Month: July 2012

Travel to Uganda Now Deadly

Travel to Uganda Now Deadly

by Arusha ♥ 16 Comments

There is a reason that ebola has reached Kampala, and it’s the same reason I’ve recommended against visiting Uganda for a while: the dictatorial Ugandan government.

The first (and last) time that ebola (or what we thought might have been ebola) reached a metropolitan area was in Nairobi in 1980, which became the subject of the documentary book “Hot Zone.” But in 1980 the size of Africa’s city populations were much smaller. Transport around the area and even just within the cities themselves was nowhere near as easy as it is, today.

As the most infectious disease we know on earth, the Kampala outbreak may unfortunately be a story only just beginning.

All the neighboring countries have moved into full-scale alert. Kenya has put all its national hospitals on special alert and has dispatched health officers to all border crossings with protective Hazmat gear.

“All the necessary kit and medical supplies needed have been assembled and dispatched to health facilities in the bordering districts,” Rwanda’s New Times newspaper reported this morning.

The South Sudan government said it will “not take any chances“ with the disease and has mobilized its national health network.

This is the fourth outbreak of ebola in Uganda since 2000. This is the first time that an announced original outbreak was not contained. Whatever the reasons for not being able to contain it this time, the reason it reached Kampala so quickly from the far end of the country is because the government of Uganda lied about the outbreak.

Three days before 14 people hemorrhaged to death in Kampala’s Mulago hospital, the government denied there was an outbreak. Friday, the Associated Press quoted a Ugandan government official who dismissed the possibility of a widely reported ebola outbreak in Kibaale province “as merely a rumor.”

Two days before the outbreak appeared in Kampala, a local news source quoting government authorities reported that “The team deployed in Kibaale has indicated that the outbreak is now fully contained and no further spread is expected to take place.”

This misinformation is typical of Ugandan authorities.

London’s Daily Telegraph tells the story best. After an outbreak in a nonrural area of northwest Uganda 2-3 weeks ago, the government tried to keep a lid on the story. When they were unable to, they claimed the outbreak had been contained. The confusion contributed to panic in the hospitals in the region, which led to people fleeing the area.

The Ugandan government’s policies of lies and misinformation are now beginning to undermine the little health care infrastructure that exists in its rural areas. Several weeks ago Transparency International issued a damning indictment of the government’s failing health care policies in rural Uganda.

Ebola’s incubation period is 7-10 days. One of the ironic components of this most infective of all diseases is that it’s so deadly if contained it kills itself pretty quickly. So if health officials can actually contain the disease this story will be dead and over in 3 weeks.

Unless, of course, Ugandan officials try to hide it, again.

I’ve said for a while now that the increasingly oppressive regime in Uganda with its unstable politic and jittery society makes it an undesirable destination for tourists.

And now there’s lot more reasons not to visit.

The Undemocratic Election

The Undemocratic Election

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

South Africa like the U.S. allows unlimited campaign financing but Kenya has moved to severely regulate it. Which democracy is likely to last?

These two democratic powerhouses both have progressive constitutions but differ radically on candidate funding. Kenya has yet to hold an election under its new constitution but South Africa is well along, yet I think it’s already clear that Kenya’s much greater regulations will lead to fairer outcomes.

South Africa and the U.S. have essentially unregulated candidate financing. Don’t be fooled by those who argue otherwise, because “essentially” is the formative adverb. There are filings and partial disclosures, but “essentially” a candidate can solicit and distribute unlimited amounts of cash to promote the campaign.

Kenya, on the other hand, is severely restricting such financing. In fact the regulations are so tight that there is public concern that the commissioners regulating the campaign could themselves become instruments of unfairness.

And that’s the current debate in Kenya. There is no debate about whether there should be stiff regulation. Everyone supports in principal rules for limiting campaign spending based on the population and individual earnings level of the electoral area.

Kenya also prohibits corporate financing of individual campaigns as well as severely limits how much a candidate himself can contribute to his own campaign.

It takes no rocket scientist to know why. Money buys votes.

I remember my grandfather in Chicago talking about the rigged elections for mayor. Once we even visited a bar where the alderman was buying drinks for potential voters and … passing out cash.

Later I remember living in Kenya where exactly the same thing happened: Local politicians in a bar buying drinks and votes.

Getting a free beer or pocketing some cash doesn’t in itself guarantee that voter will even go into the ballot box and then if he does tick off your name. So a bit of cleverness was required in those days long past, and it basically came as follows:

“What’s the other guy giving you?”

The answer was rarely “nothing” and more often was always “not enough.”

And that’s the hook in today’s world, too, whether it be South Africa, Kenya or the U.S. Of course there is never enough so long as more is possible. And as evidence that I can provide you with more, here’s a beer.

Or a promised tax cut. Or a promise of “deregulation” intended to mean more cash in your pocket. Ultimately a promise to make you richer, like those who are already rich buying you off.

South Africa after twenty years of new independence is feeling the effects of such unregulated financing. The country is far richer than Kenya and in that regards much like the U.S.

But one party has dominated South African government since Mandela became its first president, the ANC, and the cogent argument today is that money has made it that way.

