By Hook or By Crook

By Hook or By Crook

Will President Kikwete (far left) not be reelected Sunday?
Before Angle vs. Reid on Tuesday, we’re going to have Kikwete vs. Slaa on Sunday. And a remarkable surprise may be in the making.

Several opinion polls are now predicting that the sitting president of Tanzania, Jakaya Kikwete, may not be reelected.

This is really incredible. I have to admit my own surprise by admitting how I never would have considered it possible.

In my blog of October 12, I said most analysts were predicting a landslide for the sitting president, Jakaya Kikwete. Well, no more. Most are predicting a victory, but not by much, and there are even some daring to suggest he will lose to his most formidable rival, Willbrod Slaa.

Tanzanian voters have only had a choice of presidential candidates since 1992; before that, a single-party state controlled the presidency. This will be the 5th election since then, and it would be the first that a sitting president was ousted.

Today the main issue in the campaign is corruption and government competence. This has appeared suddenly and surprisingly. Corruption and government competence has always been questioned by Tanzania’s elite and educated, but the message has apparently gained traction with the masses.

Much of the broad political fight has been focused onto Kikwete’s support for his former prime minister, Edward Lowassa, who is attempting to return to Parliament after resigning several years ago as a result of a scandal that implicated him in millions of kickbacked dollars.

Although Lowassa is popular in his home region, he is vastly unpopular elsewhere. He’s a de facto admitted crook. But the president is supporting him, and the president’s opponents are calling him out for doing so.

And focusing the entire charge of corruption on this one very visible event.

We’ll see. All eyes on Tanzania Sunday. I’m still predicting Kikwete will win,.

By hook or by crook.

Oh those Scandalous Wildebeest!

Oh those Scandalous Wildebeest!

Reports in the media that the great wildebeest migration this year has made a wrong turn and surprised ecologists is absurd. There is nothing anomalous about the migration this year.

The East African newspaper reported Monday that “A change in the spectacular wildebeest migration schedule in the great Serengeti-Mara ecosystem has caught ecologists offguard.”

Using reports that seem confined to a luxury private lodge in Tanzania just outside the Serengeti near the Kenyan border, the article went on to say that 150 – 200,000 wildebeest were reported around this lodge in September, “never before seen.”

This was then picked up worldwide. Such reliable on-line sources for Africa as ETN headlined the same day, “Mystery as great wildebeest migration cut short in Maasai Mara Game Reserve.”

Stop! Stop! This is all wrong!

Now none of this current balderdash is as infuriating as the scandalous “Wildebeest Migration Blogpost” – which of this writing, by the way, hasn’t had an entry since June. That completely misleading blog actually comes out of a South African tour company whose principals are never in Tanzania. Figure that one. Practically everything in that blog is dead wrong.

SO beware oh yee of internet searches.

The main article which started all the nonsense Tuesday seemed to have been motivated by a single blog from &Beyond’s Klein’s Camp, a great private camp just east of the Serengeti and south of the Kenyan border. Their blogs have reported numerous wildebeest herds as early as September. But they’ve been going and coming, as is normal in a year of heavy rains.

This has been a year of heavy rains.

Deeper into the Mara, that is further north from Tanzania, many camps like Governor’s reported “best migration season ever” this year, which would normally mean Tanzania saw nothing abnormal at all.

What’s the truth?

The truth is that it has rained so heavily this year, that there is good grass in many places that in normal years there would not be good grass. This means the migration is spread out all over the place.

Tourists – even veterans – tend to report they’ve seen a “great migration” when at best they can see only a tiny fraction of the herds. There are likely 1.5 million wildebeest.

When I sit atop Wild Dog Hill southwest of Ndutu in late March and look around me for 360-degrees over flat plains covered by wildebeest, from a horizon on the west that is probably 60-70 miles from the horizon on the east, we are probably at best seeing a quarter million. This scene only happens in the southern Serengeti from February – April if the rains are normal. Only a teeny-weeny fraction of tourists ever sees this.

The vast majority of tourists see “the migration” as large numbers of wildebeest moving across the plains or jumping over rivers, and these groups probably at most number a few thousands.

Smaller events like these can happen in a thousand different places nearly at the same time! These are usually in the last half of the year, mostly reported from Kenya’s Maasai Mara (because that’s where most of the tourists go). But these types of events can happen almost anywhere year-round depending upon the rains.

Wildebeest don’t have schedules. Unlike monarch butterflies or Wilson’s warblers, they aren’t triggered into migration because of changing daylight or diminishing temperatures. Unlike caribou or polar bears, they aren’t triggered into migration because of ice. They move to wherever they can get a good meal, whenever they can get a good meal.

It’s just that over centuries the rainfall has been more or less regular. (That, by the way, may be changing with climate change, but not enough yet to alter long-term statistics.) Normally, heavy rains fall on the southern Serengeti during the first half of the year, and heavy rains fall in the Mara (northern Serengeti) during the last half of the year.

So, normally, they move south to north around mid-year for the rain produced grass, and then return north to south at end-year for the rain produced grass.

This year there was a lot more rain than normal everywhere, and it ended later and began earlier. So wherever they moved they could eat. So they’d eat themselves out of one place, then race over to another. Then it would rain where they just were, so they’d race back. This is not unusual.

The reporter got charged up when he made the mistake of asking Tanzanian scientists what it all meant. In complete deflection of the facts, the Tanzanians basically said it was great … because the “unusual ecological change” meant there were more wildebeest in Tanzania than Kenya, and they just love to stiff their Kenyan counterparts.

For tourists, it was great everywhere! So don’t worry either if you’re a traveler or a lover of animals. Everything’s doing just fine.

At least this year.

Nairobi Bombing Was Preventable

Nairobi Bombing Was Preventable

A little more than twelve years ago I sat in my room in the Norfolk Hotel and listened to our embassy in Nairobi being blown up. Now, our ambassador at the time says we knew it was going to happen.

Prudence Bushnell, U.S. ambassador to Kenya in August, 1998, listed 8 reasons in a July interview with the Washington Post that contributed to bad intelligence sharing that prevented her from knowing at the time that the Nairobi and Dar embassies were going to be blown up. But it was only last week that she got frighteningly specific, during a radio interview on WBEZ’s WorldView program.

A man walked into the Nairobi embassy in December, 1997, identified himself as a scared Al-Qaeda recruit and said he wanted to warn the embassy that it would be blown up with a truck bomb. (That was how it was done eight months later.)

Dismissed as a “flake” by embassy staff, the man was later apprehended in Tanzania and tried for his involvement in the Dar embassy bombing. He wasn’t convicted, but deported back to Egypt where he’s disappeared.

Bushnell is obviously quite bitter. Her rants and raves against the intelligence service then and now fluctuate between on-point and churlish. But the truth seeps out.

Bushnell wasn’t very good. I remember thinking that at the time, comparing her diplomatic capability to the caliber of binoculars that carry her name. She morphed as a career civil servant into high diplomatic brass when Bill Clinton was elected president.

She was immediately thrust into two failures as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. First, Blackhawk Down, and second, the Rwandan genocide. She complains often viciously of being placed in public positions of prominence, but never being let into the circle of real intelligence that knew she was going to fail. Sort of propped up to the be the fall girl.

Her ultimate excuse for not stopping the African embassy bombings was that the growing intelligence that something was going to happen was buried by the Monica Lewinsky affair.

