In the News
Costa Rica Elects First Female President in Country’s History
MEXICO CITY — Costa Ricans elected a former vice president, Laura Chinchilla, as the country’s first female president, giving the ruling party a resounding victory.
Laura Chinchilla, who won 47 percent of the vote, with supporters Sunday after voting in San
Ms. Chinchilla, 50, won 47 percent of the vote, and both the second- and third-place candidates, the leftist Ottón Solís and the libertarian Otto Guevara, conceded before 10 p.m. Sunday.
Ms. Chinchilla thanked her supporters through Twitter before heading to a hotel in the capital, San José, to deliver her victory speech.
The dominant theme of the campaign was voters’ concerns over rising crime, and Ms. Chinchilla, a former minister of justice, has promised to raise spending on security by 50 percent. Speaking to the crowd, she said: “The greatest challenge we have is crime, violence and drug trafficking. I have said it in a dramatic way: Central America could be the last battlefield of the war taking place in Colombia and Mexico.” She added, “We must recuperate our tranquillity.”
Ms. Chinchilla, of the National Liberation Party, promised continuity with the free-trade policies of out-going President Óscar Arias, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who helped guide Central America out of its cold war conflicts.
Although she follows the center-left welfare policies of her party, she is social conservative who opposes abortion and gay marriage. Ms. Chinchilla holds a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University and is the mother of a teenage boy.
As the early results were announced, Ms. Chinchilla’s supporters began to fill the streets of the capital, waving the party’s green and white flag.
Although Costa Rica is still a relative oasis of peace and economic development in Central America, the rising crime rate there became the dominant issue in the campaign. Ms. Chinchilla blamed organized crime and the spillover from drug trafficking through Central America.
The global economic crisis pushed Costa Rica into recession last year, but the economy is expected to grow this year.
Both of Ms. Chinchilla’s leading opponents had argued that if she won, Mr. Arias, who is 69, would continue to wield power from behind the scenes. A campaign commercial for Mr. Solís showed Mr. Arias pulling the strings on a marionette representing Ms. Chinchilla.
The campaign has had its share of unusual moments. In response to questions over campaign financing, Mr. Guevara took a polygraph test on television. Mr. Solís also submitted to a test, but Ms. Chinchilla declined.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/world/americas/09costarica.html?ref=world
NY Times
By ELISABETH MALKIN
Published: February 8, 2010
The Happiest People
Hmmm. You think it’s a coincidence? Costa Rica is one of the very few countries to have abolished its army, and it’s also arguably the happiest nation on earth.
There are several ways of measuring happiness in countries, all inexact, but this pearl of Central America does stunningly well by whatever system is used. For example, the World Database of Happiness, compiled by a Dutch sociologist on the basis of answers to surveys by Gallup and others, lists Costa Rica in the top spot out of 148 nations.
That’s because Costa Ricans, asked to rate their own happiness on a 10-point scale, average 8.5. Denmark is next at 8.3, the United States ranks 20th at 7.4 and Togo and Tanzania bring up the caboose at 2.6.
Scholars also calculate happiness by determining “happy life years.” This figure results from merging average self-reported happiness, as above, with life expectancy. Using this system, Costa Rica again easily tops the list. The United States is 19th, and Zimbabwe comes in last.
A third approach is the “happy planet index,” devised by the New Economics Foundation, a liberal think tank. This combines happiness and longevity but adjusts for environmental impact — such as the carbon that countries spew.
Here again, Costa Rica wins the day, for achieving contentment and longevity in an environmentally sustainable way. The Dominican Republic ranks second, the United States 114th (because of its huge ecological footprint) and Zimbabwe is last.
Maybe Costa Rican contentment has something to do with the chance to explore dazzling beaches on both sides of the country, when one isn’t admiring the sloths in the jungle (sloths truly are slothful, I discovered; they are the tortoises of the trees). Costa Rica has done an unusually good job preserving nature, and it’s surely easier to be happy while basking in sunshine and greenery than while shivering up north and suffering “nature deficit disorder.”
