expert generalist

I am on Delta Flight 200 from Atlanta to Johannesburg, on the way to the first technology conference in the last absolute monarchy in Africa, the kingdom of Swaziland. The flight is 15 hours across the Atlantic. Somehow flying so far over the churning sea makes my stomach drop, more than if we were flying over land. The woman sitting next to me looks near retirement and is from a rural town in Oregon. She is going with her husband to a hunting reserve in South Africa. I ask her if it costs extra to kill an elephant. Yes, she says, they’ve looked into it, elephants cost $80,000.

In the seat in front of me, 38G, sits Katrina Heppler, a video blogger from San Francisco whom I now officially have met in person. Before I got on the flight, I was not quite sure I hadn’t actually met her in the flesh, since we had exchanged a plethora of tweets before and during the first BarCamp Africa at the Google campus, where she was helping to live blog. I was running around trying to stream video from our panels about social change in Africa, as well as streaming video to Mountain View from no fewer than four African countries in the space of a few hours. I was laden with gear at that conference: Nikon D50, Sony PD100, iPhone, MacBook Pro, Flip, analog-to-digital video converter for translating the official Google video into a web-based uStream video for people all over the world to watch. Our idea was to connect people and opportunities in Silicon Valley and African countries. Continue reading »

My 5-year-old American son, whose father is from Ghana, knows that Barack Obama’s father was from Africa too. I have wondered, as his white mother, how race issues will affect him. I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad when one day when I picked him up from preschool, he announced:

“We are all beautiful.”

“Yes, we are all beautiful,” I agreed.

“Even if we’re brown like me and Jackie, we’re beautiful,” he said proudly, climbing into his carseat.

I hated to hear him say even. And then…one day he told me he wished he had hair like my hair. I didn’t know what to think or say – did every 4-year-old with hair different from his mother say such a thing? Or was he starting to view himself in a certain way based on having a certain kind of hair?

Then, today, as we await the inauguration of President Barack Obama, my son announced to me, proudly: “Barack Obama has hair like my hair.”