But cut through her whining and you find some terrible news. There was enough intelligence to stop the Rwandan genocide, we’ve known that for years. But there was also plenty of intelligence to stop the Kenyan and probably Dar bombings five years later; that’s news.

Not only didn’t we learn from our mistakes, but apparently, doomed to suffer them, again.

And let her personal vindication settle out and she describes an America we know all too well: inebriated with its successes, blind to the future.

She accurately explains how the end of the Cold War fooled the government, mostly a Republican Congress, into thinking the world was now hunky dory.

“Many Congressmen didn’t think we needed embassies, anymore,” she claims. So funding was slashed for the State Department.

The 1986 truck bombing of our Lebanon embassy resulted in new regulations requiring all embassies to be off-set from main thoroughfares. Had those regulations been implemented in Nairobi, 224 people would not have been killed and more than 4000 not wounded.

But they weren’t. Because Congress denied the funds.

I think it’s important that we keep in mind this happened during the Clinton administration. I’ve always been skeptical about his popularity. Today, he’s championed as the democrats White Knight, saving Obama from himself.

But my feelings about Clinton have always been tainted by his failures in Somali, Rwanda.. and now, apparently, Kenya and Tanzania. The guy oversaw an exploding domestic economy and did implement a few home policies that seemed progressive.

But he was a failure when it came to intelligence and was unable or unwilling to correlate these failures with the growing threats to America, much less the world as a whole.

So long as he could get top billing with Jay Leno for wiping out welfare services, Clinton seemed pleased as puddin-pie as the world was being subsumed by Al-Qaeda. Bushnell claims that the Clinton Administration considered Nairobi a “backwater” not worth paying any attention to.

After wards, Clinton became a real Afrophile, apologizing profusely for his negligence in Rwanda and throwing untold millions into East Africa, almost as reparations for the bombings, implying if never saying, “If Only I’d Known.”

And in that context, Bushnell comes right out of his mold. Capable of complaining and apologizing, she nevertheless reflects blame elsewhere.

Later this swirl of evil hits the Twin Towers. We now know that Bush II also ignored important intelligence, thrust the world into wrong wars in reaction and probably never read John Le Carre.

Has this ostrich head in the sand ended? I hope so, but just for insurance I think I’ll trust Kenyan diplomacy over American diplomacy when it comes to dealing with Al-Qaeda.

Elect Elephants or Pumpkins

Elect Elephants or Pumpkins

Elephants are on the rise, in numbers, in tusk size, in populations, and their growing battle with humans is straight on the top of the mind of Tanzanian voters going to the polls this week.

Lots has been mentioned about the side issue of the proposed Serengeti highway in this weekend’s elections, but an underlying component of that issue can be reduced to elephants.

It’s been more or less accepted in the campaign that if built completely the Serengeti Highway will diminish the vibrancy of the Serengeti/Mara ecosystem mainly by disrupting the wildebeest migration. But this amazing herd does not wander like elephants, and when politicians speak of foreigners’ interests lying “more with animals than people” what is understood is “more with elephants than farmers.”

Our non scientific elephant viewing this year has been phenomenal. I have to stretch my memory back to the seventies to recall the numbers and sizes of elephants we saw this year. And if I as a casual observer had this experience, imagine what the farmer saw.

In fact, several times I saw what the farmer saw. Twice I watched farmers chasing elephants off crop land, obviously at great peril to themselves.

We are waiting anxiously for an important elephant report scheduled to be published before the end of the year by WCS that will show in much greater detail the state of elephants in Tanzania. But we got a glimpse of it this month when the coordinator, Trevor Jones, published one of the important maps that will undoubtedly be seen in the report.

WCS will undoubtedly define important elephant corridors throughout the country that link diverse protected areas. Allowing any animal populations great mobility increase the physical and genetic health of the species.

Jones is going to argue that very tiny corridors especially in the dead center of the country are essential to maintaining the health of the elephant populations.

Notice on the top left map Jones has placed arrows showing the most important corridors.

But these corridors fall directly over the country’s most productive agricultural regions. Note the map on the bottom left from the EU shows where Tanzania’s most productive agricultural lands are, right over Jones’ most important elephant corridors.

And while we may be waiting for Jones’ report, I doubt the voting farmers have to.

Earlier this year the Tanzanians were rebuffed by the world community when a plea to allow them to sell stockpiled ivory was narrowly defeated at the CITES convention in Doha. I robustly supported the Kenyan/U.S. initiative that managed the defeat.

My support for the Kenyan initiative was with the understanding allowing the sales would aggravate elephant poaching and because the case the Tanzanian officials made was terribly flawed, reeking of corruption. But the Tanzanian farmer is less worried about these issues than harvesting his pumpkins.

It was a shame that that important battle in Doha did not address the more serious human/elephant conflict which will now be addressed in the Tanzanian election.

Trail of Hate Rounds the World

Trail of Hate Rounds the World

Unable to do it at home, U.S. Righties do it in Africa.
The gay bashing which became gay beating two weeks ago in Uganda was widely reported worldwide. But not enough has been said about the U.S. Christian right which fomented the violence in the first place.

In September I wrote that the “C Street Players” – a list of prominent leaders and politicians on the U.S. far right – were implicated in rigging the re-election of the Ugandan MP who introduced draconian legislation to punish gays and people who knew people were gay.

Fortunately that bill was tabled by Uganda’s president after substantial pressure from the west.

Listen to a great audio history by Democracy Now.

But the evil continues. A rogue newspaper, not registered (and were it anything but a gay basher tabloid would have been viciously suppressed by the Ugandan regime), incited incredible violence earlier this month by naming the country’s “Top 100 Homos.”

It’s really impossible to know if American money is behind this new tabloid, and in a sense, it doesn’t really matter. Hate on the level C Street brought to Uganda in the first place, which promulgated legislation that couldn’t possibly get even rightest attention in the U.S. (execution for certain gays), was intense enough to start these brush fires.

Fewer than 2000 copies of the Ugandan Rolling Stone issue were circulated, but that seemed enough to cause something of a cultural rampage in the capitol. Shortly thereafter, the real violence began. Four gays were seriously beaten, others injured, scores intimated.

This is a terrible story, but I actually believe the more terrible story is how effective the American Christian right is now in East Africa.

Much of this current violence can likely be traced to Lou Engel, an American evangelical, who received permission to hold a kill-gays rally on the campus of Uganda’s most prestigious university, Makerere. More than 1300 people attended that rally in May.

As reported then in the Huffington Post Engel was a picture perfect conservative rabble rouser. To the American press he disavowed any animus towards gays and even any knowledge of the bill before the Ugandan legislature.

But once at the rally his tuned changed significantly and he was dispensing hate with incredible efficiency. He seemed to know that the five-year long fight for an anti-gay bill in Uganda so beautiful maneuvered and heavily funded by the U.S. Christian right was in trouble.

So his response was to say incredibly vicious things. “…he whipped up bizarre fears of evil gays lurking in schools in Uganda” according to Wayne Hudson in that Huffington article, along with screaming that Uganda was “ground zero” in the fight against gays.

This is what the American right does: lie, then use that lie to engage the deep-set anger of those foolish enough to consider it. Once engaged, the anger is finally corrupted to any use they wish.

Senators De Mint and Coburn will never succeed in punishing people in the U.S. for being gay, and not even Lou Engel could preach such nonsense here. So…

…they go to Africa, where the angers are greater and deeper, and they shift their lunacy for power there.