After dragging my 12-year-old daughter through Honduran slums and Nicaraguan villages on this trip, she was delighted to see a Costa Rican beach and stroll through a national park. Among her favorite animals now: iguanas and sloths.
(Note to boss: Maybe we should have a columnist based in Costa Rica?)
What sets Costa Rica apart is its remarkable decision in 1949 to dissolve its armed forces and invest instead in education. Increased schooling created a more stable society, less prone to the conflicts that have raged elsewhere in Central America. Education also boosted the economy, enabling the country to become a major exporter of computer chips and improving English-language skills so as to attract American eco-tourists.
I’m not antimilitary. But the evidence is strong that education is often a far better investment than artillery.
In Costa Rica, rising education levels also fostered impressive gender equality so that it ranks higher than the United States in the World Economic Forum gender gap index. This allows Costa Rica to use its female population more productively than is true in most of the region. Likewise, education nurtured improvements in health care, with life expectancy now about the same as in the United States — a bit longer in some data sets, a bit shorter in others.
Rising education levels also led the country to preserve its lush environment as an economic asset. Costa Rica is an ecological pioneer, introducing a carbon tax in 1997. The Environmental Performance Index, a collaboration of Yale and Columbia Universities, ranks Costa Rica at No. 5 in the world, the best outside Europe.
This emphasis on the environment hasn’t sabotaged Costa Rica’s economy but has bolstered it. Indeed, Costa Rica is one of the few countries that is seeing migration from the United States: Yankees are moving here to enjoy a low-cost retirement. My hunch is that in 25 years, we’ll see large numbers of English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast.
Latin countries generally do well in happiness surveys. Mexico and Colombia rank higher than the United States in self-reported contentment. Perhaps one reason is a cultural emphasis on family and friends, on social capital over financial capital — but then again, Mexicans sometimes slip into the United States, presumably in pursuit of both happiness and assets.
Cross-country comparisons of happiness are controversial and uncertain. But what does seem quite clear is that Costa Rica’s national decision to invest in education rather than arms has paid rich dividends. Maybe the lesson for the United States is that we should devote fewer resources to shoring up foreign armies and more to bolstering schools both at home and abroad.
In the meantime, I encourage you to conduct your own research in Costa Rica, exploring those magnificent beaches or admiring those slothful sloths. It’ll surely make you happy.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 6, 2010
Songs of Senegal
“I LOVE the evening in Dakar,” says Youssou N’Dour, glancing out the darkened window of an S.U.V. at the nocturnal crowds streaming into his nightclub, Thiossane, as a warm West African breeze rustles the palms and stirs up the dirt in the unpaved parking lot.
They arrive by foot, car, scooter and battered black-and-yellow taxi, dolled up in their Saturday best for the imminent wee-hours concert by Mr. N’Dour, Africa’s biggest music star. “It’s a city that really comes alive at night.”
Though he has recently returned to Dakar, the Senegalese capital, from a gala in New York City for the international Keep a Child Alive charity — where he sang with Alicia Keys and was honored alongside Bill Clinton and Richard Branson — Mr. N’Dour sounds more like a wistful local kid than a 50-year-old global icon who has won a Grammy Award and was once named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People.” “I’m still very attached to Dakar,” he goes on, adding that he was born in a working-class neighborhood a few miles from the club. “And the people of Dakar are very attached to my music.”
And how. When he takes the stage, an ecstatic roar explodes, and soon several hundred bodies are dancing madly. With its fast-driving, interweaving traditional sabar drummers — rounded out by guitar, bass, keyboards and a rock drum kit — the opening number, “Less Wakhoul,” is pure mbalax, the propulsive, percussive, melodic pop music that Mr. N’Dour popularized starting in the 1970s and that remains the dominant sound emitted from Senegalese radios.
