divine drummer” “Ghanaba;” the American jazz immortals Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders; the harmonica blues man Sonny Boy Williamson; Memphis Slim; great soloists of the Ellington band he heard and met in London in the early ’70s, including Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Cat Anderson and Clark Terry; Ellington himself, though Koo Nimo never got to shake Duke’s hand — “we would go to the dressing room and just look at him;” the very different guitar geniuses Charlie Christian of Oklahoma City and the Virginian Charlie Byrd of samba fame; the rock legend Jimi Hendrix, for his guitar chord voicings; and the Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim — two of whose songs find their way into Koo Nimo’s performances here.

But here’s the beauty of “world music” as the great Koo Nimo embraces it: his sound is never remotely a soup. And he himself is never to be confused with any of the people he admires so generously. “They are all influences,” as he says to me, “but I have a way of keeping the influences light… I listen to Latin calypso a lot,” he adds, and you’ll hear it in his playing, “but I use all these influences, all these techniques, to do justice to our own.”

Click to listen to Chris’s visit with Dr. Kofi Sam to the village of Aburanza (28 minutes, 17 meg mp3)

We are making the full village rounds here in Aburanza, near Cape Coast, with a strong-minded, strong-willed modern chief. From furniture works to dress-making class to palm-nut oil pots, Dr. Kofi Sam is barking out variations on his evangelical theme: West Africa can provide the essentials for itself (food, clothing, shelter and healthcare) if only it first licks a second AIDS crisis — the Acquired Import Dependency Syndrome.

Kofi Sam, who graduated from high school in the 1950s with Kofi Annan of the UN, is a cheerful misfit in the Ghanaian elite. He is an engineer with English training and now a compelling Ghanaian vision, however eccentric. He ran steel works in Ghana back in the day, and held the Housing ministry in Jerry Rawlings’ military government in the 1980s. But he was all the while getting more focused on “appropriate technology” for tropical Africa — on finding modern designs and materials, that is, for the climate and culture of a hot, poor place. Tight denim blue jeans make an interesting Western fashion statement, as he might say, but what is their place in Africa? And what is all that Scandinavian concrete doing in new Ghanaian housing?

How is it, Kofi Sam asks, that “for 50 years we haven’t been able to design a building that doesn’t use air conditioners?” Kofi Sam laughs a lot through what can sound like a stand-up routine getting heavy and deep:

Why is Africa waiting for Germany and Japan to go solar? Because we are copy cats.

Whatever the master in England does, we copy it. Our buildings should have big open windows. That’s how the imperialists, the white men, built their bungalows. We knocked them down and replaced them with glass houses, sealed glass.

Africans wear suits with neckties! With socks! With underwear! We cover ourselves so we feel the heat, then we go to the office and call our secretaries to bring us hot coffee, not cool cocoa, using an air conditioner that could light forty homes…

We only wear what we make on Fridays — Friday wear! That’s the problem…

There is a tunnel called ‘Western education.’ We enter it and learn how to forget. We go to Accra and forget about the village…

The African intellectual is like a bee who has forgotten how to make honey.

The governmental system in Africa only caters to Western-educated people, even though they’re less than 15 percent of the population. From the president right down to the teacher, they get paid at the end of every month.

No villager gets paid for anything. They get up in the morning, they go to their farms, they produce their cassava or yam or plaintain. Nobody guarantees them a market. Nobody gives them loans. All the taxes raised in the country are for Western-educated people, like Kofi Sam.

The villagers don’t get anything.
Dr. Kofi Sam with Chris Lydon, in Aburanza on the Atlantic coast of Ghana, January 28, 2010.

We spend the day surveying some good old alternatives. At one smoky, blistering-hot open-air work site, a dozen women are time-sharing a machine that cracks palm nuts, and in their individual vats they’re slowly cooking the cherished red oil that Africa uses for soap and cooking. No corn oil here, thank you. In his home village of Aburanza, Kofi Sam has sponsored a cane furniture works, hand-weaving of kente cloth, and machine-assisted grinding of cassava flour. His sister’s henhouse looks spotless and contented. “You asked what should aid agencies do,” Kofi Sam remarks. “How about a little capital so that my sister and her kind can each construct 100 henhouses and start with ten layers apiece. Whole villages improve that way.”

At a hilltop prayer meeting at mid-day in Aburanza, families answer my greeting (“He’s real! He’s alive! He’s on time!”) with “Hallelujah!” A pastor is offering pint-sized bottles of an herbal remedy. As for those basic necessities that Africa can provide itself, I challenge my host on one big point: “Native medicine isn’t going to cure malaria, Dr. Sam,” I say. “You’re wrong,” he fires back. “I made the same mistake you’re making.” What he learned eventually is that malaria wiped out mainly white newcomers; West Africans had developed an immunity and boosted it with natural medicines. Malaria was a weapon, he said, that forced the British to adopt “indirect rule” in West Africa, rather than settle as they did in Kenya and Southern Africa.