Mark Jordhal, a blogger friend in Kampala wrote me recently:

“The proposed bill found fertile ground here and, frankly, if you asked out on the streets at least 90% of Ugandans are fully in favor of the bill. The only thing that kept it from coming to be was the fierce international response and the fact that a third of Uganda’s national budget comes from foreign donors. Five years from now when that money is replaced by oil revenues, the story might be much different.”

Here at home there’s a glimmer of light that the ton of negative lying campaign ads are actually having a backlash effect.

I hope in the end Ugandans themselves will realize how they’re being manipulated, and manipulated not by some foreign power preaching an ideology, but by demons preaching hate, who have little concern for Ugandans themselves.

U.S. Kids Duped / Africa Disparaged

U.S. Kids Duped / Africa Disparaged

The International Club of Windsor High School, Colorado.

Here’s a perfect picture of what’s wrong with part of America: Kids, yes kids, duped by charity.

No one doubts the generosity of Americans. But charity must be researched first. And that’s what so many Americans just don’t do.

It would bother me less if it weren’t adults misleading kids. And I wouldn’t be quite so enraged if a series of subsequent adults didn’t affirm the original lie.

According to the Windsor, Colorado newspaper, The Beacon, Windsor High School students in northern Colorado are holding a big fund-raiser November 3 to help children fleeing a war zone in Africa.

The problem is, there is no war zone.

I don’t know if the lead teacher, Jackie Doman-Peoples, believes this. I tried to find out by calling her school and sending her an email, but she didn’t respond. So I don’t know if she just went onto the website of Invisible Children and didn’t dig deeply enough into their pages for the “current history” of Uganda and just got spell-bound by the movie about Invisible Children which no longer applies.

I don’t know if she then just decided, wow, that looks good, just like thousands of American idiots read a Sharron Angle’s poster and decide, wow, that looks good.

Doman-Peoples could have set me and lots of people in Uganda straight, but she didn’t. And I worry that she is leading her students to believe that their hard earned donations would be used to build a school to welcome recent escapees who had been kidnapped and turned into child soldiers by the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

The LRA hasn’t been active in Uganda for at least two years, maybe longer.

According to Human Rights Watch, the LRA was “pushed out of northern Uganda in 2005 [and] now operates in the remote border area between southern Sudan, Congo, and the Central African Republic.”

So there aren’t any children fleeing an army that no longer exists in a war zone that isn’t.

The Beacon fed into the online version of a major Ft. Collins newspaper, the Coloradoan, where it reappeared.

So, we know the Beacon didn’t fact-check, and we know the Coloradoan didn’t fact-check the Beacon, and we know that Doman-Peoples didn’t take the opportunity to tell me that she didn’t believe what was reported about her.

Now to be sure, the LRA is still a force to be reckoned with, but not in northern Uganda. This weekend the leaders of a number of African nations met in Bangui, Central African Republic (CAR), to plan a strategy to finally wipe them out.

This is because the LRA was defeated in northern Uganda, southern Sudan more than two years ago by a proactive Ugandan military mixed with adroit international diplomacy.

The African leaders met in Bangui to discuss the LRA, because that’s the country in which the LRA is now most active. The renegade leader, Joseph Kony, fled northern Uganda when his dwindling forces were being routed and is probably in a hold-up in Darfur, much closer to the CAR than Uganda.

LRA is now active in a place that’s as far from northern Uganda as Windsor is from Las Vegas or St. Louis. The displaced kids from this new war zone can’t be helped in northern Uganda. And unfortunately, these new war zone areas are far too unstable for schools of any kind at the moment.

My irritation is certainly not with the generous souls of those kids in the high school, or even with the good intentions of someone like Donam-Peoples. There are plenty of children still in northern Uganda who still need assistance from the war which ended two years or more ago. They will likely need assistance the rest of their lives.

But I’m mad as hell that the implication is that the war continues, there! It doesn’t! Or that innocent kids are still being displaced, there. They aren’t!

This is also a story of what happens to NGOs when they become unnecessary. They won’t admit it. According to Mark Jordhal, whose wonderful Ugandan blog first broke this story, Invisible Children doesn’t deny that fund-raisers are still using their materials, particularly the film, which claims that the war in Uganda continues.

Their website, under the page “History of the War”, has recently updated the facts. But their promotional materials remain steeped in the past, and it is that pitch, that kids are being kidnapped and escaping into Invisible Children’s welcoming arms in northern Uganda, which is a serious outright lie.

So if Donam-Peoples checked with Invisible Children, a charity which has accomplished a lot of good work in northern Uganda, she could have been misled from the getgo, because that’s what their site does. And good gracious me, why on earth would we question a good American charity?!

It’s so important to the peoples in northern Uganda/southern Sudan – and particularly their children – that we recognize their victory. Claiming that a war still exists trashes their victory and discounts their noble hopes for the future.

There is no excuse for this.

Even though Invisible Children is still showing their film literally to this day to raise money. A film which claims the war continues.

The film was shown Tuesday on the Main Campus of Temple University. Perhaps at the end of the showing the presenter explained it was no longer happening in Uganda, I don’t know. But this once good charity, having run out of its main justification for income, can’t seem to move on. There’s a lot of good charity work left in northern Uganda. This aspect to this story is a story in itself.

But I can’t get over the fact that children are being misled. You don’t muster the power of kids without knowing the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. It’s called:

Fact-Checking!

Katherine Popowski who wrote for the Beacon didn’t. And then David Persons, the editor of the Beacon didn’t. And by the time that the senior editor of the Coloradoan, Robert Moore, didn’t, it almost seems… true. And Doman-Peoples didn’t let me know if she did or not.

I held the publication of this post for two days to give all the above a chance to comment. I made phone calls to the school, sent emails to the teacher, the newspapers, the on-line reporter. Not one response. Not one email in reply.

They aren’t alone.

This may be the biggest problem in America, today. Not Knowing the Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth. But more importantly, not caring. Standing by your lie.

Thanks to Mark Jordahl in Kampala for bringing this to my attention. Take a look at his excellent blog, Conserve Uganda.

Prices Trending Lower for 2011

Prices Trending Lower for 2011

The weather’s been unusually rainy, but I can see through the mist to a 2011 landscape with fewer tourists on safari.

As we approach the most important annual conference for African tour companies in London next month, the news is leaking. Competition is fierce.

Budget travel has been all but wiped out. Midlevel travel is in fierce competition with a major decline in prices, and upmarket travel is contracting capacity and not increasing prices.

For the prospective traveler it looks good on two counts: (1) there will be fewer tourists, and (2) prices are stable or dropping.

For the local African tourism company, there’s going to be a lot of rolling up the sleeves and hard work. I predict more closures, merges and partnerships and a workforce that is likely to contract by another 5% before it bottoms out late next year.

The surge of travel that followed the technical end of an economic downturn is over, and vendors see this from slim forward bookings. By June of this year vendors had noticed a pullback in December holiday bookings, and pretty grim pickings for the start of the year.

This is an economic cycle at its perfection. When travelers realized the earth wasn’t coming to an end last year, those who had waited up to two years to travel all came at the same time. That’s now over, and the market is readjusting to levels that will be here for years to come.

Germany is an important source of foreign tourists to East Africa, and the German economy is doing well. So companies specializing in tourists from this area of north central Europe might even expand next year.