When the sun dips behind the Atlantic, this gritty concrete metropolis — exhilarating, inventive, emotive — flares into a living jukebox of sounds with few African rivals. And with the imminent arrival of the annual Africa Fête — a music festival from Dec. 12 to 19 featuring the mbalax master Omar Pène and many other top local acts — the city’s tuneful bounty is about to go on even larger and more ebullient display.
It should be a welcome moment in the spotlight for Dakar, one of the globe’s most dynamic yet least touristed music centers. With its bevy of international stars — Mr. N’Dour, the acoustic bard Ismael Lo, the adventurous singer-songwriter Baaba Maal — and an ever-increasing crop of new talents, the Senegalese capital is ripe for discovery.
“Dakar is one of the most musically vibrant cities in Africa,” says Simon Broughton, editor in chief of the Britain-based Songlines magazine, which last year began operating tours of the city and this month features Youssou N’Dour on its cover.
“There’s a large number of clubs,” Mr. Broughton says, “and lots of music as part of the fabric of everyday life.”
Indeed, the musicians and singers of Dakar serve up a remarkably diverse sonic smorgasbord with a rhythm for any mood or occasion. Seeking something mellow? Try Pape et Cheikh, whose Senegalese-folk has won fans like Tracy Chapman, or the group Touré Kunda, whose song “Guerilla Africa” was reworked by Carlos Santana into “Africa Bamba” on his multimillion-selling “Supernatural” album. In an Afrofunk mood? Xalam will show why the Rolling Stones hired them to play on their “Undercover” album.
Distinctive takes on hip-hop, salsa, reggae and jazz are also key parts of Dakar’s extensive repertory — to say nothing of the almighty mbalax, whose popularity carries on through young stars like Titi and Pape Diouf.
“Every two or three years there’s a new generation, both musicians and singers,” Mr. Diouf says. “We’re always trying to find ways to perfect Senegalese music. It’s only natural. There are other sounds, other styles of music, other rhythms.”
ON a Saturday night in late October, I watch as a large group of Senegalese musicians in their 50s and 60s begin setting up drums, saxophones and guitars on the outdoor patio stage of Just4U, one of the city’s live music temples.
Expectation is palpable in the crowd — young Senegalese professionals and 30-something Western expatriates — and for good reason: the band, Orchestra Baobab, is a local legend. And their rise, fall and rebirth is one of the most remarkable stories in Senegalese music and a window into the evolution of the country’s characteristic sounds.
Back in 1970, recalls one of its guitarists, Lafti Benjeloun, as we watch fans arrive, the musicians were recruited by a new Dakar night spot called Club Baobab — “the most beautiful club in West Africa” — which was frequented by members of the governmental and social upper crust.
Musically, the band latched on to the craze for Afro-Cuban music sweeping the region. It was a natural fit. Conjured from “a brew of African percussion and Western influences, mainly Spanish,” as Mr. Benjeloun puts it, the music coming out of Havana instantly caught on with West Africans, who “naturally recognized themselves in the rhythms.”
Orchestra Baobab stirred in other influences — Gypsy jazz licks, Arabo-Andalusian strumming, Malian rhythms — and produced some hugely successful recordings; soon it was the toast of the nation. But a growing tide of Senegalese cultural pride unleashed by the country’s independence from France in 1960 eventually helped create mbalax mania and forced foreign sounds out of favor. By 1985 Orchestra Baobab had dissolved.
Then, 16 years later, came a storybook twist. Nick Gold, a fan and founder of Britain-based World Circuit Records (home of Buena Vista Social Club) helped persuade the band to reunite. Mr. Gold resurrected their career, organizing a 2001 reunion concert in London and releasing the band’s first new albums in decades. Within a few years, the band was performing on David Letterman and starring in a VH1 special.
Jamming onstage, the graying bandmates don’t seem to have slowed at all. As I sip a huge bottle of local Gazelle beer under the patio’s bamboo roof, the grooves feel as tropical as the night air: warm, up-tempo, lushly orchestrated, full of rich horn riffs and rock-steady guitar strumming.
