While many designers are telling us to don platform shoes and love beads, the man behind London-based Hi-Tek watches is looking even further back in time – drawing his inspiration from classic visions of the future.
Hi-Tek’s stainless steel timepieces bring to mind early futuristic films such as Lang’s Metropolis and Chaplin’s Modern Times with their grotesque exaggerations of modern machinery. That era’s confusion, fear, or simple wonderment at new technology influenced everything from toasters to steam trains.
For the equally economically and technologically turbulent ‘90s, Hi-Tek designer Alexander has captured this sense of techno-wonder with watches, sunglasses, and other hip accessories. One watch looks as if a Cuisinart hit it, leaving gears strewn across the face. Another has a retractable lid like an astronomer’s observatory. Yet another tells time with the blinker of a radar screen. Despite their made-exclusively-for-James-Bond appearance, all cost less than $190. Available at Possessions in Montreal, Body Body in Toronto, and D and R in Vancouver.
It was the decade of the happy face, bell-bottoms, avocado fridges, disco and the Bay City Rollers; in short, the 70s was a pimple on the ass of history, better evaporated in a pot haze on a waterbed. Not so says 70s-obsessed author Pagan Kennedy, who believes the much-maligned decade is the victim of a bum rap perpetuated by the idolization of the 60s.
Kennedy says the 70s saw all the radical ideas and culture of the 60s go mainstream and mutate in a way the hippies couldn’t imagine.
Social relations and culture were profoundly reshaped during this decade as the non-traditional family took form, women flooded the workplace and unions became rich monoliths.
The social turmoil spawned blue collar red-necks with Confederate flags customizing fuck trucks – vans complete with waterbed, eight-track stereo, bong and sleazy airbrushed exteriors of naked women – to cruise the nation’s highways enjoying the liberal sexual values while keeping conservative political views. Sexual liberation for these clowns consisted of bumper stickers saying “Ass, gas or grass – nobody rides for free!”. Kennedy remembers it all too well.
“This was the midst of the energy crisis, so big cars that wasted a lot of gas were really cool,” she says. “I guess it came out of the whole drug culture, sex culture thing. It was like a basement kids have, only it was on wheels – a party on wheels. It’s not just the mattress for the fuck truck, you’re supposed to be doing your bong hits in there – so the police can’t see you.”
Sex holidays
“Our lives are much more constrained than they were in the 70s,” continues Kennedy. “I think the 70s must seem like an exotic time to grow up in. One of my favourite parts in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X is when the characters want to take a sex holiday to 1974.
“There was a lot of obsession in the early 70s with swingers and wife-swapping. It was the one time when suddenly the sexual revolution was kicking in, not just for white, privileged college kids, but for everybody – for the working class. There were discos and orgy clubs. There was Plato’s Retreat in New York City where you would go in and there was an orgy in full progress.”
In music, the 70s rocketed between extremes. There was nauseating soft rock, concept albums and “progressive” rock. There was the outrageous glam, with artists like Slade and Gary Glitter jacked up on elevator shoes in sequin one-piece flare suits. There was disco and punk. But the sickest phenomena says Kennedy was corporate rock.
David Cassidy
“In the 60s, people were just learning how to package rock and make it a big corporate thing. By the 70s they had learned a lot. The Partridge Family was a group that was entirely fabricated. David Cassidy had a bigger fan club than Elvis. This was a guy who didn’t become a rock star until he went on TV. In the 60s, FM was alternative radio – you could play anything. Corporate guys got their hooks into FM by the 70s. They were formatting. It was no longer what the DJ wanted to hear. You were getting playlists. The money came from big rock concerts, so there was a desire to push these mega-groups and superstars.”
Another truly 70s phenomena was TV as social conscience. Before the 70s, TV variety shows focused on pure entertainment. But now writers, directors and producers schooled in the 60s political milieu were in control.
Blaxploitation
“All in the Family, Maude and Good Times were all part of the same world. All in the Family acknowledged the deep rifts in American society – America was at war with itself. Yet it did it in a soft enough way to not offend people.”