You’ll hear Kofi Sam inviting me back to Aburanza — and me promising to return before Christmas. “I want people like you here,” he says, “to let the world know that the aid they give doesn’t get to us. It’s in Accra — in the swimming pools of Accra, in the golf courses of Accra, in the lawn tennis courts of Accra, in the restaurants of Accra…”

And then, for $20, he sells me that striking handmade blue shirt off his beautiful brown back. Thank you, Kofi Sam. We will meet again.

Click to listen to Chris’s visit to Kwabeng with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang (31 minutes, 19 meg mp3)

I’m going “home” here with my friend Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang to “where my belly button is buried,” to the seat of his fondest memories and his first great love, his grandmother. And I’m concluding presumptuously, on a day’s visit, that there is much good living yet to be done in village Ghana.

The burdens on ten-thousand villagers in Kwabeng, in Ghana’s Eastern Region, begin with infectious diseases: malaria, typhus, HIV. They have no hospital, no resident doctor. Listen and you will hear a village leader tell me: “people over here are not feeling fine at all.” Another: “when someone falls ill, sometimes you lose the person on the way to finding help.” The gold digging company that skipped town two years ago left a contaminated water supply and no benefits. The leading farmers in Kwabeng fret openly about backward methods and bad markets. They should be planting more trees. They are not sustaining their own environment.

But it’s the robust strengths of the village that astonish and stick. Handsome men gather and gab in the breezy open air at their own self-started NGO, the Kwabeng Development Foundation. Some in work clothes, some in traditional robes, they all glow with calmly Emersonian self-reliance. “It is now generally understood,” one farmer explains, “that government by itself cannot solve the problems of life. We need to depend on ourselves.” Projects like the village hospital “have to start with us.”

“Our life is good,” says a man in the chief’s council of elders, and the supporting evidence is all around us in Kwabeng, whose name means literally “the forest that was cooked red.” A host of little children and teenagers play noisy games at the heart of town. The air is familiar, confident, safe without a second thought. Kwabeng seems delighted to meet a stray American. “It’s as if the government of America is here,” a woman marvels. She has heard I do radio, and when I ask “if we had our own radio station in Kwabeng, what would we talk about?” she says: “farming, and education!”

These are people of breathtaking physical beauty, and twinkling humor, too. The name Barack Obama brings out affection and a touch of mischef. “He is our brother,” says an elder. “He’s our friend. He’s our son. He’s everything to Ghanaians.” So why did they all laugh when I first mentioned our president? Because, they explain, Obama had handed Ghana a sweet victory with his first sub-Saharan visit, a score as delicious as Ghana’s futbol win against Nigeria just before I arrived. “If Obama can send some American doctors to this district, and help us build a hospital, we will be pleased.”

We’re all in on the irony that Ghana, in fact, exports medical doctors to England and the US. I was shocked to hear reliably that there are more Ghana-trained doctors working in London and New York than in Ghana. Can it be? Ghana’s home network of healthcare is held together, just barely, by a couple of hundred Cuban doctors. It is one of Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang’s assignments, as a local boy made good at the University of Cape Coast, to get a Cuban doctor assigned to Kwabeng for one day every weekend.

It comes clear, as teenagers drift up to Professor Opoku-Agyemang with their college applications and their test scores, that he is also the village’s higher education chief. All afternoon he is giving students discreet advice and encouragement, showing me how the village works, and aspires. Kwabeng, with an immemorial past, looks to the future, too. Of course, the fantasist in me is scheming: how do I get back here — to live?

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang (30 minutes, 18 meg mp3)

I’m in Ghana for a week — starting from Cape Coast, toward the western end of Ghana’s Atlantic shore. Cape Coast is a university town and a major fishing center in West Africa. It’s the spot where First Lady Michelle Obama locates her ancestors. It is the site of the Castle that President Obama and his family visited last July. No ordinary tourist attration, the Castle is the place that haunts human history eternally as the point where millions of Africans were warehoused, then shipped in the infamous Middle Passage to slavery in the new worlds of North and South America.