The other source of a smile is the coast. Sun ‘n sand holiday makers from Europe have replenished the Indian Ocean beaches. Charters were pretty full this past season and will likely stay that way next. Africa’s coast is now a nearly completely matured market that can rival coastal holidays almost anywhere else in the world, and so the value particularly for Europeans is pronounced. It’s a wonderful success story. Now, all we have to make sure is that security that Kenya and Tanzanian can provide will do the trick.

But as far as I can tell, Germany’s momentary economy strength and the East African coast are the only two positive signs in a year which otherwise looks very weak and pretty miserable.

Southern Africa’s ridiculously high exchange rates – a result of the world’s reliance on basic resources like gold in an economic downturn – are keeping prices for everything, including tourism products, ridiculously high and this will continue to depress that market.

Often budget travel does well in an economic downturn, but the problem this time is that the younger traveler no longer exists, the Asian traveler which flooded the market last year has stabilized and is decreasing, and all that’s left are pensioners with an increasing concern about their financial future.

To the extent that the midmarket doesn’t depress pricing enough, it will move down to the budget level. We see that happening right now with chain companies like Serena and Sopa providing Somak’s new customers. To the extent that the first two S-companies lack further pricing moves, they will drop customers to the bottom S.

And that’s where the stiffest competition will be next year: The midmarket. It’s where potential travelers will find the best values and where investors will have the most headaches.

The upmarket was the hardest hit when the economic downturn began in 2008, it rebounded the most in 2009, increased a wee bit again this year, and will take the hardest hit next year because its rebound was so high relative to the overall market. Although where it ends up as 2011 will be remarkably close to where it was in 2009.

The volatility of the upmarket is a result of its small size and ability to price quickly depending upon market trends. So with alarming speed &Beyond published incredible deals in early 2009, ended them with the same alacrity in 2010, and is now presenting them again for 2011.

&Beyond is the only transnational company throughout sub-Saharan and southern Africa, and so it has its feet solidly in two different mud pools. One might be sinking while the other is firm. It’s always a good company to look at for comparisons. Right now &Beyond’s pricing is getting much more aggressive in east than southern Africa, I think because of presumptions that Zimbabwe might be coming back on line and a recognition that the East African market for upmarket travel is cooling.

I’ll revisit all these general predictions with hard numbers after the November convention.

Not AfroPop! Afro Rock!

Not AfroPop! Afro Rock!


At last! A music festival that treats AfroPop as a melting Good Humor Thing. Last weekend’s Malawi Music Festival did it right.

The music of Africa has never been just drums and air blown through hollowed out animal horns bashed away on xylophones. And in Malawi, they just proved it!

Human voice in vibrant, distinctive exhalations is something the west has successfully adopted into its own music for centuries. And for the last generations good African musicians have been sticking punk into reggae!

Malawi hasn’t been a place for great African music festivals. In the past it was South Africa, Nigeria and Mali, more or less in that order. And South Africa will always dominate African music. But Nigeria is too complicated and Mali is now too unsafe.

So taking up the slack this year was Malawi’s Lake of the Stars. And what I particularly liked about it was they didn’t pretend to be AfroPop. This ridiculous notion that AfroPop is something discovered homegrown, sort of like a baobab tree, is nonsense. Modern African music has been a very recent work in progress, including so-called AfroPop, and is heavily influenced by the west, Britain especially.

The Lake of the Stars featured this perfectly. Not only were the great African stars included, but also western stars whose music is considered heavily influenced by African artists.

It is a two-way stage.

I’ll let you decide as you enjoy:


Peter Mawanga, a home-grown Malawian about as far away from AfroPop as Chicago is from Dakar. Great music. And his video really shows how modern life works its way into times of old.


Nyali is fantastic. This video explains specifically how they are trying to mix African culture into (in their words) “modern instruments” and music. What I find really interesting is a definite Arab cum-Egyptian vocal style.


Fabulous reggae by Malawian Chiozo. And the lyrics of this song explain why modern music anywhere, even Africa, will always be influenced by the west, for it was the west that conscripted Reggae and turned it into Chiozo’s style. (Go on YouTube to hear a blastful of Chiozo singing Frank Sinatra!)


Representing Big Time, the Noisettes, one of the UK’s 6th most popular bands according to Entertainment Weekly, came to the lake with their remarkable mix of reggae and early rock. The band has morphed from wild and crazy to a style that today evokes a close kinship with African love songs.


Now I’m not sure I like this. Oliver Mtukudzi-Raki : traditional African songs mixed (sometimes too mixed) into mixtures of mixed modern instrumentalism. It’s too mixed up for me, but he’s incredibly popular.


Sam Duckworth: Get Cape Wear Cape Fly. After a run-in with a conservative British politician several years ago, the British rock star Sam Duckworth became a converted political radical. His free concerts for poverty eradication at home and abroad have gained him international billings, but Africans feel some of his earliest music (D.A.N.C.E., in particular) shows a deep African affiliation.

There weren’t too many traditional performers, but here’s one. Aly Keita is from the Ivory coast and is famous for making his own xylophone-like instrument as a modern version of an ancient African hollow flute drum.


I hope like me, many of you won’t like this. But the point is that from the earliest bands in Africa, disco prevailed: Reverend and the Makers. Disco to me it is, no matter how interrupted the tempo or beautiful the video. AND disco will forever be in the African soul.


The epitome of the amalgam of Africa and the west is Afrikan Boy. From Nigeria, he’s made it big in the U.K., and now sends it all back home.


Zimbabwean Tinashe is widely considered to be the next rising star. This particular video is before he was signed by Island Records. You can go on YouTube to see how they polished him up, but I think this original is better.

Lovers of the New & Different

Lovers of the New & Different

It's war, Herman, war! BioWarDiversity!

We lovers of Africa are focused this week on the biodiversity conference in Nagoya, Japan. It’s a big conference with big ideas that will have very, very small outcomes.

As a kid who grew up in a reduced biodiverse environment (a crowded city suburb being sprayed by DDT and taken over by McDonalds), the moment I stepped into Africa my heart exploded with wonder. Then I went to the Amazon, having trained my senses of observation, and I’m still overwhelmed.

We like to see lots. Lots of legs and eyes, and lots of colors, and lots of unimagined shapes and even unexpected natural outcomes. This sense of newness is essentially an integral component of joy.

And that, in fact, is one of the main arguments for biodiversity. My great hero, E.O. Wilson, calls this biophilia.

It’s fitting that the UN staged this conference of nearly 200 nations in Japan, in the center of Asia’s modernity and development, because it’s there that biodiversity is of lesser importance.


This video is…Pure Joy! Thank you! Aldo Tolino.

Woe be it for me to characterize an entire hunk of world culture, but since I have no academic professorship to lose I’ll do so, anyway: Asian cultures are far more dedicated to stability and status quo than western cultures. Their much longer history provides many more models and guidelines for immediate sustenance.

(Two Qualifications. In blogs we have qualifications, instead of footnotes. 1-There are many Asians more passionate about biodiversity than George W. Bush’s EPA administrators. 2-Societies like ours, obsessed with wealth, may likely espouse biodiversity more than an Asian counterpart, but we may end up damaging it more.)

So while Asian myths and religions are far less egocentric, their economies and societies are more practical. If there’s a bluefin swimming out there, eat it.

It’s a rational argument. If instead we spend our resources to save the bluefin – which takes a lot more resources than eating it – we deplete our community’s ability to sustain itself, much less develop.