U.S. election lawyer, Michael Lowry, describes precisely how unregulated financing in South Africa has led to the dominance of the ANC. And like the U.S. it’s more onerous than just the election of a single candidate:

Once unrestricted campaigns elect rich politicians, the dynamic quickly moves to the actual levers of power. In other words, only the rich begin to earn cabinet posts and even military positions.

Soon a single class – or party – is not just controlling the outcome of elections, they are controlling the society.

And democracy no longer exists.

Rwanda’s Choice: Gorillas or Guerillas

Rwanda’s Choice: Gorillas or Guerillas

by Arusha ♥ 4 Comments

Rwanda is beginning to boil. Genocide is not in cards, but tourism is definitely jeopardized.

Last month the UN issued a report clearly implicating Rwanda in the growing conflict in neighboring Congo. Western countries on the Security Council responded with reductions of aid and other sanctions, and the situation is growing tense.

The mountain gorillas live in an area that straddles the three countries of the Congo, Uganda and Rwanda. There is fighting in The Congo and it’s never achieved a level of safety capable of a stable tourism industry.

Uganda remains unstable for tourism, and the market has confirmed this. A mountain gorilla permit remains $750 in Rwanda and the 56 daily permits are often booked up a year in advance. In Uganda you can now obtain a permit for around $350 for the day before.

As the situation in the Congo escalates, the safety or more correctly, the well-being of tourists visiting Rwanda is jeopardized. I’m not warning tourists to avoid Rwanda, now, but it’s very important that those who now book gorilla ascents recognize that future events could impact the efficacy of their planned visit.

They should be prepared and willing to cancel at the last minute.

While violence is increasing in The Congo, there is no violence in either Uganda or Rwanda and nothing right now to suggest any. The point it that the same discomforts and apprehension tourists traveling to Uganda to see gorillas feel today might in the next year or so develop in Rwanda as well.

These discomforts and apprehensions are often minor. We as guides are effected by them much more than the tourist. They’re manifest mostly in a breakdown of park patrolling and authority, the increase in the necessity of bribes, and the breaking of conservation rules especially those applied particularly to tourists visiting the gorillas themselves.

Eventually tourists begin to feel these, though, and that’s the reason for Uganda’s huge market decline right now.

Rwandan Tutsi seem to be throwing down the mantel, and that’s not good for tourists. Popular local journalists are growing increasingly offensive to Americans, especially.

Sensitive American tourists are now reporting the unease themselves.

The complicated problem in the area is the same as it’s been for centuries: Hutus versus Tutsis. The violence has a colonial culpability to it, and the inability for any lessons to have been learned from the great genocide of 1994 is squarely the blame of western countries, particularly France and the U.S.

I find it singularly ironic that Bill Clinton, the principal reason the 1994 genocide was not curtailed (and he has admitted this as his greatest foreign policy failure) was in Kigali a few weeks ago acting totally oblivious to the storm clouds gathering.

The UN experts determined last month that Rwanda was directly funding and in other ways supporting the main Tutsi militia group that has successfully beaten the UN peace keeping forces in several battles in the last several weeks.

M23 has taken control of considerable territory in Kivu Province and is threatening the major town of Goma. Refugees are fleeing by the thousands. The UN is in an enormous dilemma as the current peace-keeping force will be unable to curtail further M23 advances.

Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994, perhaps a million Rwandan hutus fled into the less stable eastern Congo. At first they were treated as refugees and supported by the UN but over time they became a powerful militia known as the Interamwe.

Rwanda and to a lesser extent, Uganda, supported any armed group that could push back against the growing power of the Interamwe. As time passed allegiances grew complicated, as did the politics of the greater Congo nation. In an attempt to establish authority in the far eastern Kivu province, Kinshasa essentially provoked more war in Kivu, stirring up the pot further.

Out of this extraordinarily complicated mess emerged “M23,” a militia group decidedly Tutsi. One of its first commanders is currently on trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity, specifically the conscription of children as soldiers. But M23 continued and is today the single greatest threat for stability in Kivu.

And the UN with western nations’ affirmation has charged that Rwanda is illegally supporting M23.

This will not be solved soon. Rwanda is one of the most dictatorial countries on earth, but that alone shouldn’t stop aware tourists. Safety is the paramount issue. And “well-being” which includes being able to have fun, is intrinsic to any valuable travel experience.

Rwanda’s teetering on the fence. Stay tuned.

Rich Kids Can’t Run

Rich Kids Can’t Run

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

Kenyan runners are set to win 9-10 Olympic medals but their path to victory is ridiculously different from their competitors.

Any child athlete anywhere in the world who aspires to the Olympics has to first demonstrate winning.

And in many countries like Kenya, being chosen for the Olympic Team is not by winning a formulated try-out as it is in America. Rather, a professional committee makes the decision based mostly on recent victories achieved outside Kenya.

In large part this is because the country doesn’t have the high-tech equipment or venue good enough to actually measure global performance. They’re unable to produce a try-out with global standards.

So global excellence has to be measured by the contests abroad that the individual applicants enter. The Kenyan stars on the team this year include the marathon winners of Chicago, London, New York, Berlin, Boston and a number of other cities around the world.

