On Sunday I wrote about Spanish PM Zapatero addressing African leaders at the opening of the 14th ordinary African Union Summit in Addis Abeba, and how he stuck to generalities on his speech. The summit finished yesterday, and, keeping in the line, African leaders made some interesting declarations but did not push through any revolutionary decisions. Nevertheless, I have tought it may be a good idea to put together the most important outcomes of the summit:

The most commented aspect of the meeting, as it is often the case in African politics, was a question of leadership. Thus, the earlier part of the summit was dominated by a bitter controversy: the desire of the AU Chairman, Muammar Al Gaddafi, to exten his one-year term. During his tenure, Gaddafi has been the centre of numerous controversies (some of these have been mentioned before in this blog - for example, here and here), but this time he had to give up and cede the AU Chairmanship to Malawian president Bingu Wa Mutharika. This change to a presidency on the south of the continent was part of an established rotating system, but after Gaddafi's wishes were ignored - something that some consider as an "rare glimpse of courage" from African leaders - Gaddafi accused the "political elite of the continent" of lacking "political awareness and hence the political determination”, and set his sight on a new international role - this time as leader of the League of Arab states.

Newly elected AU Chairman Bingu Wa Mutharika (Photo Reuters)

On the main theme of the conference “Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Africa: Challenges and Prospects for Development”, not much appears to have been advanced. There was, of course the unavoidable declaration of good intentions at the closing ceremony, with the Chairman Wa Mutharika pointing out the need to "put in place a food security program to alleviate poverty in the next five years; the need to develop transport and telecommunications, and connect countries through ICTs; and the development of energy". But these declarations are not enough and ICT analysts and experts still think there is much work to be done, and that sometimes the AU focuses on the wrong areas.

A number of other topics were however also discussed at the AU summit, such as:

- the dissolution of NEPAD - after nearly ten years in which it failed to deliver a single project - and its substitution by a new agency - the NEPAD Planning and Coordination Agency (NPCA) - formally integrated within the AU's structures.

- on the inauguration of 2010 as the "Year of Peace and Security in Africa", Wa Mutharika also declared "war on unconstitutional change of government on the African soil and resolve to take strong necessary punitive action against all authors of coup d'etats and those that provide them the means to unseat duly elected governments", and pressed for the AU to take a harder stance on coup leaders in countries like Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea (with measures being announced next week).

- a letter from Eritrea was circulated among the leaders attending the summit, accusing Ethiopia of blocking Eritrea's participation at AU events by failing to extend appropiate guarantees to its officials.

- AU leaders also considered, according to the Chairman of the AU Comission Jean Ping, offering "land and naturalization benefits" to Haitians affected by the earthquake and who may seek to return to the African continent.

- at the the summit, the AU also endorsed South Africa's candidature for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, on the elections that will take place at the General Assembly in October this year.

- finally, at the summit, the AU also unveiled its new flag, selected from those put forward after the call for new ideas made in 2007.

Africa News - APA-Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) The African Union (AU) allows Eritrea to open''as soon as possible''a diplomatic mission to the AU Commission, to enable the authorities of that country to participate meetings of the Pan-African organization, APA learned on Tuesday a source close to the Union.

• Eritrea allowed to open a diplomatic mission to the AU in Addis Ababa (afriqueavenir.org)

I just recently finished reading this article. It's massive. It's longer than the Wikipedia article on Michael Jackson, but of course there is a good reason for this. This article on Wired UK details more points about the internet cables that are being deployed off the coast of East Africa than any other article I have read to date.

I have to be quite honest in that the initial tone of the article is rather paternalistic at first with grand, Stanley-esque ways of explaining things such as "Somalia, the planet’s most utterly failed state". Thankfully, it gets past all of this and digs right in to the facts such as Kenyans paying $2,300 a month for a duplex satellite connection with one megabit of throughput, but 600ms of latency. This means that they're spending a helluva lot of money for a meager pipe that takes over a half a second for each single bit of data to transmit. Given that even a lean page has 50000 bytes of data that is not a fast connection whatsoever. This is one of the reasons that we're seeing such a fanfare about these new connections. They will be the first time that East Africa will be connected to an internet that more closely resembles the rest of the world and at a price that will be much, much more affordable (although not at first of course.) And with the cable transmitting at 1.28 terabits per second (or 16,800 megabytes per second if my math is correct) that should be some pretty decent throughput.