And once that bluefin’s gone? Aha, there’s the question, and there’s no obvious answer.

…….

Wilson believes this worry – this What If – is an important caution that has been hardwired into our brains. He doesn’t suggest, though, why Asian cultures might be less governed by this than he or I am, so I will explain: As cultures age (and Asian cultures are much older, remember?) our hardwired biophilia is eroded by fresh thought. Thinking mostly about a future infinitesimally small in any context of changing natural processes. Worries about the moment.

We Lovers of the New & Different have a very hard time trying to explain why we shouldn’t be pulling garlic mustard from our county preserves. Pure biodiversity nuts like me believe the world all by itself will find the best balance with the unnatural intruder known as a businessman.

That doesn’t mean some help isn’t needed, mostly in the form of stopping the Armani shoe from squashing a spider on the sidewalk – restraint, but it also doesn’t mean that the ecosystem doesn’t need wide leverage to create success when competing with Wall Street.

It also doesn’t mean that Richard Leakey isn’t right: a 6th great extinction may have been underway for some time, at least since the first edition in 1995.

And it’s not an extinction we should fear more than our overreaction to it by clearing garlic mustard from county preserves. The time would be much better spent in Nagoya trying to find a hotel room.

Not enough double negatives?

Next argument has many fewer conundrums, because it’s simple. If we don’t save that tree now, we won’t have discovered the cure for schistosomiasis that it carries.

An analog to the argument is also simple: we simply don’t know enough to risk losing something important to us. We aren’t skilled enough to know the effect of killing all those noseeums just because at the moment they’re crawling up our nose.

If you’d like a more academic summary of the warring sides, click here. McGill’s simple website reflects the broader arguments very well.

Almost all the countries of the world are represented at Nagoya for this conference, and those attending are widely in favor of protecting our biodiversity. But their handlers and the politicians to whom they report hold the purse strings. They aren’t policy makers, or if they are, they are there to soften any conclusions that might be made.

The troubled world of humankind has little time today to worry about the wild flowers in the garden. It’s the oil underneath that commands attention.

But ultimately.

The question is:

Are you smiling?

They Will Divorce

They Will Divorce

Guess what? After a generation of war the peace of a richly endowed part of Africa the size of Texas all comes down to … who gets .. That’s it! .. The what? OIL!

I’ve been writing for several years, now, that I believed – almost counterintuitively and certainly contrary to many observers — that southern Sudan would become a peaceful nation next year. Well, I might have been wrong. But not by much. It might be just slightly delayed as everyone works out who gets rich and who stays poor.

This week we watched some confused hand gesturing by Sudan’s current president, some rational talk by its senior foreign minister, some hand slapping by Hillary Clinton, and some sabre rattling by those expected to become the new South Sudan government. It wasn’t exactly getting ready for a ribbon cutting ceremony.

Other than the Balkans where the combined power of world force shellacked peace to death by imposing the breakup of existing states, or before that the implosion of the Soviet Union by capitalist viruses, there have been no breakups in existing countries in the world.

According to my calendar of state breakups, this was the next one. January, 2011.

The planned breakup of Africa’s largest country, The Sudan, into larger but poorer north and smaller and richer south, was the embodiment of a truly historic peace agreement in 2005.

Extreme, dictatorial and xenophobic Sudan agreed to a referendum. (That meant that individual southern herdsmen who were shot ten years ago if they looked a northern soldier in the eye were supposed to find a ballot box while keeping their eyes on the ground.)

The outcome was obvious from the beginning. The South would become a separate nation. Referendums on a separation are never scheduled because of uncertainty. When there’s uncertainty, unity rules.

The South and the soon to be “North” were never meant to be, anyway. The culture, religion, even geography is considerably different. Like so much that’s wrong with Africa, this was Britain’s fault for believing that contiguous deserts and swamps belonged together because there weren’t any cities in them (at the time).

Only needed one governor, then.

The point in scheduling a referendum is to give the divorcing parties time for counseling. You need to work out visitation rights, alimony, and the thorniest problem of all, oil.

Well, everything’s been worked out right on schedule except … oil.

I just don’t understand why this surprises everyone. Today’s headlines are running around the world proclaiming war.

War won’t happen. Peace is coming, but it might be delayed, so just breathe slowly. And who gets the oil will be decided in The Sudan long before Sunis, Shiites and Kurds decide who gets it in Iraq.

That is not to say that, like in Iraq, the uncertainty or poor agreement does not set the stage for civil war a decade hence. But my prediction stands. Sudan will become two within a few years at most without anymore fighting.

Kirubi vs. Obama

Kirubi vs. Obama

Kirubi vs. Obama. In change and hope, that is.
This sounds cheeky, but a blog by a Kenyan yesterday has inspired me more than Peter Baker’s interview of Obama. Anybody disagree?

Peter Baker’s in-depth interview of Obama published Tuesday in the New York Times really depressed me, and so what does a progressive American do when depressed? Obviously, read a Kenyan blog!

The Kenyans did only a little bit better than so-so in the recent Commonwealth Games, and Chris Kirubi’s blog pulled in readers with a “don’t worry it was great” congratulations before continuing on a lengthy discourse of what makes excellence.

I began to wonder if I were reading the text of one of my middle school teachers? It was pure American idealism. So different from what in my opinion is the state of America, today, as shown in Baker’s interview. It seems that in America, hard work and vision just doesn’t mean a lot any more.

Whereas in Kenya, hard work is really paying off with a surging economy and exploding modern culture. And Kenya’s Vision 2030 is one of the most ambitious and yet likely to be achieved goals any nation has ever set.

Here’s some of Kirubi’s blog:

“When I look at the lives of these athletes one thing I admire is their attitude and determination to excel. This got me thinking. What if we were to embrace the same spirit and adopt this attitude, determination in every aspect of our lives and businesses? Wouldn’t we be far off than we are now?

As a society we’ve accepted the incredibly durable myth that some people are born with special talents and gifts, and that the potential to truly excel in any given pursuit is largely determined by our genetic inheritance.

This is not so.

Excellence for me is derived from working and building what you have. It is not an inherited trait which determines how good you become at something, but rather how hard you’re willing to work.

Bear in mind that excellence comes at a price and you must be willing to pay that price.

If you want to be really good at something, it is going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with the frustrations, struggles, setbacks and failures that you encounter. In the end, becoming really good at something you’ve earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.

Remember that you have the remarkable capacity to influence your own outcome and that each time you fail is a chance to begin again this time more intelligently.

As my friend and renowned motivational speaker, Azim Jamal once said, “obstacles are part of the journey of life. When we keep our eye on the goal, obstacles are not threats. In fact, they become opportunities to create breakthroughs.”

If only Obama read my blog.

Kenyans Embrace Jewish History

Kenyans Embrace Jewish History

Taking a lesson from Jewish history, the Kenyans begin an important conference tomorrow outside Boston to boost their country to world prominence by 2030.

The official conference name is “Tap into Wealth”, but the name being used repeatedly in the Kenyan press is the “Diaspora Conference.”

Kenya’s certainty of becoming a middle-income nation by 2030 was given an important lift last month with the passage of its new constitution. That document gives dual citizenship to all Kenyans living abroad, and according to Kenya’s Business Daily immediately resulted in increased remittances and queries for new business partnerships from America.

Currently, Kenyans abroad remit more than $1.2 billion annually to Kenya and more than half of that comes from America. Kenya’s entire GDP for 2009 is estimated at just over $60 billion, so that represents a whopping 2% of GDP.

