Month: March 2011

Real People Making Real Choices in Cote d’Ivoire

Real People Making Real Choices in Cote d’Ivoire

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

By Conor Godfrey on March 7, 2011

I am an avowed Africa optimist, but that doesn’t mean we can’t call a spade a spade—the situation in Cote d’Ivoire is a disaster for everybody.

Last Thursday, forces loyal to incumbent Laurent Gbagbo even opened fire on women engaged in a peaceful prayer-protest.

This is a video of the crackdown taken on a participant’s cell phone.

(Warning; the violence that starts about ¾ of the way through this video is very graphic.)

I post the video for two reasons: one, I think it is interesting for a non-West African audience to see what an Ivorian protest looks like, as opposed to an American, or North or East African demonstration.

The second and more important reason is because I have noticed in myself a tendency to treat people in these conflicts as expressions of larger ideas rather than flesh and blood citizens that run mechanic shops and sell bean sandwiches at corner stores and leave grandchildren behind.

If you also sometimes watch CNN and seize on “Pro-Democracy Partisans” in Libya, or “Righteous Demonstrators” in Cote d’Ivoire, this video might help you remember that protesters are best viewed as themselves first and ideologues second.

I needed a visceral reminder.

Watching the brave women praying in the middle of an Abidjan street got me thinking about protests in general.

If violence can not win decisively, and/or the use of violence will merely serve to legitimize a violent response, what options do engaged citizens have?

Some of you may have seen the New York Times article last month about Mr. Gene Sharp.

I had never heard of Mr. Sharp or his ideas–but guess who had–Otpor in Poland, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, dissident movements in Burma, Estonia, Bosnia, Zimbabwe, and of course in Tunisia, just to name a few.

Professor Sharp’s contact with these diverse movement comes mostly in the form of two famous writings—“From Dictatorship to Democracy,” and “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action.”

If you don’t have time to read the entire “From Dictatorship to Democracy” (I confess I did not), the “198 Methods of Nonviolent Actions” makes for snappy reading.

The New York Times article highlights “protest disrobing” as a creative technique; I liked “sky and Earth writing,” “mock awards,” and “mock funerals.”

While we are thinking of protests, next week, I would like to take up the case of Gbagbo and Ghaddaffi’s supporters.

In all of the unrest so far, ‘pro-regime’ has been synonymous with guilty, according to the media. I think it would be worth a few moments to think about whether or not that is always true.

The Great Green Wall

The Great Green Wall

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

by Conor Godfrey on March 4, 2011

Big projects capture the imagination. They attempt to solve big problems with eye-popping solutions. The Apollo missions, the Panama Canal, the Hoover Damn; these were projects that defined generations.

How about this for a big project– a wall of trees, 15 kilometers thick, stretching 8,000 km from Dakar to Djibouti, interlaced with water retention ponds and plants designed to improve soil quality.

This is exactly the big idea that got its final approval this week in Bonn, at the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

Just as competition with the U.S.S.R. spurred the U.S. into high gear in the space race, the Great Green Wall project also has a nemesis—the Sahara Desert.

This sandy foe creeps south at approx 48 kilometers per year consuming farm and pasture land in a decades long war of attrition.

In some cases, such as Nigeria, the desert claims almost 1,400 square miles of land every year.

Many months ago on this blog I wrote about this very problem; desertification and other forms of environmental degradation have put Nigeria’s identity groups on a collision course, competing for ever scarcer environmental resources.

Take a look at this picture of Lake Chad.
The blue represents the actual lake, and the green demarcates the lake’s historical limits.

Lake Chad has shrunk by 95% in the last 50 years.

The consensus view among experts is that about 50% of the water loss was caused by desertification due to overgrazing, and the other 50% to long term climatic changes.

Chad is a major supporter of the Great Green Wall project.

11 desert and Sahel countries–Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan—will collaborate to implement the massive Great Green Wall.

This will require unprecedented collaboration between 11 countries, with 11 environmental/agriculture ministries, teams of international scientists, and thousands of communities in the Sahel speaking a multitude of local languages.

I am skeptical but inspired.

Much like other big projects launched to solve big problems, the three gorges Dam or the Panama Canal for example; the devil will be in the details.

In addition to standard worries about corrupt contractors, the real worry here is simple free riding. Each country faces a threat from desertification, but the threat level varies, and the implementing capacity of each country varies even more.