Before long, bodies are swaying and dancing. A Senegalese guy in Malcolm X glasses and impeccable threads twirls his date, a lithe Senegalese girl in skintight black pants. Matronly women in colorful native dresses jiggle and laugh. The scene is proof of something Mr. Benjeloun said to me with a chuckle before the set: “Wine gets better with age, and so do musicians.”
The same week, another pioneer strides onto Just4U’s outdoor stage: the hip-hop star Awadi. Twenty years ago, the dreadlocked wordsmith more or less created Senegalese hip-hop when he and Doug E. Tee (now called Duggy-T) founded Positive Black Soul. The duo quickly went on to become the nation’s most successful hip-hop act, signing with major labels, touring internationally and collaborating with boldface rap names like KRS-One.
Positive Black Soul’s success gave birth to an exploding Senegalese hip-hop scene, whose influence in Africa is now way out of proportion to the country’s small size. With their socially conscious lyrics, top Senegalese groups like Daara J and Pee Froiss have found audiences well beyond their homeland. In the words of Benn Loxo du Taccu, a top English-language blog about Senegalese music: “This little country in West Africa probably has the most developed rap concert and recording scene anywhere on the continent.”
Dressed in a camouflage outfit, Awadi seizes the microphone in front of his three-piece backing band. The military attire is apt. Propelled by a mid-tempo funk beat broken at intervals by mournful vocal harmonies, he launches into “Le Cri du Peuple” — “The Cry of the People” — a diatribe in French (still widely spoken in Senegal) about the sufferings of Dakar’s huge underclass:
“The city’s full of schemers, full of people with no job / They used to be honest men, but the system made them rob / The city’s full of easy sisters, looking for cash to score / Yesterday they were honest girls, but the system made them whores.”
Over the next hour, the group fires its verbal bullets at an array of targets — corrupt politicians, rising prices, foreign wars — amid a succession of richly conjured hip-hop hybrids with reggae, soul and sinister, synth-heavy riffs.
After the show, Awadi acknowledges being influenced by American hip-hop — he even went to New York to record his coming album with the duo Dead Prez as producers — but says that Senegalese hip-hop is usually far less swaggering and proudly thuggish.
“It’s a hip-hop influenced by social reality and politics that tries to tackle the problems and sicknesses of society,” he says.
He insists that he’s not cynical. He credits Senegalese rappers with motivating a widespread youth vote for Senegal’s historic 2000 elections, in which the populist Abdoulaye Wade defeated the longtime president Abdou Diouf, ending decades of Socialist rule. (Mr. Wade has subsequently fallen out of favor with many Senegalese, including Awadi.)
“We believe that another Senegal is possible,” Awadi sermonizes as the crowd disperses. “That another Africa is possible, that another world is possible.”
By day, the Dakar of Awadi’s people — poor, struggling, decaying, determined — comes vividly into view as I step out of the Hotel Farid into the hot, garbage-strewn streets of the city center.
Set against the glittering Atlantic, the grid of wide, French-built boulevards and crumbling narrow streets assaults the sensory apparatus at every entry point: the feel of dust and mosquitoes on the skin; the taste of exhaust fumes in the mouth; the smells of sweat and sewage and grilling meats in the nostrils; the chainsaw buzz of cheap scooters and the booming Muslim call to prayer echoing in the ears.
Even the short walk to the teeming indoor-outdoor Sandaga Market — where I head for local music CDs — brings all of Dakar’s contradictions to life. Gleaming Mercedes-Benzes crawl behind disintegrating jalopies and men pushing wheelbarrows. Art galleries and clothing boutiques nudge against cheap luncheonettes and abandoned storefronts. Suited Senegalese businessmen and Westerners (embassy staff? expatriate businesspeople?) brush past homeless families sleeping on the sidewalk.
There’s no danger — Dakar by day is largely safe — only the constant scent of desperation mingled with a periodic whiff of prosperity.
