Rebekah Hurt
African Media and Popular Culture
April 25, 2007

Blogging in Africa:
Shaping New Concepts of Selves and Communities
Through Internet Push-Button Publishing


“We feel that in having discovered or arrived at ourselves, we have discovered a continent which is all our own.” –American philosopher Irwin Edman, as quoted by Ghanaian blogger E.K.Bensah II


Introduction

In the recent publication Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (2006), Karin Barber and her colleagues illuminate the breadth and examine the significance of an extensive body of heretofore unstudied documents written by African non-elites over the past two centuries. In the forms of diaries, letters, notes, newspaper entries, and creative writings, these fragments – often treasured but frequently kept in varying degrees of secrecy and mostly receiving little attention through formal publication – both demonstrate and embody the corpus of values, skills, and aspirations to which Barber lends the descriptor “tin trunk literacies.” Hidden Histories’ contributors cast a brilliant backward glance at alternative and marginalized strands of historical discourse, yet, I, as a researcher of emergent publishing techniques and of the ways in which new internet communications technologies are being adapted to meet the literary, intellectual, and social needs of peoples in West Africa, believe that the edition’s principles should be applied to new, 21st century sources in a more forward-looking manner if their true relevance is to be established and the maximum benefit from them gleaned. I was struck, in reading the essays of Hidden Histories, by the notion that the same guiding interests, methodologies, and probing questions employed by the researchers in their examinations of the “hard-copy” written and typed personal documents from West Africa’s recent past might be applied equally well to present samples of electronic, internet journals, diaries, and columns.

In the following analysis, I focus upon one unusually prolific “blogger” (also sometimes written as web-logger but not to be confused with Blogger with a capital “b”, which is a specific blogging site and method belonging to Google) by the name of Emmanuel K. Bensah II, a Ghanaian national and current resident with a Belgian upbringing and education, and the nine (!) blogs that he currently maintains. This deliberate focus upon a single individual is designed to allow the closest possible engagement with the fullest possible selection of his writings, however, a number of other major Ghanaian and Nigerian blogs and bloggers have been consulted for context and a selection of their sites is enumerated in the references section. There are a great number of blogging sites available at present, at some of which I myself am an active blogger, others of which I am familiar with, and still many of which, I am sure, I remain entirely unaware. In this analysis, I have focused upon blogs maintained through the Google service Blogger (with .blogspot.com URL tag) for three main reasons: first, Google has created a blog-search engine, much like its more widely known and utilized general internet search engine, which allows one to efficiently search for African blogs by in-putting keywords such as “Ghana” or “Nigeria” or “Africa” and the like, as other sites do not have this search function, it would be extremely difficult to confirm whether or not one’s sample blogs were representative of the available material[1]; secondly, various web searches I initially conducted revealed that Google Blogger is one of the most common sites that bloggers from Africa are utilizing; and, thirdly, Google Blogger has a reputation widely recognized and a “feel” experienced by those of us engaged personally in the so-called “bloggosphere” for being a site where many (if not the majority of its) bloggers strive to create substantive news content, commentaries, and/or personal reflections of a nature similar to those monographs examined in Africa’s Hidden Histories, and so it is my opinion that the blogs selected are most appropriate for comparison to those writings in the aforementioned edition. A final point I wish to make clear is that there have been relatively few scholarly writings as yet on the work of bloggers, and no more than two or three works are available dealing primarily with bloggers outside of the United States (see, for example, Gwyneth Daniel’s Our Tasmanian Home, Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq, and Muna Hamez’s “Dahaysha Diary, A View from the Camp” -- but even these are merely re-productions of blogs written by individuals in interesting international situations and do not contain commentary or analysis of what is written in those blogs nor of the mechanisms whereby the material is presented). Nothing, to my knowledge and after extensive searching, has been written about blogging in West Africa and certainly not from the angle which I currently adopt. There are several pertinent works I have become aware of regarding the general background of blogging vis-à-vis other internet technologies and addressing the political impact of blogging in an American context, but their theses are far removed enough and their collective content too voluminous to be examined here, given the constraints of the present assignment. I have nevertheless listed these secondary works in a section for “further reading” following my references and to examine them in the future would undoubtedly provide a more comprehensive understanding of this burgeoning field of modern tin-trunk literacies.

Having established the intended scope and basis for my study, one might still question, what is to be gained from such an exercise? In defining “tin-trunk texts as a field of inquiry”, Barber and colleagues have identified three main themes: 1) “the profusion of innovative individual writing and enterprising efforts in local, small-scale publication by non-elites in the colonial period,” 2) “the propensity to collect and ‘archive’ such texts,” and 3) “the significance attached to reading, especially as a mode of collective and individual betterment” (3). The same themes, with slight modification, I find, can be identified in the work of current African bloggers, and the overall driving force behind my project is the desire to identify who the bloggers are – both/either in their “real” identities or in the (sometimes overtly and self-consciously and other times more subtly crafted) performances and avatars of selves that constitute their web presence – to quantify how long they have maintained their blogs, how many entries they have made and how frequently, to understand how they choose to lay-out their blogs and what the relationships are between their original, blogger-generated content and other online media available for general consumption (i.e. news, text, music, images, video, and other bloggers’ work), to make available a sampling of what these bloggers write about, and, most importantly, to interpret from factors such as the structure, style of presentation, and assumed audience (and, in this case, also from the variance of stated purposes and of types of content spread amongst Bensah’s nine unique blogs) how the blogger conceptualizes his own subjectivity in relation to the wider communities – of fellow West African (in this case, Ghanaian) citizens, educated and technology-literate young people, and the international web population – and whether his engagement with his and other persons’ blogs effect changes in that fundamental conception of self and subjectivity. All of this is to say, I hope to develop thoughtful ways of responding to these types of texts (genuinely valuable as sites of “literary” and historical enquiry in their own right), which, as Barber describes, “evoke forms of personal publicity and collective privacy, modes of projection, distribution, multiplication and storage of lives and personalities for which we still need to develop a vocabulary” (12). In what follows, I examine the impetus for expression among West African bloggers generally before moving to explore the case-study of E.K. Bensah II – particularly, I address: his profile, the organization of his blogs; the interface between writing and visual media therein; the function of widespread quotations, copy/paste, and intertextuality; the central role of playing with language; the assumed audience and relationship of public to private; the blog as a vehicle for and record of self-improvement (and/or international progress); his considerations of national subjectivities and moves to international positioning; and the function of the blogs in both reflecting and evidently enabling some overcoming of the blogger’s experienced intellectual alienation. West African blogs such as those created by the prolific E.K. Bensah II exemplify the medium of blogs as a source of serious literary and historical information worthy of scholarly examination, and Bensah’s particular use of his blogs proves the bloggosphere as a site of ongoing transformation where new concepts of selves and communities are continually being formulated and reformulated.