The funding will mostly come from outside sources, including $119 million from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and several billion dollars from other international donors, but each participating country will be responsible for educating local communities and managing modern tree nurseries, as well as the logistics involved in continuously transporting saplings and other inputs to the Green Wall.

The projects supporters claim that the wall will “sequester 3.1. million tons of carbon”, reverse Sahel desertification, improve the climate in the semi-arid Sahel region, and offer income generating activities for communities that border the wall.

Detractors question this narrative: they note that the Sahara is not advancing per se, but rather over grazing and deforestation in the border regions have removed the roots that traditionally anchored the soil, leaving the soil vulnerable to wind and other elements.

And how will local communities benefit in the short term?

Even if an education campaign succeeded in connecting changing climate patterns and decreasing pastureland with the absence of trees, how local communities justify taking time from tending their own land, animals, or jobs to manage their section of the wall when the benefits will not be apparent for years?

I would be very interested to hear opinions on this project from conservationist or from people that have lived in Sahel communities.

Note: This has been tried before. In China most recently, and in U.S. back in the 1930s on a much smaller scale in the “Shelterbelt Project”.

North African Film Reviews: Bab’Aziz; The Prince Who Contemplated his Soul, and Outside the Law

North African Film Reviews: Bab’Aziz; The Prince Who Contemplated his Soul, and Outside the Law

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

by Conor Godfrey on March 3, 2011

Every Thursday in February the Smithsonian Museum of African art opened their galleries for the North African Film Festival, highlighting films from Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria.

I would accuse the Smithsonian of war profiteering, but I suppose they had this planned long before Tunisian president boarded his plane for Saudi Arabia.

My favorites this month were Bab’Aziz;The Prince Who Contemplated his Soul, and Outside the Law.

These are as different as two films can be; the first is a beautiful fairly tale that unfolds ever so slowly across the rolling sand dunes of southern Tunisia, while the other is an urban, visceral, action packed guerilla war epic with an elevated body count.

However, I think both put you in touch with the modern fabric of N. African life; one with the whimsical fantasy and mysticism of Sufi Islam, and the other with the legacy of pain and resistance that I have been told figures quite prominently in North Africa’s public consciousness.

Bab’Aziz (The Prince Who Contemplated his Soul)
Director: Nacer Khemir
Writers: Tonino Guerra (collaboration), Nacer Khemir
Stars: Parviz Shahinkhou (Bab’Aziz), Maryam Hamid (Ishtar)

This movie is filled with music—not just the energetic, haunting Dervish music that various wandering souls sing or play throughout the film, but also the music of the wind over the dunes, or the cackle of a fire.

Many reviewers called Bab’Aziz a “visual poem”. The entire movie centers on the Journey of Bab-Aziz, a blind dervish, and his spirited granddaughter Ishtar, as they trek through the desert in search of a gathering of dervishes that takes place once every 30 years.

As Bab-Aziz reminds Ishtar and the viewers throughout the movie, no one knows where the gathering is to be held, but everyone who has been invited will eventually find their way there.

This set up mirrors the quote from the Hadith, or sayings of the prophet, that opens the film—“There are as many paths to God as there are souls on the Earth”.

A quick refresher on Dervishes.

Dervishes are Sufi Muslims following an ascetic path, or Tariqa (Interestingly enough, in the West African Fulani language spoken where I spent my Peace Corps days in the Fouta Jallon, Tarika means tale or narrative.)

Their origins are most likely Iranian and/or from the Indian subcontinent, but today Dervishes are most closely associated with Turkey and to a lesser extent North Africa.

Much like Christian monks, Dervishes can belong to any number of orders whose garb and rituals may vary.

In general, Dervishes take a vow of poverty and seek spiritual purity and enlightenment through humility and dedication to religious principles.

Back to my thoughts on Bab’Aziz.

Time seems suspended as Bab’Aziz and Ishtar wander through the dessert.

The desert becomes a transformative space where normal rules are suspended, and the Dervish aesthetic predominates.

People from the real world that wander into this transformative space throughout the movie are crushed and humbled by the immensity of the desert, and eventually driven onto the invisible path beneath the desert sands that winds, seemingly aimlessly, toward the gathering of dervishes and the unseen conclusion of whatever it was that drove that soul into the desert in the first place.