(I remember introducing a softball league to western Kenya in the early 1970s. You can’t imagine what we did for bats and balls, and I’m sure that my star hitter might have performed differently if he was using a regulation bat.)

So how do you get that first win?

According to Forbes magazine, an aspiring Olympian starts spending $15-20,000 per year before even becoming a teenager.

That’s impossible in a country where the average annual wage is less than a tenth of that. And consider that two current Kenyan Olympians, a Maasai brother and sister, Moses and Linet Masai, come from such a poor village that without birth certificates they simply chose for their surname their tribe.

Forbes reports that early money for an aspiring Olympian goes primarily for coaching. The bulk of the twenty grand may actually be the coach’s salary, but there’s also living, schooling and travel expenses since you go to the coach, the coach doesn’t come to you.

In Kenya the coach works for free. For the world’s greatest runners he’s an Irish priest and the story about Father O’Connell is one of the most wonderful stories of the Olympics this year.

And the training area as you’ve already guessed is a high mountain village above the Great Rift Valley. Getting there from nearly anywhere in Kenya is expensive by Kenyan standards. Once there, the kid needs food and schooling, and all of this is provided by Father O’Connell and his mission.

The contrast is stark with an American child glamorously walking into a famous Denver gym with parents in toe.

Now Father O’Connell has no stage-of-the-art timing devices; he still uses a stopwatch. There are no perfect surface running tracks; kids run on dirt. The first day at his mission they aren’t fitted with $800 training shoes; usually they start barefoot.

And when they finally achieve his blessing to go compete on the world stage, his order has no money to buy them bus tickets to Nairobi. So who does?

The other successful Kenyan athletes. There is an unwritten code among Kenyan winners that they must fund the up-and-coming, even those who might ultimately beat them at the Olympics. Can you imagine Roger Federer doing that for Andy Murray? Yet that’s exactly what happens in Kenya.

Wilson Kipsang Kiprotich vowed recently he will smash the marathon world record at the Olympics currently held by Kenyan Noah Ngeny, who paid for Kiprotich’s first trip outside Kenya.

The three fastest men in the world, Kipsang Kiprotich, Silas Kiplagat and Nixon Chepseba – as professionally clocked in marathons the last two years — are all competing for Kenya in the Olympics. Together.

Father O’Connell’s village travels straight out of the Great Rift Valley to the London arena. It’s a sense of community worth all the gold in the world.

“Rich kids can’t run,” Moses Masai recently told the BBC.

May I add there’s a lot of other things they can’t (or won’t) do, either?

Hot Migration Topic

Hot Migration Topic

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Is it really such a burning issue: why are the wildebeest so late?

I’ve often experienced them crossing from Tanzania to Kenya even later, sometimes not until August. Normally, though, the herds cross the two river border that separates Tanzania from Kenya by mid- to late June, so we’re a month behind.

This year it’s stinging Kenya more than before.

Kenya’s tourism is reeling from terrorism and a rapidly inflating currency. So the few tourists coming to the Mara who are expressing disappointment is just another blow the Kenyans don’t need.

Looking anywhere for a reason their vacation has been diminished, there are a number of American tourists now blogging incorrectly that the reason the migration is late is because the Tanzanians are setting fires in the Serengeti which is disrupting the wildebeest from moving north.

And of course the general collection of end-of-the-world nuts have picked up this version of what’s happening.

They’re all wrong, but first let me explain where the less apocalyptic are coming from.

The wildebeest eat grass and nothing but grass. Their traditional migration patterns are based on where the grass grows when. It’s that simple. Historically the rain pattern traces a parabolic circle the north of which is Kenya’s Maasai Mara and the south of which is Tanzania’s Serengeti.

For more detail, click here.

The rainiest place in East Africa is Kenya’s Maasai Mara. When it’s dry everywhere else, it rains in the Mara, so the wildebeest go there. The Mara is higher and more rocky and has more acidic soil than in the Serengeti, and so the grass isn’t as nutritious. But at least it grows when it doesn’t grow in the Serengeti.

Separate from this rain dynamic that guides the migration is the age-old agricultural and wildlife management question about whether or not to burn grasses on a prairie.

A proponent of burning that I trust explains the necessity as the only way from keeping the prairie from turning into a forest. Most scientists agree with this explanation, but they also disagree that’s good. Most science suggests burning isn’t overall a good strategy for either agriculture (slash-and-burn) or wildlife management. In other words, it might be better to have a few more forests and a few less prairies.

The argument has been going on since Caesar.

Here’s a blogger that’s got it right.

Whichever side you choose, the fact all agree on is that the increased prairies in East Africa over the last half century is part of the reason that the wildebeest population has tripled. Another argument is over whether the current huge size of the wildebeest population is good or not, but certainly from a tourist point of view it is.

Both Kenya and Tanzania park rangers burn their grasslands. Come September and October when the rains return to parts of the Serengeti and the herds begin to leave Kenya, Kenyan rangers start furiously burning to delay their departure from there.

So both sides do it, and both sides argue they do it for scientific reasons, albeit there is a short-term benefit that does for a very short while delay the herds. Burning, as you may startle yourself from remembering 3rd grade science, produces water (moisture) which drops on the burned prairie and immediately sprouts new short grass even without rain.

