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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Posts by Gbemisola_Olujobi

BETWEEN THE WRONG THING AND ‘THE DONE THING’
JUN 7, 2007 - 9:10AM PST
Posted by Gbemisola Olujobi
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USC Center on Public Diplomacy Research Associate Gbemisola Olujobi sheds light on one of the pejorative images that has come to define Africa in the eyes of many around the world.

Corruption goes by many names in Africa -- "kola," "egunje," "maslaha," "kompo," "kitu-kidogo," "tikoko," "toshiyar-baki," "sweetener," etc. Everyone recognizes it as a gangrenous evil. Sometimes, however, the line between wrongdoing and the done thing tends to be...a little fuzzy.

The story is told of an African public officer who went to a Swiss bank and announced himself as a member of his country's anti-corruption commission. He said he was... FULL TEXT
 
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THE AFRICA YOU NEED TO KNOW
DEC 1, 2006 - 5:12PM PST
Posted by Gbemisola Olujobi
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What is disaster pornography? Africans define it as the Western media’s habit of blacking out Africa’s stock markets, high rises, internet cafes, cell phones, heart surgeries, soaring literacy and increasing democratization, while gleefully parading her genocides, armed conflicts, child soldiers, foreign debts, hunger, disease, and backwardness.


I recently found myself making small talk with an airport official in the United States. “I hear in Africa, people are very poor and hungry, they don’t have anything to eat,” he said.
“I saw a documentary on Africa a few days ago on CNN, and there were all these hungry people, dying children,... FULL TEXT
 
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