The Impetus for Expression

As a beginning point, I want to ask: what has motivated African individuals (as compared to American, British, or otherwise identified people) to begin blogging? And what are the reasons or incentives for them to sustain their participation in what might be called the blogging community? Why, in short, are these individuals writing online and what broader societal, educational, and political forces have given rise to their opportunity to blog and their choice to do so? It is interesting to consider the ways in which the bloggers themselves conceptualize and disclose – both explicitly and implicitly – their reasons for writing, their assumed audiences, and their desired or expected impacts. In his profile, E.K.Bensah hints at his motivation for writing, saying:

In Jan. 1981 [at age 7] I arrived in Brussels, Belgium with my parents and one and only older brother. In Aug. 2004 I arrived in Accra, Ghana to work professionally, with my parents following a month later. Belgium is my surrogate home, English my surrogate mother tongue, but Ghana my home – I’m loving it! The chip on my shoulder is that I’m not a trained journalist, so this blogging enterprise is an attempt to redeem myself, and do some soap-boxing that is quintessentially me!

Here and elsewhere in his blogs, Bensah communicates that for him blogging is both a way of reclaiming his Ghanaian identity and heritage after having been away for the greater part of his life and a way of self-consciously putting to work his position as insider-outsider to represent Ghana favorably to the rest of the world, especially the West, and, in turn, to represent to his fellow Ghanaians the benefits of education based on Western models and the desirability of working to obtain new, alternative perspectives through self-improvement, technological experimentation, and critical engagement with international web-users and media sources. In her essay that constitute chapter eight of Africa’s Hidden Histories, “Entering the Territory of Elites: Literary Activity in Colonial Ghana,” Stephanie Newell describes the membership of Gold Coast reading circles and the ways in which members situated themselves to maximize the opportunities for using their liminal positions, writing that members of these circles “took themselves seriously as potential representatives and guides of their unlettered fellows and as a point of articulation between the colonial authorities and the ‘native’ population. In effect, their aim was to make their intermediate position pivotal” (13). It would be inappropriate and condescending to couch a description of blogger’s current function in exactly those terms, but, essentially, I believe that Bensah and his fellow bloggers do aim to capitalize upon an intermediate position, of interest to a substantial public precisely because of its intermediary quality, in order to suggest improvements to perceived social ills and to express unabashedly normative values – Bensah, in this brief introduction to his blogs, makes no attempt to disguise the central function of “soap-boxing” in his work. I would like to say that in a significant way, today’s West African bloggers are motivated by a similar sense of self-positioning as Newell suggests and that the bloggers seek to fulfill a similar function – in this day and age serving as intermediaries not necessarily of basic literacy but, instead, of ICT skills and familiarities with the workings of online news and journal workings and readerships.

Other West African bloggers express similar sentiments that support this interpretation: Adeyemi Adeleye writes, “I’m a young, tall, dark and Godly guy. I’m funny and a born-leader with tall goodly dreams.” The emphasis upon dreams and aspirations is a strong and consistent one in the African blogger profiles that I have read. This is not necessarily a feature unique to African blogs as opposed to American or European ones, however, I believe it would be fair to posit that perhaps as a result of the relatively greater expense and trouble associated with maintaining a blog in West Africa, compared to the Europe or America, West African bloggers attach a greater sense of purpose to their writings, whereas more often than not, the American blogs that I have read tend to be sometimes frivolous and un-unified outpourings of a more scattered nature. Another West African blogger known by the username Chxta writes,

I am Nigerian born, bred and buttered, Nigerian I am, Nigerian I will die. I
don’t believe in choosing another nationality for the sake of convenience any
more than I believe in choosing another family for the sake of convenience. I
agree that my country can be a lot better than it currently is, but if I run
from my responsibility, who then would make it better?

‘Fiyinfoluwa heads her blog with the statement, “Whatsoever is beautiful, the truth and is children centered, that you will find on this page”, and she writes in her “about me” section: “I’m a young African lady, Nigerian precisely who believes there is beauty in being black and all that is black. I believe my country will be great again and infact [sic], she’s towing her way to greatness now. I love people based or oriented work.” These women attest to being motivated to blog by a sense of responsibility to find out more about their academic/professional and personal interests through online sources and other blogs, a responsibility to communicate their strengths and some realistic and positive reflections of the people and material surroundings in their respective countries for the benefit of an international online readership, and a responsibility to find intellectual and creative support through the blogging community that will refresh and renew them, perhaps lessening their senses of alienation, and thereby allowing them to return the full energy of their talents to their work in their immediate, physical communities outside the bloggosphere.


Case Study: Emmanuel K. Bensah II

Profile

Emmanuel K. Bensah II, from whose profile I have already given an excerpt, is a twenty-nine year old man who works as a web-journalist/communications officer in the non-profit industry for Third World Network, Ghana in Accra (East Legon). This information and other basic details can be obtained easily from the standard Blogger profile. He has been a user of Google’s blogger since February 2005 and has had, as of April 2007, more than 4,500 profile views since that time (a figure generally lower than the number of blog views). He gives in his profile a webpage (http://ekbensah.tripod.com/) as well as his email address (ekbensah@yahoo.co.uk). His interests include:

United Nations, international politics, diplomatic history, public speaking,
Belgium, motorbikes, thinking about sex, existentialism, listening to the radio,
BBC Radio Four, journalism, The Guardian newspaper, regional integration,
walking my dog (Fenix), positive thinking, reading quotations, Abraham Lincoln,
Dag Hammarskjold, Dale Carnegie, W.B. Yeats, history, French Revolution,
Robespierre, social justice, NGO community, diplomatic community.