Young Maryam Hamid puts in a fabulous performance as Ishtar, the grand-daughter, and the supporting cast plays their bit roles well enough to let the “visual poem” unwind without distractions.

Some of my companions found this film beautiful, but slow.

I am sympathetic to that critique in so far as the there is almost no ‘action’ in the film, but it takes time to suffuse the audience with the music and silence of the desert. I think director Nacer Khemir hopes that viewers leave this film feeling crushed and humbled, but with the feeling that somehow they too are on a path.

Outside the Law
(Hors la Loi)
Director: Rachid Bouchareb
Writer: Rachid Bouchareb
Actors: Jamel Debbouze (Saïd), Roschdy Zem (Messaoud), Sami Bouajila (Abdelkader), Chafia Boudraa (their mother), Bernard Blancan (Colonel Faivre)

Do not take a first date to this movie. Outside the Law is 220 minutes of non-stop high drama, with nary a smile for comic relief.

That being said, it is one of the best guerrilla war epics I have ever seen.

The film is also very controversial in France.

Its release drew thousands in protests in Southern France where the war in Algeria still raises temperatures on both sides.

The film opens with a split screen. On one side, jubilant scenes of V-E day in Paris, French women are kissing members of the resistance in the street, and De Gaulle is congratulating the French population on throwing off the tyranny of the Nazi oppressors, while on the other side of the screen, the French military and pied noirs (European Colonists living in Algeria) are massacring peaceful protesters on May 8th, 1945 in the Algerian town of Setif.

This same message is repeated in a myriad of different ways throughout the film.

How can the French, who have just thrown off the chains of oppression themselves, not recognize the righteousness of the Algerian cause?

How can they not see that they have become the oppressors?

In one seat gripping scene, the three brothers at the center of the film kidnap a French colonel who had distinguished himself in the resistance during the Nazi occupation.

They compliment the colonel on having fought on the right side, the side of justice, during the occupation, and ask him to make the same decision again; to fight on the side of justice, in this instance, against la gloire de la France, rather than for it.

The colonel’s decision will ripple through the lives and deaths of the film’s cast for the remainder of the film.

I am neither French nor Algerian, and do not feel entitled to the gut wrenching emotion that this conflict evokes in those whose lives were touched by it…but this film made me feel it anyway.

Where is Africa?

Where is Africa?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

by Conor Godfrey on March 1, 2011

For the past several weeks pundits have been scouring the world for countries that might, in any way, shape or form, relate to the events unfolding in North Africa.

Darts have landed on China, Iran, all the countries of the Middle East, as well as the remaining Eastern European and Central Asian despots.

On this blog and elsewhere there has also been a lot of talk about what the revolutions north of the Sahara mean for Africa.

But wait—I thought this all started in Africa?

Is there really any debate as to whether or not Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are on the African continent?

Let me start with the punch line: Africa is more of an idea than a place.

An idea anchored loosely in geography, but far more in psychology.

To illustrate what I mean, I have mocked up a conversation I find myself in with astounding regularity. I currently work at an organization promoting U.S. – Africa trade.

When pushing the new Africa to skeptical investors the conversation often goes something like the following:

The investor first expresses skepticism that Africa fits their firm’s risk profile.

The Africa expert then points out that the African reality has probably surpassed the investor’s outdated perception of the continent: in fact, 6/10 of the fastest growing economies in the world from 2000-20010 were in Africa.

This will momentarily compete for space in the investor’s brain with the national geographic special he was watching last night as he went to bed.

“Which countries?” he might ask.

“Angola (11.1% GDP growth), Chad (7.6), Mozambique (7.6), Rwanda (7.1), Nigeria (8.7), and Ethiopia (8.4).”

“That is all very interesting” says the investor, but, “…many of those countries are simply benefiting from an increase in oil and commodity prices. And my firm does not like the lack of transparency in most of those nations.”

The Africa expert is undeterred.

Well, “Do you know that Africa boasts a number of countries whose good governance ratings exceed many other countries with whom you already do business?

According to Transparency International, Botswana ranks 33rd in word in terms of transparency, with many other African Countries falling above the median– Mauritius (39th), Cape Verde (45th), Seychelles (49th), South Africa (54th), Namibia (56th), Tunisia (59th), Ghana (62nd).

