It is a tradition in my house and other Caribbean homes to eat rum cake during Christmas. Rum cake or black cake or fruit cake (different terms on various islands) is a rich mixture of raisins, butter, dates, prunes, vanilla, eggs, cinnamon, brown sugar, nutmeg, and, of course, rum. Every island has their version of making the cake.
The cake is eaten during other special occasions like Easter, weddings, and childbirths. When I was growing up, rum cake was something my family eat after Easter dinner. My mother usually bought it from a friend of hers who made it and then shipped it to us in Boston from Miami. It is also eaten on special occasions (in my opinion) because it takes so long to make. But the great thing about it is that it lasts a long time. You can keep it in the fridge nicely wrapped up in tinfoil for months, and it will still taste fresh. I also like it with either vanilla or cream cheese frosting.
Yummy!
I am making it this week for my loved ones. Again, I am hoping if it turns out okay, I will have enough to keep in the fridge until next Easter.
Here is a video that is close to how I make rum cakes. Some of you have asked me if I would be making cooking videos anytime soon. If I have time in the new year, I will see what I can do. Stay tuned!
A few weeks ago it was announced that Zimbabwe will use the Chinese yuan as an official currency. In exchange, China will cancel the southern African country’s $40 billion debt. Mind you, the US dollar and the South African rand are also de facto currencies in Zimbabwe. Many economists may argue that using the yuan is a good idea to getting around American sanctions.
This is just the latest maneuver by China to further penetrate the African continent through trade and development. According to the International Monetary Fund, of the 20 countries worldwide projected to grow the fastest by next year, 10 of them are in Africa. Africa’s population is also expected to double to 3.5 billion by the 2050.
So it would make sense for China and other countries to make a move on potentially big economic opportunities related to the continent’s rich resources and minerals. Approximately over a million Chinese people have moved to Africa in the last 10 years alone as part of a new scramble for Africa. However, many feel that China is doing more harm than good.
Journalist Howard French wrote a book a couple of years called China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire in Africa. He traveled to half a dozen African countries to meet with these Chinese migrants about their motivations. They work in a wide variety of occupations, including factory owners, farmers and even prostitutes. Many of them come to Africa because they are either tired of the competitiveness, lack of freedoms and/or lack of economic mobility back in China.
The book left a really bad taste in my mouth and a fear for the worst. Many of the Chinese interviewees sounded the same way European colonizers did during the original Scramble for Africa over a one hundred years ago. Most of the interviewees speak of Africans in a very racist manner, commonly calling them the derogative hei ren.
The biggest gripe with the Chinese businesses is that they hire other Chinese workers – not African workers – to construct big development projects in Africa. The Chinese businesses say they do this because they feel the Africans are not smart enough, childish, and don’t eat bitter, or work as hard as the Chinese. Then when Africans are hired for jobs, they are paid low wages with very limited benefits and in dangerous environments. But many of these problems stem from African governments allowing Chinese business to come into their countries while ignoring their labor laws.
It seems like China is setting up these African countries to be totally dependent on them by just hiring only Chinese workers. It would be more valuable for the continent to practice capacity building, where they train Africans to build and maintain their own infrastructure. Sure, American aid and development projects in Africa have also been known to have shady, ulterior motives in the past as well, including most recently with PEPFAR, but at least Americans mostly hires Africans to work on African projects. Even when I work on any media development projects in Africa, we make a conscious effort to hire locals because the whole point of development is all about, in my opinion, “ teaching someone how to fish.”
There is also a Chinese presence throughout the Caribbean. In Jamaica, where my family is from, there have been similar complaints about Chinese development projects, mostly in the tourism sector with resorts. Recently I was in Kingston and I noticed that the Chinese community self-segregates themselves from other Jamaicans and don’t usually hire locals in their businesses. Jamaicans that are hired are treated poorly. Because of this there is growing hostility towards the Chinese migrant community. A Jamaican friend once told me, “We have replaced British colonization and exploitation with the Chinese. They are only here to exploit us.”
What is most interesting about the Zimbabwe situation is that introducing Chinese currency into the country’s economy takes the Chinese neo-colonialist agenda to a whole new level. China, a country that has a long rap sheet of human rights abuses, is hooking up with Zimbabwe, another country with serious human rights problems. Furthermore, despite the fact that he has been an egomaniacal despot in recent years, Mugabe was originally a freedom fighter 40 years ago who helped Zimbabwe become a free country. Now it feels it feels like the country is moving back into colonialism.