His favorite movies are: “The Usual Suspects, Collateral, Mindhunters, almost any Kevin Spacey film, Snatch, Pirates of the Caribbean.” His favorite music is: “Al Jarreau, Jazz, Grover Washington, Soul, Pop, Garbage, Catatonia, Meredith Brooks.” His favorite books are: “The Brothers Karamazov, Fathers and Sons (Ian Turgenev), Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ Being Happy!” His is the author of nine blogs at blogspot.com: Ghana ICT Journalists (Association) – which is co-authored by penplusbytes, Nana Appiah Acquaye, Leopold, and Ghana ICT Journalists but of which Bensah is the President and primary blog maintainer, Accra By Day & Night, A Critical/Progressive Look @ Regional Integration, Digital Camera Captures of Ghana@50 (celebrations), I’m Angry Enough to Change Myself, Reflecting the Eccentric World of E.K. Bensah II, The Trials & Tribulations of a Freshly-Arrived Denizen…of Ghana, Trials & Tribulations of my Twelve Days in Tunis, and The UN Apologist. Beyond these details summarize in his Blogger profile (visible from and identical among his numerous blogs), the careful, long-term reader of his blogs discovers the type of neighborhood Bensah lives in, near Spintex road in East Legon, facts about his family life such as the information that his father was a government official and translator for significant international organizations related to African development and that his grandfather, “O’Pop, as he was endearingly referred to, was a Pharmacist before he was elected as an M.P. for Swedru during the first republic when Kwame Nkrumah became president” (Reflecting the eccentric world, Feb. 11th). We learn that he had an older brother, Sam, who died in adolescence, that he is an aspiring author of a crime-thriller, and much more. In some posts we even see photos of Bensah, doing yard-work outside his home in Legon and at conferences for work, and, in other posts, there are videos made by him of his surroundings with his voice narrating. In all and as is, in my experience frequently the case with blogging, these fragments come together to give the dedicated reader a surprisingly intimate and, one imagines, fairly complete view of Bensah and his community. On an entirely personal and impressionistic level, he seems the sort of profoundly interesting, trustworthy, well-connected, and energetic individual who might prove a very useful research contact and whom I now feel I may very well contact for assistance in my future fieldwork in Ghana.

It might be said that an analysis of Bensah’s writings cannot be viewed as truly representative of “African” blogging, as the majority of his upbringing and education was completed abroad, in Europe. However, I persist in my interest in Bensah and would argue that, firstly, as an individual who clearly has chosen at a recent point in his adult life to return to, remain in, and identify with Ghana as his home, Bensah is as much a suitable representative of the area’s blogging activity as any and, even with his stint of life abroad, is very comparable to various of the figures examined in Hidden Histories who similarly were educated in Britain or elsewhere before returning to write from West Africa; and, secondly, whether one emphasizes Bensah as a transplant or not, my discovery has been that, as a matter of course, the great majority of blogging in Africa at the present time is being done by young-to-middle-aged men of at least some tertiary or technical education, who are employed in positions which generate enough disposable income to maintain an internet connection and/or to frequent internet centres like BusyInternet in Accra, and who frequently have had some experience traveling or studying abroad.


Organization of the Blogs

Google Blogger is a site located at http://www.blogspot.com/, where any user can sign-up for a username of their choice and a corresponding password that allows them to log-on to their own blogspot, a webpage routed through Blogger, for free. Users begin with a standardized template determining what the blog layout looks like, what fonts and colors it uses, how the different essential elements are arranged on the page, and so forth, which can then be changed at any point to a different one of the pre-coded assortment of styles on offer or which, for the more html-savvy blogger, can be totally scrapped in exchange for a journal format entirely of the blogger’s creation. The blogger is given the option of entering information into a user profile and of titling the blog. Then, each time the blogger comes to the blogspot homepage and signs in, a window appears with a (modifiable) date stamp with spaces for an entry title and body. Blogger gives the user the option of toggling between a “compose” page where one simply has to enter the text as one normally would on a sheet of paper or in a word processing document or a “edit html” page where the same text appears as has been entered in the compose mode but where there is also the option of modifying line-endings, spacing, embedding media, and more if the user knows the correct html commands. The Blogger “help” directory/function is, in my experience, among the best in the blogging realm and, with its occasional assistance, blogging becomes an enterprise that is actually far easier and straightforward simply to do than to explain the mechanics of. As I have mentioned, Bensah maintains nine different blogs through Blogger, each with a slightly different layout and a slightly different content and anticipated audience.

Accra by Day & Night is designed in pink tones and is headed by an elaborate banner where different photos rotate within a fixed screen, overlain by moving star characters and blue spots which contain occasional captions. Beneath this very advanced blog feature is the following short description, “Accra is the capital of the small, West African country of Ghana, which achieved its independence in 1957 from its colonial master, the United Kingdom. It celebrates 50 years in 2007, and is projecting itself fast and furiously as ‘gateway to West Africa’. It’s an exciting city, with its unique problems, but with it close to the Atlantic ocean, and many beaches, who can resist not [sic] coming here? Come along...” Along with this header, there is another unique and advanced inclusion of a background song that can be turned on and off with the click of a speaker icon and that, when on, plays on repeat the theme-appropriate song, “Ocean Sized Love” by Leigh Nash[2]. At the top of the page there is a link to the Ghana at 50 website, and then down the right hand margin of the page appears Bensah’s profile, a selection of his favorite videos with embedded media, followed by an extensive list of links to other city photoblogs across the world, a Zooomclouds cluster box which highlights the words most frequently appearing in the blog, and a list of previous posts. The governing order of this blog is that Bensah posts a new photo or photos from daily scenes around Ghana (primarily Accra and Legon) with short captions, comments, and observations.

Reflecting the eccentric world of e.k.bensah ii is another one of Bensah’s primary blogs. It is a page primarily in white and with a catchy blue and orange header giving the title. It has the same rotating-picture slideshow banner feature embedded as Accra by Day &Night, but on this page there is no audio and the photo slideshow is followed by a sub-header which reads: “Ruminations of a single male in late twenties. All jazzed-up, all funked-up. Whimsical. Candid.” Beneath this colored section follows an embedded feature from ThinkExist.com Quotes, consisting of a small blue box that is designed to display a different quote along with its author every day. A recent quote, for example, has been “The less routine the more life” by Amos Bronson Alcot. One final constant-bar appears beneath this section, displaying a quote by Benjamin Franklin, which reads: “Think of these three things: whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account.” Down the right-hand margin of the page appears his profile and a section headed “what they said” that contains quotes from his readers about his blog, such as this one from username New Age Harlot, which reads: “Why I love your blog – you’re both eclectic and deep, far-reaching in your search for things and liking to probe for the truth. And now I know what mental pabulum [a phrase Bensah frequently uses to mean food for thought] means.” Beneath this appears an embedded map form Bravenet Guestmaps where visitors are encouraged to place their virtual “pin” on the world map where red spots of varying diameters over different locations display the extreme range of places from which Bensah’s blogs are read. Finally, there is an embedded bar from Yahoo Answers, an online advice and information-search service Bensah is a part of and that he elaborates on in other posts. A list of previous posts concludes the upper half of the sidebar. Yet, Bensah includes more information and embedded media sources than I have ever seen in any other blog layout, and goes on to include in the bottom half of the sidebar the black and white image of the cover of the novel he is writing The End of the Night, another ZoomClouds word clustering feature, a list of links under the heading “visit ghana!”, a list of links under “my other blogs / my passions,” a list of links under “international relations,” a list of links under “Belgian blogs / links,” a list of links under “regular reads,” and a list of links under “relationships are hard to do.” The organizing premise of this blog is simply to create an assortment of Bensah’s day-to-day thoughts about, well, as he says, his eccentric world, full of relationships, sexual tensions, professional interests, travels, amusing stories, links to online news stories, and personal reflections. Trials and Tribulations of A Newly Arrived Denizen of Ghana is comparable to Reflecting the eccentric world but, Bensah writes, is more geared toward an African audience in contrast to Reflecting the eccentric world, which he views as being for his international readership.

