A Bit More Detail

• CBC Hamilton reports on patterns of misconduct by members of armed forces units in the Hamilton, Ontario, area.


• That the Cape Breton Post, main newspaper of that island, may no longer be printed in Halifax says much about that city's growing dominance of Nova Scotia (and, too, of Cape Breton's decline). CBC reports.


• Building a new library on the waterfront of Sydney, in Cape Breton, might well anchor a wider revitalization of that city. CBC reports.


• Guardian Cities shares the story of how the Swedish iron ore-mining town of Kiruna, facing subsidence, is literally moving kilometres away.


• The Inter Press Services notes that the Rwandan capital of Kigali will have a downtown ecotourism park.

• If ever I make it to Detroit, the John K King bookstore would surely be a must-visit. Atlas Obscura reports.


• Metropolis, Illinois, is celebrating Superman. Where better to do so? Wired reports.


• Seattle, like so many cities around North America, is apparently facing a gentrification that makes it increasingly uncomfortable for too many. Crosscut has it.


• The San Francisco Bay area community of Foster City faces imminent danger from rising sea levels. CBC reports.


• Decades after the horrors of the mid-1990s, dogs in the Rwandan capital of Kigali are starting to be treated as potential pets again. National Geographic reports.

• Centauri Dreams looks at the design of Japan for a laser-fueled ion engine for deep space probe IKAROS, destined for the Trojans of Jupiter.


• The Crux notes the achievements of Jane Goodall, not least for recognizing non-human animals have personalities.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on a model detailing the accretion of massive planets from icy pebbles.


• Hornet Stories shares Tori Amos talking about her late gay friend, makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin.


• Language Log reports on a powerful essay regarding the writing of the first Navajo-English dictionary.


• The NYR Daily notes how the Russian government of Putin is trying to deal with the Russian Revolution by not recognizing it.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on the efforts of a visitor to drink the signature ikigage beer of Rwanda, brewed from sorghum.


• Drew Rowsome quite likes the Guillermo del Toro exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. (I should go, too.)


• Towleroad notes early supports suggesting the Australian postal vote on same-sex marriage will be a crushing victory for the good guys.


• Window on Eurasia notes the pressure of new education changes on smaller minority languages in Russia.

• Bloomberg talks about Poland's problems with economic growth, notes that McMansions are poor investments, considers what to do about the Olympics post-Rio, looks at new Japanese tax incentives for working women, looks at a French war museum that put its stock up for sale, examines the power of the New Zealand dairy, looks at the Yasukuni controversies, and notes Huawei's progress in China.


• Bloomberg View is hopeful for Brazil, argues demographics are dooming Abenomics, suggests ways for the US to pit Russia versus Iran, looks at Chinese fisheries and the survival of the ocean, notes that high American population growth makes the post-2008 economic recovery relatively less notable, looks at Emperor Akihito's opposition to Japanese remilitarization, and argues that Europe's soft response to terrorism is not a weakness.


• CBC notes that Russian doping whistleblowers fear for their lives, looks at how New Brunswick farmers are adapting to climate change, and looks at how Neanderthals' lack of facility with tools may have doomed them.


• The Globe and Mail argues Ontario should imitate Michigan instead of Québec, notes the new Anne of Green Gables series on Netflix, and predicts good things for Tim Horton's in the Philippines.


• The Guardian notes that Canada's impending deal with the European Union is not any model for the United Kingdom.


• The Inter Press Service looks at child executions in Iran.


• MacLean's notes that Great Lakes mayors have joined to challenge a diversion of water from their shared basin.


• National Geographic looks at the elephant ivory trade, considers the abstract intelligence of birds, considers the Mayan calendar's complexities, and looks at how the young generation treats Pluto's dwarf planet status.


• The National Post notes that VIA Rail is interested in offering a low-cost bus route along the Highway of Tears in northern British Columbia.


• Open Democracy notes that the last Russian prisoner in Guantanamo does not want to go home, and wonders why the West ignores the Rwandan dictatorship.


• TVO considers how rural communities can attract immigrants.


• Universe Today suggests sending our digital selves to the stars, looks at how cirrus clouds kept early Mars warm and wet, and notes the discovery of an early-forming direct-collapse black hole.


• Variance Explained looks at how Donald Trump's tweets clearly show two authors at work.


• The Washignton Post considers what happens when a gay bar becomes a bar with more general appeal.