All of this is not coming cheaply. Seacom (the entity that the article mostly talks about) is investing $650 million USD in the project which goes to show why the TEAMS project isn't faring as well given that it's working with a sixth of that to lay its cable.

Teams doesn’t appear to have a website. It also doesn’t appear to have a dedicated office, telephone number, email address or anything else one might reasonably expect. But work is definitely underway.

From the history of the projects, the article then delves in to the technical elements of how cable is laid, which I really thought was just a process of dumping it on the ocean floor. It happens that it's just a tad bit more complex than that:

Deep below the waves somewhere off the coast of Africa, a bright-yellow six tonne box-shaped object, about the size of a small military tank and bristling with wires, lights and gadgetry, is trying to take hold of a submarine cable lying on the seabed. This is the Tyco Resolute’s remote operated vehicle, or ROV – and one of the coolest toys imaginable. It has rubberised tracks to drive about on the ocean floor as well as thrusters on its sides, enabling it to fly like an undersea helicopter.

Then it gets in to Kai Wulff. I would warrant that while Kenyans are probably happy to see that they're getting faster internet in the very near future, they're probably not all that thrilled that a German is going to be the one in charge of it. And Wulff doesn't mess around: "the first large-scale customer of Seacom in Kenya, having secured a 15-year 10Gbps slot on the cable for a cool $100 million." KDN (Wulff's company) is apparently also in the process of "rolling out fibre links to Kampala in Uganda, building redundant rings around Kenya, linking into Tanzania, Rwanda and other countries." meaning that in a good way, this map will need some updates.

All of this is just a snippet of the article though. If you haven't read it yet and have any interest at all in these projects, I would highly recommend taking a look; allusions to cable engineers looking like Antonio Banderas and all.

I think the main driving force in my life outside of technology and its affiliated gadgetry is food and wine. Being currently based in California with regular trips to North Eastern Spain, the wine angle is pretty much taken care of in any number of ways. For food though, I'm always on the lookout for new places to try (although again, California and Spain don't let me down.)

Someday, somehow, I'm going to put aside the time to get over to Taste of Africa in Berkeley. People all around say that while the service is pretty hit and miss, the West African dishes they serve are nothing short of perfection. Of course these reviews are on Yelp for the most part, which should always be taken with a drop of chili oil.

In San Francisco though, there are a decent number of options, especially in the Ethiopian department. It's rare that you actually find one that specifically calls itself Eritrean. For those unfamiliar, Eritrea is a small country along the Red Sea, which was part of Ethiopia at various points in history until that was all settled by the quite nasty Eritrean-Ethiopian War. Because of this intertwined history, obviously the food is going to be similar in these two countries. For example, the staple of any good Eritrean or Ethiopian meal is the injera bread which you use to scoop up all of the food, sans utensils.

I encountered all of this at Assab Eritrean, a small restaurant perched out on Geary Blvd, in the Richmond District of San Francisco. The decor of the place is basic overall with touches of African objects here and there to give it more of a flair. The good is, after all what one is there for and they have a great, extensive menu of meat and vegetarian dishes to choose from. Surprisingly, there isn't a lot of seafood, given that Eritrea has quite a good deal of coast, I was under the impression that was one of the main distinctions from Ethiopian dishes, but apparently not at Assab.

The staff are nice, but the wait can take a bit for the food, which didn't bother me all that much as they're a pretty small operation and I'll take that any day over something more akin to MacEritrea Bell. When it comes to the food itself it is quite, quite good. Flavors of any and all dishes, whether simple lentils or beef, are deep and varied. They don't just crank up the heat and leave out the flavors. No, things are fresh, good and enjoyable. While it would seem elementary, the injera was perfect and worked to complement the food exactly how it should. Probably my only warning would be that if you're not a fan of spicy foods to order carefully as some dishes can pack quite a punch. Otherwise a good stop in San Francisco when one is craving East African vittles.