Alas, a very tempting reason to stay and have another bite.

It was very unfortunate that an excellent Kenyan newspaper, Nairobi’s biggest, propagated the inaccurate story. It’s beneath the standard of the Daily Nation but even worse, suggesting the fires are being uniquely set as a blockage rather than just the normal half-century old grass burning strategy is totally irresponsible.

The greatest reason the herds are late is because the rains – like everywhere in the world – have been very unusual. I’m sitting in a place of a horrible drought. East Africa – northern Tanzania in particular – has had unusually heavy rains, and this has resulted in much more new late grass.

The migration isn’t so hard-wired that animals will leave a food source. Migrations worldwide are driven by food sources. We had an unusual warbler migration this year in the Midwest, because bugs – their food – appeared earlier than normal.

Burning is incidental to this, perhaps a short-term fix delay (a week, maybe two) but nothing more significant. Tourists who believe they can fine tune their “migration vacation” in periods of two-weeks are nuts.

Tanzanians blame Kenyans for everything wrong in Kenya, and Kenyans blame Tanzanians for everything wrong in Kenya. In this case there’s nothing wrong to begin with.

Except bad reporting and tourists who didn’t do their homework.

Live For Your Trip

Live For Your Trip

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Here’s a sure fire way to kill yourself: plan your own trip to East Africa.

This is going to sound like the most self-serving blog ever, but I find little solace reporting about the 73 people killed last week when – once again – the ferry between Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar capsized.

The ferry is featured in Lonely Planet, in dozens of plan-yourself travel forums, and even in WikiTravel.

It’s pointless to write about the ferry, today, because I would simply be repeating what I wrote about a year ago when the same thing happened.

Do-it-yourself, plan-it-yourself travel to Africa has not quite developed to a safe enough point yet in most of East Africa, and the ferry is the best example. Forums like Lonely Planet are getting better to be sure, but they are also among those that sail right past the news of the day.

On July 8 jpinab entered the Thorn Tree Forum of Lonely Planet and asked for advice about traveling from Zanzibar to Arusha.

After several replies and backpostings, including two which I suspect were actually small local tour company stealthers from Dar, jpinab fortunately decided not to take the Zanzibar ferry.

But was there any discussion about how dangerous they are? About how unreliable they are? How of five ferries scheduled daily rarely 3 actually operate?

No, the discussion was governed by cost. And that’s the same that happens time and again if you move through these travel forums. The preponderance of activity is how to get a good price, and the presumption is that everything is possible at a good price.

That’s crazy. It’s also deadly.

South Africa and Europe are superb places to explore on your own, with forums of helpful individuals that I’ve only rarely found to be completely wrong.

If you’re savvy about forums, if you realize that most of the information from travelers who have been only once or twice to a destination is very limited and usually not true in any general way, then you’ll be careful enough to survey large numbers of remarks panning through a variety of seasons and types of people.

If you take the time to do all that, then I wager you have a pretty good chance of determining something good and safe by yourself.

But not yet in East Africa and the ferry is a good example.

The information I see from independent travelers in East Africa on these forums is saturated with inaccuracies. The most inaccurate of all is the discussion of the “great migration.” It amazes me how travelers who visit a place once in their lives suddenly are experts.

But the inaccuracies about the Zanzibar ferry defy my patience and understanding. I hope the four foreigners killed on the Zanzibar ferry last week didn’t use a travel forum to get there.

Traveling to the Mara in January to see the “migration” is a mistake that you’ll be able well to live with. That’s the point: Live.

A Tale of Two Futures

A Tale of Two Futures

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

Colorado will have fewer tourists, now, after last night’s shooting. Just like Kenya.

A test of Kenya’s security abilities starts tomorrow. Yesterday al-Shabaab announced that increased and renewed attacks on Kenya will begin Saturday, the start of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. And for the first time, the terror organization specifically mentioned “Nairobi.”

So we have a new real threat, acknowledged by Kenyan officials, and an announced plan to prevent violence from happening. It’s a test if ever there was one, and tourists around the world will be watching.

Colorado, on the other hand, has no desire to test its inability to control home-grown terror. Like so many other states recently, Colorado has reduced gun control including allowing concealed weapons. Unless these absurd tendencies are changed by American lawmakers, shootings like last night won’t diminish.

But Kenya’s gun laws are strict. Kenya’s problem is with foreign terrorism not home-grown terrorism, and Kenya has very strict – some say too strict – security laws. Starting Saturday and through the month of Ramadan, we’ll be able to measure how effective Kenya is at preventing terrorism.

More than a hundred people have been killed in terror attacks this year alone in Kenya, and many more injured. Two large attacks were notable in Kenya’s second largest city, Mombasa, and smaller grenade attacks did occur in Nairobi (not claimed by Shabaab) but the majority have occurred in remote areas near Somalia.

Unfortunately according to Nairobi’s main radio station, “Al-Shabaab is believed …building up to a larger attack.”

What strikes me as so sadly ironic is that Kenya is doing everything possible to prevent terrorism. Moreover, tourism is critically more important to Kenya than Colorado.

