As an African I often had to pinch myself to realize the speakers are talking about Africa - an Africa that I cannot see through their sophisticated eyes but only from my own experienced eyes: Poverty, corruption, war, rape, murder, hunger thirst, suffering. Are academics asleep or simply endemic positivists? It affirms that unless you know and experience Africa you can never talk of it in any authoritive way. OXFORD has regressed to being an OX-FORD. All you sophitocrats, enjoy your seminars, barbeques, luncheons and theorizing, while Africa bleeds from every orifice. Granted, I cannot say this about every writer and speaker, but most left me feeling that from a new distance of safety, the sense of real danger rapidly regresses to the back of the mind, like the wounded soldier shipped back home with sudden glee relates war stories. But back on the front friends continue to die.