I am picking up many threads (starting with slavery) of a conversation that began most of ten years ago with the poet and teacher Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, at the University of Cape Coast. His voice has become for me one of the beautiful deep songs of Africa. Before I’d ever met Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, his book of poetry and prose, Cape Coast Castle jumped into my hands off a bookstore table in Accra, and many of his lines seemed to clutch my heart and never let go:

Slavery is the living wound under the patchwork of scars. A lot of time has passed, yet whole nations cry, sometimes softly, sometimes harshly, often without knowing why…

… perhaps the most horrendous experience of the victim society belonged to a group hardly ever mentioned in the literature: the damned who survived, those deprived relatives of the captured African. These included parents, brothers and sisters, uncles and other relatives and friends who knew and cared for the captive. In a way, theirs was a lot de profoundis, a lost of deepest death. For they were denied the cathartic benefit of a burial for their loved ones. Olaudah Equiano, the 18th century African abolitionist, tells the story in his autobiography of 1789 of how, as a greening youth, he and his sister were kidnapped from their Igbo village by slavers while their parents were at the farm… And yet what we read is not the full story, only a portion of it. For Equiano’s mother came home from the farm one evening to find her only daughter and youngest son stolen, never to be heard from again. We do not know her story. Nobody knows the story of her grief…

The Castle is a standing provocation to thought and action: upon its disarming rests a whole people’s freedom. Cape Coast Castle, the metaphor and the edifice, is a society in itself, a society of experiences, a system or order whose fundamental concepts are planted in the disordering of our society. We kneel because it stands, and it stands for a system of production, distribution and exchange. But it does not tend what it produces, does not nurture what it distributes, does not value what it exchanges. There is no tending, no nurturing, no valuing…

The fact is that the pressures of our societies today, the tributes we play in blood — colonialism, neo-colonialism, even poverty in the lopsided world order — are largely the effects of the slave trade. In the trade, societies were ransacked, the land was gutted, its human loam was washed to the sea, its potential was stunted…

Slavery gives the enslaved nothing but a legacy of pain, alienation, fear, and worst of all, a fetish erected around the denial of the fact and lasting effects of enlavement. It is a fetish that allows us to pretend that our world is whole; thus we nullify the castle by incorporating, then ignoring it. And so we live in a shattered world with an eroded sense of history in a world we swear is whole.
Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, Cape Coast Castle, A Collection of Poems, 1996. Pages 1 – 10.

I associate Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang with a broad and deep unofficial drive in Ghana to break an old silence around slavery. About the time his book was published, a troupe of Jamaican musicians and dancers refused to perform at Ghana’s first Pan-African Arts Festival, precisely because it was being held in the Castle where their forebears had been stockpiled in chains. In public and private, Ghana’s conversation about itself has never been the same again. In my first Cape Coast reunion with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang we’re trying to keep the inquiry perpetually open-ended, as he says, “so that every new generation may visit it to quarry its lessons.”

Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte

Stellarium, the realistic 3-D planetarium for your computer.

Guest: Matthew Gates for Stellarium

Shownotes

Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 48:00

In this episode, Dan and Jason have fun making up words and also report on the latest with MacRuby, Rails 3, and more.

Red Dirt Ruby Conf is a unique two-day conference that provides focused, up-to-date content and related training in four of the most important areas of active development in Ruby. Oklahoma City, May 6-7th, 2010.

The Ruby Show is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com.
Show Notes

• MacRuby 0.5 Released
• GemCutter Update
• GMoney – A RubyGem for Interacting with the Google Finance API
• Rails 3 Online Conference
• From Zero to Rails3 on Windows in 600 seconds
• Unobtrusive JS In Rails 3 With Prototype
• validates :rails_3, :awesome => true
• rails-upgrade is now an official plugin
• Delayed_paperclip

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Robert McChesney and John Nichols (56 minutes, 26 meg mp3)

Robert McChesney and John Nichols are grappling with the question: what would Thomas Jefferson do about the death of the American newspaper? Better, Jefferson said, to have newspapers without a government than to have government without newspapers. Yet here we are two centuries later, and the papers are disappearing. What is to sustain essential journalism in the digital age?

Core doctrine among the Founders, in the McChesney-Nichols argument, was not just that the press must be free of interference and censorship but that its vigor and variety should be sustained by subsidized access to printing and the mails. Some of the freshest parts of their book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, recount how Generals MacArthur in Japan and Eisenhower in Germany designed and built new institutions of free open journalism on the theory, as McChesney and Nichols put it, that “creating a viable free press is the first duty … of the democratic state.”

Thirty billion dollars a year is the subsidy figure that McChesney and Martin are proposing today — their projection of the support that Jefferson & Company gave to the press two centuries ago. They insist they are thinking of rebuilding a culture, not bailing out dying newspapers. They embrace Dean Baker’s idea of a Citizenship News Voucher which would let people direct the spending of, say, $200 a year, to the local, global or specialized journalism they value, so long as it’s non-profit and non-commercial.