Colorado, on the other hand, is being governed by wildly conservative fanatics who we can safely predict will do little more to control the market in guns and explosives. There’s little reason to believe things will get better in Colorado; in Kenya, their chance is about to begin and they have sounded confidence.

Tourism is something earned; there’s no inherent right that any place just because it exists should be visited. Colorado and Kenya are falling to the bottom of holiday makers’ lists of places to visit. And they should be.

So as tourists around the world plan next year’s vacations, Colorado, whose reputation has only declined again and again more than ten years after Columbine, is being scratched out. Kenya is being watched.

Good luck, Kenya.

Back Home after 2 Million Years

Back Home after 2 Million Years

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The remarkable new science of early man evolution is shifting from the hallowed halls of Harvard, Berkeley, Wisconsin and Rutgers to Wit, where it all began!

It all began about 2 million years ago.

Southern Africa was experiencing the end of a long period of climate change during which the Great Rift Valley had formed, one of earth’s most central geological features. A period of intense drought was ending. There were a lot of earthquakes going on as earth’s gargantuan plates sought long-term resting places.

Around what is now Johannesburg the veld was full of life, despite the millennia of drought that had considerably reduced the area’s biomass. But that meant that everything that was left was very successful.

There were dozens of species of rodents and antelopes, thousands of birds, and many predators like the Saber-toothed tiger. And there were men, or almost men. At least 4 species of hominins, maybe more.

Two of those were Australopithecus sediba, a woman with her child or perhaps much younger brother. They were walking among the tall forests and over the occasional meadows looking for food. They weren’t hunters.

They were looking for tubers, fruits and seeds, a pantry of nourishment hard to find in the dry conditions in which they’d been born. So often they ate more than just the leaves of a bush: they ate the bark, too.

Virtually all their waking hours were spent searching for food and avoiding predation from the tiger .. and maybe from the other types of early man especially those who had developed incisors and were eating meat, likely an evolutionary response to diminishing food sources.

All the forms of hominin at the time were small and chimp-like. But what made these two different from other types was that the front of their small brains resembled ours. And their pelvis resembled ours. Our brains and our pelvis are two very distinctive parts of the anatomy of homo sapiens.

What these two creatures didn’t know, and all the other animals in their area didn’t know either, was that they were foraging over a huge underground cave. The area was in the final stages of forming what would later become earth’s greatest vein of gold and other precious minerals, a hundred million or more years of work.

So one final touch on this geological sculpture opened up the earth above them, and they and many other animals with them tumbled into the cave and were crushed to death. Even the feared saber–tooth tiger that might have been preying on them fell prey to the earth opening up below them both.

Then hardly a few days or weeks afterwards and reflecting the great climate changes occurring on earth at the time, there was a torrential thunderstorm, and huge rivers of water poured into the cave, pushing the two early man creatures, the tiger and many other animals together into a far underground pool that quickly solidified as rock.

The site of these two creatures and many of the animals with them was discovered more than a decade ago. Excavating the remaining bones from rock, however, is a very difficult process, so the fossil bones of the female were presented to science only two years ago.

Australopithecus sediba immediately became the star of early man studies. As more and more scientists got a look at the bones, it seemed reasonable that she might be a direct ancestor to us, something that few scientists have claimed of any of the ancient Australopithecine before.

Now, thanks to new scanning technologies similar to an MRI, the bones of the younger male still in stone can be studied without being recovered from the stone!

The machine creates a perfect picture of just the fossil bone separate from the rock that cakes it. And then new 3D imaging technology creates a facsimile out of a plastic-like substance.

My narrative above, of course, is totally fictional. But what really is known of the creatures themselves is turning paleontology upside down. The results are stunning.

For years we’ve presumed that our larger pelvis was the result of having to birth a creature with a larger brain. But Au. sediba’s pelvis is relatively as large as ours, and its brain is only a third as big.

For years we’ve presumed that brain size (or more correctly the ratio of brain size to body size) determined the cognitive intelligence of the creature. But recently neuroscience has concluded cognitive intelligence is not so linked to the size of our brain as the specific formation of its frontal lobe. And guess what? Au. sediba’s frontal lobe is remarkably like ours, and remarkably unlike other early men we have in study.

And perhaps the most stunning discovery of all might be … skin. Fossil bones are not organic. When we say that this creature or that ate this or that, it’s a presumption from the fossil remains of seeds and plant casings that have turned to stone.

But the unique, fast way these creatures and all the life around them was encased in stone lends hope that real organic matter with DNA, such as skin, might be preserved!

There’s another stunning development. Unlike many American paleontologists who guard their science like their family heirlooms, the science being undertaken at the University of Witwatersrand is the most transparent paleontology ever undertaken.

The ongoing excavations will be video streamed in real time! The laboratory work, the fossil bones already completely recovered are wide open to virtually any scientist in the world to take a look at. This transparency is not simply revolutionary, it is incredibly refreshing and long overdue.

Compare this southern African science, for example, to American Tim White’s ten-year secrecy of the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus.

The chief scientist and discover is an American, Lee Berger, who has been associated with the University of Witwatersrand for more than ten years. His wife, Jackie Smilg, is the person developing the scanning technology.