Angry Enough to Change Myself, Ghana@50, Ghana ICT, A Critical/Progressive Look @ Regional Integration, Trials and Tribulations of My Twelve Days in Tunis, and The UN Apologist are more minor and far less frequently updated blogs, and so I shall merely give an overview of each. A complete index of blog entries with their times, dates, and titles broken down for each different blog is included as an appendix to this essay. Angry Enough to Change Myself consists of eight posts written between September and November 2006 and dealing with Bensah’s attempts to get in shape and increase his level of physical fitness. Ghana@50 consists of four posts from March 2007 that are digital camera captures of Ghana’s 50th anniversary celebrations. Ghana ICT consists of twenty-three posts from April 2006 to March 2007[3] and is a virtual meeting place/message board/forum for articles written by members of the very newly formed Ghana ICT Journalists Association, which was formed by journalists who attended a certain training event in Accra at BusyInternet that Bensah elaborates on in his posts and of which Bensah has taken over Presidency. This blog contains official association notes such as minutes from monthly meetings and the like. Especially interesting to the researcher is a list of the other members/participants in the BusyInternet web-journalism workshop and the blogs that they evidently set up during that workshop. I include this list in the notes[4] to this essay, although it should be recognized that, upon closer examination, only several of the blogs have more than a couple posts and are in current use. Especially good amongst these are Enoch Darfah Frimpong’s linked site Welcome to Kumasi, The Garden City of Africa (http://enochdarfahfrimpong.blogspot.com/) and Yaw Owusu’s blog Yaw Owusu’s Village (http://yawowusu.blogspot.com/) which begins with Owusu’s bold declaration, “I want to help enhance the journalism profession and also set a standard for the upcoming ones to follow.”A Critical/Progressive Look @ Regional Integration consists of seven posts on the titular topic from 2006, but Bensah has become more active in rejuvenating this blog during April 2007. Trials and Tribulations of My Twelve Days in Tunis consists of entries cross-posted to Reflecting the eccentric world, wherein Bensah chronicles twelve days he spent at a UN internet and information society governance conference. The UN Apologist consists of twelve posts written between March 2005 and August 2006, as one would expect, dealing with the UN in current news reporting and with reasons for its existence and strengthening in general. Bensah represents a tremendously committed and prolific blogger with a great deal of technological know-how and an interest in a wide spectrum of issues that he writes about frequently and well.


Interface between Writing and Visual Media

A major part of Bensah’s blogs hinges upon the interface he creates between writing and visual media such as photos and short videos, both taken by himself on digital camera and gleaned from other places on the web. There are two of his blogs which focus primarily upon visual media – Accra by Day & Night features a photo (or several) for nearly every day of the year. The considerably shorter Ghana@50 is based upon video clips. Ghana@50, especially, is unique because of its portrayal of the events and local Ghanaian news reportage of Ghana’s fiftieth anniversary of independence. In the first of these several clips, posted on March 8, 2007, Bensah has recorded the T.V. broadcasting of a public gathering where men in traditional dress are reenacting the independence proclamation made by Kwame Nkrumah in 1957. In the second post of this blog, made March 9, 2007, Bensah again is recording television coverage, this time of the Duke of Kent addressing members of the Ghanaian parliament in their chambers. In the video clip, the Duke can be heard saying, “Today Ghana can look confidently to the future on foundations of domestic stability, freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights. [cheering] In 1957 Ghana self-consciously sought herself as a pioneer in the process of decolonization…” While the message is one of praise and congratulations, the image of it being spoken by the Duke create an odd combination. The Duke looks very out of place and there is a definite point of rupture in the text created by the entirely dispensable speech being made by the old, white representative of the British government in a setting where the Ghanaians are quite capably overseeing the celebration of the country’s jubilee, marking the very point of separation from the colonizing forces represented by the Duke. Bensah’s own caption in the post reveals this very tension; he writes: “Ghana’s former colonizers, represented by Duke of Kent, addresses (somewhat patronizingly) Ghana’s highest legislative-making body on the eve of 5.03.07.” In the third post of the series, also made on March 9, 2007, Bensah portrays what he summarizes as “the very personable [linked] Cardiff-university-trained-Mary-Anne Acolatse (formerly of [linked] TV3) interviewing Ben Ephson of the Daily Dispatch on the perception of the foreign media of Ghana.” Ephson criticizes the Ghanaian government and especially the information and national orientation ministry for “miss[ing] a golden opportunity” to really use the jubilee celebrations and the fleeting but intense international media attention they brought to Ghana as an opportunity to represent Ghana to the world as a modern and increasingly technologically advanced and economically competitive country worthy of foreign interest and investment. Epson concludes, “The question is how do we take advantage of thousands of programs for the next few days, for the next month, to move further Ghana’s agenda?” The theme of the fourth and last post and its corresponding video clip is the same. Bensah summarizes: “Ben Epson tries to answer the question of whether the international media has branded Ghana well—or not.” In effect, what Bensah does with his video-blogging, in this instance, is to make up for some of the deficiency that Epson and the like perceive in the “official” Ghanaian government’s handling of visual, radio, and online media, by creating a powerful contrast with this Ghana@50 blog, composed entirely of video material, drawing the attention of his regular blog’s textual readers to captivating and different forms of information about his country. Visual media are a constant and important presence in the remainder of Bensah’s blogs as well, but the essential impact is the same. The visual media used in these blogs, I believe, is chiefly of interest because it is still novel and different, yet Bensah makes this YouTube-empowered novelty more powerful by creating accompanying commentaries which point out flaws, inconsistencies, and ironies that the clips themselves might prefer to gloss over.