US blacks had been ignored until the civil rights struggle of the 1960s woke up a dopey white America. In the 1970s, blacks were being portrayed like never before in the media and popular culture. But all of this awareness took a twisted turn.
“I think what happened among blacks was they saw their leaders either killed or put in jail. And that was devastating. Blacks really turned to electoralism in the 70s. A lot of black people started running for office. While trying to change things from outside the system, they realized the price was too high. A lot of black people were involved in making those blaxploitation movies, but so were a lot of white people. Shaft and Superfly are like the bookends of the genre. They were really made by black filmmakers. But then there were all these ripoff versions starring football players – whitebread ideas of what black culture was like.”
Pagan Kennedy’s latest book, Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 1970s, is published by St. Martin’s Press and available in most book shops. She’s got a really cool collection of eight-track tapes and drives a yetch! 1974 Plymouth Valiant.
“Tripping on 70s Culture”: Watch Magazine was published in Toronto, Canada in the 1990s. “The Bi-Weekly Student Perspective on Culture, Issues and Trends.”
According to a new report by the International Institute for Environment and Development, Africa now has a larger urban population than North America and 25 of the world’s fastest growing big cities. Europe’s share of the world’s 100 largest cities has fallen to under 10 percent in the past century.
Counter to common misperceptions about what is luring people to big cities, the report’s author, David Satterthwaite, said it isn’t because governments and aid are attracting them: government “policies leave much to be desired as they tend to neglect the urban poor, leading to high levels of urban poverty, overcrowding in slums and serious health problems. Governments should see urbanisation as an important part of a stronger economy and their expanding urban population as an asset, not as a problem.”
But global perceptions of Africa are changing. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation has listed the most efficiently run African economies, with a strong correlation between good governance and higher growth rates (Mauritius, Seychelles, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Ghana and Senegal).
In most of urban French West Africa, extensive interviews with micro-entrepreneurs and micro-finance practitioners found that most operating micro-enterprises in the informal economy are entrepreneurs by necessity, and that their most basic needs drove their business activities and behaviours. Success was held back by lack of capital, poor training, and a general aversion to risk (Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University).
While access to capital has been identified as the key factor in opportunity, entrepreneurs aren’t even waiting for microfinance institutions to help them. “I started this business of selling chips (French fries) two years ago using money we raised as a group of 30 women,” said Mary Mwihaki, 27, who lives in the Mathare slum area outside Nairobi.
Each member of her group of women contributes about US 30 cents a day and the resulting US $9 is given to a different member of the group on a rotating basis, she told IRIN news agency. Mwihaki waited three months to raise the US $27 she needed. She joins many other women across the country taking the same approach to raising capital.
For some entrepreneurs, it is just the proximity to a buzzing urban atmosphere that is a spur to action. One clothes seller told the African Executive he has been able to make enough money to get a house built just selling second hand clothing. Twenty-three-year-old Henry Mutunga in Nairobi, Kenya takes advantage of the high turnover of the city’s Machakos Country bus terminal to sell second hand clothes.
“After months of searching for a job, I asked myself, ‘Why am I wasting the business studies knowledge I acquired in school?’ I was not comfortable being left in the house every morning, with nothing to do, while my uncle went to work in order to feed me and pay the house rent. I got hooked to the urban mentality and tried my hand at selling trousers.”
Now with two employees, he is able to rent his own house, and is able to use extra money to have his own house built. He urges other youth to become employers, not employees.
At the technological end of entrepreneurship, in Nairobi, Kenya, Mumbi’s Dial-a-Cab company is joining 20 fleet firms in the country to adopt a new mobile phone-based vehicle-tracking technology developed by two young African IT entrepreneurs, Waweru Kimani and Paul Mahiaini. The technology allows management to know how low fuel is, which car has gone where, when a car has been hijacked, what car doors are open, how long it has been stopped, and where it is located. Impressively, it also allows management to stop the car at the touch of a button if it has been stolen. It costs US $570 to install, and costs US $40/month to use.
