I am writing to commend you for this tremendous website.
I am Ugandan and since I work in the same environment as the author [publisher] of the site, I must say
for long I had neglected to look at the site. Well, I am doubly impressed with the layout and its positive focus on Africa.
History may not have been kind to this continent, but you could have said the same to
Europe, Asia, and America at one time. Hope and diligence in the affairs of our time will sustain us and will be significant when the tide does turn.
I wonder whether new categories can be introduced on your site;
can we have more on the indigenous companies that are progressive, innovative technology companies, and exemplary individuals who are showing us that the impossible can be achieved on this continent?
Guys like you
who has given us a site where we do not have to refer to choking figures of civil strife, HIV/AIDS and the political immaturity and lack of vision of some of our leaders, should be recognised.
Angelo Izama
Kampala, Uganda
June 27, 2002
There are also women in Africa !!!! Where are they in your rankings. There must be at least one who's done something more prominent than a Footballer!!!!!!
Amma Dodoo
London, England
June 21, 2002
Just to let you know that your web site is excellent.
I did study with the editor of Africa Almanac Mr. Timothy Kalyegira. I do trust he will
be one of those Africans who will use the Information Technology to turn Africa around.
The African continent has been grossly misrepresented by the international media for reasons best known to the powers that be.
The information highway, as the Internet in this case with the like of Tim, will readdress this issue big time.
I think the African continent has a lot to show other than coups and drought! Keep it up.
Arthur Johnson Ruberantwari
Entebbe
Uganda
June 18, 2002
Good site, good vision. Can we be your Kenyan partners so that we supply the Kenyan news?
Medinet Concepts
Nairobi, Kenya
June 15, 2002
I came across your site by accident, and wish to comment on the Top 100 list [of 2001].
First I wish to commend you on the good work motivated by presenting
Africa's GOOD NEWS to the world, something that also motivated me, and like you I have found a hard task, mainly because of lack of resources.
Muammar Qadhafi. I highly commend your analysis of him, which is quite
rare for someone to be able to have such an insight as you did in the way you noticed his activity. I also like your final conclusion why he is not higher in the list.
Likewise I like the Museveni and Mbeki articles.
What I find incredulous, is measuring positions 4 and 5 to White South African capitalists (nothing wrong with a white capitalist per se) by the amount of money they take from poor blacks, whites of eastern
Europe and yellow people into their pockets.
If you have ever visited South Africa yourself, even today, how could you fail to notice the rampant alcoholism which was inherited from the apartheid era when workers
were often paid with alcohol from the farms of lowest non-sellable quality, and which benefits even today from advertising openly on television and elsewhere?
South African Breweries, for God's sake, takes from areas
like Eastern Cape, you see the trucks come in to deliver to the Shabeens (poor people's drinking houses) and go out with empty bottles and money.
Money going out from the poor to the rich. And South African Breweries
does nothing --- not a single school, or social responsibility program in these areas of Eastern Cape. Surely the same is duplicated across the country.
Fat white men who grew rich under apartheid, and continue to
benefit from the misery of mostly black people, yet they are rated because they bring some dollars into South Africa --- but to where?
It would have been good if it had been explained on this list, how the people
arrived onto the list, and how they were rated?
Votes by viewers? Suggestions by viewers? Or the subjective, well-meant but as is inevitable, faulty premises of an Editor?
I don't like to make non-constructive
criticism, so please do not take the above as such. You no doubt put in a lot of work, and perhaps this is also unpaid voluntary one-man effort as Mathaba is.
I have only made a quick visit to your site, and my
judgment --- if any --- will be hasty. I just wish to comment or inform you about something which I experienced in South Africa and find reprehensible, and some surprise to find --- out of all the people in Africa ---
that they reach top 100, let alone top 5, for contributing to Africa's welfare.
Louis X