Quotations, Copy-Paste, Intertextuality, and Language Play

Closely related to this relationship between the visual and the written is the relationship between original, author-generated content and written and visual clips linked, quoted, and/or copy-pasted from online news sources, websites, other bloggers pages, or material written in Bensah’s other blogs or even within previous posts of the same blog. By borrowing from and making reference to a wide range of literary and not-conventionally-literary sources, Bensah and other bloggers like him demonstrate their cultural literacy but at the same time often delight in the deconstructive pleasure of appropriating quotes, pasted web content, and embedded media alongside contradicting elements or for purposes and in support of causes at odds with those the authors of the borrowed content may have originally intended. Some of the blogs rely more heavily upon linked and/or pasted web-content than others. The UN Apologist, for example, consists nearly entirely of linked and pasted articles from various online news sources. After the introductory post on March 30, 2005 Which informs us of “Coming very soon… everything the world needs to know – well almost – about why we need the UN,” the next, March 31st post is a link to and pasted copy of a Guardian story on Kofi Annan and the oil-for-food scandal; the following, 2nd post from March 31st is a pasted article from a tongue-in-cheek American perspective about why Americans hate the UN by Gersh Kuntzman from the New York Post; the following post, also on March 31st, is a pasted article on Annan recovering from the oil-for-food scandal by David Usborne in New York; the following on March 31st is a linked and pasted article from The Guardian; the April 5th post is an article about the film The Interpreter; next, on June 6th, is an article on Darfur war crimes from CBS News; next, on Sept. 8th, is a pasted article on UN goals; and other pasted and linked articles follow for the duration of the blog.

In other blogs, copied and pasted material is used in different ways and contexts. There is far less direct and less extensive “borrowing” in Accra by Day & Night. However, an interesting instance of intertextuality in this blog and in Ghana@50 is the representation in the blogs of photos of newspaper headlines and front pages in addition to home videos of television coverage of local events. For example, on June 20th in Accra by Day & Night, we are presented with the front page of The Daily Heritage, where in the upper-right hand corner a green box says “Chieftaincy is A Leadership Position Not A Profession” and where the headline reads “After Stunning Victory Against Czech, Stars for Semis?” and so forth. The effect of this technique is to cut out a lot of unnecessary work for the blogger but also to stretch out the blog into a three-dimensional, sensory-rich cultural space where rather than simply reading a coherent and non-interactive narrative, one can experience a hodge-podge of nearly tangible images and documented speech-acts in a conglomeration that mimics the real world – or something like it.

In her essay on colonial Gold Coast literary circles, Newell has observed, “The vast amounts of cross-referencing and literary quotations in the novelettes club members produced illustrates in a starkly visible manner the dynamic relationship between local readers and the English literary canon” (Barber 219). Something quite similar is happening with current West African bloggers (not to mention bloggers elsewhere, because it must be said that the exercise seems rife with quotations and novel forms of textual appropriation no matter where the blogger may be situated) whereby bloggers establish their own unique internet presence by demonstrating a mastery of diverse literary forms. Bensah, in Reflecting the eccentric world frequently quotes from literature and self-help and Christian philosophy texts in passing to reveal bit by bit his repertoire and to lend support to whatever particular point he may be in the process of making. However, Bensah also uses non-literary sources in the same fashion. On July 14th in Accra by Day & Night, Bensah gives a picture of a sign next to a painted wall and building entrance and writes, “I don’t want to re-invent the wheel, so I’m copying what the website says about West Africa’s biggest ICT centre. What follows is a pasted and linked description of the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE). While his ostensible motive in using copy-paste here may be to save time and effort, a side-effect and perhaps alternate motive is that the pasted text takes on the air of an authoritative and presumably objective outside source. In this way, Bensah is careful to support his own stated impressions of Ghana with outside material so that, one imagines, the international reader is assured of the real modernity of the various facets of Ghanaian life Bensah is describing.

In addition to these instances of quotation in all its various forms, one finds a great deal of more general language play in Bensah’s blogs. For instance, Bensah frequently uses the phrase “mental pabulum” to mean “food for thought” and is caught using other rather ridiculously complicated phrases to make light of his periodically pretentious prose. He writes on Oct. 10th in Accra by Day & Night of being in a city bus: “packed almost close to that of my maritime descendants Ghanaians so like to eat (fish!)” as substitute for the more common phrase, to be packed like a can of sardines or something of that sort. Similarly, on Nov. 22nd in Accra, he titles his entry as being “platitudinously African,” and, in his own way, draws attention to and mocks the self-importance of the previous colonial regime by employing such inflated language while he goes on to explain the very fact that the images are indeed “clichéd” and typical of what cultures unfamiliar with contemporary Ghanaian life might persist in viewing as realistic. By frequently pausing the progress or by stepping back from the apparent theme of a blog post or series of related posts in order to engage in parenthetical moments of language-play where the blogger’s own with and command of language is highlighted, the blogger and blog demonstrate a level of linguistic mastery that others should aspire to but in such a good-natured and often self-consciously humorous way that a message seems to be that such knowledge is well and good but, ultimately, also rather removed from the practicalities of daily life and something that may or may not have inherent value. Presumably, to readers of the blog and to other bloggers, the perception would be that such word-play does possess inherent value, but it is by no means assumed that this skill is the only nor most important factor for the solidly ICT-literature middle class or for other sections of the public.


Vehicle for and Record of Self-Improvement/Record of International “Progress”

Many contributors to Africa’s Hidden Histories observe their research subjects’ use of journals, diaries, and other writings for recording and encouraging continued self-improvement and they examine the historical bases for such practice. For instance, Stephan Miescher, in his study of the autobiography of A.K. Boakye Yiadom, a Ghanaian teacher-catechist writing from 1946 to 1988, notes, “The Basel Mission was strongly influenced by Pietism, a reform movement within the Lutheran Church of Würtenberg that advocated a personal relationship with God and emphasized the importance of regular introspection. Keeping a diary was part of an educated Pietist lifestyle” (Barber 31). There are portions of Bensah’s blogging which conform to much the same patterns – portions of his writings are openly and directly dedicated to charting his own developments in matters of fitness, relationships, creative output, and general well-being; other portions of his blogs are devoted to observing the need for and sometimes reveling in the actualization of different small progressions on his local, national, and international fronts. Bensah’s comparatively short-lived blog Angry Enough to Change Myself is, clearly from the title, directly dedicated to writings about his struggles to lose weight, exercise more, and generally become more healthy. The first post in this blog, from September 1st is endearing and reads,

As you gathered, my name is Emmanuel. I am highly imperfect. I want to use this
conduit to improve many aspects of myself…starting with…my weight. I completed
atwo-day visit to the doctor today to be told my cholesterol is high, and my weight a scary 100kg. For a 6”-er as I am, that is scary. I want to change my lifestyle and lose weight drastically. I am obese, overweight. I want to lose 15kgs in 4 weeks. Can I do it? [My note: One recognizes this particular figure as unlikely and potentially unsafe!] This is the first step. Come join me on my journey!