At the market, everybody wants a piece of the foreigner’s purse. Roaming hawkers flash me batteries, SIM cards, Scrabble games and cheap backpacks, using every imaginable entreaty. “Hey, Mister! Where you from?” “Ça va, Monsieur? Qu’est-ce que vous cherchez?” “Shake my hand! Shake my hand! Obama! Obama!”
After some friendly haggling with the music merchants, I come away with homemade bootleg discs of mbalax by Thione Seck — an old-school master of the genre who still thrills crowds with regular gigs around town — as well as Xalam. And though I’ve gotten the albums for a mere 1,000 CFA francs apiece (around $2.20 at 456 CFA francs to the dollar), I know I’ve still been politely fleeced.
That night, my quest to discover some of Dakar’s newer music takes me to Villa Krystal, the most recent challenger to established spots like Thiossane and Just4U — and maybe the least expected.
Opened in January by two French expatriates with no background in live music, the red living-room-like space was originally intended to give Dakar a restaurant “where we might actually want to eat,” says Lionel Mandeix, a co-owner and former ad man, with a laugh as he toys with his iPhone in the velvety dining area.
For the first five months, Villa Krystal’s musical programming — basically evenings when customers played a name-that-tune game — played second fiddle to the foie gras, rabbit in mustard sauce and other Gallic dishes. Everything changed when Dakar’s annual Fête de la Musique, a citywide festival, arrived in June. For Mr. Mandeix and his partner, Thomas Cazenave, a onetime banker, the dynamism of Dakar’s music scene was astonishing.
“We said to ourselves, ‘This place is really happening!’ ” Mr. Mandeix recalls.
The pair began booking bands and singers, but they were not interested in making yet another mainstream mbalax club. Instead, they have created a home to cultivate younger artists like Njaaya, a young local Afrogroove singer, and Naby, a Senegalese reggae artist who won this year’s Discovery Prize from the international French radio powerhouse RFI.
“We’re trying to open the range of music to include genres like hip-hop, folk and jazz,” Mr. Mandeix says.
On this night, however, the star attraction is Cheikh Lô, a longtime local favorite. Sporting huge sunglasses and waist-length dreadlocks, the skinny singer-guitarist sits with his unplugged band and plucks out his trademark mellow mbalax lite.
As Senegalese couples and a quartet of Spanish women watch from deep couches, the group slides into a mid-tempo mix of jazzy guitar chords, golden saxophone runs and the light pitter-patter of Senegalese drums, like rain on a roof, all punctuated by Cheikh Lô’s trebly wail.
In time, Brazilian elements begin to slip in — shakers, Rio-dreaming horn passages, minor-key shifts — transforming the sonic landscape into an Africanized Ipanema reverie. As the band strums and drums away, the mbalax rhythm is gradually subsumed. By the end of the set, the music is far less a beat for dancing than a soundscape for our late-night drives back to homes and hotels.
The week’s biggest new discovery awaits me at the Institut Français Léopold Sédar Senghor, a sprawling cultural center in downtown Dakar with a lovely outdoor concert amphitheater. Though known for its big-ticket events — an annual jazz festival, hip-hop awards, and shows by top West African acts — tonight the center is hosting part of its fifth annual Découverts series, dedicated to emerging music talents.
By 9 o’clock, the tiered seats are full of tweedy intellectuals from foreign embassies, Arabic-speaking young women in headscarves, N.G.O. workers in ethno-chic outfits, and many Senegalese hipsters. As the hour strikes, a hush falls over the crowd and the star of the night appears onstage to a burst of applause: Imany, a young French-Cameroonian vocalist and a protégé of Wasis Diop, an inventive singer-songwriter known for his moody and atmospheric compositions.
Backed by guitar, bass, drums and a string section, Imany moves through a set of original folk-rock songs, in English, that sound lifted from the notebooks of Tracy Chapman or Joan Armatrading.