And with full backing of the government of South Africa, the Cradle of Humankind is becoming not only a major tourist attraction, but a scientific center.

For all of modern history, early man science has had its thoroughfare in the universities and museums of the western world. No longer. It’s back home!

What goes around comes around.

Not so Nobel

Not so Nobel

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The Nobel concept of microfinance is being revealed as little more than a business whose effects on poverty are no better than any other banking enterprise. Darth Vader sits on many of their boards.

There’s something sweetly compassionate in the pure Islamic concept that money should never be lent at an interest rate. It’s also anathema to modern capitalism. Periodic negative cash flows are intrinsic to many successful businesses; and many genius if awkward ideas would never have come to fruition in our modern economies.

But the two radically different concepts have one thing in common: you’ve got to have money to make money. White angels might have existed in medieval times; today you need collateral.

About two decades ago microfinance emerged as a charitable bridge between the despised money lender and the little guy in need of a few bucks to run his gristmill:

Or buy his heifer, or paint his school house, or open his corner café, or buy his first bicycle so go he could go to work, or plant his half acre of white beans.

It was deemed so successful that many of its original proponents received world bonuses … like the Nobel Prize.

Bangladeshi Muhammad Yunus became the world’s poster banker for helping the poor while helping himself. But, of course, he didn’t intend to help himself; he just meant to help the poor.

The concept is simple. Lend very small amounts of money to responsible people who are very likely to pay you back and keep the interest rate down.

It’s also been around for a very long time. Self-help groups in India formed during the British colonial period and continue throughout the developing world, today. U.S. credit unions were originally formed to provide the service here, although they’ve “grown up” in recent years.

This is a huge capitalistic market, and especially in emerging economies where the only big thing is the urban slum. And since “small” banks don’t exist anywhere, not even in Dhaka, it wasn’t a job banks were doing or wanted to.

Win-win, right? Yes, except it became win-win-win.

The Heifer Project was more or less an early type, and after Yunus won the Nobel Prize in 2006, microfinance became all the fashion. Three Cups of Tea followed on its heals, and today a slough of so-called microfinance charities exist. One of the largest in the U.S. is KIVA whose young female founder and CEO is now the star of a number of national television commercials.

But as New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff so aptly put it, Three Cups of Tea … spilled. Three Cups of Tea was a patent scam. Money solicited for schools was used for the founders’ own increasingly lavish lifestyle. Moreover, his claims and promises about the why and wherefore of his projects proved widely untrue.

But to be fair, most of the microfinance groups are not like Three Cups of Tea. Their missions aren’t made up. A reasonable percentage of donor money actually gets to the developing area.

The problem is a problem with the concept of microfinance more than with the individual entities that do it. And I think it fair, today, to claim that lofty claims of goodness no longer apply. And there are some critical thinkers who believe microfinance actually increases poverty.

The first discoveries made by analysts in the early 2000s applied to organizations like the Heifer Project where growth spurned greed in the organization. Salaries went up, administrative costs became so high in the Heifer Project that the founders created a shadow foundation board to hide some of the money. In some states this is a felony.

That’s been remedied and today the Heifer Project looks more like it did when it first started, and illegalities are no longer assumed. And the attention that was poured on the Heifer Project about ten years ago reigned in much of these tendencies by other micro finance groups.

But after the scandals of Three Cups of Tea and the early Heifer Project dual foundations, criticism of microfinance in general exploded.

KIVA, America’s microfinance dandy of the here and now, was first harshly criticized almost three years ago by a charity whistle-blower, David Roodman.

Roodman doesn’t claim that like Heifer or Three Cups of Tea, KIVA’s practices may be illegal. Rather, he claims that KIVA manipulates donor money (in the way any good bank would) to maximize effect, and in so doing is misleading donors about what they are actually doing.

KIVA solicits your funds by showing you a number of uplifting small business projects to which you can donate. You then open an account with your donation, which immediately depletes and then fills back up as the debtor repays the loan. You can then, as most do, elect to place your money and its modest earnings into another project.

The problem is that your money is pooled with everyone else’s, and KIVA’s directors disperse it as they see fit.

There’s nothing illegal about this, although it does strike me as sort of a ponzi scheme with yourself. But the point is that it’s grossly misleading.

KIVA realizes that if you as a small benefactor were simply solicited to “fund a small microfinance bank” you’d be much less likely to give than if you supposedly target your money for helping a Congolese self-help group “to buy 2 tubs of tomatoes, a tub of peanuts, and 50 kg of sorghum.”

Thirty thousand people weekly are now contributing to KIVA. And as Roodman rightly points out, “In short, the person-to-person donor-to-borrower connections created by Kiva are partly fictional. I suspect that most Kiva users do not realize this. Yet Kiva prides itself on transparency.”

It remains unclear if Three Cups of Tea has remedied itself like the Heifer Project did. The American Institute of Charity (CharityWatch.org) gives Heifer an “A-“ rating, today.

And that’s the other maybe biggest part of the problem: organizations like CharityWatch and GuideStar are widely used by charity givers to determine if their noble intentions can find Nobel placement.

And through no fault of their own, charity rating agencies use the most basic business criterion to determine honesty if integrity of mission. Nothing wrong with this. It’s exactly what you as a donor should demand.