These countries all outrank China (tied 78th), Thailand (78th), Brazil (69th), Greece (78th) and many other countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Find the transparency International corruption rankings here. ”

Still, the investor remains unconvinced.

“Well, those were intriguing comparisons, but some of those island nation’s with good governance are more Indian than they are African, and we all know that South Africa, Botswana and Ghana are outliers in terms of governance. I’m still not sold on Africa”

The Africa expert gives it one more go—“Mr. Investor, do you know that Africa is growing so fast that there are 240 million people who today can only meet their basic needs who will become consumers with disposable income by 2015?

Or, that Africa’s level of urbanization is comparable to those of India and China when those countries’ growth rates began to accelerate?

Or, that North Africa has the most favorable labor demographics in the world, with large numbers of highly educated young people?”

“North Africa?” exclaims the investor. “You mean the Middle East?”

Sigh.

This type of Socratic exchange on nominally African opportunities leaves people with the idea that Africa refers only to the bush, to places with anemic growth, periodic violence, and a rapacious class of elites.

Anything that does not fit that mold on the African continent is ascribed to something or somewhere else—oil, the influence of a former colonial power, similarity to another region, historical idiosyncrasies, anything to avoid the cognitive dissonance generated by the thought of an exciting, stable, growing African economy.

Note: Nothing this archetypal investor said was 100% inaccurate, his comments simply revealed a common bias in our thinking about the African continent.

This is the most diverse continent on the planet, and each of Africa’s 53 (54 with South Sudan) nations manifests that diversity in different ways.

Different historical trading partners, different chief exports, different histories of exploitation and resistance, etc… .

But all of these nations are, to borrow a popular cliché, made in Africa. They are shaped by the geography and cultural heritage of the African continent, from the sands of the Sahara to the waters of Lake Malawi, from teeming urbanity in Nairobi slums to Dogon cliff villages in Mali.

Africa lays claim to all of this—successes included.

Libya beyond the headlines

Libya beyond the headlines

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

by Conor Godfrey on February 28, 2011

News on the ongoing conflict in Libya continues to head the news on the front page of The New York Times, and thus there is little I can add in terms of late breaking news that isn’t one click away.

What I can do, however, is go a little deeper than the coverage I have read so far on Libya’s unique tribal dynamics.

There is a reason that Reuter’s stringers on fickle and expensive satellite connections, trying not to get in the way of a stray bullet, haven’t been able to do in-depth research on tribal alliances in Libya—they are helluh complicated.

While I’m sure a Libyan eight year old could rattle off tribal histories like my little cousins can the Johnny Appleseed story, it took me a few hours of background reading just to master the basics.

I believe that geography is the defining influence in how individuals and societies develop, so I like to start with a map.

Courtesy of STRATFOR Global Intelligence


This map does not detail the 140 tribes that make up the fabric of Libyan society, merely the large umbrella groupings of Berber, Bedouin (Arab), Toureg and Toubou.

In reality, the overwhelming majority of Libyans are ethnically mixed, especially among the nominally Berber or Bedouin/Arab populations.

Look at the physical map and note the three natural/historical regions of Libya; Tripolitania in the West, Cyrenaica in the East, and Fezzan in the dessert interior.

The two most densely populated regions—Tripolitania and Cyrenaica—are separated not only by the Gulf of Sidra but also by an inhospitable stretch dessert.
Historically these regions have seen the world quite differently.

For most of the last thousand years, Tripolitania considered itself part of the North African Maghreb, the sandy north western swath of the continent that takes its name from the Darija Arabic word for Morocco — Maghrebi, or land of the setting sun.

Cyrenaica in the East was always oriented toward the Islamic world, with closer ties to neighboring Egypt than to Tripolitania, the West.

This Islamic orientation is the genesis of Colonel Ghaddafi’s seemingly absurd comments about Al-Qaeda infiltrating the Cyrenaica based protest movement centered in Benghazi, Cyrenaica’s capital.

Fezzan, the dessert interior, is home to a variety of traditional dessert peoples whose seat at the negotiating table comes from their ability to sabotage oil fields and equipment in the interior.

Now overlay the politics of 140 tribal groupings on top of this geographic powder keg.

Moammar Ghaddafi is not one Goliath against armies of Davids. Autocrats almost never are.

