I spoke to my best friend,
Juliet, today who told me Jemila Abdulai is a very talented and brilliant individual. That kind of endorsement from someone like Juliet--a trained and experienced publisher and journalist--can only be good, especially if Juliet happened to have been Jemila's "trainer" at a reputable magazine a few years back.
It's also good, especially when I know Jemila as well, and recognise that she is
indeed a talented and brilliant individual, who also happens to manage a blog, entitled "CIRCUMSPECTE".
She claims to write about:
"
Ghana::Africa::Development::Youth::Global Issues::Life::Anything & Everything"
Though she does do that, she does it very well. She also tweets, and a few weeks ago, when the "trending topic" was "
Jemi", she quipped something in her tweets that suggested that someone might have come across a major piece of news which funnily corresponded with her name.
Truth be told, the "Jemi" is a compound name of "
Demi Lovato/
Joe Jonas", who ostensibly work for Disney! Some clever sod with too much time on his hands decided they would turn it into a trending topic, and given how US-centric twitter can be, it got there!
But back to the "Real Jemi"!
Perhaps one of the central reasons for chosing Jemila's blog was not just because I know her a bit after phone and email conversations and recognise how at 23, she's very smart, but also because I -- shame on me!--very rarely visited her blog! This was not because I did not want to--more about so many other blogs, being updated more regularly, that were (and have been) competing for my attention.
Still, lucky her. Today's her day--and not necessarily because she's "Pick of the GhanaBlogging Week", but because I believe she deserves it.
Her blog is structured in a way that pretty much segments information (in the same way I like to segment some of mine). So she has:
*Development
*Interviews
*The Water Chronicles
*The Letter-Writing Project
*The 16' Journal
These are among the highlights of her writings, but the one that does it for me is the "Letter-Writing Project", where she writes about an important and topical subject (sometimes it's newsworthy) in the form of a letter.
I will refer to the latest one, entitled "
I had seen this article elsewhere on the web, totally oblivious to the fact that it was she who had penned it. It is a very insightful commentary on the increasing use of salaciousness in movies, and what it means for what the Brits would call "dumbing down" of our nascent-but-rapidly-developing
movie industry.
Although the whole piece is good, what I most liked about it is this quote:
"I also think you need to think twice about how you're presenting these issues to the Ghanaian and global public. It's one thing to try to encourage confidence in one's sexuality by talking about the inherent issues, and it's another thing to go the overt sex or soft porn route. One - the actual sex act- belongs in the 'private domain', while the other - sex education -is in the 'public domain'. Education concerning sexual reproductive health and rights is just beginning to take root in many African societies and that's precisely because of the fabric of those societies. You need to keep that in mind the next time you decide on a detailed threesome or office tryst. And for heavens sake, keep the buttocks-showcase to a minimum. This whole soft-porn business might not be too bad for the male actors, but with the double-standard society we live in, I can only imagine the havoc it's wrecking on the females' reputations. That statement might sound sexist, but it's the truth. And the worst of it all, is that with this focus on sex, less attention is going to be paid to talent"
She could not have put it any better!
Go check out her blog on
http://www.circumspecte.com!
labels: ghanablogging, pickoftheghanabloggingweek,