Bensah goes on, in this blog, to plug the writings of a fellow blogger (Nov. 8th) for inspiration to himself and others on weight loss, offering the link to http://jenellybean.blogspot.com/, and then goes on to chronicle the amounts and types of exercises he is doing, what he is eating and how he is changing his diet, and what frustrations and results he is encountering. In the early posts of one of his main and currently most updated blogs, Reflections of the eccentric world of e.k.bensah ii, Bensah makes similar commitments to intellectual and professional self-improvement. In his Feb. 11th post titled “The Learning never stops…”, Bensah writes

I just came across a great site – BBCTRAINING.com. The URL is actually http://www.bbctraining.com/pdfs/newsstyleguide.pdf. The guide is a cool 92-pages read. It’m [sic] going to be my next pet project. To master the best way possible that guide… I had always been a budding journalist and if, as my ekbensah.tripod.com/1994/ site attests to, the closest I ever came to being a journalist were my diary entries. I always think how many pages all the diaries I have written since I started in 1988, when Same was alive and well, {and when we were living in 18 rue eekhout, 1900 overijse—as it was then instead of the now 3090 overijse} would comprise. Certainly more than 100 pages! I am thinking of hiring my future partner to type most of them up:-) Yeah, am serious!!! But back to my point…I gotta be the person I so want to be…and that means learning everything and ANYTHING on how to become a better journalist…Writing style has always been , to a certain extent, there as it were, but it needs polishing…I need an edge over most people: WRITING very well-cum-HTMLING very efficiently…

In Reflecting the eccentric world on Aug. 8th, he makes a list of his priorities, writing, “Over the weekend, I decided I would begin to cluster my life as as to simplify it. I arrived at a clustering of five: I. My professional work, II. Writing my novel, III. Blogging, IV. ICT Journalists Association, V. Regions Watch,” and he goes on to elaborate about why these areas are most important and what he hops to accomplish (and how) in each of them.

As regards more public forms of progress, Bensah writes in his A Progressive Look @ Regional Integration blog, another of the more limited and infrequently updated blogs, that the BIMANORI: Bi-Monthly Analysis of Regional Integration newsletter he writes will focus on five different angles and measures of regional integration and on how these measures create accountability for regional institutions because, “RegionsWatch belives that it is, in a way, creating the space that will facilitate progressive forces and groups to feel empowered to institute better monitoring mechanisms” (emphasis his, Aug. 18th). More local matters of need and progress are also touched upon, for instance, in Accra by Day & Night on Sept. 13th, Bensah gives a photo of the street where he lives along with the following caption: “…and, sure, it looks dark. That is because for despite all the so-called wisdom of our government, none of the members of the administration have seen it fit to have STREETLIGHTS set up on this road.” Later in his blogs, he posts a photo of the street with streetlights, the need that he perceived in his community having been met, partially through his own lobbying. He writes of the progress and the role his photo-documentation of the situation via blog, “I am one of the breed of people who believe sincerely that a constant reminder, and explicit and irreverent reminder of these things…does get results” (emphasis his).

However, the blog as record of self-improvement does not always function in transparent or one-dimensional manners. It is, in that regard, much like the writings Miescher examines in that, as Barber summarizes, “Miescher shows that rather than functioning as an aid to spiritual introspection, the diary projected and orchestrated a shifting multiple self and was at least as much a script for the performance of a persona as it was an exploration of interiority” (10). Bensah’s blogs are as much about the performance of a slightly idealized version of himself and his communities and about the continued speculation about the boundaries of those ideals and the realism of those performances as his blogs are about strictly and consistently keeping track of specific progresses though to the completion of projects. On Feb. 21st, Bensah quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail,” and follows with this post, which self-consciously reflects upon his blogging persona and what he would like to make of it, reflecting his growing consciousness about his site’s potential readership and consumption:

Delusions – indeed – of grandeur are setting in, so stop me before I go too far;-)) point is I chanced upon my article on the deregulation thing on Club Ghana [linked]. It was for personal consumption! But hey, it’s up there. What can u do? It’s, I guess, stupid to assume that anything you post online will not find its way out of your intimate site, and outside the parameters of your “eccentric” or conservative world. It I sjust [sic] not possible that it will stay there untouched without the indefatigable Google finding its way to it by way of its various spidering techniques:-) Anyway, this revelation has come as an epiphany of sorts in the sense that I am fast beginning to realize I best watch what I write…clubgh Ghana had founf [sic] my site, and may visit it again. However, taking cognisance of this should not mean that I start affecting, or exaggerating, my life: it should quintessentially be about me, any my life—as solipsistic as that may sound:-( Let me enlighten you a bit about that word. I
remember it so vividly being used by a Guardian writer about Quentin Tarantino
in 1998. […] Blazing the trail – I am not quite sure that’s what I want to do, but I must admit that it is one of the most profound quotations out there. It evokes a visceral desire {yes, my A-Level English literature training coming out rather in the wrong way!} to just to [should be ‘do’] better and pust [push] that EFFING envelope just a bit to make a difference…”

Bensah pokes fun at himself by gesturing toward these “delusions of grandeur”, his comparison of himself to Emerson and his possible imaginings that recent attention to his blog are warranted by the high quality of his writing, but, at the same time as he goes on to write that “taking cognizance of this should no mean that [he] start[s] affecting, or exaggerating,” one finds that, inevitably, he is emboldened, and perhaps very rightly, by his increasing web popularity. The positive feedback he receives through blogging impacts the very processes of self-improvement that he is blogging about because, having received such praise, he imagines himself capable of doing bigger and better things – such as completing his full-length crime-thriller.

The blog form is a fitting mechanism for these types of self and community-monitoring and goal-setting because it not only provides the same benefits of the traditional paper (or similar) journal such as the ability to chart, sense, and therefore feel empowered by gradual change over time but further because it vastly increases the writer’s sense of accountability to his readers and may thereby provide a slightly greater impetus for change than similar goal-setting in traditional journals. This is not to say that users of traditional pen-and-paper journals have not invented and practiced novel means of reminding themselves (and their potential/eventual audience) of the gravity of their goals and responsibilities to work toward them. For instance, Barber’s edition gives the example of men like B.K. Yiadom, the Ghanaian catechist I have mentioned, and Akinpelo Obisesan, an Ibadan chief/cocoa trader/entrepreneur who kept a diary virtually every day for forty years from the 1920s onwards, who elaborately signed in their journals their oaths to self-improvement with not only their names but also listing various positions of personal and communal importance such as school teacher, scout master, and so on, as if to further cement the extent to which they were looked up to and therefore bound to continue growing, learning, and behaving respectably. Similar methods are embedded in and built off of in the work of contemporary bloggers. The blog, finally, has the added benefit over traditional journals (but potentially also a slight hindrance, to some) of its combination anonymous-yet-public nature working to provide individuals committed to self-improvement with an active, respondent community of fellow self-helpers in addition to an opportunity to read from other bloggers’ “trials and tribulations” and thereby to understand that the occasional set-back or shortcoming is to be expected. It is to this curious, new sense of imagined community, most especially in regard to its potential for combating the plight of alienated intellectuals and to its situation on the broader overlap between the public and the private, that I now turn my concluding remarks.


