Ethan Zuckerman has an interesting post that suggests an explanation for the lack of news coverage of Africa in the Western press. His theory (recycled from Joi Ito) is that people care about news from nations to which they have some personal connection.

I spent two weeks at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania a few years ago, teaching a workshop on embedded systems for the International Atomic Energy Agency. While I don’t think that the workshop was particularly effective, it made me care about Africa, and East Africa in particular.

Last week, Kilinux released the first Swahili word processor ever. To me, this is big news, which is why I wrote most of the article for Wikinews. There are at least 1 million people who speak Swahili as a first language. The language is spoken by 55 million people worldwide. The well-educated people I met at the University of Dar es Salaam spoke Swahili, a local dialect, and English. When in groups, Swahili was the language they used. Access to a free common platform for creating text documents with commands in a language that’s easy for them to use is a huge step forward.

The Swahili word processor story has been up on Wikinews for a week or so. Ethan Zuckerman posted it to WorldChanging.org. Other than that, I haven’t been able to find coverage in any other media outlet. There are a couple of stories (ZDNet UK and the BBC) that covered a pre-release version before the translation was finished, back in December. Microsoft has said that they are working on a Swahili version of Windows, but the release date reported by the BBC (six months from June 2004) has passed without any news. I guess there aren’t so many shareholders in Dar es Salaam.

You heard it here first, folks.