The process of enfranchising and then actively soliciting the franchised is a page out of the Book of the State of Israel, and the Kenyans are quick to point this out.

Following the November 2, 1917, letter by then British Foreign Secretary James Balfour to Baron Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, underlining the British vision to develop Palestine for displaced Jews, investment from the Jewish Diaspora began to flood into Palestine and has not stopped since.

Kenyans study this aspect of Jewish history with a view to recreating the conditions, today, that the British created in Palestine in 1917.

The conference commands big brass. Headliners include Kenya’s Deputy Prime Minister, Uhuru Kenyatta, and US Ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger.

Kenyatta is the son of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, and now the head of one of Kenya’s richest families. He is also widely seen as a presidential contender. Ranneberger is one of America’s most respected ambassadors in a generation, having worked tirelessly to bring Kenya and its constitution to the position it currently enjoys.

But underneath the glitter and star power will be a number of American Kenyans who now for the first time will have unfettered access to Kenyan development, because they will be considered normal Kenyan citizens.

Two of the principal U.S. organizers include Peter Wairegi, publisher of the African American Lifestyle magazine and on-line services, and Wilfred Saroni, current head of a Boston media group and formerly the CEO of a health care training college. In 2006 senior members of Congress awarded Saroni the “Ronald Reagan Republican Gold Medal.”

My interest is Kenya, but many other emerging countries in the world have similar plans. We as Americans need to take these seriously, as we didn’t the Brazilian and Chinese explosions onto the world scene.

Tanzania Violence No Catastrophe

Tanzania Violence No Catastrophe

A lot of hot air, and very little to fight about.
Sporadic election violence breaking out throughout Tanzanian cities is not a harbinger of any October 31 disaster. It’s not like Kenya in 2007.

Last week the most pronounced violence ever to hit Arusha town occurred when proponents of two opposing political camps tried planting their flags in the city market area. Police moved in to break up the heated exchange and proponents began pelting the police with stones.

The police responded with tear gas that at first actually attracted more brawlers into the fight, which did last several hours. The incident was over before nightfall and remains the most severe violence so far.

In Dodoma, Tanzania’s technical capital city, police began arrests yesterday afternoon of suspects they claimed were planning more election violence. The strict laws in Tanzania give police the right to hold such persons without charges for an indefinite period of time.

Unlike in Kenya three years ago, these are not issue-driven incidents. They are basically thugs and bullies whose local differences vary greatly from region to region. The difference between the various national parties in Tanzania is actually quite small with regards to substantive issues.

That was not the case in Kenya, where stark differences separated the people’s socialist candidate, from the ruling elite’s business candidate.

Another important difference is that Tanzania’s election on October 31 will not be close. It may be closer than 2005, when current president Jamaya Kikwete won by more than 80 percent of the vote. In fact a poll released yesterday stunned the nation when it suggested Kikwete’s margin this time may be less than 15%. But by most analyses, it will be considered a landslide.

The trigger for the massive Kenyan violence was an election so close that like Bush/Gore, the victor arose from the power extant. It was simply too difficult to untangle the closeness to obtain a rational, undisputed outcome.

And the final, possibly most important difference, is that there is no single hotbed of dissent in Tanzania, as in the massive Kenyan slums of Nairobi. It was there in Kibera and other slums surrounding Nairobi that the violence burst. There are no massive concentrations in Tanzania of populations who feel disenfranchised from the status quo.

So don’t worry as you read growing accounts of Tanzanian election violence. I don’t yet see any possibility of widespread reaction to the election two weeks from Sunday.

The Story of Simon Ndege

The Story of Simon Ndege

Mutt struggling to survive over the Nguruman Mountains.
Simon Ndege. Simon “Bird.” That’s what we called this little known man who has spent his life with Kenyan raptors.

In the earliest days of my safari guiding, hardly 30 years old, I irritated more than one client by insisting that we needed time to visit Simon Ndege. “To see a bird?!” was the universal exclaim. But once they did, their hearts never stopped racing.

Simon moved around a lot. He lived in old houses abandoned by missions in the middle of the Great Frontier, or he assumed a mud hut some affluent tribesman built. He was very shy and spoke so softly you wondered if there was a voice in there at all.

I’d crowd my clients about twenty yards from his hut, he’d disappear inside for what seemed like an incredibly long time, and then out he came with some magnificent raptor on his arm. His favorites were peregrines in the days the bird was very threatened, but mine was the gargantuan martial eagle. How he even kept it on his arm was beyond me.

And then, he’d fly the bird for us. Binoculars focused, the pigeon released, the raptor took off creating a wind storm around our heads. Once you synced onto the incredible soaring flight it was amazing! And then, when the dive to the kill came, it was absolutely unbelievable. Peregrines plunged down at 250 miles per hour!

I know that not a lot of my clients had the binoc skills to watch this, but then they would put the binocs down, squint and still get the rush watching the dot in the air fall like meteorite! Then, dinner over, Simon uttered one of his multitude of different whistles and the bird returned to his arm like a pterodactyl in a James Cameron movie.

Simon let us come because he was so poor. Finally a number of us, whom I’m sure he never knew, managed to direct a few yet respectable Saudi princes to him, and for a few years he earned some good money. A pair of Simon’s desert raptors sold for $25,000 in the early 1980s.

But Simon wasn’t interested in selling birds. He wanted to make them free. A number of organizations kept Simon alive and happy, as he moved shyly through life among his grand and awesome birds.

When asked for a bio that could top a blog a woman friend now writes for him, this was all he had to say:

“I was born and raised in Kenya and have looked after raptors ever since I was a small boy. I’ve been rehabilitating and conserving large African eagles including Martial eagles and Crowned eagles, as well as falcons and hawks, for the last 16 years for the Peregrine Fund and the National Museums of Kenya. I work wherever the birds take me.”

Simon’s latest project was “Mutt,” a Lammergeyer, one of the most beautiful and endangered raptors in Africa, also known as the Bearded Vulture. In a rare account of his work, the attachment perhaps obsession that this extraordinary man has for raptors spills all over the narrative. But in between the sad facts of the failure in reintroducing Mutt is revealed in much greater amplitude than I was ever privileged to know the story of a very special and dedicated lover of birds.

I have edited the original blog, which you can read here.

**********************
the Lammergeyer Release
account by Simon Thomsett
transcribed by Sheryl Bottner

I was asked by a friend about the outcome of the Hell’s Gate Bearded Vulture re-introduction project. There is no way I could answer what took up years of my time in a few brief sentences so I thought I could write this blog. In a nutshell, five Bearded Vultures (Lammergeyers) were rescued from Ethiopia in 2001-2002. The project had multi-NGO backing including support from the Peregrine Fund finance, Kenya Wildlife Service and the Ethiopian Wildlife and Conservation Organisation. The project was partly successful with two of five released birds surviving in the wild for years.

Our intention was to take 15 birds, some put aside for captive breeding, some for immediate release. We could easily have filled that quota with the abundance of Ethiopian nests, but logistically it provided tough to do. Although I had great support from volunteers and colleagues and for two years it was easy to see the famous “Lammergeyer’s of Hell’s Gate,” active persecution of the released birds and proliferation of industries within Hell’s Gate together with a burgeoning human population compromised the continuation of the plan. Two of the five birds were lost.