Other entrepreneurs are piggy backing their success on the booming housing markets in Angola, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nigeria, Congo, Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Botswana, Ghana, Mozambique, Rwanda, Kenya, Mauritius, Uganda, Algeria, Egypt, Senegal: all creating enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs providing other services, like furniture, appliances, insurance, landscaping, security, architecture etc.
And the giant US internet search engine Google is now setting up operations in West Africa, based in Dakar – a sure sign that they see this as a new boom market. And Indian investment in Africa has also dramatically shot up this year, according to mergers and acquisitions magazine, The Deal. In 2005, US $81 million was invested in Africa. In 2006, US $340 million; and in 2007, US $294 million.
African Entrepreneur: A frank diary of the experiences of a successful African entrepreneur and her ups and downs.
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
Africa is becoming a world leader in mobile phone applications for health and healthcare. Despite dramatic improvements to the quality of hospitals and the number of qualified doctors, the continent’s healthcare services are still a patchwork, with rural and slum dwellers poorly served and the stresses of treating patients with contagious diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria pushing resources to the limit.
But innovative inventions are coming along to provide new tools to doctors and medical personnel and to better engage patients with remote services.
South Africa’s Afridoctor (http://twitter.com/afridoctor) mobile phone application claims to be Africa’s first personal mobile health clinic. It lets patients use its “SnapDiagnosis” system to submit photos of their ailments and in turn receive advice from a panel of medical professionals, or use the mapping feature to find doctors, clinics and health industry-related services nearby.
Afridoctor was conceived to fill the gap across Africa for basic health information that is reliable and trustworthy.
There is an emergency feature to notify next of kin during a medical emergency and provide a location. Other features include symptom checkers, first-aid information, health calculators and quizzes.
Expert feedback comes within 48 hours after submission of a request.
A winner of a Nokia competition, Afridoctor was developed by the labs of media company 24.com (http://20fourlabs.com) of Cape Town, South Africa.
“It is more for external use – like dermatology – for things like a bee sting or a snake bite and you don’t know what to do or how to diagnose it,” Werner Erasmus, who created the app, told the BBC.
The “find a doctor” system uses Google Maps to geo-locate local health services including doctors, hospitals and emergency clinics.
The distress feature enables users to contact a family member or friend at the touch of a button. It does this by storing the mobile phone number of a selected relative. When the distress button is pressed, they are notified of the phone’s location.
Developed in just three weeks, to enter mobile phone company Nokia’s contest (http://www.callingallinnovators.com) for mobile phone applications, Afridoctor went on to win the competition in 2009. It is now being expanded to be usable on most, if not all, smart phones.
As in the rest of Africa, mobile phone use in South Africa has dramatically increased in the past 10 years. It is estimated that over 70 percent of South Africans now have access to one.
Another application getting attention is Ghana’s mPedigree (http://mpedigree.net). Designed to combat the damage done by counterfeit drugs in Africa and across the South, mPedigree works by letting a person send a text message by mobile phone to the mPedigree service to check a drug’s authenticity. A message comes back confirming whether the medicine is authentic or not.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that 25 percent of medicines sold around the developing world are counterfeit. Some contain no active ingredients, and others are even harmful.
mPedigree uses cell phones to build networks to tackle and identify counterfeit drugs. Website: http://mpedigree.net/
AirStrip Technologies: Securely sends vital patient information electronically to a doctor’s mobile phone device. Website: http://www.airstriptech.com/
Instant ECG: Uses the iPhone to interpret ECG (electro-cardiogram) waves. Website:http://www.instantecg.org/
iStethoscope: An application for the iPhone that turns the phone into an electronic stethoscope. Downloaded already by over 3 million doctors around the world, and is being praised for how it helps doctors in remote regions. Website:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/istethoscope-pro/id322110006?mt=8
OsiriX: An Open Source programme for computers and devices allowing doctors to stream medical imaging data live. Website:http://www.osirix-viewer.com/
Star Analytical Services: Have developed an app that allows patients to cough into a phone and receive a diagnosis. Website:http://www.staranalyticalservices.com/
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
David South Consulting 
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