Conclusions

The theme of intellectual alienation is a prevalent one throughout Africa’s Hidden Histories – the monographs therein demonstrate that, frequently, where higher and specialized education is acquired by few, ambitious individuals, those individuals inevitably feel themselves removed from the dissimilarly educated or un-educated people around them, even if those people are ones about whom the educated individual cares very much. In some historical instances mentioned in the edition, we find the act of writing has enabled intellectuals to actually and/or imaginatively reach out to one another to counteract the limitations faced by them in their immediate surroundings, and, in other instances, it appears that writing became a sort of compensation and coping mechanism for that sense of alienation when to connect with others of an equal education and world view was simply not practical or possible. On a fundamental and perhaps superficial level, the numerous blogs of E.K. Bensah II, with the sheer volume of outside media sources they draw in to re-present and respond to as well as the wide audience they evidently reach, seem clearly and inarguably to function as tools for forging new, virtual relationships and senses of belonging. In his blogs, Bensah makes periodic posts about his real-life relationships, especially with women, explaining what characteristics and interests he is attracted toward, what positive effects he experiences from pursuing these relationships, and what difficulties he encounters. He discusses reading what he calls “sex blogs” by other people and even speculates on several occasions about why some of his fellow bloggers consider his own writing to have an element of the sex-blog in them. In this limited example, we can see Bensah using the blog form as a space for working out his relationships to others and adapting his opinions and expectations of others based upon the feedback and advice that he obtains from his online readership. However, what I really want to get at is a larger sense in which Bensah and other West African bloggers like him – among lonely bloggers the world over – are utilizing the genre and technology to create worlds around themselves – through the selective inclusion and embedding in their blogs of the “best” (or at least the most well-suited to their personalities and levels of education and political awareness) of literary references, photographic representations of the places they live and have traveled, videos of other sites where they have been, linked web content of a particularly insightful nature, and so on – where their sense of intellectual alienation is significantly diminished due to the improved, if artificial, level of information quality and organization. Bloggers create and populate alternative worlds for themselves where there is rarely the chance or provocation to feel out of place because their constructed, parallel realities are just as smart, original, and challenging as they are. But, because crafted from fragments of the “real” world, these alternative realities bear a strong enough resemblance to things known externally that the blogger can rest assured (perhaps foolishly) that the new, more pleasant world is not simply an ephemeral creation of their own invention.

For all of its useful informative functions, entertainment, and potential tools for greater personal fulfillment, blogging remains, in West Africa, a limited form and still requires education, money, technology, and basic physical access to engage in. Any analysis of contemporary publishing techniques and ICT use in Ghana must, nevertheless, take into account the growing strength of this new genre and its enabling technologies. While I limit my analysis to this exemplary individual, there remains a wealth of primary material to be examined. In addition to the work that should be done to probe more systematically and deeply into the topics I have skimmed across, future research would benefit from examining comparisons between different blogging platform sites; qualitative differences between the many, many people who blog from Africa about short-term travels/studies/work-assignments there versus people who live there more permanently and/or originally; and the potential differences in presentation and in content among blogs created by individuals in different regions of Africa, perhaps, most notably, between Nigeria and Ghana, with the other West African countries where blogging is most common, and South Africa, another pole of widespread blogging activity.


Notes

[1] Livejournal (http://www.livejournal.com/) has a different feature than Google Blogger, whereby users with paid accounts (which I have had for personal use) are given access to a regional search tool. As of 24 April 2007, this table notes that the following numbers of blogs exist from the various following African regions (until recently – circa 14 April 2007, there was a much more effective tool on livejournal whereby a list could be generated given the total number of users for each African country – at the time of my writing, however, this has been modified, so that one must search each country separately and the number of matches per country is capped at 1,000 displayed). (The countries’ figures given are meant as a representative sample and do not include all the countries for which statistics are available.) It is important to recognize that on livejournal these regions are not officially confirmed in any way (resulting, for example, in a disproportionate number of users declaring their nation of origin for Djibouti and the like, simply because it might seem humorous) and even where blogger declarations are accurate, these results contain large numbers of expatriates studying or working in Africa for less than a year (see also note below).
Algeria 648
Angola 460
Benin 293
Botswana 1,000+
Burkina Faso 713
Burundi 164
Cameroon 228
Cape Verde 275
Central African Republic 165
Chad 431
Congo 448
Côte d’Ivoire 323
Dijibouti 1,000+
Egypt 1,000+
Eritrea 132
Ethiopia 689
Gabon 110
Gambia 52
Ghana 203
Guinea 44
Guinea-Bissau 73
Kenya 1,000+
Lesotho 80
Liberia 60
Libya 71
Madagascar 493
Malawi 75
Mali 89
Martinique 105
Mauritania 94
Mauritius 161
Morocco 426
Mozambique 255
Namibia 118
Niger 549
Nigeria 330
Rwanda 542
São Tomé and Príncipe 100
Senegal 97
Seychelles 178
Sierra Leone 118
Somalia 116
South Africa 1,000+
Sudan 82
Swaziland 204
Tanzania 179
Togo 298
Tunisia 118
Uganda 319
Western Sahara 292
Zaire 192
Zambia 207
Zimbabwe 1,000+

Two interrelated problems with livejournal are these: first, because there is no content-search function similar to Google Blogger’s, it is tremendously difficult, without systematically reading from each individual blog’s contents, to separate out blogs being written by African nationals in Africa or in the diaspora from the far, far more numerous blogs being written by Americans and Europeans working, studying, or pleasure-traveling in Africa – and, regardless of the identity of the blogger, livejournal has a culture of being a far more casual site for the recording of daily personal affairs, rants, and quiz results than Google’s Blogger, which has a reputation for and atmosphere of being a site for more “serious” blogging in more correct grammar and style and with more writing of universal interest. Indeed, all blog sites have slightly different “feels” and cater to slightly different clienteles. In my experience, the only ways to discover and discriminate between these personalities are by reading regularly and by experimenting with blogging on these sites oneself.

