Those who've been to Gambia or Senegal will recognize it immediately. It is a kind of music that blends traditional instruments from Western Africa with guitars, trumpets, and electronic music (for a history of the genre, see here). Its main trait is that very busy rythm so hard to get rid of. In Dakar it's everywhere: markets, bars, night clubs, cabs. Many, specially women, dance it wherever they are, moving according to the last fade in mbalax dancing -- even for this there are trends. The music is said to be primarily Wolof, but it seems to me that it is now everyone's music, thanks to, among others, Youssou N'Dour, Titi, Thione Seck, Ismaël Lô, Omar Pene o Coumba Gawlo Seck. Most of these musicians are from minority ethnic groups (= not wolof).

During my brief stay in Senegal, *the* move of the season was a lateral 2-step. You can see a practical example in the video below, made for the song Maana by Fallou Dieng. I have lost track of how many times I have danced this song trying to emulate the women around me (the results were always disapointing). But, together with this elegant and somehow arrogant move, one always finds a more traditional dancing style. A serer friend called it "the ass-breaker dance" for reasons that will become evident after watching that video (pay attention after minute 3).

Yes, this is what a posh nightclub in Dakar looks like a saturday night. However, and from my very humble point of view, what really caught my attention was to see women with their long skirts dancing Mbalax "sabar style" (sabar is, at the same time, an instrument, a kind of music, and a dancing style). Want to see what I am talking about? The video below, made by a Dutch student, explains a bit the whats, whos and whys of sabar.

And, in case someone still wants more music, below you will find a version of No Woman, no Cry by Titi.

More!? Two recommendations: Femme Objet by Coumba Gawlo or a more "western" tune by Yossou Ndour, here. Dancing time!! :o)

PS: If you see any mistakes in this entry, please let me know. I'm trying to learn more about mbalax :o)

It's been in the works for the last two months as we coordinated the translation work from the very adept Mr. Oumar Bah, who now blogs (in French and Fula) at Konngol Afirik. And now, we're happy to announce that the Fula language version is live on Maneno! It's the 'FUL' option at the top for those who may know the language via a different spelling, such as 'Peul' in French.

Fula (or Fulfulde as it is known in the language) is spoken primarily in West Africa with around 16 million speakers or so according to Wikipedia. Although, it is the case that the amount of speakers could be as high as 50 million, as a commenter mentioned below. Given the number of dialects and the spread of the language, hard, fast numbers are hard to come by, but it is generally assumed that the Wikipedia article is far too conservative in its total.

The amount of countries that this language is spoken in to at least some extent is massive (take a look to the left), which is why we're very happy to have it as a language interface option. We hope that there will be a far reach with this language as Oumar is extremely well-versed in the Fula language mechanics. He compiled the first Fula-French online dictionary, which he is also looking to publish.

If you look at this language version of Maneno, you can see that there are similar issues as with the Bambara version in that there are a a number of characters which are outside the typical ones in the extended Latin alphabet. These should all have native supported on the internet, but that can support can sometimes be lacking. Thankfully, due to the Bambara experience, this was much less of a problem this time around, although Internet Explorer 6 simply will not display these characters, so upgrade if you can.

Again, we thank Oumar for all his work as well as Claire Ulrich who worked to connect us with Oumar in the first place.

I've mentioned that Namibia beckons in the past, but I should also mention that I'm quite fascinated by The Gambia as well. It's a very small country (the smallest in Africa) which may be part of the fascination, along with the fact that one of its main exports is peanuts. Also, I'm always intrigued by countries that are in the middle of or bisect other countries as The Gambia does to Senegal. I even found out that the airport in the capital, Banjul, happens to be an emergency shuttle landing site. All very interesting, but amazingly not the most interesting tidbits I've now heard to date.

The opening plenary address for the Berkeley HRC New Machine conference was by Trevor Paglen author of Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World (side note: why are all the book titles from this conference damn near longer than a Twitter twit?) It was a great opening talk. I learned a great deal about the science and research that was behind discovering and uncovering the CIA's secret flights that they used for rendition of suspected terrorists in the days after 9/11. The really cool thing was that Paglen and his cohorts made use of information that was all publicly available at the time from flight schedules, to finding out that there is an actual airport code for Guantanamo Bay, to showing a CIA black ops site on Google Maps.

The talk was especially beautiful to me in showing data in visualized formats. I always love this as I love data and I love seeing what it's doing if applied to a physical space or time. Somewhere along there, Paglen put up a rendition flight map. A lot of the sites were ones that people probably knew about if they had followed the press coverage of all this nasty rendition business. But there, in the lower part of one of the maps I saw a flight path to... yup, The Gambia. It appears that on some level (and I don't know to what level) these cover flights had passed through the airport of this small nation. It's a decently odd choice, but then again, looking at these flight paths in general it shows that all the flights were done in such a way to really cover what they were doing; not to be direct and efficient.

While on some level, I'm bound to be let down, I really need to make a trip down to Banjul whenever I get to Dakar someday soon and see what all is happening there. Of course, I should probably keep it to a purely touristic inquisitiveness lest I end up in some really dumb trouble

A segment of the rendition flight map showing the link to The Gambia, apparently directly from Washington DC.

