That’s the tagline for Roving Bandit, a new development blog I stumbled upon. I laughed out loud. Many of the posts provoke the same reaction (in a good way). The author, I gather, is an American working in southern Sudan. He’s an excellent human browser, and finds many things likely to be of interest to readers of this blog. I will be reading.

Another excellent human browser is Nigerian blogger Olumide Abimbola at Loomnie. His profile says he’s a social anthropologist studying the used clothing trade between Europe and West Africa. I look forward to the book. He writes a column, Anthropologically Speaking, for a Nigerian magazine, and he gives us a taste of his motivations here.

I can also remember that by the nineties we had started seeing a steady increase in the influx of ‘China’, such that white fabric for school uniform came in different kinds, a particularly popular one of which was simply called China. At this point, consumption of textile products in Nigeria was shared between imported fabrics and locally produced ones. Sometime between then and now, Nigeria managed to lose the textile industry, an industry that, according to some sources, was the second largest employer after the government.

Interesting throughout.