[2] Lyrics for background song, “Ocean Size Love” by Leigh Nash (copied and pasted from http://www.onlylyrics.com/):
I know what I’m doing may be dumb
I know I should not be staring at the sun
But just the thought of you leads me to temptation
It’s the same whatever side you’re on
Separated we are delicate and small
And the space between needs our attention
I see you right in front of me, as close as you can get
And I pray that you won’t leave, this daydream yet

And it might seem much too far, to get back to where you are
But it’s close enough, with an ocean size love
So if you can’t reach out to me, send a sign across the sea
And I’ll pick it up, with an ocean size love

I don’t have to worry any more
If I need you I’ll go to the shore
And the thought of you is my protection
I see you right in front of me, a vision in my head,
And I know this is as real as a daydream gets

And it might seem much too far, to get back to where you are
But it’s close enough, with an ocean size love
So if you can’t reach out to me, send a sign across the sea
And I’ll pick it up, with an ocean size love

You make no sound but I can hear you in the wind
I can see this never ends, like the sea, like you for me

And it’s close enough, with an ocean size love
So if you can’t reach out to me, send a sign across the sea
And I’ll pick it up, with an ocean size love
And it might seem much too far, to get back to where you are
But it’s close enough, with an ocean size love
So if you can’t reach out to me, send a sign across the sea
And I’ll pick it up, with an ocean size love

[3] All of my references and indexes of blog entries end at the last of March 2007 for consistency’s sake, although a number of the blogs have continued to be updated throughout April 2007 as I have been in the process of composing my analysis.

[4] List of Ghanaian Journalists blogging, from Bensah’s Ghana ICT blog, post on Apr. 28th:

Anumu Emmanuel – World of Thought
http://anumuemm.blogspot.com/

Kofi Larweh – Kofi Larweh
http://kofiweb.blogspot.com/

Isaiah Kojo Oppong - Nanasompahoppong
http://nanasompahoppong.blogspot.com/

Doris Dery – Doris Dery
http://derydoris.blogspot.com/

Tennyson T. Wubonto - TT
http://ennyson.blogspot.com/

Ruby Amable – Our Way
http://awoamable.blogspot.com/

Enoch Darfah Frimpong – Welcome to Kumasi, The Garden City of Africa
http://enochdarfahfrimpong.blogspot.com/

Seth Addi – Evening Tribune
http://sethaddi.blogspot.com/

Listowell S. Fordjour – freemind
http://listowell.blogspot.com/

Fred Sarpong – fredtot
http://fredtot.blogspot.com/

Nana Appiah - ICTPowerhouse
http://ictpowerhouse.blogspot.com/

Emmanuel K. Bensah II – Trials & Tribulations of A Newly Arrived Denizen…of Ghana
http://ekbensahinghana.blogspot.com/

Mawutodzi Kodzo Abissath – Abissath’s Wisdom Page “Voilaaa”
http://nyansah.blogspot.com/

Aba Arthur – Babsy’s Page
http://abasblog.blogspot.com/

Alex Sepenyo Dzokoto – Sepenyodzokoto
http://alexdzokoto.blogspot.com/

Emily Nyarko – Mynewsonghana
http://mynewsonghana.blogspot.com/

Henry Malm – Henrymalmtv3
http://henrymalmtv3.blogspot.com/

Vida Ampofo – 24newsbureau
http://24newsbureau.blogspot.com/

Tommistina Adu Boahene – Akuaachaa’s own
http://akuaachaa.blogspot.com/

Yaw Owusu – Yaw Owusu’s Village
http://yawowusu.blogspot.com/

Osman Dauda – northernpodmedia
http://northernpodmedia.blogspot.com/

Mavis Mensah - Mavis
http://mavis-mavis.blogspot.com/

Veronica Kwabla - Ronnie
http://www.vnknewmedia.blogspot.com/

Selase Attah - Dykus
http://inspiration4gh.blogspot.com/

Raphael Adeniran – One world
http://ralph-northstar.blogspot.com/


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Newell, Stephanie. “Entering the Territory of Elites: Literary Activity in Colonial Ghana.” In Karin Barber, ed. Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006.

Nyarko, Emily. Mynewsonghana. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://mynewsonghana.blogspot.com/

Ogunlesi, Tolulope Gbenga. The Wonderer is Dead. Long Live the Wanderer. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://omoalagbede.blogspot.com/

Olawunmi. Silent Storms in an Ocean of One. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://olawunmi.blogspot.com/

Oppong, Isaiah Kojo. Nanasompahoppong. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://nanasompahoppong.blogspot.com/

Oracle. The Oracle’s Corner. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://sparklingoracle.blogspot.com/

Owusu, Yaw. Yaw Owusu’s Village. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://yawowusu.blogspot.com/

Raven. The Corvine Blog. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://ravenique.blogspot.com/

------. Onward, Raven, Through the Fog. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://houseofficer.blogspot.com/

------. Raven Pics. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://corvuspics.blogspot.com/

Richardson, Will. “Web Logs in the English Classroom: More than Just Chat.” The English Journal 93.1 (Sep 2003): 39-43.

Sarpong, Fred. Fredtot. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://fredtot.blogspot.com/

Tetteh, Isaac and Rebecca Wanjiku. Ghananie.com. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://ghananie.blogspot.com/

Uche. My land. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://ucheland.blogspot.com/

Uknaija. Musings of a Naijaman – a Nigerian man living and blogging in the UK. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://uknaija.blogspot.com/

Weiler, Greg. “Using Weblogs in the Classroom.” The English Journal 92.5 (May 2003): 73-75.

Wood, Molara. Word’s Body. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://wordsbody.blogspot.com/

Wubonto, Tennyson T. TT. Blog. Accessed April 2007. http://ennyson.blogspot.com/


For (My) Further Reading

Armstrong, Jerome. Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Pub. Co., 2005.

Bausch, Paul, Matthew Haughey, and Meg Hourihan. We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2002.

Byron, D.L. and Steve Broback. Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2006.

Daniel, Gwyneth. Our Tasmanian Home, 2nd ed. Christchuch, Dorset: Willow Books, 2005.

Davis, Richard. Politics Online: Blogs, Chatrooms, and Discussion Groups in American Democracy. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.

Hewitt, Hugh. Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation that’s Changing Your World. Nashville, TN: T. Nelson Publishers, 2005.

Holtz, Shel. Blogging for Business: Everything You Need to Know and Why You Should Care. [electronic resource] Chicago: Kaplan, 2006.

Richardson, Will. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Webtools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Corwin and Sage, 2006.

Riverbend. Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq. 2003. London: Marion Boyars, 2005.

We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture. 2002. Reading, MA and Oxford:
Perseus, 2003.

Worstall, Tim, ed. 2005: Blogged: Dispatches from the Bloggosphere. 2005.

Wright, Jeremy. Blogmarketing: The Revolutionary New Way to Increase Sales, Build Your
Brand, and Get Exceptional Results. 2006.


Appendix – Complete Index of Entries for (9) Blogs
Maintained By Emmanuel K. Bensah II
(Omitted for version of this paper posted to my own blog due to space constraints)