When I first heard about Maneno, I wondered why they would need a blogging platform specifically geared toward Africans..
Creator Miguel Hudin Balsa had this to say:
“We travel quite a bit and I found that anything hosted in the US gets slower and slower the further you get from the US, so I worked to create a CMS/blog platform that was very stripped down, yet fully functional. Don’t get me wrong, Wordpress is a beautiful, fantastic system that I admire and also use, but when you’re on a satellite connection in Bukavu or very slow DSL in Sarajevo, it’s mighty slow to use, which is the same problem with GMail and other web based applications that were developed in North America and Europe. So, I realized that what I was doing for our personal blogs would translate very well in to a system that would meet a great many of the needs for a new blogging system for Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Maneno
I don't mean to sound ignorant or geocentric, but the internet has always manged to expand my world view.. growing up with Tarzan movies, it's still hard to imagine that Africa is not covered with grass huts and Zulu tribesmen!