Dictators exert power and influence by dispensing patronage and maintaining the loyalty of what Professor Graeme Robertson calls “critical elites.”

This class might include military and security services, business people, religious leaders, or influential local leaders.

Momar Ghaddafi hails from the small al-Qaddafa tribe based in Tripolatania, and he has maintained power and influence for 41 years by dispensing patronage to several key tribes including two of the largest, the Warfallah and the Margariha. Both these tribes originate in Cyrenaica, or eastern Libya.

Almost immediately after Ghaddafi responded with deadly force to the first protests in Tripoli, a group of elders representing the Warfallah tribe publically broke with Ghaddafi.

And thus fell one pillar of the tripartite alliance of the al-Qaddafa, Warfallah, and Margariha crashed to the ground.

This set off a series of smaller tribal defections that further weakened Colonel Ghaddafi’s military readiness.

The third pillar of the ruling alliance, the Margariha tribe, originally hails from the desert Fazzan region but today can be found in most coastal cities.

The balance of power currently rests with decision makers in this tribe.

While the tribe has not publically broken with the al-Qaddafa, many of the tribe’s most prominent personages have been seen aiding the rebels.

If the Margariah jump ship en mass, Colonel Ghaddafi will find himself surrounded by enemies with only the al-Qaddafa for support.

If this comes to pass, members of the Colonel’s own tribe may be tempted to assassinate him to stave off the inevitable reprisals.

If you want more information on the 135 tribes I did not mention, check out this special report on Libya’s tribal dynamics by STRATFOR Global Intelligence.

On Safari: Is The Delta Floating Away?

On Safari: Is The Delta Floating Away?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Climate change is effecting Africa seriously, and perhaps nowhere is it as evident as in the Okavango Delta.

The delta is Botswana’s landmark attraction. It’s where the Kalahari ecosystem floods. That’s right, a “desert” in flood.

The unusual continental divide in Africa is very close to its western coast. And the torrential rains of Angola flow regularly east creating some of Africa’s great rivers like the Zambezi, and some of its most famous natural wonders, like Victoria Falls.

And the Okavango Delta, for here the water spills onto a flat scrubland, creating ever-changing islands and massive marshes and wetlands. And the rich nutrients deposited create a fertile ecosystem with as diverse a biomass as found anywhere in Africa.

But the Delta is being stressed by global warming. More water than ever imagined is flowing into it. And this year it’s a double whammy as unusually heavy rains pour relentlessly onto the delta as well.

Our camp’s airstrip was flooded out. The circuitous tracks we had to take from the nearest surviving airstrip challenged our Landcruisers as they submerged well above their floorboards and bubbled through flooded areas like tugboats!

High water time in the Delta is May and June. Yet already in March the water was higher than it had ever been before.

What does this mean? For one, there have been many resident animals like elephant, giraffe, buffalo and sassaby that may be pushed out. For another, reeded wetlands supporting many bird rookeries may be pushed far away towards the radical climates of the pans.

And for populated areas like the important central city of Maun, humans are being relocated away from the rising tide.

The wilderness is resilient. I have little doubt that for many years of stress during our global climate change, plants, animals and birds will adapt. But man’s permanent settlements, including existing camps and lodges much less cities and villages, will be much more traumatically challenged.

On Safari: Wells to Protect Game?

On Safari: Wells to Protect Game?

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

For a very long time throughout southern Africa wilderness areas have been supported by manmade wells to provide year-round sources of water for the game. It’s absolutely necessary.

And so different from East Africa, for example, where this level of intervention in the wild hasn’t yet occurred.

I visited Nxai Pan national park in Botswana, which is very similar to the nearby and probably better known Makgadikgadi Pan to its south. Together they represent the largest salt pans in the world, ancient lakes that if connected would have been among the largest fresh water lakes in the world.

Although technically salt pans are incapable of any vegetative growth, there are vast grassland and scrubland areas on the periphery which bloom in this rainy season.

And today, thanks largely to the manmade water wells drilled in these peripheral areas, considerable game can reside year-round. True, the vast majority appear during the rainy season (November – March) but the “borehole” ecology is creating a year-round big game ecosystem.

I was there as the rains ended in March, together with hundreds of zebras which only a few short weeks before were thousands of zebra. There were also lots of wildebeest, elephant, and the springbok and oryx are resident year-round.

