Month: February 2012

On Safari in The Cape

On Safari in The Cape

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

A Rooibos Tea Farmer in The Cape
Cape Town is my second favorite city on earth, and in no small part because it’s so damn beautiful. The vegetation is lush, but also unique. Giant plants, myriads of bizarre flowers and vines, give an impression of a city in a jungle. Do you drink red bush tea?

I arrived yesterday after several days in the wine country, and it was sixth consecutive day of perfectly clear, hot summer weather. I was ecstatic, because it meant that the guests I would be welcoming today could truly get to the top of Table Mountain, one of the city’s most famous attractions, but one that is rarely enjoyed.

Table Mountain stands over Cape Town like a behemoth angel frozen since the beauty of the world was unveiled. But its head disrupts the complex winds that come from the east, off the world’s warmest sea, the Indian Ocean; and from the west, off the world’s coldest ocean, the Atlantic. When there is the least bit of meteorological turbulence, the grand mountain spins itself into a cocoon of thick cloud even while every other part of the horizon is clear blue.

So we say the mountain is shy. And we learn never to promise a visit to its top, even if you’ve given yourself the week necessary to fully enjoy this place.

So, today, after my guests had arrived, the mountain was back to normal, hiding in its tablecloth.

Never mind, there are hundreds of things to do here, and top of my list is “city bowl” with its overwhelmingly powerful District 6 museum, a stroll with commentary through the Company Gardens, and another stroll through Bokaap including some Malay finger food. And that’s just a start.

And besides, anywhere you go, it’s simply beautiful. Summer, winter, spring fall, something is blooming and exploding color and fragrance. And the best place of all to see a representation is the world famous Kirstenbosch Gardens, one of seven national botanical gardens and among the best in the world.

But I was prompted to write about Cape Town’s horticultural side, today, because of a news report in yesterday’s Cape Times that casts doubt on the longevity of rooibos – you probably know it as red bush tea.

In contrast to everything I’ve said so far, rooibos is not very attractive. It looks like spiney grass. As it ripens just before harvest, it turns brown and ugly, like giant pine needles covered with mildew. And up close it rather smells like bad sap.

Nonetheless, it is one of the world’s most unique teas. South Africans for centuries have lived by it. Early British tourists couldn’t understand why when they ordered tea this despicable infusion arrived instead. And even today, beware. If you say “tea” without qualifiers, it will be rooibos in your cup.

It is admittedly an acquired taste. Like vegemite, haggis, sweetbreads and other basically repulsive sources of energy, when served at a young enough age an immediate affinity is achieved that if missed requires massive concentration to ultimately tolerate.

So my kids, introduced to rooibos at a young age, swore by it. Or rather swore at me if I came home from a safari without it. It took me about 36 or 37 years to finally acquire the taste, but once achieved, it is truly magnificent. Whereas I once described rooibos as tasting something like an infusion of a recently ripped off outer shell of an aged Michelin steel radial, I now think of it as sort of chocolately.

Rooibos farmers don’t actually farm, since it’s a naturally growing weed in one of the super unique micro-climates of the Cape in an area near the Cedarberg mountains. But the farmer’s skills are essential to maximizing the crop: knowing in particular how to, or not to, prepare the soils after each harvest, which traditionally is right about now.

The rooibos farmers here produce 12000 tons of tea annually, and South Africans keep half of that for themselves, or about 2.4 billion cups. Most of the other 2.4 billion cups are drunk by my kids. I drink several cups a day.

There is no question that it has special nutritional values, and this is what has led to the monster battle between Nestle corporation that is trying to obtain a world patent on the active ingredient of Rooibos, and South Africa, which thinks of rooibos as part of its heart and soul.

So today, after nearly a week of unusually hot temperatures in the Cape (mid to upper 80s), climate change experts quoted in yesterday’s Cape Times say the fragile weed could be doomed.

Horticulturally cultivation has failed. People have tried to grow rooibos in Australia, the United States and South America, to no avail. Cultivated rooibos rarely succeeds. It’s got a mind of its own, this thing, and rising global temperatures might doom it forever.

So if you haven’t yet acquired the taste of rooibos, you better start right away. According to these same experts we have less than a hundred years, and it could well take you half of that to learn to enjoy it.

No Coffee Blacks

No Coffee Blacks

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My several days in Stellenbosch gave me new insights into the extraordinary difficulties South Africa is trying to confront. My optimism for the future of South Africa has diminished slightly.

Nowhere in the world are the effects of ethnic segregation as easy to see and historically easy to study as in South Africa. And unlike what most Americans think, this isn’t a single generation’s problem: apartheid might be a recent word, but it has been entrenched in South Africa since its prehistory.

Stellenbosch vies with Pretoria as the most conservative major metropolis in South Africa. Just under 100,000 people (a quarter of which are students) it was the first major settlement after the Cape in the late 1600s, the birthplace of Afrikaans and nationalist ideas, and the very center if epitome of Dutch Reformed church theology.

Today it is a producer of some of South Africa’s best wines, a seat of higher learning, and a major tourist destination. I’m here at the end of its summer, its principal tourist season, and there are tourists everywhere from every part of the world.

Yesterday midday I waited as all tourists do, hovering over one of the café tables at Java, an excellent restaurant and coffee house on Ryneveld Street, pouncing the moment someone left. Once seated, no concerns that it will take a server some time to finally get around to you!

Every beautiful café in the 4×6 block city center was the same, but it was also clear there were as many South Africans as foreigners. Many were South African tourists, as the South African who can afford to travel does so far and wide. But there were also many locals, enjoying a beautiful Sunday only about an hour after the great central church had disgorged its supplicants.

During my two days and two nights and four meals and coffee breaks during my weekend stay here, allocating a lot of time to maneuvering for a place to sit… I saw only three nonwhites.

When I went to the local “mall” and only main supermarket, it was all reversed. The mall is only a two-block walk from all the beautiful cafes and restaurants, across from the gargantuan city hall. There it was completely reversed. Hordes of weekend shoppers, only scattered whites.

