It seems like weeks since I have journeyed through the blogosphere and visited old friends and spaces - here are a few posts I thought of mentioning.

I read this post on No Longer At Ease which provides a reality check into what ordinary people want and what they think of democracy.

But what do the people of Hong Kong really want?. A BBC reporter asked one of the people of Hong Kong what he thinks:

Across the lane, Ming Chan was crouched over his flower stall, preparing an extravagant bouquet of purple flowers. He too was cynical.

“In the past, if you were poor, you could work hard and get on”, he said. “That’s not true any more. In today’s Hong Kong, you’ve got to be educated, a middle class professional. Not an uneducated entrepreneur.”

So what about democracy, I asked. He laughed. “Democracy? The poor don’t want a vote, we all want a better life”. “As for democracy”, he added, “we barely know what the word means.”

On a related topic, Annansi Chronicles wonders about the role of Africa’s billionaires in the scramble for Africa’s resources and where do they get their money from?

While this means there is more African representation in Robert Frank’s Richistan, many of us in lower to not-even-close Richistan, are beginning to ask even more questions about what role Africans play in the scramble for Africa’s resources. A BIG question raised in the conversation about African billionaires on Forbes’ list was, where are those billionaires getting their money?

An awful disturbing story from AfroMusing on the rape of a small baby in Kenya. Lucy is being cared for by the Nest home in Limuru, Kenya. As Afro says, her story is not comfortable reading but we still need to read it. For details on how to support Lucy see Afro’s blog.