• Wired notes that the World Wide Web still is far from achieving its founders' dreams, looks at how news apps are dying off, and reports on the Univision purchase of Gawker.

At the edge of the Rwandan capital, on a hillside formerly packed with small houses made of compressed earth, Wang Zenkhun pours over a map of what will soon be the East African country’s largest residential development.

Wang, an employee of the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, serves as site manager for the project. He oversees approximately 100 Chinese and 2,500 Rwandan workers, who toil in the sun on the 80-acre site outside his office. Known as Vision City and financed by the Rwanda Social Security Board, or RSSB, the country’s pension body, the project will begin with an initial phase of 504 units, due to be completed next year. It will eventually scale up to 4,500 homes. In line with Kigali’s ambitious master plan, which seeks to transform the city of 1.3 million into a “center of urban excellence,” the site’s developers promise a community “tempered with a tinge of elegance and subtle nobility” that will be a “reference point for contemporary Rwandan living.” In addition to the houses, there will be restaurants, hotels, offices, schools, a sports complex and a Wi-Fi-connected town center. It’s all part of a citywide mixed-use strategy meant to decentralize key business and recreational activities and minimize road congestion.

For Kigali residents, who, like most urban Africans, face a dire shortage of quality housing, it all sounds great. There’s just one nagging detail. According to RSSB, the most affordable Phase 1 Vision City units, two-bedroom apartments, will cost 124 million Rwandan francs ($172,000), more than 100 times the city’s median annual household income. The most expensive — five-bedroom luxury villas with exteriors of marble and granite — will run close to 320 million francs.

[. . .]

Vision City is only one of several forthcoming Kigali housing developments, some of which, officials say, will deliver more affordable units. But the project is emblematic of a conundrum facing cities across sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s most rapidly urbanizing region. Buoyed by a decade-and-a-half of robust economic growth, Africa’s cities are home today to unprecedented concentrations of wealth. They’re also seeing endless streams of impoverished rural migrants, typically young people in search of jobs who see no viable future in the small-scale farming of their parents’ generation. These dual phenomena have led to striking degrees of inequality. According to the United Nations Human Settlements Program, U.N. Habitat, Africa’s urban areas are now collectively the most unequal in the world, having surpassed the cities of Latin America sometime in the century’s first decade.

Nowhere is this widening gap more visible than in Africa’s radically divergent standards of housing. While upscale developments, which are more attractive to investors, have sprouted on all corners of the continent, governments across the region have largely failed to spur development of modern formal housing that’s accessible to ordinary urban residents. Today, according to U.N. figures, 62 percent of Africa’s urban population lives in slums. These are typically tightly packed, haphazardly planned settlements that do not adhere to basic building standards nor allow for proper sanitation. Cities with a high prevalence of informal, single-story houses generally face extensive public-health challenges and lack the population density needed to become cost-effective hubs of manufacturing, therefore hindering job creation. Although housing policies seldom top government or donor agendas, economists say they’ll play an increasingly critical role as Africa moves toward becoming an urban-majority continent, which the U.N. projects will occur by 2040. Paul Collier, the development economist and director of Oxford University’s Center for the Study of African Economies, has even called housing the “single most important factor in Africa’s economic development.”

Jean’s trip will mark the first state visit to Rwanda from a Commonwealth country since it joined that 54-state organization late last year. But cozying up to Britain and its former colonies is only the latest chapter in Rwanda’s move to English. Many say it all started with the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when members of the country’s Hutu ethnic group killed up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The country blames France for helping arm the instigators, and then not doing enough to stop the carnage.

In the wake of the genocide, Rwanda’s main donor became the United States. Meanwhile, thousands of exiles returned to their homeland from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda—neighbouring English-speaking countries where many Rwandans picked up the language. Then, in 2006, a French judge dropped a bombshell. He accused Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, of helping start the genocide because of his alleged complicity in the rocket attack of April 6, 1994, that killed Rwanda’s Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana—the spark for the massacre. Furious, Kagame shut down the French Embassy, kicked out the ambassador, ordered Radio France Internationale off the air in Rwanda, and closed the local French cultural centre.
Two years later, in 2008, Kagame announced that English—which became one of Rwanda’s official languages in 1994—would replace French as the official language of instruction in the country’s schools. In the wake of that momentous step, thousands of Rwandan schoolteachers were fired because they couldn’t teach the new language.