“You see,” my affable waiter at one excellent dinner restaurant with only whites eating said, “this is not a white place.”

That’s hardly an explanation, so I probed.

Essentially, it’s not that he believed nonwhites felt ostracized anymore; indeed, they control not only the government but a growing proportion of South Africa’s huge economy. “It’s too expensive.”

The racial divisions that have plagued South Africa since inception, institutionalized by Britain in the independence act of 1911 and refined and strengthened until apartheid was torn down by Nelson Mandela, stratified economy by race.

And that’s a hard nut to crack.

The October 2011 census statistics are still being processed, but the 2001 numbers are expected to be better. That’s because in the last decade as many as 4-5 million African refugees have either legally or illegally come into the country.

But as of 2001, 1 in 11 South Africans is white, just a slightly higher percentage than “coloureds” — a uniquely South African racial division representing mixed race with a high percentage of whiteness. That means that roughly 4 out of every 5 South Africans is something else, mostly black.

At independence in 1911, 22% of the population was white. By 1980 that had decreased to 18%. The dramatic emigration of the subsequent several decades, which bled the country not only of skills and talent but also capital, was the result of the writing on the wall of history. South Africa was going to change, and so it did in the early 1990s.

But though its constitution is a model for any truly moral society, and though its top industries are becoming more and more under non-white control, and though its government is wholly controlled by nonwhites, whites still reign.

Because, as my nonwhite waiter explained, “it’s too expensive for us.”

Income inequality plagues the world. The United States ranks among the highest of developed world income inequalities with a “Gini Score” of 41. (“0″ is no inequality; “100″ is total inequality.) Most developed countries are in the 20-30 range. But South Africa? 64

This is almost, but not quite, a which came first conundrum, the chicken or the egg. If you got it, you’re not going to let it go easily, and you’re going to do everything possible to keep it for your kids, your cousins and your community. It’s almost … natural.

But what economists recognize today is that in a rapidly growing and interacting global platform, inequalities are unsustainable. Yesterday in Joburg’s Sunday Times business leader Michael Spicer pleaded with his colleagues to do something about this, calling the current situation in the country a “disaster.”

It isn’t that good South Africans of all colors aren’t trying. The University of Stellenbosch, founded by Afrikaners who wanted to restrict virtually all economic gain only to those of Dutch heritage, excluding even the English, today has one of the most progressive enrollment policy of any major South African university.

Together with nearby University of Cape Town admission policies make our own affirmative action policies seem tepid at best. These major institutions are trying to achieve a 40% non-white enrollment by 2016, and they’re well on their way to doing so.

And not without serious controversy. Admission standards for nonwhites have had to be reduced nearly in half to achieve this measured growth. And you know where that leads academics intent on performance.

So it seems that everyone, everywhere in South Africa is trying to reverse what nearly 400 years of unjust history has created. And how they are trying to do it must be a shining example for every part of the world where income inequality breeds disarray.

The question is simply, will it be fast enough.

Les Fisher on Safari

Les Fisher on Safari

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Today I’m on my way to Africa for seven weeks of exciting safaris and consulting, and this time it’s so very special because of a certain great person joining me.

I’ll be guiding the Director Emeritus of Lincoln Park Zoo and some of his friends, in Cape Town and Botswana. Dr. Lester Fisher is 91 years-old and if I recall correctly, this is his 6th “Last Safari Ever!”

My first safari with Dr. Fisher was in the 1980s. Since then we’ve been to Africa almost two dozen times together, and often on some extraordinary and very unique voyages: into Kivu province in The Congo, countless gorilla trips (since he’s the world expert on captive gorillas), multiple times to East Africa including with his own family, Ethiopia, Namibia, Zambia – you name it!

His popular book, “Life on the Ark” describes many of our adventures.

I remember on his 2nd or 3rd “Last Safari Ever!” I had as I’m wont to do kept the group out far too long on a game drive the last day on safari. And it was during a drought in the Serengeti to boot.

It was extremely hot and dusty. We should already have been around the campfire with a Tusker in hand, but we were only at Naabi Hill, still another hard hour’s drive away from camp.

Les was already up there in years, and I saw him get out of the car to walk to the restroom. I raced after him and waited for him to return as I surveyed the dour faces of the others returning slowly into the vehicles.

I was terribly worried that this over zealous last game drive wasn’t exactly “icing on the cake.”

Les came out and I stepped next to him as we ambled to the car, waiting for any remark whatever from this man who was above all known throughout his career as extraordinarily diplomatic. But I was fully expecting the worse. He said:

“What do you think about bringing my family back in June?” And we did!

Les’ evening chats around the campfire are legend. With time the volume of knowledge he acquired of the zoo world, the animal world (and by the way, the people world) became truly astounding. He is a veritable encyclopedia of people’s interaction with wild animals.

General Patton put him in charge of his dog. The City of Chicago put him in charge of their zoo for years and years. And the experts of the zoo world put him in charge of their gorilla strategies.

And he put me in charge of his safaris. I have no greater honor or pride.

A Nicer Gentler Walmart?

A Nicer Gentler Walmart?

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Will South Africa make Walmart nicer? Stay tuned to how all of us should be treating this behemoth of capitalism.

This week the local firm that will be acquired by Walmart when the South African government finally approves the takeover as expected, announced more or less, to hell with procedure, they were going to continue acting like they were already taken over.

Nobody blinked.

It’s not illegal. Massmart Holdings can transform itself however it wants, but the transformation can’t implement Walmart procedure until the deal is finally approved. The net result of this limbo is that it’s costing Massmart some of its expected profitability.

And if the deal is ultimately not approved, Massmart stands to be in rather deep trouble.

Legally today, Walmart owns 51% of Massmart, but other than placing the majority of its board members, it cannot completely function as the Walmart we all know and hate (oh, sorry, or love). South African law distinguishes from majority ownership and corporate control so that even minority South African equity usually governs corporate practice of foreign-held firms.