In constantly striving to create a more accessible platform, we at Maneno are always on the lookout for new languages to make the site available in because let's face it, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish versions are great, but we feel that the true strength of the site will be having the native languages of Africa available as well. Because of that, there is the Swahili version and soon (hopefully very soon) we will have a version in Bambara. In case you haven't heard of this language, let me assure you that this is not an April Fool's. This is a West African language that is spoken by around 2-3 million people. Naturally, it doesn't have a strong online presence, but we're hoping that this can change in the future because of efforts like this. I mean, if Slovenian, which is spoken by 2.4 million people can have a Wikipedia with over 100,000 entries, why not Bambara?

Implementing

When it comes to integrating African languages in a website, one such as Swahili is overall, rather easy to implement. It uses a strictly English, Latin alphabet for the base of its characters. Bambara however gets considerably more complex. There are a number of characters which are in addition to the Latin base such as ɛ, ɔ, and ɲ (or ŋ depending on the dialect.) Typing these characters is a problem because there is no native support in Windows or the Mac OS.

By way of my pain, I would just like to point people to Sil, a group which has created a keyboard for Bambara and other languages, albeit a keyboard that is only for Windows machines. That takes care of the typing. There is still the issue of the displaying. For that, you need to encode your pages as UTF-8 which amazingly, actually supports these characters, although possibly not in every font for the web, so your kilometerage may vary. There is also the issue that any translation file needs to be created, from the start as a Unicode file. Regular files will just end up mashing up the extended characters.

That is a quick overview of the problems. I hope that it helps others who might be trying to do something similar with Bambara or other languages on the web. Obviously, once we launch this version of the site, you can be sure that we'll let everyone know about it as we think it will be pretty darned cool to have!

A quick preview at how the site will eventually look in Bambara.

For nearly my entire life, the NASA Space Shuttle has been taking to the heavens, pulling we mere mortals from the face of this planet to the reaches of a space that we've just begun to scratch at. Of course, shedding off our gravitational coil is not without its risks and we have lost a couple of the shuttles over the years. One might think that strapping yourself on to a massive liquid hydrogen-fueled rocket is a pretty risky proposition, but those diligent eggheads have gone to amazing lengths to make sure that as many possibilities are taken care of in the event of a MIDS (Moment of Incredible Deep Shit) overtaking the shuttle launch.

I happened to be browsing through the Wikipedia page for N'Djili Airport in Congo DRC when this one sentence stuck out at me, "It is an alternative landing site for NASA's Space Shuttle." Huh? I mean, sure, they've got a runway and it pretty much works, but this is a rather sordid airport. In fact, after passing through it, I felt compelled to write a survival guide, despite the fact I was seeing it at a vastly improved state than just a few years ago. But still, in the event of a MIDS with the shuttle, they would land it there? This required more research.

As it turns out, there are a number of locations in Sub-Saharan Africa that are on the list of potential emergency landing spots in addition to N'Djili including: Banjul, The Gambia, AFB Hoedspruit, South Africa, and Roberts International Airport, Liberia. It should be noted that out of these, only Banjul is designated as a true emergency landing site. The other three are just there for when things go seriously, seriously bad and they essentially have no option short of breaking apart. Why is Banjul so optimal given that it's in a country only 40km wide and 250km long? Well, this is explained:

Since September 1987 [following the Challenger crash], Banjul International Airport (BIA) has been among four selected locations in the world designated as augmented emergency landing sites and recovery locations for the United States Space Shuttle. B1A is adjacent to the capital, 13 degrees north of the Equator, on a flat plane, seven miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. NASA space shuttles, launched eastward in a ballistic trajectory over the Atlantic, fly directly over Banjul, thus making it an ideal location for emergency landings. In addition, The Gambia's dry season from November to May provides favourable weather conditions, with generally good visibility for emergency landings.

A best case scenario in an emergency means landing in Banjul. For a slightly worse case and the reason that one of the other three sites would be a Transoceanic Abort Landing. This is a landing attempted in the first 30 minutes after lift off. I still don't even know how they would pull that off given the wicked velocity they're traveling to escape gravity.

In you might be wondering how on earth they would secure a space shuttle if it were to land at one of these sites, well NASA has again though of that as least in the case of Banjul:

During the week preceding a shuttle launch, a team of NASA mission-support specialists and medical personnel from the United States Department of Defence arrives in Banjul to activate the TAL site. They work closely with BIA's twenty specially trained security officers, and with the Gambian Fire and Rescue Service, which remains fully operational during this period.

Of course, if the shuttle makes it back down, then again, they have a very nifty way to get it back to Florida which is this puppy. While a shuttle tacked on to the back of a 747 isn't the most attractive or graceful of things, I do have to admire the simplistic approach they took to getting it home in that hey, these two things fly, stick 'em together and fly 'em. And if you're thinking that your last plane ticket was pricey, try spending $1.7 million to just truck that thing back across the US. I can't even imagine what it would cost from another country.

The shuttle taking off with Banjul Airport in the upper right and N'Djili in the lower right. All images from Wikipedia.