Mutt had to be recaptured.
With one of the remaining three birds recaptured to save its life, we changed our aim to captive breeding, recruiting birds within Kenya using a no-impact sibling rescue method we pioneered in Ethiopia. Although accepted, we failed to get adequate official assistance or appropriate permits. As a result we lost 4-5 opportunities to take young. In addition I closed down the facility in Athi and had to seek new homes for all the raptors there, including the remaining Lammergeyer called “Mutt.”

The final destination for Mutt the Lammergeyer was not as we had planned. I hoped that she would be free and find a mate in the Nguruman mountains on the Kenya and Tanzania border.

In February 2009 Laila Bahaa-el-din and I delivered Mutt to Mark Jenkins at Ol Donyo Laro, below the Nguruman Mountains on the Shompole plains near the Kenyan/Tanzanian border. Mark built a shed on a mountain ridge so that Mutt could establish herself and get “homed in” to the location. Despite the cage she was feather perfect but she was unfit for the wild, so I decided to rig up an outside flight arrangement that allowed her to fly some 90m. For this I needed Matusa my old assistant who came out of retirement to help. Matusa, I hoped, would be able to put Mutt out each day and return her in the evening to the shed, lest leopards eat her.

Finally we were ready to release Mutt and I drove back to the Jenkins’ ranch. This is some of the softest volcanic ash on earth. The wind-screen wipers struggled to keep dust out of our view. The air intake filter needed to be removed and cleaned every few kilometers. The drought was terrible at the time, exasperated by an invasion of livestock many times over that which the land could possibly sustain. Dead cattle and wildlife littered the road. Significantly not one was eaten by vultures or hyenas.

We met Mark Jenkins and after a grateful shower, fine meal and good night’s rest we continued the next day to drive the one hour up the mountain to Mutt’s domain. Matusa, well into his seventies, excitedly told me of the elephants that smashed trees outside of his banda the previous night. He recalled similar nights, many years ago near Machakos with a mournful shake of his head and click of his tongue. There haven’t been elephants there for the past 40 years.

The trouble with Lammergeyers (Bearded Vultures) is that they do not train up like other more conventional raptors. They find it difficult to land on a glove for example. They never get keen or hungry enough to consider flying to receive their food on a lure or glove like a hawk. While there is a negative side to training Mutt it would greatly have helped her overcome her physical weakness and allowed her to understand that she could habitually feed at a certain location. I just didn’t have the time to train her. The best we could do was to give her a long climbing rope to fly up and down from perch to perch. Since her earlier failed release I noted that she had spent much of her time leaping about and fracturing the tips of her flight feathers. She was obviously keen to go.

Mutt and two wild White-necked Ravens had become good buddies and I hoped they would help lead Mutt in search of food when she was free. I heard from the rangers that one raven got too cheeky and while stealing food was grabbed by Mutt. Some respect was now afforded to Mutt. Alarmingly the rangers and I had not seen more than three vultures from Mutt’s shed for the past nine months! Mark Jenkins had seen a few groups but he too recognized their serious decline. This was something inconceivable only a few years ago when dozens would be expected each day.

On October 7 we took Mutt’s jesses off. Matusa walked her to her favorite rock. Mutt sat there as though nothing had changed. I wanted no dramatic release. She should leave at her own chosen speed and not be hurried into it. The hours ticked by. The magnitude of the event was long past and we all turned our attention away. I lowered the camera. Then the wind stirred. She lifted off and sailed past the perch and over the valley.

We ran for binoculars and telescopes to see her traverse distant mountain ridges with the grace of a veteran. She vanished out of sight heading towards Tanzania. I turned on the radio receiver to hear its edifying silence. Later just before dusk the radio signal was faint, then strong. She had moved back into range. Somewhere within 30 kilometers she spent the night.

* * *
(From Jim: A successful release of a rehabilitated raptor begins with its first flight, but it never immediately flies away. Often for weeks it returns to the “hack” site where it first launched, where the falconer provides the normal meals the bird ate during captivity. As the bird regains its skills and develops its muscle tone, it will begin to hunt on its own, finally abandoning the hack site for good. Mutt never returned to the hack site, so Simon had to track her down.)
* * *

Mutt the Lammergeyer flew into a border zone where security is not so good. The next five days were some of the toughest I have had for many years. I scrambled, slid, abseiled and climbed in search of an elusive “blip” on a radio receiver. I was scared because if she was killed or disappeared out of radio contact I would have the death of a very rare animal on my conscience. The responsibility of it was sickening especially so as others would be sure to take a dim view of failure. In hands-on wildlife management critics are ever ready to oppose, no matter what the outcome. It was not good to worry about people’s opinions but as we searched with an ever increasing risk of finding her dead, I kept reinventing what I was going to have to report. In every respect this was the best chance Mutt would have, with the huge resources of Ol Donyo Laro supporting her. If she failed here she would have no hope anywhere else.

I exhausted three ranger patrols, which would have made me chuffed had I not been highly alarmed and in dread of finding her dead. Frustratingly Mutt proved yet again her total inability to return to the “hack” site for food. Instead she hid. Sometimes she must have flown out of one canyon into another, hugging the forested contours and never venturing out into visual range.

From a distance the Nguruman mountains look like rolling hills cloaked in forest with patches of cliffs and open grassland glades. From afar these look ideal and it is possible to find elephant paths that allow easy walking. You can walk the entire length of these mountains in glorious wooded avenues stamped asunder by millennia of elephants and buffalos. To picture the untrodden slopes in which Mutt was so unkind as to spend the night, think of taking a few dollops of mashed potatoes and arranging them in a neat line like Alpine mountains. Then with the back of the fork go berserk scraping the lower sides with furrows and ridges. Then pour thick gravy all over it so that you cannot see these wicked furrows and you have made the section of mountains in which Mutt decided to hide. It looks smooth and forested from the outside, but in fact it is deeply scared beneath with a myriad ridges. It is impossible to get a good fix on a radio signal because radio waves bounce or get cloaked depending upon the landscape.

Larle, a ranger who had helped me with the previous failed release, was inexhaustible and stayed with me for two days. Like me he was unarmed and did not carry a flak jacket, provisions, radio, heavy army boots etc., as did our original accompanying ranger force. We left them far behind as we moved mostly on all fours through terrible terrain.

The second night I woken with deep pain in the back and was unable to sleep until dawn. The day before, while negotiating a rocky slope in thickets I had slipped badly and hurt my stomach and back with the stiff backpack which had a thick kidney belt. The next morning I urinated some blood and decided to take it easy and stayed in camp. Thankfully things settled down. All I got that day from Mutt was a steady and reassuring signal coming from the same sort of area far across the valleys. The next day we went early with a fresh team who surged ahead and left me behind. They had no idea where they were going and soon came back. Cautious about my health I plodded along warning them that they had no idea what was in store for them. They needed to reserve their energy.

The next 10 hours saw us sliding and crashing up and down vertical banks, sometimes on ropes. The rangers would pause every hour to shake their heads in wonder. Surely none had seen these parts of the mountain. Mutt’s signal was wandering. She was flying. We went lower down the mountain descending hundreds of meters mostly on our backs and finally appeared at a large spring. The water was cold, very pure and much appreciated. The spring fed a small riverine line of tall trees and beyond it was the lowland hot acacia woodlands. The hill here was called Milima moto (meaning hot hill), and it lived up to it.