Massmart can, for example, reorganize its supply chain towards China. But until the Walmart deal is completely approved, it will not be able to place those cheaper China goods on its shelves for customers. It can start the planning and even construction of new stores, but until the tax breaks Walmart negotiated are in place, brick and mortar could make it bankrupt.

When Walmart made the move to acquire Massmart there was significant resistance in South Africa. Opposition was strikingly traditional: Labor organizations were worried that it will reduce jobs and job pay and benefits, and small retailers were worried they’ll be drowned out.

But the acquisition, $2.4 billion, doubled South Africa’s foreign investment in a single fiscal year. That’s kind of hard to ignore. So the process of approval went rather quickly, less than a year, and last summer the final hurdles were overcome and the deal got the South African stamp of approval.

Pending appeal. That’s where we’re at right, now, the appeal.

But the size of the investment is just too big to refuse. Last week the U.S. Chamber of Conference pointedly said to South Africa that if Walmart is refused, it will have a catastrophic effect on foreign investments in South African for years to come.

And there is really one awfully interesting probably good reason that no one thinks the deal won’t go through. It does not mean, as it means in America, that Walmart stores will not be unionized. Walmart has caved on this, and it’s an incredibly important exception.

In fact, it’s remarkable. Low wages and poor benefits is a hallmark of Walmart in the USA. In South Africa that may now not be the case, although the agreement struck with South Africa’s powerful labor unions is not totally ideal.

Massmart employees will likely lose some wages and benefits: most importantly, a type of tenure that tended to guarantee a job with longevity of service.

But it’s still remarkable. First for the obvious reason that it protects the worker. But almost equally because it reveals the hypocrisy of Walmart’s claim here at home that union involvement wrecks their business model.

So if it works in South Africa, any reason it can’t work, here?

Somalia & Peace?

Somalia & Peace?

by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

Painting by Abushariaa.
My text.
Peace may be coming to Somalia. If so, kindly note carefully that the country of Kenya is the first country in a half century to unilaterally establish peace with war.

I seem to remember another country that tried: in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and oh, in Nicaragua. And her adversaries tried in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary; and other adversaries in Tibet.

None of those worked very well. What’s critically important this time, is that the big failures don’t derail the little success. Listen, please, to Kenya.

Thursday’s peace conference in London is being reported by the western media almost like composers gathering to write a funeral dirge. At first I just couldn’t understand this.

Then it hit me: peace is coming to Somali, not through the bigwigs and their F16s and drones and special operations and decades of failed warring, but because of a slow and methodical and most importantly, little military operation by Kenya that began last October.

Some argue that incessant droughts, western European poaching of its rich fisheries, and the west’s systematic routing of al-Qaeda are the main reasons, but I disagree. They are all important, of course, but the main reason is that a neighbor on its own volition stepped in less as the Terminator and more as the School Mom with a big stick.

None were more skeptical than me. The notion of getting “bogged down” grew literal with early, heavy rains. And it was only reasonable to suppose that no major putsch was possible with such a little force.

But what appears to be the new working military formula, is that putsch is old school. Perhaps necessity structured the Kenyan campaign, so be it. Civilian losses, mostly in terrorist revenge attacks near the border, are subsiding and “pacification” by Kenyan troops as the inch themselves towards the sea seems to be working.

Somalia was too far from Europe to be a cultural center like Alexandria. There were no Lawrence Durrell’s writing about its ancient spirits. But Somalia in the old days was very much of a Mediterranean-like African country: pretty if lazy, modern if low-key, and increasingly self-sufficient.

Above all they were seamen, accomplished fishermen and navigators. As world wars loomed at the end of the 19th century, Britain used the pretext of suppressing a popular local ruler, Abdullah Hassan, to gain control of critical ports accessing the Red Sea.

Similar to earlier jihadists like Sudan’s Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad, Hassan could easily organize the enormous local antipathy to modern western ideas like school for women. The “modern world” was thrust on much of Arabic Africa far too quickly.

After the world wars it was only natural that the former colony would choose the other side of the Cold War, and Somali became a Soviet ally. Even so it prospered nearly as much as neighbors like Kenya who had chosen the West, and education, especially exploded throughout the population.

The end of the Cold War left Somali without a patron. And ideologues like Reagan thought no further than ending the reign of an adversary. A huge vacuum was left in the societies which for a generation had depended upon the Soviets and Chinese.

It was like a calendar flipping backwards in time.

Mogadishu imploded in 1991. Black Hawk Down ended in catastrophe in 1993, and Somali was apportioned by warlords who had been the benefactors of a quarter century of arms buildup by proxy adversaries a half a planet apart.

One can read the history of 1990s Somalia very similarly to General Gordon’s battles in Khartoum in 1884. A century apart, the killing and fighting is placed conveniently far away from the main protagonist, a distant super power trying to impose an alien culture on a local people.

But such analogies probably have little significance, today. Historical imperatives might just have evaporated in the last quarter century. The world is too closely connected, now. Hiphop is just as popular in Mogadishu and Nairobi as in London.

And I am surprised by the Kenyan success. Fighting which brings peace. I hope I am not surprised once again that I was surprised.

Presidents’ Day Holiday

Presidents’ Day Holiday

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The Presidents’ Day Holiday in America, today, is perhaps the least celebrated of the year, and it shows how America like much of Africa is moving away from a powerful executive.

The exceptions validate the rule, so the dozen or so African dictators still in power in places like Uganda, Zimbabwe, Cameroon and Chad, among the most egregious, delineate the old days. As modern African societies emerge and new constitutions are formulated, the chief at the top gets less and less power.

And so it’s distressing particularly when a country like Senegal that had embarked on the modern trajectory does a U-Turn. Senegal’s tortured constitution limited a president to two terms, but Senegal’s even more threatened tortured court system abrogated that section and the current 2-term president, Abdoulaye Wade, is now running for a third term as his society implodes.