My question — my reservation really — is the thought that the Internet is already the government’s accidental gift that keeps on giving. It’s worth much more than $30 billion to have wiped out the cost of paper, printing, delivery and all the capital barriers to a worldwide marketplace of ideas. My guess is that Thomas Jefferson, a blogger in retirement, would be reading and reveling in the digital miracle that has enabled kindred spirits like Glenn Greenwald, Juan Cole, Joshua Micah Marshall and Arianna Huffington… not to mention Robert McChesney, John Nichols and their admirable creation, FreePress. Net.

Post up, please, on what more you’d spend and where, to sustain the contentious journalism Jefferson had in mind.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz

Cfengine, the standalone datacenter management platform.

Guest: Mark Burgess for Cfengine

Shownotes

Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 57:15

In this episode, Dan and Jason bring you a ton of news and keep it short and sweet.

The Ruby Show is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com.
Show Notes

• Are you testing your attr_* methods? If you do, then you might want to clean up your specs with RSpec attr extensions.
• JRuby for Android JRuby for Android is an application that provides a JRuby scripting environment for Android, including an IRB shell, source code editor and script manager.
• Rakegrowl rakegrowl tells you when your rake tasks end via Growl.
• Conversational and short URLs on Rails Jason Lyons has a post on the Carsonified blog about how to generate conversational URLs in Rails such as /events/in/chicago.
• Polymorphic association support added to searchlogic
• Active Record Query Interface 3.0 Pratik Naik goes over the new query interface and deprecations in Active Record 3.0.
• Getting Up To Speed with Rails 3 Gabe da Silveira walks through getting an app updated and on to Rails 3.
• The Path to Rails 3: Approaching the upgrade Jeremy McAnally posts about upgrading to Rails 3 and the changes involved.
• New ActionMailer API in Rails 3.0
• Vanity Vanity is an Experiment Driven Development framework for Rails.
• Interview with Matz InfoQ has an interview with Matz about Ruby, Functional Programming and Programming Languages Design.
• A Simple Pattern for Ruby's inject method
• WTF The WTF gem provides a Ruby class to convert between standard time and World Time Format.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Harold Evans (41 minutes, 19 meg mp3)

Harold Evans, doubtless the finest English newspaper editor of his time, could make you weep in his memoir of formative days in Manchester and glory years (1965 – 1981) with the Sunday Times of London. Weep, that is, not so much for the anemic papers so close to death today, but weep for those cheeky deadline artists, the newspaper writers and “subs” on the copy desk who are disappearing into memory and mythology, like the American cowboy.

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times is the story of Harold Evans’ addiction to printed news, and of the characters whose trade he lifted — newspaper guys (and they were all guys, long before Evans met Tina Brown) with nicknames like Nifty, Bow Tie, “Big Tom” Henry, “Beachcomber” of the Daily Express, and “Mr. Will” on the Northern Echo, Evans’ first paper. “Curiosity is the thing in journalism,” Mr. Will said. “Ask questions, Evans.” And then there are the giant by-lines of the Sunday Times, like Godfrey Hodgson in America, John Barry in Ireland, David Leitch in Vietnam, and the investigator Bruce Page, everywhere.

Harold Evans spins my head around just when I’d begun to think we could do without the papers, which we may just have to. But what about those people — those “rag and bone men of the opinion trade,” where Evans located himself; those lightning desk editors on the Manchester Evening News, “hunched men in cardigans reducing cataclysms to column inches,” and all those reporters gifted, as one of them said, with “ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.”

The thread in our conversation is: how long can free democratic people survive without those faithful wretches?

We are a mixed bunch. One of the great strengths of the Sunday Times, when I edited it, was how variegated the characters were. I mean we had a former antique dealer, who actually led us to the first exposé of the antique dealers’ rings. We had a microbiologist. We had a woman who gutted chickens who later became Anne Robinson … so we had a really variegated staff. That is one thing that I think is missing today. That heterogeneity that we celebrated is slightly disappearing… I think the business of discovering truth is much assisted by different perceptions of renegades. At the same time, I had all these these very clever PhD’s in my office. So, whichever way you spun it, it seems a very bohemian bunch of people, some of them drinking a lot, some of them smoking a lot, some of them not doing either of those things. We had a few aesthetes on my papers, in my time. But out of this multi-faceted approach to our complicated world came something very close to the truth from time to time…

It’s more important to find out than to sound off. And we get a vast amount of sounding-off today, without anybody knowing what the hell they’re talking about. Just think how different our last ten years would have been if we’d done the proper job of reporting on Iraq before we went into it… This era overlapped with the web. And I love the web. The point is that not even the web, not all the famous bloggers really got onto this.

So we have a situation, we’re entering now a world where we’re going to have cascades and cascades and cascades of information, like rain, and none of it will reach the flower of truth.
Harold Evans in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 19, 2009