Ghanaian business executive Ed Brown said the best quote in French’s book:
“This [relationship] is going to be determine Africa’s future for the next fifty years. This big question is whether African countries are dynamic enough to take advantage, or whether they’ll end up being the appendage of somebody else all over again.”
As many of you know, I have been working on starting a news startup with a group of Jamaican journalists for the last two years. I am a big supporter of media development. I feel that I am lucky to live in a country where press freedom and democracy are upheld, and when I can, I try to provide as much support and resources to my counterparts in countries with limited reporting tools.
One of the members of this group, Jared Jameson, I first met on one of my first UN-funded media development projects I worked on in Nigeria over ten years ago. Jared is a veteran photojournalist who has done fantastic work throughout the Caribbean and West Africa. Four years ago he asked me to help him start an online news site focused on the northeastern part of Jamaica, mainly in the parish of Portland. Most of the writers and photographers are from the area and the United States. Portland is a major agricultural producer of coffee, mangoes, bananas and the national fruit, ackee.
You would think it would be easy to start a news website around economic development, but there is a reason it has taken two year to get this off the ground. Some of our bumps in the road may be familiar to other media development practitioners, especially around money.
Investments – Getting investors continues to be a big barrier. It is hard to get financial support for a media project like this because investors want to see how the product will work out first. That’s a Catch 22!
Money for issues, not for growing independent journalism – Unfortunately, the little money that is available for media development projects is not used to develop long term, sustainable journalism, but rather for short term issue projects.
Write for pay – Of course writers should be paid for their work, but most of the time news startups in developing countries, money for content is not immediately available at the beginning.
Training & Resources – Even if there is some money to keep the news operations afloat for a while, who is going to be in charge of website maintenance? Who fixes the website when it goes down? Who is trained to do this. In most small news startups of this nature, it might be one person doing everything. It can be expensive and time consuming to hire and train more people.
Luckily for us, we are now in negotiation for a sponsorship right now that will help us get going by the end of 2015. More to come on this soon!
Last month the Jamaican parliament moved closer to decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana. This move also highlights the Caribbean island’s troubled economy and the now desperate measures to save it.
Contrary to common belief, marijuana use is illegal in Jamaica and has been since 1913. However, there are a few factors that may have caused the change of heart among Jamaica’s political establishment recently, which is heavily swayed by the island’s religious lobby.
For one, earlier this year Uruguay moved to legalize the drug, being the first country to do so. This was done largely to prevent the kind of organized drug violence happening in other Latin American countries. However, marijuana use will be heavily regulated. Users have to be over 18 years old, can only buy 40 grams of it a month and no tourists will be allowed to buy and use it.
Secondly, Jamaica has pretty much exhausted all the IMF lending programs, and the island is on the brink of a real economic disaster. The Jamaican government is now facing the new reality that it needs to be more creative and take better advantage of potential economic opportunities. Jamaica is strategically located in the Caribbean and is closer to the United States than its competitors in Central and South America as far as food agribusiness is concerned. This is particularly important as the Panama Canal expansion is completed next year.
Also, as more American businesses are moving their outsourcing (especially telemarketing) ventures out of Asia for locations closer to home, Jamaica, with the third largest English-speaking population in the Western hemisphere, should be poised to be a hotspot for new opportunities.
But back to the issue of weed.
Over the weekend I had a discussion with some family members about legalizing marijuana on the island. I am a first generation Jamaican-American. My father came to the United States in the early 1970s, while my brother-in-law came here in 1998 to marry my sister. When I brought up the topic of legalizing marijuana to them, they both objected on moral and health reasons. My brother-in-law was especially concerned that legalized marijuana could actually create more violence.
Personally, I have never smoked marijuana and I am not really religious, so I can’t speak about the moral and health objections. But I will say that decriminalizing marijuana would take away the fear of getting a criminal record while reducing police bribery and corruption. Fewer people with criminal records means more able-bodied people who can work and contribute to the economy. Of course, if regulated properly, legalized marijuana would be great for Jamaica. Unlike Uruguay, allowing tourists to smoke weed while on holiday would bring in billions of dollars and put Jamaica on a positive financial path.
It is a tradition in my house and other Caribbean homes to eat rum cake during Christmas. Rum cake or black cake or fruit cake (different terms on various islands) is a rich mixture of raisins, butter, dates, prunes, vanilla, eggs, cinnamon, brown sugar, nutmeg, and, of course, rum. Every island has their version of making the cake.
