According to Sage India, a respected academic publisher, the book is held up at Sri Lanka Customs. The problem is that it came in the same shipment as a book by an English scholar teaching at the Colombo University which had the word militarization in the title. So Customs or whoever are reading the entire shipment to see if it any of the books have anti-state content. This has taken several weeks, leading us to wonder whether they are reading all the copies, unaware that reading one is enough.

Now I have no objection to the Customs or whoever getting educated. I’d be happy to personally donate a copy of our book along with the classic critique of book censorship, Fahrenheit 451, to their library. But as far as I know they have no right, legal or moral, to censor books in a democratic society (I have evidence that this book censorship is occurring on a broader scale and is not limited to this single shipment from Sage India). Our book has nothing about the conflict, other than a single chapter that I co-authored on teleuse between the wars in the government areas of Jaffna. But if this goes on, I may be compelled to write a whole book on the destruction of civil liberties by people who don’t have a clue.

By the way, anyone who wants to read the chapter on teleuse in Jaffna between the wars should simply click on the link. So much for book censorship in the Internet Age.

Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web

Attempts to bring affordable high-speed Internet service to the masses have made little headway on the continent. Less than 4 percent of Africa’s population is connected to the Web; most subscribers are in North African countries and the republic of South Africa.

A lack of infrastructure is the biggest problem. In many countries, communications networks were destroyed during years of civil conflict, and continuing political instability deters governments or companies from investing in new systems. E-mail messages and phone calls sent from some African countries have to be routed through Britain, or even the United States, increasing expenses and delivery times. About 75 percent of African Internet traffic is routed this way and costs African countries billions of extra dollars each year that they would not incur if their infrastructure was up to speed.

…

Prices remain high because the national telecommunications linked to the cable maintain a monopoly over access, squeezing out potential competitors. And plans for a fiber optic cable along the East African coast have stalled over similar access issues. Most countries in Eastern Africa, like Rwanda, depend on slower satellite technology for Internet service.

The result is that Africa remains the least connected region in the world, and the digital gap between it and the developed world is widening rapidly. “Unless you can offer Internet access that is the same as the rest of the world, Africa can’t be part of the global economy or academic environment,” said Lawrence H. Landweber, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who was also part of an early effort to bring the Web to Africa in the mid-1990s. “The benefits of the Internet age will bypass the continent.”

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From Capacity to Presence: Enhancing the Usability of University Research in the Internet Age (PDF format, 112Kb)