But he’s the exception to the rule, and what we see in Africa more often now is gentlemen politicians conforming to the rule of law that limits their powers. The most outstanding example is Kenya, where despite mounds of complicated legislation enacting a new constitution, the old men that used to run the country will probably not be running it for much longer.

And Tanzania, and South Africa, and Liberia and many, many others. All places where modern African societies realized that single personalities – the Grandpa authority – were no longer appropriate as social chief executives.

Ultimately, I believe even America will have to come round to this view. Our president is one of the most powerful social chief executives in the world; probably the most powerful among democratic countries. I think this may have worked well in year’s past when essential U.S. policy was pretty unidirectional.

But today, with radically opposed polarities, the prospect of a strong liberal president being succeeded by a strong conservative, etc., does little to move society in any direction but crazy figure eights.

The new societies – the emerging African societies – are designing and experimenting with better forms of democratic, capitalist government. America will have to follow.

Many government offices are closed, today. Banks are closed. The post office is closed. Some schools are closed and most businesses, like EWT’s, are “technically closed” with the phones not answered. But many workers, like me, are sitting here at their desks like most any other work day.

Perhaps an affirmation that a strong chief executive shouldn’t be quite so empowered, anymore.

Biggest! Strongest! Smallest!

Biggest! Strongest! Smallest!

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A ridiculously small, and a ridiculously large chamaeleon and a ridiculously strong little bird. Africa at its best!

I have personally seen the northern wheatear breeding in Alaska and foraging in Africa, and we’ve not known until now where the Alaskan birds migrated. That’s because there are wheatears in eastern northern Canada and even Greenland and Scotland.

Most bird migrations are determined in a pretty easy way. The bird is banded and then it’s found where it’s migrated to. And dozens and dozens of wheatears have been banded, but they’ve never been found.

That wasn’t actually unimaginable with regards to the wheatear. Unlike most species of bird, the wheatear breeds over a massive portion of the northern hemisphere and there are lots of them. So the odds of a banded bird being found were greatly reduced.

But technology to the rescue! The bird is so small, .8 ounce, that anything other than a light-weight leg band could not be used for tracking, until scientists recently concocted a really itty bitty geolocator hardly heavier than a band. And that’s where this data comes from.

There’s a real surprise, too. The birds in Alaska travel west to Africa. The birds in eastern Canada travel east. The route from Alaska to Africa is impressive: nearly 20,000 miles roundtrip! The eastern migration is half that, but it has to cross the Atlantic Ocean, the world’s most turbulent sea.

So either way around this you’ve got a remarkable little African bird! (Well, it’s also an Alaskan, Canadian, Greenlander, and British Isles bird, too.)

Note: the birds with the longest migration (approaching 50,000 miles) are the arctic tern and winged albatross.

The other fabulous African nature news this week was of still more treasures from Madagascar. We’d already found the world’s largest chamaeleon there. Parson’s chameleon is the size of most cats! Now this week scientists announced the discovery of the world’s smallest chameleon. It can fit on a matchhead!

What is really amazing about this, actually, is that these two creatures from Madagascar although definitely both chamaeleons in many common ways, are probably very different and likely have extremely different evolutionary paths.

Their point of last convergence could conceivably be at the dawn of reptiles, meaning more than 250 million years ago! The fact that they then physically changed so little except in terms of their size, likely has something to do with the special island-continent ecology of Madagascar. Island systems provide narrow paths for evolution, encouraging speciation but then subsequently constricting radical divergence.

On safari we usually find a chameleon or two and always some type of wheatear (there are several). Along with the new snakes and new primates and primate behaviors discovered recently in Tanzania, we’re learning that Africa has much more to reveal than we ever thought before!

Can’t Do It Here? Try Uganda.

Can’t Do It Here? Try Uganda.

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By South African cartoonist Zapiro.
The reemergence of the draconian Ugandan anti-gay legislation isn’t just a tedious clarion alarm. It shows that as the world’s economy improves, vital human rights concerns subside from the limelight.

It also shows how lasting wrong-minded movements once elevated to celebrity status in Africa can survive, as compared, say, to America.

Despite many of your complaints about my sarcasm and cynicism, I truly believe in America and get my sustenance from the ultimate outing of truth, here. But that’s not the case in many places in the developing world like Africa. Once launched into the heavens, it’s much more difficult to bring an errant issue down to a safe earth landing in East Africa than here.

David Bahati is the poster child for Church Street (sorry, I mean “K” street). He’s the puppet Ugandan legislator that does the gofer work for American conservatives who found an entry into Uganda after Bill Clinton’s many overtures to the country more than a decade ago.

His travel to and from America, hosting in America, and coaching as a politician came right from America’s extreme right. He introduced a bill in the Ugandan parliament in 2009 that was ultimately withdrawn because of its draconian provisions including execution for some prosecuted gays.

It is simply the American right using Uganda as a place to do what they can’t do, here.

The bill was withdrawn because of a huge public outcry worldwide. But last week Bahati reintroduced the bill, and immediately thereafter as if scripted from source, the Ugandan government supported the bill by reducing the greatest possible punishment from execution to life imprisonment.

That is the margin that the American coaches think will win the day. And they might be right.

The world’s state of happiness is improving, exception the Greece affair. The nearly two million signatures on on-line petitions against the 2009 bill set a precedent that already we know won’t be achieved this time around.

A coalition of East African clerics hopes to achieve a petition with a measly “5,000 signatures.”

Even as Uganda itself has achieved little additional political stability, its economy is no longer dive bombing. What I’d really like to see are Bahati’s emails and phone records, as I’m absolutely sure his moves are being orchestrated from here.

The right in America is on a roller-coaster right now, and each time Santorum’s head appears above the rising waters, they gloat, and I’ll bet, pick up the phone and tell Bahati, just as they would tell Santorum, it’s now or never.

They’ve got a better bet going with Bahati.