According to Nkusi, there has been very little public resistance to the government’s pro-English campaign. Kagame has a firm grip on power and Rwandans are not known as protesters. In fact, most citizens are reluctant to give their opinions even in private. But during an interview with a group of Rwandan teacher-trainers, some of them open up. “French flows in my veins,” says Ladislas Nkundabanyanga. “My father taught me French and my friends all speak French.” Nowadays, though, he knows kindergarten students who don’t understand the word “bonjour.” As a result, he’s convinced the French language in Rwanda is doomed. Nkundabanyanga’s colleague, Beatrice Namango, agrees. The new policy, she says, is “like telling me to keep quiet. It’s stopping me from talking.”

Several news-agencies made mention of a prominent Rwandan opposition member, Victoire Ingabire, being arrested on charges of cooperation with a terroristic rebel group, and perhaps more conspicuously, on charges of ‘genocidal ideology’. The precise scope of the relevant criminal provision is not known to me, but according to a Dutch news-agency it concerns a legal prohibition to deny genocide. However, the same (brief) article (http://www.bndestem.nl/algemeen/buitenland/6579160/Oppositieleider-Rwanda-Ingabire-gearesteerd.ece) also states that merely addressing ethnicity is formally prohibited according to Rwandan legislation since the genocide. This seems a bit unlikely, but readers who can confirm this are cordially invited to comment.

Assuming that raising the issue of ethnicity is allowed as long as it does not amount to a denial of genocide, the question still arises whether a fair balance has been struck in this case between the right of freedom of expression and maintaining public order through a prohibition on hate speech. Particularly as Ingabire seemed to have been acting in the capacity of politician while making the concerned statements. Rwanda’s Prosecutor General confirmed the charges, but is not cited giving any concrete examples of ‘genocidal ideology’ (as the Cambodia Daily refers to the charge). The paper speculates that the charge may be based on public statements in which Ingabire has said that many Hutu’s – and not only Tutsi’s – have been killed during the genocide, who were never officially mourned. Ingabire, who is of the Hutu ethnicity herself, is said to have criticized the government for over-simplifying the account of the genocide on several occasions.

This aspect, criticism on the government, may actually have been perceived as more of a poignant statement by the authorities than Ingabire’s views on the historical accuracy of the genocide. Critics have put forward that the ‘genocidal ideology’ prohibition has been used before to restrain political dissent (Cambodia Daily April23). But also other legal grounds have been used recently in an alleged shake-up of the military, as two high ranking generals were arrested for corruption and immoral conduct. Another senior official and former general has defected to South Africa, claiming that his life was at risk for disagreeing with governmental policies. It is to be hoped that the repressive policy as regards addressing ethnic issues does not backfire by fuelling racial division more than avoiding it, by denying the (ethnic) opposition a voice.

• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew's very skeptical about the good sense of ideas to save money on the TTC by cutting service: positive feedback loops in negative directions are always nasty. (Thanks to mindstalk for correcting my terminology.)


• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shows pictures of the footsteps of the Apollo 12 astronauts taken by a recent Moon probe.


• Centauri Dreams reports that, in the recent tradition of astronomers finding smaller and more distant objects, a small chunk of ice a bit less than one kilometre across was found seven billion kilometres away from Earth by the Hubble.


• The Global Sociology blog tackles the nurture-versus-nature debate on gender differences and argues strongly on nurture's side.


• Joe. My. God lets us know that a North Carolina politician mocked the sexual orientation of another politician's dead gay son, and that Rwanda is also considering strongly homophobic legislation on the Ugandan model.


• Language Log's Geoff Nunberg discusses the question of how linguists should respond to conflicts of interest, with the discussions expanding upon what a conflict of interest for linguists actually is.


• Murdering Mouth wonders how, or if, you can break through to someone operating under a completely different paradigm.


• Inspired by Douglas Muir's posts from the Congo at Halfway Down the Danube, Noel Maurer uses Mexican history to demonstrate that banks and breweries can survive extreme levels of violence.


• Slap Upside the Head reports on anti-gay freakouts, among gamers unhappy with a same-sex encounter in a video game, and with homophobes who don't like a Nova Scotia MPs inclusion of a picture of him with his husband on his Christmas mailing.


• the F OR V M discusses the question of whether or not the failing of US companies to bid on Iraqi oil means that they expect significantly greater instability in that country in a year's time.