A number of things have struck me since we arrived in Europe to attend a number of conferences, travelling from Ghent in Belgium through Munich in Germany to beautiful Venice in the Veneto of Italy, and they do not augur well for the future of human society or the planet. These range from observations in […]
travel
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
They herded us into the aircraft like cattle
By Robtel Neajai Pailey I thought I’d become immune to the indignities of travelling with an African passport, but an encounter last month proved me wrong. After a series of meetings in Dakar, I travelled back to London via Madrid on a red-eye Iberia Airlines flight. Disembarking from the plane in Madrid in the early […]
Posted inGeneral, Tech
Florence, Siena and the ‘space of flows’
We are in Florence for a conference, in what is to my mind the most enchanting part of Italy, namely Tuscany. Because I have always been interested in art and architecture, and in principle we don’t take taxis, but walk everywhere we go, we have already seen the most beautiful buildings and urban landscapes, framed […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
In a world obsessed with passport tiers, citizenship is personal and political
By Robtel Neajai Pailey Late last week, I was informed that I would not be able to travel to Dubai for an important meeting scheduled months ago. Like other countries across the globe, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) halted travel for those with Guinean, Liberian, and Sierra Leonean passports during the height of the Ebola […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Wannabe pilot Gigaba’s ill-fated flight of fantasy
While arrogance is undoubtedly an unattractive trait, in modern society it is so prevalent among politicians, top officials and corporate leaders as to be entirely unremarkable. However, when it combines with a stubborn inability to admit to error, it becomes dangerous. Until recently the most newsworthy act by Malusi Gigaba was dressing in the uniform […]
Posted inGeneral
Travels through Schizoville
On a recent trip to the Netherlands we had a first-hand experience of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari mean when they claim that the typical “malady” of today is schizophrenia — what Ian Buchanan calls “an everyday schizophrenia in which the absurd is simply ‘how things are’ ”. Once you have been alerted to it, […]