TEDGlobal Conference Arusha, Tanzania: Indigenes and Friends Meet to Discuss Africa

June is going to be a busy month in Arusha, the resort town of Tanzania. Some 250 individuals from all walks of life are gradually congregating in the Arusha - a town located in the Great Rift Valley amid the Serengeti Plain (a World Heritage Site), Ngorongoro Crater, Lake Manyara, Olduvai Gorge, Tarangire National Park, and Mount Kilimanjaro National Park – for the TEDGlobal conference. See conference program

AfricanLoft will be monitoring the event closely via input from some blogs and TED website.

Jen Brea, blogger at Africanbeat, flew in from China just in time for the conference. She has a Flickr picture page devoted to the event.

Ory Okolloh of Kenyan Pundit is on ground with her infant child. Ory a Harvard-trained lawyer and a socio-political activist - will speak at the conference on Mzalendo - an interesting blogging initiative on the Kenyan parliament.

Hash from White Africa, flew in from Florida, and appears well embedded in Arusha going by his pictures and coverage of the event.

Ethan Zukerman (My Heart’s in Accra) has some extensive and interesting postings on TED as well. Excerpt from one of his, titled Getting Rowdy with Andrew Mwenda:

“Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda (photo: top left)is man of strong opinions. His opinions in 2005 about Museveni’s government were strong enough to put him in jail briefly. He tells us that this is an auspicious time for this meeting, since it parallels the meetings in Germany for the G8 which are discussing “a Marshall plan for aid for Africa”. To call Mwenda skeptical about this idea is to do him an injustice - he’s a firm believer that international aid is a dangerous and largely harmful direction for Africa.

“The media tells nothing but the truth [about Africa] but not the whole truth”. The stories covered - despair, civil war, famine - are not the only reality. Actually, they’re the smallest reality. These stories create a misframing of Africa, and lead us to the long solutions. By giving food to the hungry and medicine for the sikc, Africa is stripped of self reliance and of hope.

“Why can’t African nations enable entrepreneurs to trade internationally and sell goods to international markets?”