And unfortunately, Ugandan activitists are being clobbered not just by American righties but South African righties as well. Same dynamic: can’t do it at home, do it where you can when you can.

Jon Qwelane was appointed South Africa’s ambassador to Uganda last year. He was subsequently convicted of hate speech (anti-gay) in South Africa, but his ambassadorship continues. South Africa has a long tradition of gay rights, and it’s embodied in its constitution. I wouldn’t doubt an “evil axis” of K-street and aberrant South African diplomats.

So this time the Ugandan putsch is without finesse. Last time it went through Parliament several times like a ballerina pas-de-deuxing through a china shop, as quietly as possible then finally petered out after a huge international outcry.

This time several days ago, only a week after Bahati reintroduced the bill, the Ugandan Minister for Ethics and Integrity initiated a massive public campaign to arrest gays.

In fact he personally marched into a convention of presumed LGBT and took over the podium, announcing arrests as activists ran to the corridors.

Since 2009 the Ugandan parliament has been riveted with controversy, descent and wide movements of subservience to a growing executive followed by courageous acts of trying to assert their increasingly diminishing power. But the net result, today, isn’t good.

I think this time the anti-gay bill will pass. Fortunately, it won’t mandate execution for being LGBT, just life imprisonment.

Santorum won’t win. Bahati will.

Wudst Time Just Move On

Wudst Time Just Move On

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Yesterday I listened painfully to a brilliant African jurist try so hard not to be condescending to a rabid American academic who characterized himself as a “strict constitutionalist.” Some Americans are so stuck in the past. We just can’t see the world whipping past us leaving us in history’s dusts.

So what does one do when in an unusual situation you’re unexpectedly driving across the country on a workday? Listen to NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and the program yesterday afternoon was fabulous: “Should the U.S. Constitution Be An International Model?”

According to the host, Neil Cohen, the program evolved from the tremendous criticism from the right of Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg’s Cairo interview recently where she dared to suggest Egyptians might want to consider other alternatives to the U.S. Constitution when writing their own new one. (After the first two minutes in Arabic, the interview changes to English, stick with it.)

As Slate.Com’s David Weigel posted, the interview “disturbed the balance of the universe.” (The onslaught of rightest invective was so intense there are concerns Congress may try to impeach Ginsburg.)

Headling yesterday’s NPR program was Cape Town professor, Christina Murray. Murray was instrumental in designing the South African and Kenyan constitutions. She was among an exclusive group of global “experts” hired by both countries to assist each in creating a modern form of government.

I would have loved to have listened to Murray and those of similar learned dispositions (like Yale prof Akhil Reed Amar who was also on) talk forever about what I’ve come to realize are two of the world’s newest and now best constitutions. Then perhaps a week later we could start discussing the process of how experts like them were chosen, what motivated the revolutionaries in each country, etc.

But that’s not America, today. Media like NPR feel (under the heavy boot of Congressional funding) a national responsibility to impede intellectual development by giving equal air time to the ignorant. The result is always … nothing but further honing of irreconcilable first principles. Tiring and trite.

The vast majority of intellects studying government systems, today, understand that different cultures emerging in a new world where the ability to protect unique heritages and folkways is at last secure, will have different needs. Like Kenya and South Africa.

The vast majority of intellects studying politics, today, recognize that just as we moved from the diode to the transistor to the computer chip in a mere quarter century, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with altering a bit rules of governance first thought up in 1797.

Yet NPR’s foil to reality on the show, Roger Pilon of the ultra rightest CATO Institute, hogged air time to say the same thing again and again: Raw American 18th century democracy is primae facie the best form of self-governance because the only necessary social objective is to have as little government as possible.

What does a professor say in response to such immature, tautological hogwash? It causes pauses, and that wastes more time. And it transformed Prof Amar into someone who sounded like he was explaining to a four-year old why it was OK that the robin gobbled up the worm.

We’ve got to move on, folks. Murray and Amar and virtually all but one of the callers knew this. The 30+ rights enshrined in the Kenyan constitution offended Pilon who explained he was pretty offended by several of our own Bill of Rights, because “we really don’t need them” arguing that “freedom” means we have “infinite rights” anyway.

I need a plaster. But please, click on the link above and listen to the show. You can turn down the volume when old man Pilon talks.

So kudus to NPR for bringing on Murray, who I hope some day will be nominated for a Nobel Prize. She’s still young and vibrant, and her body of work is exceptional. The constitutions of Kenya and South Africa will be the models for future governments well through this century.

And if we can just get beyond the sludge of our own intransigent ignorance, perhaps even for us.

Highways or Hyrax

Highways or Hyrax

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Nairobi National Park: 50 sq. miles adjacent city of 7 million
One of the greatest icons of big game parks is about to fall: Nairobi National Park. To a highway.

I’m not protesting; I’m not asking you to sign the petitions that successfully stopped the highway through the Serengeti, I’m just sick with nostalgia. This remarkable wilderness has survived with its ups and downs next to one of the most rapidly growing urban areas in Africa.

But with cloverleafs blooming all over Nairobi city, clovers have to go.

The very first wild animal I ever saw was in Nairobi National Park. My wife, Kathleen Morgan and I, flew into Nairobi directly over the park (still do) and I saw giraffe below the wing. We had hardly been in the city for a day in the early 1970s when I rented a car and drove to Nairobi National Park.

We paid our fees and drove onto the (then) dirt roads of Nairobi National Park and less than a minute later I had driven the Toyota onto a rock and we were totally stopped … about two feet from a rhino.

Rhinos were poached out of virtually all of wild East Africa in the next ten years (they’re coming back) and the city of Nairobi grew in leaps and bounds. The park did not grow. It remained as originally hardly 50 sq. miles, but also as always only three sides are fenced. The southeast side is open to the semi-wild country of the Athi Flats.

That used to be wild Maasai land all the way to Amboseli National Park. But soon a huge manufacturing area near Athi River town developed, along with some ground mining further south, and large ranches further west.