Except that the mission might not work. Or might even be wrong.

And that’s often the case, especially in the Africa I know. When I sit above my little yellow pad and start adding the millions – billions – of dollars Americans have given to so-called charities in Africa, and then understand how little development was actually produced, it’s heart-breaking.

Roodman has recently published a book, “Due Diligence, An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance” which I’d paraphrase in a simplistic way by the above statement, that the mission(s) of microfinance rarely work. And when they’re wrong, they contribute to poverty, they don’t alleviate it.

Roodman himself has been scrutinized, and that scrutiny is widely favorable. Both NGOs here at home as well as those in the developing world are increasingly critical of microfinance in general.

And the reason is pretty simple, too. Bad projects probably outnumber good projects. The private world of giving is probably no better – indeed, probably much worse – than government to government aid.

The net result of microfinance, like most private aid in general, harms the developing world, doesn’t help it.

And on The Other Side

And on The Other Side

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Weather you kill me or not, the world is spinning out of control. 3 dead in South Africa from heavy snow and cold; more than 100 die in my Midwest from heat.

I’ve had a lot of fun in my career surprising people with the facts of weather in Africa. Most Americans grow up believing Africa is the hot jungle it isn’t.

Most of sub-Saharan Africa has a statistical climate far milder and much more pleasant than many parts of North America, especially by own Midwest: Less hot in summer, less cold in winter, and much less severity.

Global warming is an extreme phenomenon. That means it just doesn’t get warmer each moment, it ping pongs from warmest to coldest, driest to wettest. The graph line trend is up and wetter, but the ride is anything but smooth.

Johannesburg’s longitude is exactly reversed to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, or the tip of Texas. It’s in winter now, and snow is not unheard of. There’s even a single ski resort! However, it’s closed at the moment, because there’s too much snow.

Over the weekend, three people died from radical winter weather. National highways are gridlocked, the main and only highway between Johannesburg and the country’s third largest city, Durban, closed yesterday afternoon because of snow.

Record low temperatures and record amounts of snow has casued much of the country to shut down Monday and wait for the thaw predicted for tomorrow.

And while this version of winter is extremely rare in the Johannesburg area, in the interior of the country it’s virtually unheard of. The Cape, for example, sits above the planet’s warmest body of water, the Indian Ocean. But today, even The Cape is frozen by winter weather.

A lovely highland pass between Cape Town and the famous “Garden Route” that so many tourists drive is closed because of ice and snow.

Meanwhile back here in the balmy Midwest I sat outdoors yesterday evening with friends for a performance of Richard III in Spring Green, Wisconsin. We ended the evening feeling like we’d been hit by a truck.

It’s the heat to be sure, but the psychological effect of this relentless heat, driving past miles and miles of lost corn, seeing nothing but brown is enough to add ten degrees to the already scorched thermometer.

And today we in the Midwest begin three days of “hazardous weather” heat. The bland looking national weather warning uses industry jargon to describe the unusual and deadly situation as “headlines.”

Much of South Africa is no worse prepared for climate change than we are in the Midwest, which isn’t saying a lot. But of significantly more urgency is the fact that the vast majority of Africa is far less capable of dealing with this extreme weather.

Weather or not you kill me, you’ll likely first kill the Africans.

Black and White

Black and White

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Flip it, white man. What if you were, well you know, the other… color. They sang in London, but they were from Africa.

The difference between black and white, between slaves and slave masters, is the ultimate difference between race, although I agree with many that it isn’t that much different than between Kikuyus and Zulus. But it is the ultimate. You can’t go further down the spectrum.

My take of the many excellent bands and singers in South Africa is with this constantly embedded theme of difference, separation, oppression. From most of the rest of the world, it’s flipped. But today, in South Africa, it’s arguably the white who feels oppressed.

Last month in London the annual concert brought together contemporary music from South Africa to the white disaspora outside.

South Africa’s White Diaspora is one of the most interesting floating cultures in the world. Formed mostly by the 1800 people monthly that fled the country in the 1980s, it’s created huge footprints in Australia, Canada, the U.S. and England.

While some have returned, most have not, but unlike immigrants and refugees from other parts of the world, white South Africans find it difficult to integrate into other western societies.

I’ve often met, for instance, the children of those who immigrated speak with a South African accent even though they’ve grown up outside.

The tribalism of white South Africans is as strong as any black tribe on the continent.

Let the music tell the story:

Clinton’s Congo Collapses

Clinton’s Congo Collapses

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

2004 Painting by Cheri Samba
The UN’s actions in eastern Congo to stop the escalating war might work for the moment, but they are useless down the line without an American pivot in Rwanda.

America was drawn into this mess because of the political weakness and inept statesmanship of Bill Clinton.

As time accelerates off those years Clinton comes into sharp focus as a politician par excellance but a pragmatic leader without vision. He road a wave of latent 1960s American aspirations that he was unable to fulfill domestically.

So when Blackhawk Down undid his lofty rhetoric about the global arena, he cowered like a dog who had wandered unintentionally into a mad neighbor’s yard. And he failed to recover quickly enough to stop the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

Instead, a year later he and other equally timid western leaders began an extraordinarily expensive cleanup, which like BP in The Gulf was cleverly crafted as a great humanitarian accomplishment.