The rangers, feeling as though they had all survived an awesome experience all expressed a resolution that no matter what, we would continue on and find Mutt no matter how far she had gone. They were prepared to walk a week or more and have rations dropped on them from the sky. Still feeling beat from ailing kidneys, my comradery with my new fraternity faltered at this suggestion and I sincerely hoped that I could borrow a plane instead.

In line with her radio signal we saw a Crowned Eagle fly out over the hot lowlands and descend fast. I thought this odd because Crowned Eagles are restricted to the high forested slopes from which we had come. The radio suddenly went quiet, an ominous sign so we immediately pursued the signal now over this flat landscape. We trudged on towards a huge salt lake sweating profusely in the stifling heat. I tried the radio receiver and changed course to the left. It was so faint a signal and she sounded a very long distance away. Maybe she was covering ground fast. Then appearing before us were a few giraffe looking down, and there on the ground was Mutt. She had been beaten to the ground by the Crowned Eagle.

In the next few weeks I organized a new home for her at the Honorable Mutula Kilonzo’s residence near Machakos. Mutt has had more than enough opportunities for freedom and has demonstrated an inability to return to the place of release. She never ate and spent her freedom sulking, frightened and hidden. Even with the full support of Ol Donyo Laro and their formidable team of rangers we recognized that another release attempt would be fatal. I was disappointed in the lack of other wild Lammergeyers, as these hills were a previously known habitat for this species. The future of Mutt must now include captive breeding.

To be honest I dread the responsibility of re-opening the Bearded Vulture re-introduction project, as it will entail considerable physical effort and fiscal resources. Neither of which I have these days! The lessons I learnt nearly a decade ago were not so much the difficulty in achieving a re-introduction, but the insurmountable problems encountered in modern day conservation bureaucracy. Personally now, I have a few priorities to straighten out securing a place to work and live, before I can focus attention on Mutt, again.

Biopiracy in Africa

Biopiracy in Africa

STOP!! Don't pick it, honey! It's not yours!
So let’s say you’re enjoying the weeds in your backyard during this warm, beautiful fall when you come across this cute little azure flower. Don’t pick it! It might belong to Pfizer!

Last week’s major COWPEA conference that began in Nairobi and ended in Senegal is the latest of a number of African initiatives to take back their weeds!

Yes, I know, it’s sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? But it happens to be true. In today’s globally managed world of trade, more and more western corporations – mostly pharmaceuticals and agrogargantuans – are stealing magical African life forms that they then patent and make billions from.

These end product treasures include sugar substitutes, many drugs treating everything from diabetes to erectile dysfunction to weight-loss, to plants NASA can grow in space stations for feeding astronauts, to Australian hamburgers!

And the way the world’s closely held patent regulations work allows any corporation that gets its hands on the mother plant first, to look deep inside it for something useful, and then tweak it ever so carefully so that its chemical nature is changed enough to be considered “different.” Then, it patents it. Then, it owns it.

The reason Africa is such a big playground for this game is that the western world has essentially found everything in its own backyard already, and the world’s jungles are too pristine.

Too pristine?

Exactly. Africa has been worked over by growing human populations for millennia, unlike the depths of the Amazon or Borneo. Plants, fungi and microbes have had enough time to evolve into forms with greater associations to humans.

The earliest extant case of this biological theft from the world’s poorest currently benefitting the world’s richest was in the 1980s. Deft little organic theft from one of Kenya’s poorest, most primitive tribes, the Boran, and Zimbabwe’s least developed tribes, the Tuli, led to a current strain of beef used in Australia, an industry estimated to be worth about $7 billion annually.

Australian agro-researcher, Dr. John Frisch, was working to find a way to successfully supply Australian’s growing love of burgers. Australia is basically an arid land, especially where cattle farming occurs.

So he went to Kenya and discovered how healthy the cattle were in the deserts lived in by the Boran tribe. Not quite beefy enough, though. But apparently years before (maybe hundreds of years before) DNA pointed Frisch south, and he discovered in the much more developed country of Zimbabwe the same strain of Borani cattle now selected even better for mass breeding and slaughter among the Tuli tribe of herders.

So then what did these Australian cowpokes do?

Well, first they formed a respectable association, a “joint venture” that allowed Australian scientists into the Boran and Tuli communities doing undoubtedly good work like studying sand and inoculating cows against flu, while … just a bit on the side and very much on the sly… collecting embryos from pregnant cows.

The embryos were quietly taken to Cocos Island in August 1988 where they were implanted into surrogate cows. In March 1990, live calves – parading as ‘Aussies’ – landed in Australia. Since then the now named “Tuli breed” has largely been used as a crossbreed in Australia’s beef industry.

According to the Australian government the introduction of these embryos in 1988 now contributes A$2 billion annually to the value of the beef market.

And now, according to Oduor Ong’wen, director of a prominent Kenyan Trade Think Tank, Australians are selling (note the word, “selling”) pure-bred Tuli embryos on the world market.

And how much have the Boran or Tuli earned from this bio-theft? Zip.

(Much of this post can be attributed Ong’wen’s amazing Biopiracy article published this week in Pambazuka.)

Since that early beefy heist, there have been some victories for the little African guy. The most celebrated case came from the Kalahari Desert.

For thousands of years, the San people (Bushmen of the Kalahari and Namib Deserts) ate the Hoodia cactus to stave hunger and thirst. Unlike western remedies like caffeine or black market drugs, the cactus is a stimulant that doesn’t produce jitters.

In the mid 1990s, South African scientists from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) identified a previously unknown organic molecule in the Hoodia which they christened P57 (with no equivalent translation into click languages).

CSIR then patented the molecule and sold it in 1997 to Phytopharm plc, which in 1998 subleased the marketing rights to Pfizer for $32 million plus royalties from future sales.

The San people got it together and sued. They sued CSIR, Phytopharm and Pfizer. Pfizer has yet to develop a widely used drug from the source, but it has subsold some of its rights to a number of health food companies and it continues to study the molecule.

Meanwhile, the health food craze over Hoodia exploded and Pfizer easily recooped its initial $32 million investment by selling various rights to health food companies.

Pfizer and Phytopharm have settled with the San Peoples in a questionable agreement. The San are to get 8% of the royalties of any finally created Pfizer product. But there isn’t any finally created Pfizer product yet, even while Pfizer rakes in funds from the health food companies.

Boran/Tuli beef and Bushman uppers are hardly the tip of the iceberg. Current battles are raging in foreign ministries and trade organizations over hundreds if not thousands of life forms being taken from Africa by the western world and turned into lucratively marketed products.

Among the most contested right now, on which western corporations hold patents and Africans are trying to get their fare share, are:

– brazzeine, a protein 500 times sweeter than sugar from a plant in Gabon;
– teff, the grain used in Ethiopia’s flat ‘injera’ bread;
thaumatin, a natural sweetener from a plant in West Africa;
– the Kunde Zulu cowpea, a bean with super protein that grows fast and easily;
– the African Plum from Kenya for treating certain forms of Prostate cancer;
– a bacteria SE 50 found in Kenya’s Lake Ruiru used to treat diabetes in the drug acrobase;
– a bacteria stolen from a termite hill in Gambia used in an anti-fungal and an immunosuppressant, 29-desmethylrapamycin
– the seeds from a Congolese plant used to manufacture Bioviagra

But there are thousands more.

World law is just developing that will license and control this “BioPiracy.” Needless to say, the big firms are on the side of Pfizer.