By the park’s principal water hole reside the park’s only lion pride. They don’t have much work during the dry season, because the animals in the area during the dry season will have to come to drink at some point. So the lions just hang out around the water hole.

At this time of the year there’s a bit more of a challenge, and we found the pride of 8 lion wandering some distance away into a dense forest, stalking impala. Shortly thereafter, we saw a magnificent male leopard strung (it seemed quite uncomfortably) atop the stick branches of a dead tree in the middle of that forest. Clearly, he had been chased up there by the lion.

The true Nxai pan is an amazing salt flat with raised islands of vegetation. Nxai’s most famous is “Baine’s Baobabs”, a little forest of 8 remarkably sculpted baobabs in an area that couldn’t be more than a half-acre large. It creates one of the most scenic landscapes in Africa that I’ve ever seen.

When boreholes for game reserves were first contemplated in the early part of the last century, there was some considerable debate about whether it was appropriate. The debate no longer exists.

I suppose as an East Africaphile I have an innate aversion to this, and many other similar management techniques employed in the south. Such as carrying capacity land management and culling.

But in the end, is it any different than the bird seed in my feeders at home, or the heated bird bath on my deck in the winter?

On Safari in the Kalahari

On Safari in the Kalahari

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Tourism has come to the Kalahari Desert, but not everyone wants it to, not least some of the Bushmen who live there.

I spent two days in the Central Kalahari Reserve at a beautiful 8-bed lodge called Tau Pan Camp, experiencing this huge natural wonder as a dream come true. I was not disappointed.

The Kalahari Desert is vastly misunderstood, for it is hardly an expanse of sand, nothing like the Sahara or the desolate sands of the Namib just to its west. The reserve itself is just over 20,000 sq. miles, although this is probably only two-thirds of the entire ecological area.

This huge area – about twice the size of Massachusetts – is a magical scrubveld, similar to much of Arizona and New Mexico. Beautiful succulents, innumerable wild flowers, characteristic water-saving tubers and even acacia and baobab trees pepper a certainly very flat landscape.

It is particularly beautiful now, as the intense summer rains begin to end. And the many varieties of grasses draw large amounts of game like oryx, springbok, sassaby and red hartebeest.

And these beautiful, colorful creatures tend to linger at the Kalahari’s many pans, like Tau by which I stayed. These are sometimes massive, sometimes small depression remnants of ancient lakes, which today fill only briefly and then with very shallow pools of water. Some through eons of evaporation become actual salt pans. Others, like Tau, become immense fields of nutrient grasses with the rains that begin in November and last through March.

And not just animals, but remarkable birds are found here. The rains allow the birds to bloom as much as the grasses! I was mesmerized by the many strikingly colorful black khorans displaying, their bright red faces calling love tunes to any nearby lady, quite oblivious to our interest!

But the Kalahari’s marvelous ecology is an on-off one regarding water. Come the end of April, there is often nothing but dust until the new rains in November. But this magical places stores much of the rainy season underground, and occasionally (and more so with help from boreholes) the water is available year-round to the resident Kalahari lions and other predators.

And therein lies the controversy. The Botswana government is waging battle against some of the San (Bushman, click-speaking) people to force them from their traditional lifestyles into community based tourism projects. Part of this battle is the drilling of boreholes to establish permanent colonies of wild animals.

One early morning I was taken by one San, who in English vernacular chose the name “Custom”, into the bush not far from the lodge. There he demonstrated some truly remarkable skills of the desert nomad, including how to snare small game like steenbok, how to extract medicines and poisons from the vegetable bounty that surrounded us, how to start a fire and how to extract pure water from the large turnip-like tuber base of a flimsy little succulent.

Custom, being a part of the tourism industry already, had no qualms about the government’s moves. But as for his relatives? He was equivocal.

There are only two places currently in this massive area for tourists. I stayed at the stunningly beautiful Tan Pan Camp. My life has been in tourism, and I feel when done properly, it contributes as much to the well-being of current peoples as to the preservation of traditional cultures.

What none of us want to see is a degeneration of traditional cultures into the refrigerated housing of current American Indians. Let’s hope the Botswana government and San peoples will find the right way.