But small corridors remain open to the Amboseli/Tsavo/Kilimanjaro wilderness, although animals have to cross a major highway to get there. And even today you can find giraffe, zebra and wildebeest, and thanks to the special care of the Kenyan Wildlife Service, even a rhino and from time to time, lion.

It’s absolutely striking to see these wild animals beneath a skyline that is quickly rivaling the looks of an Asian city in explosive mode.

Couldn’t last.

Nairobi is in desperate need of highways to relieve the unbelievable congestion of traffic. And while the plan presented presumes that the land lost will be made up in a sort of triangular acquisition of adjacent farmland, this will absolutely break up the existing long-distance corridors.

And local Kenyan opponents are particularly concerned about the lost of trees. The park has been a nursery of sorts for tree farms often created in compensation for other parts of the city’s forested areas lost to housing and development.

The loss is stinging, but it isn’t in reality the catastrophe that the possible Serengeti highway would have caused, for example, and truly, it’s hardly a surprise. And if we’re to believe the wincing KWS officials, there may still be enough manageable land to sustain some grazers, and the park as always will remain a tremendous place to rehabilitate rescued wild life.

It’s all about clover or cloverleafs.

Why Do Zebras Have Stripes?

Why Do Zebras Have Stripes?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Thanks to Bill Banzhaf.
Why do zebras have stripes? It’s complicated, but one thing’s for sure: it’s not because they’re incarcerated.

Over my 40 years of guiding in Africa it became quite evident to me why zebras have stripes: Whenever I watched lions attacking a group of zebra, I couldn’t keep my binoculars well positioned. Something kept disrupting my concentration.

So I decided to watch a kill without binocs. And the answer sprang out like the mud clumps flying into the air from the zebra’s hooves. The pack of zebra ran together away from the lion. They didn’t disperse like gazelle do from an attacking cheetah.

And this mesh of striping, like a kaleidoscope out of control, confused my focused view in the binocs and certainly would confuse a predator in the chase. Great defense! This notion of camouflage has been reaffirmed often in scientific as well popular journals.

But then not long ago, Phillip Ball in his fascinating book, Nature’s Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts argued that zebra striping is perfect for temperature control.

Ball posits that animal patterns which are oblique, like squares or triangles, increase body heat; and that nonoblique patterns like stripes and circles, decrease body heat.

Temperature control for the African savannah!

But now comes another notion. Two Scandinavian scientists have just published a report in the Journal of Experimental Biology arguing that the light refracted by the unique repeating pattern of thick stripes on a zebra actually … is a bug repellent.

Their experiments aren’t complete, but quite compelling. And it’s notable that there are no other successful horse-like creatures wild on the African savannah, and that domestic horses are very difficult to keep in Africa, because of the large number of flesh-biting bugs.

Seems to me it’s some combination of all of the above, and probably more that we haven’t yet discovered. Nature is multi-dimensional, multi-formated to place a creature perfectly into the sphere of things in which it lives.

We know, for example, that every zebra pattern is unique, like fingerprints. Although certainly unlike anything resulting from fingerprints, zebra’s seem to recognize each other at pretty great distances. We also know that inbreeding breaks up the even geometry of striping, merging and truncating stripes, and that maybe if given a choice, a nicely groomed stripe is the preferred date!

So, why do zebras have stripes? Because they wouldn’t be zebras without them!

Dictators Don’t Tweet

Dictators Don’t Tweet

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"Hiphop is freedom of expression" from streetball.com
Twitter and African Hiphop websites are today the main source of news about Africa’s trouble spots. And they’re better than CNN!

Like so much in Africa today where economies and cultures are developing faster than anyone could have imagined, traditional news reporting is dying and being replaced by faster information facilitated by today’s hi tech.

Excellent news sources like Kenya’s Nation Media and South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, are being eclipsed in Real Time. Can you imagine the most important, accurate news from Twitter, and not from the New York Times?

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening from Somalia, where the commander of the Kenyan invasion forces is tweeting constantly. Long before the BBC, Reuters, the Times or even local media embedded with his troops file a story, Kenyans have it wholesale.

Yesterday the Kenyan forces inched their way further towards Kismayo and routed a major al-Shabaab base killing one of the main militant leaders in Somalia. Here was the real time twitter feed from the commander of the operation, Major Emmanuel Chirchir, @MajorEChirchir:

#OperationLindaNchi During the attack, 13 Al Shabaab militants were killed while others escaped with serious injuries.
#OperationLindaNchi Abu Yahya, an Al Shabaab’s field Commander in the Southern sector, is suspected to hv been gunned down during the ambush

And when battles aren’t occurring, the Major answers everyone he can. Kenyan Victor Kurutu characterizes himself as a “dairy farmer, foodie and nature lover” and became distressed when he listened to radio reports on February 4 that more than 20 of the Major’s troops had been gunned down. He tweeted the commander.

@MajorEChirchir
@VicKurutu Nothing of the sort happened…propaganda

As I’m writing this early Thursday morning my time, South Africans are preparing to hear President Zuma’s State of the Nation annual address. Earlier today in South Africa the twitter hashtag, #SONA, was created for the event and most of the address has already leaked into that feed.

Right now as I’m writing as fast as I can, two or three tweets a second are coming over #SONA!

Eyewitness News @ewnupdates
If you’re in & around parliament tweet us pics of what you see. You can also send them to [email protected]. Remember the hashtag #SONA

Oftentimes English-speakers won’t benefit from this real time world. Although much of the tweeting that came out of Tahrir Square was in English, most was in Arabic. Similarly, today, major trouble spots in Africa are in Angola and Senegal.

Angola’s language is Portugese and Senegal’s is French. But English is a global language, and in these cases it’s HipHop websites that are consolidating and translating the news!

Today’s www.africanhiphop.com site features the trouble in both Angola and France. The site was founded 15 years ago in Senegal, so it’s particularly sensitive to what’s going on, there.