But her finest moment is a track called “Spinning Around,” which she explains was written for her by Mr. Diop. Under melancholy bossa nova-esque music — brushes on the snare drum, Brazilian acoustic guitar chords — Imany spins a plaintive love story in a low smoky voice:
“Maybe tonight won’t hurt so bad / Maybe tonight your lies won’t seem so sad / I hear the music in the background / My head is spinning around.”
Above, stars glimmer in the African night as the bittersweet melody echoes through the rapt spectators. Afterward, some of the audience head to Just4U to experience the mbalax of Omar Pène. Others make their way to Villa Krystal to discover Njaaya. Wherever they go, another sublime Dakar musical moment seems all but assured.
By SETH SHERWOOD
New York Times
Published: December 6, 2009
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/travel/06senegalmusic.html?pagewanted=1&emc=eta1
A Lady to Look up to
First lady talks with Denver high school girls
Offers inspiration and encouragement
First lady Michelle Obama told Denver students Monday that there is a sure-fire way to succeed: hard work, focus and confidence.
Speaking at a luncheon for high school girls at the governor’s mansion and at a sit-down with students at South High School, Obama urged the teenagers to reach their potential, seek out mentors and be role models for kids younger than themselves.
“Be at school. Work hard. And don’t let anybody doubt you,” she said. “I want each of you to think about what you’re going to give back.”
“There’s no way that I could have known at your age that I would be standing here as first lady. What I did know was that I wanted to make my family and my community proud,” she said.
University graduate, in town for a day of mentoring, also let some of the students at South High School in on a secret: She never performed “great” on standardized tests. Straight A’s, student government, sports, teacher recommendations and her essays are what led her to the Ivy League.
But while Obama said she didn’t consider the tests a good indicator of future success, she told the students that they are “part of the system” and need to be taken seriously.
And she urged them to focus on the thing they have most control over: their grades.
“Fundamentally, the difference between an A and a B oftentimes is in your own hands,” she said, responding to a student’s question about whether it was fair to use test scores as the measure of school performance when many kids can’t speak English.
“So if you use what you have and you make the most of the opportunities that you have control over, then things like test scores don’t have to completely throw you off,” she said.
The first lady’s visit to Denver was part of a mentoring program she launched Nov. 2, when more than a dozen high school girls from the Washington, D.C., area came to the White House and met with Obama and members of her staff.
Cabinet officials, scientists, actresses, politicians and an astronaut met with 80 high school girls at the governor’s mansion for a lunch of butternut-squash soup and baked chicken. The girls were chosen by their respective schools based on who the faculty thought might benefit the most from the experience.
Noting all the successful women in the room, the first lady told the girls that the women’s achievements did not come easily.
“For each of us, we’ve all failed. We’ve all made mistakes,” Obama told the girls. “What we didn’t do was let those mistakes shatter us and keep us from moving on to the next set of challenges.”
Alex Pash, 16, is on the tennis team at East High School and aspires to be a news broadcaster after college. Seeing the first lady, she said, was a chance of a lifetime.
“I just think she is incredible. She has style and passion about what she’s doing,” Pash said.
After the luncheon, Obama visited South High School, and the group of mentors visited 10 other metro-area schools.
Media access at the schools (the majority of which are public) was limited to a handful of initial questions. Reporters were then asked to leave as politicians and celebrities continued to speak with students.
Obama and about 30 students at South gathered their wooden chairs in a circle, and the first lady took questions.
One student asked her what was the most difficult part of being first lady.
“You’re always struggling with making sure that you’re doing right by the country, but you’re also doing right by your kids,” Obama said, noting that she and the president always make sure they are available for their daughters, Malia, 11, and Sasha, 8. “That means when they have an event, it takes precedence over everything.
“I want to make sure they come out of this as whole as possible.”
By Karen E. Crummy
The Denver Post
Posted: 11/17/2009 01:00:00 AM MST
Karen E. Crummy: 303-954-1594 or kcrummy@denverpost.com