On Safari: A Glimpse of Sad Zimbabwe

On Safari: A Glimpse of Sad Zimbabwe

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

The sad state of affairs in Zimbabwe was not something I expected to be a part of on this trip. The surprise was shocking.

My flight Wednesday from Nairobi to Gaberone, Botswana, traveled via the pariah city of Harare, and it’s one of the few air services that exist into and out of this capital of oppressed Zimbabwe.

So it was not unexpected that most of the passengers were headed to Zim. These were Zimbabweans, not NGOs or aid givers or missionaries. They were people who were returning to their country after business abroad.

At least half of that was with very small children who required medical attention that no longer exists in Zim. It was quite uplifting to see these now healthy kids jumping around. But the flipside were the passengers boarding in Harare for Nairobi. These children were being carried onto the plane looking dazed and very ill, totally silent, by very concerned parents.

And sitting near me in business class were three Zim government officials. Two sat far away from a third, and whispered constantly. The third took his seat and started demanding champagne, then speaking louder and louder to those of us around him, about inconsequential and unintelligible stuff.

When the flight attendant asked him to be quiet during the video on flight safety as we taxied out, he raised his quite large bulk out of the seat and started shouting at her, reminding her of his special importance.

It was a sad reminder of the state Zim finds itself in today. Children with no modern medicines, parents with no alternatives abroad, and the big bosses taking advantage of them both.

On Safari: Always Begin with Nairobi

On Safari: Always Begin with Nairobi

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

No matter what I’ll be doing, I start my African journey in Nairobi, because to me that seems to be the heartbeat of Africa. It’s where you really find out what’s really going on.

It’s also a good idea to arrive at night, although I was unable to this time. Morning traffic in Nairobi is absolutely unbelievable. At night, the ride from the airport to the center city takes all of 20 minutes. It took me, today, 2 hours.

That may not seem unbelievable to someone working in Manhattan and commuting from a distance Connecticut suburb, but this was 12 miles in 2 hours. Most of the time you sit in a car with an engine turned off, waiting for the spurts of movement caused by police opening up certain routes into the city’s roundabouts.

I remember years ago in Bangkok that it was the same, so I also remind myself of this, because in those days Thailand was at the stage of underdevelopment that much of Africa is, today. And frankly, I think Africa’s going to reach Thailand’s level much more quickly.

After getting settled into my hotel, the rest of the day was spent reuniting with old friends, buying a new phone, and completing a consulting job critiquing a new Nairobi hotel transparent politics and very positive about the future based on the great performance of the present. Like many developing economies, Kenya’s GDP growth may approach 8% this year, phenomenal by developed world standards.

So more people have jobs and more jobs are better paid. It’s still a long, long way from what we consider tolerable. Parents still play an active role in getting their adult children .

The folks in Kenya are doing better than ever, energized by new and more jobs, and in probably more than half the households, young children are raised by grandparents, not parents.

This isn’t because the parents have abandoned their children, quite to the contrary! It’s because so many jobs are far from home and require the parents to live apart from their families, sometimes for weeks at a time. This is quite common. Nearly a sixth of Kenya’s population lives in or around Nairobi, but jobs are spread throughout the country.

As the Kenya economy improves, many Kenyans are beginning to feel that the adult children who had moved to places like the U.S. or the U.K. should return. It’s a particularly appealing feeling, since perhaps as many as half of the Kenyans living abroad are doing so as illegal immigrants.

Finally, today, I critiqued the new Sankara Hotel in Westlands. This is an upmarket area of Nairobi experiencing very rapid development, including a number of new NGO offices and residences. It’s near the National Museum.

Sankara is a sleek and beautiful hotel with a minimalist style that will remind guests of America’s Omni or W hotels. The rooms are spacious, beautifully furnished, lavished with lots of teak and glass. The hotel is an indoor/outdoor with the three outer edges of the pyramid where the rooms are, and the center a massive atrium.

It includes Nairobi’s swankiest pastry shop which looked to me like an art gallery more than a place to buy sweets! The pastries are works of art, and most, far too big for me!

The wine cellar, displayed entirely in glass on glass shelves in climate controlled glass pantries, houses some of the most famous wines in the world.

This is a hotel for the young, the romantic and the jet-setter, and it was no surprise that while I was there so was a convention of Citibank Africa and a South African movie video company.

Tomorrow: on to Botswana.