African hiphop – very much like hiphop and rap most everywhere – is driven by issues of poverty, abuse, oppression and has released what I considered not too long ago a much too timid African psyche.

Few people outside of Angola realize what a horrible regime is doing there, and how youth are beginning to organize a protest that could rival what happened in Tunisia. You won’t read about this in the BBC or even in South African media, and not because of bad reporting, but because traditional news reporters are banned.

And while there’s plenty to learn from Twitter if you speak Portugese, it’s up to a hiphop website, Central 7311 to let the outside world know what’s happening. The site is prosperous in part because authorities don’t rap! So it was left alone.

And while the site itself is Portugese, consolidator hiphop sites like africanhiphop.com will translate and disseminate.

Dictators don’t tweet.

Is It A New Dawn?

Is It A New Dawn?

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The fighting in much of Africa is settling down into a complicated and unnerving politics. Some see this as a lull before a real storm. I see glimmers of peace.

My rosy outlook depends on Europe. This is because everything in the world is economically linked, and the weakest chain right now is Europe. If six months from now Europe is stable, with or without Greece, I’ll breathe a sigh of relief.

Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Kenya and the giants of Libya and Egypt all have indigenous organization that will right their bobbing ships if Europe resolves quickly. Even chronic trouble spots like Somali could cool down : My view.

There are other views. Most of the prominent thinkers in Africa would be considered extreme progressives by most Americans. They see their continent as settling down just like I do, but while the developed world heats up. This switch in developmental political polarity is seen as an opportunity for Africa to step out of old world orders like those governed by capitalism.

This view presumes Europe won’t resolve. It presumes that America’s self-destruction isn’t ending just with the Republican Party. It even presumes that China is poised to enter its own period of intense civil disobedience.

“We are in a revolutionary moment and revolutionaries cannot be pessimistic,” writes Horace Campbell in the African journal Pambazuka.

Campbell sees the world situation very similar to the era just before World War II, which followed the emergence of radical if revolutionary ideas in places like Europe and the United States after the poor end of World War I.

Western politics are driven by rich “capitalists … who want the pretext for war against Iran so that a wider conflict could cascade from Iran and the Middle East to Pakistan and wider afield” to beef up the old economic machine.

But unlike the twenties and thirties, western war machines are “degraded by the humiliations in Iraq” and the U.S. military – the world’s “greatest superpower” – is spent. Combined with Europe’s obsession with austerity, all this “old thinking” will be unable to “salvage the outmoded forms of governance.”

The result in Campbell’s view is the “revolutionary moment.” And what I see as a settling down towards possible peace in Africa he sees as the lull before the storm.

Less revolutionary but equally pessimistic in terms of a bright dawn of peace, Alex de Waal believes that the West is too impatient with Africa and time and again quashes its own good attempts at peace and development.

“The dominant interventionist approach to peace and security in Africa by-passes the hard work of creating domestic political consensus and instead imposes models of government favoured by western powers,” Alex de Waal writes in OpenDemocracy.

Because, he argues, the West (and China) are so desperate for Africa’s natural resources. This is a common theme in much criticism of the west by Africa, but it belies the fact that Africa is the seller and the West (and China) are not.

De Waal lists a number of situations from Darfur to Libya where he contends that African created and led efforts that could have ended conflict were stymied by western powers. He implicitly thanks China and Russia for stopping the west’s knee-jerk reactions towards Syria, even while supporting Syrian revolutionaries.

Because he believes that an incomplete end to these conflicts are short-term only, and that the lasting result of this outside suppression of internal healing will be increased conflict.

Conventional global powers “tended to see Libya as a problematic version of Tunisia” whereas “Africa … feared that Libya would turn out more like Chad–mercenarised tribalism spilling across frontiers” creating armed rebel groups throwing “havoc” all over the region.

Although that remains to be seen, recent reports in neighboring Niger may now confirm de Waal’s fear.

Nevertheless, I think de Waal is too pessimistic and Campbell too revolutionary. I’m no milk-toast liberal, and I agree with much of what these two political philosophers believe. De Waal is right-on regarding the impatience of the west and the intrinsic failings of its (often militaristic) band-Aid approaches to African conflict.

And Campbell’s historic analysis tempered by economic realities I think will lead pretty quickly to a revised world economic order and I’m glad it will.

But unlike both I don’t see a fiery horizon presaging a new dawn. I think most of the conflict is over.

I don’t think we’re going to go to war in Iran, regardless of what impish Israel might do. I think the healthy worker movements in Ohio and Wisconsin as much as in Zukan and London transit and Greek hospitals will strengthen and become strategic forces for change.

And I think the movements in Kenya, Nigeria, Libya and Egypt will turn out pretty good.

I believe all this, because I sense majorities of power growing in Africa as well as here and Europe that consolidate facts, stick with simple truths and release human compassion.

It’s namby pamby, or it’s real. I think Europe will resolve. I think it’s real.

An Incredible Production!

An Incredible Production!

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We’ve got another hit musical in the making: nuclear war over Tehran, American righties swinging from Egyptian guillotines, evil ladies wresting control of revolutions. Time to buy your season ticket.

The pointers in north Africa are swinging towards war: Egypt’s predictable predicament with the West cocks Israel’s war machine. This isn’t good.

Egypt’s prosecution of a number of Western NGOs allegedly for funding “destabilization” is the trigger. What? A revolution isn’t exactly stable. The notion that outside groups promote revolution at the peril of revolution is nonsensical.

Americans especially don’t understand revolution, not even their own distant one. Framing all regime changes in the history of our own relatively simple revolution more than two centuries is a mistake. We tend to think there are very few outcomes of a revolution: the good or the bad.

Only recently did American schoolbooks talk about the loyalists that supported the King. The idea that neighbors and friends and even relatives might have opposed the outcome at some earlier point doesn’t register. Too complicated.

