Reflections from the Zambezi

I think at one point most postgraduate students come to a point where they ask themselves: Is it worth continuing with my research or I should just give it up? The following article from the Royal Literary Fund is quite helpful as it shares some experiences of postgrad students who almost thre in the towel but then found ways of staying motivated. "I remember meeting a PhD student who had been working on her thesis for years. ‘Eighty thousand words is a lot of words,’ she said. The next day I was talking with a journalist who had been commissioned to do a local-history brochure. ‘It's only 12,000 words,’ he told me. ‘I can knock that out in a weekend if I have to.’ The difference was one of attitude." "Writing is a hard way not to make a living." "At the end of the second year of doing my PhD, I took the summer off to write a cricket book that I had always wanted to write. It was helpful, not because anything was going wrong with the PhD, but be...

Abidjan. Of the African cities I have visited, Abidjan, the economic and former official capital of Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) has one of the best views when one is landing. As of 2011 it was the largest city in the nation and the third-la rgest French-speaking city in the world, after Paris and Kinshasa, but before Montreal. Considered a cultural hub of West Africa, Abidjan is characterized by a high level of industrialization and urbanization. Th e city stands in Ébrié Lagoon, on several converging peninsulas and islands, connected by bridges. In 1983, Yamoussoukro was designated as the nation's capital, but most government offices and foreign embassies are still in Abidjan. With a population of around 4,000,000 people, it is the second largest city in West Africa after Lagos and has historically been the economic power base of the region.  Today, despite the current political issues in Cote d'Ivoire at large, Abidjan remains the economic and de facto capit...