But just reschedule your entertainment to include a few popular musicals like Les Miserables or Evita. A revolution unleashes all sorts of competing forces and until a lasting and dominant one prevails, all sorts of messes occur. Anything can happen.

In Egypt few were talking to the Muslim Brotherhood as it systematically garnered more and more control of the situation. Last year it was only al-Jazeera that early on regularly interviewed and reported on the Brotherhood. Barring any major disruption, the Brotherhood will soon become Egypt’s ruling force.

The 19 NGOs under prosecution are mostly American but also include one important German organization, and they’ve all been in Egypt for years. Some of the higher profile Americans, including the son of one of Obama’s cabinet secretaries, has taken sanctuary inside the American embassy. If their trial proceeds too far I can imagine SEALs attempting a rescue of those currently taking sanctuary in the American embassy in Cairo. Flashbacks to the Iranian revolution.

“The prosecution could hardly have been better designed to provoke an American backlash,” the New York Times writes this morning.

Situations like this are rarely logical, but they are predictable. I’m not suggesting that we should not have aggressively supported the Egyptian revolution, but perhaps this gives you a greater insight into why Russia and China want to try to screw a Syrian genie back into the bottle.

Societies like theirs are poorly prepared for the unprepared. In that competition, America wins the gold. And our unprepared for mistakes rattle the whole planet: CDS, anyone? Gambles sometimes lose.

In brilliantly reporting this morning NPR discovered that the person behind the Egyptian prosecutions is a woman holdover from the Mubarak regime, who apparently always distrusted Americans.

A revolution allows these types of sleeper ideologues to emerge and flourish. Imagine what chaos might ensue if Egypt’s military tries to interfere.

Yet Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy seems poised to stop Egyptian aid if the trials proceed.

Add to this fluid situation a pinch of Iranian nuclear power, an obsessively conservative Israeli regime and an American election and you have all the ingredients for a major war. A century from now, perhaps it will be the most popular musical on Broadway.

Which is Worse: Shooting or Listening?

Which is Worse: Shooting or Listening?

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Is shooting journalists better than tuning in Rush Limbaugh? Tanzania has a freer press than the U.S., according to this year’s report from Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Hmm.

This year’s RSF report is the tenth year running that ranks all the countries in the world in terms of “press freedom”, although I think that’s far too simplistic a characterization. Please read on.

Over this nascent first decade the group has tried again and again to refine its method of determining press freedom, and this year’s is the most complex of all. It’s no longer just how many journalists have been shot to death, but things like how “effective” the media is in terms of honest reporting and self-censorship.

That’s the reason, for example, that Fox News helped sink the United States so low, 47th.

“Free” is not exactly the right word, here. But there is a singularly important lesson to be learned from the fact that this year Tanzania is ranked 34th and the U.S. 47th in freedom of the press, by what reporters widely support as their outstanding global advocate.

And that lesson might be that you can have too much of a good thing.

The media in America has exploded in the last decade, especially with cable television and satellite radio, not to mention us bloggers. There’s so much news that maybe, just maybe, there’s less aggregate truth. RSF incorrectly characterizes this as “freedom of the press.”

America’s position plummeted below most advanced countries in 2006, guess why? Weapons of mass destruction. Bush administration outright lying, suppression of whistle blowers, and probably most importantly, the wholesale buy-in by media across the whole spectrum of these lies and half-truths.

So the incredible and powerful foolery of America’s press ended up, from RSF’s point of view in 2006, being equal to the killing and beating of a couple journalists in Uganda and Kenya during their turbulent political events that year.

And what about all those reporters who were convinced – and convinced us – that the housing market, hedge funds and derivatives, were just honky-dory?

There are plenty of media outlets in America truthfully reporting that there has been steady growth of private sector jobs in the last 18 months. Freely reporting the truth.

But there are also many outlets, some very effective like Fox News airing again and again the Republican Radio Address by Mark Rubio saying just the reverse, propagating an untruth. Freely reporting falsehoods. Or choosing not to report truths.

Today the Labor Department announced jobs numbers in the U.S. that knocked to the floor most economists. Good, surprising — so surprising a cynic could be motivated. But instead, excellent media outlets like On Point Radio hardly mentioned it at all. Because … American media is currently obsessed with the election.

RSF analyzes all these failings as “less freedom.”

In Tanzania there is so little media, what exists is rather moderate if benign. Tanzania’s media is heavily self-censored, and not necessarily because of government threats, but just because it’s so incredibly small.

Most Tanzanians get their news from Kenya where the media is much larger, and where the media doesn’t report a lot about Tanzania. So the sum total of bad stuff or stifled stuff or self-censored or just got-it-wrong stuff in Tanzania, percentage-wise, is less than in America.

So we have less truth in America than Tanzania?

Hmm. Yes, but we have enormously more truth available to us to find than Tanzanians if we can just decide which newspaper, which cable show, which magazine, which blogger to read, and therein lies the critical understanding.

An interesting point, isn’t it? Whether we’re southsiders in Chicago or urban cave dwellers in Dar-es-Salaam, the vast majority of us all want to know the truth of what’s happening in our society.

On the one hand I’m thrilled that someone, RSF, is at last being courageous enough to deal with “truth.” Like PoltiFact and FactCheck and good high school teachers should. But on the other hand, I fear RSF is working with an emulsion not a solution.

Tanzania’s collected sum of radios, TV, blogs, newspapers, magazines is a pinhead compared to America’s Rushmore. Even if everything that was ever reported in Tanzania were completely false, it wouldn’t begin to equal the amount of false reporting in America.

In America if Romney wants to pretend he didn’t mean he doesn’t care about the poor, there are ample millions of ways for him to do so. Not in Tanzania. There’s not enough distribution for spinning a mistake. You could think of this as a blessing in disguise. But it also means that the powers-that-be and want-to-be have fewer recourses to manifest their power. Like sending police out to shoot journalists.

RSF is saying that shooting journalists could be better than tuning in Rush Limbaugh.

Hmm.