The big then hidden problem was that cleanup included the enthroning of Paul Kagame, the single greatest cause of the Congo flareup, today.

And because the American economy was growing gangbusters, technology was exploding with one grand surprise after another, and America was wallowing in the presumed glory of having won the Cold War, Clinton was capable of assuming greatness just for being around at the right time.

It was inevitable that his terrible neglect – specifically of Kagame’s own obvious vision for Tutsi domination of the region — would one day return to haunt us all … and that day is today in The Congo.

A significant UN Peacekeeping force has been successfully challenged by M23, a powerful warlord army, in Kivu Province in the eastern Congo, and today the local population is being displaced as if Katrina had descended onto middle earth.

The tinderbox will explode at any minute. The only half-rational functioning society in Kivu, the main town of Goma, is due to either fall or be wiped out and the UN sent running.

Yesterday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon called the leaders of The Congo and Rwanda, the two greatest arch adversaries on earth, to beg for peace. They won’t give it to him.

I’m not sure how to undo a generation of politics predicated on Clinton’s cowardice, but one thing is certain. The U.S. and Europe must stop the unchecked and often unaccounted for support of Rwanda’s merciless dictator, Paul Kagame.

Kagame is front and center in the conflict, a likely billionaire as a result of it, and a fanatic who believes that ethnic conflicts are irresolvable. He has jailed his opponents, likely assassinated them abroad, and struck terror through his population.

And he is funding the war in The Congo, with U.S. and European aid money.

But the U.S. and Europe are stuck trying to justify the past and simply can’t pivot out of their culpability. The U.S. and Europe promote policies of ethnic reconciliation that cost millions but go nowhere, and support Kagame for lack of any alternative because they were the ones that put him in power.

You know, it’s time to own up to our mistakes. We’ve got to step out of a history of governance entrenched in the notion that the past was always right.

America’s vision — Clinton’s plan — for reconstructed Rwanda isn’t working. It’s like culling deer. You might save the roses where you cull, but the problem only then gets worse on the periphery where culling didn’t occur.

The periphery of Kagame’s power is Kivu, the sore that festers and will soon burst. Kagame’s American vaccinations give him immunity so he can wade into the puss and extend his power westwards.

The conflict in the eastern Congo is so complex and daunting that a blogpost seems useless without deep background. Much of what I believe rests on personal experience and a formidable body of often conflicting intelligence and analysis. In fact, probably the only evident truth about The Congo is that its complexity is its undoing.

Study Jason Stearns: His book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, was published last year, and I have used above the Samba painting that tops his invaluable blog, Congo Siasa.

Recalibrate your support for Kagame, America. Clinton’s shame is old news.

Who’s the Most Advanced?

Who’s the Most Advanced?

by Arusha ♥ 6 Comments

It’s been nearly a month since the complete bonobo genome was published, and it’s absolutely astounding how American creationists dispute the science.

This is the last of the great apes to be sequenced and completes a body of data that can significantly increase our understanding of human evolution.

Bonobos live in central Africa, an endangered primate now proved no closer to humans than chimpanzees. This first great discovery contrasts with primatologists’ presumptions based on anatomy and to a lesser extent, behavior, that had held bonobos were the closest of the great apes to man.

Confirmed is that great apes — chimps, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas and man — are remarkably closely related. This was never in doubt, at least not by rational thinkers. So the excitement of the genome is the evidence now being dissected that will more exactly draw the evolutionary timeline of primate divergence, and the possibility that complete genomes can provide evidence for behaviorial evolution.

The initial theories are pretty exciting. They suggest that the divergence between the common ancestor of all existing primates, including man, was as early as 4½ million years ago. This confirms further that quite a few stars of early hominid development, including the earliest Australopithecines, were not our ancestors, but divergent dead-ends from even earlier common ancestors to our common primate extant ancestor.

And much more interesting information is on the way. Such as the importance of rivers as effective separators of hominid evolution. Or whether the most successful hominid behavior is either “Make Love, Not War” or “Make War, Not Love” as the eminent University of Wisconsin scientist, John Hawks, told the Los Angeles Times.

But the sad story in all of this is how warped America has tried to deny the findings. The leading idiocy is from the heavily funded Institute for Creation Research.

Their resident “scholar”, a Ph.D. of no significance, Jeffrey Tomkins, berated the Nature article and all the corresponding good reporting about it as “misrepresented.”

In what even to this humble laymen was just plain dumb, Tomkins focused on the genetic difference that was shown to exist between the existing great apes, then tried unsuccessfully to extrapolate the notion that they are therefore not of the same stock (have no common ancestor).

As has been the case for the last several decades, scientists mostly ignore this stuff. But I did find one scientist, Ricki Lewis, whose personal analysis of the Nature paper specifically debunks Tomkins.

And has also been the case for the last several decades, Tomkins’ scientific-sounding article was picked up by literally hundreds of religious journals, which then propagated even more blatant misrepresentation and poor analysis of the facts. You can’t exactly call it a lie, but it’s very close.

Do a Google search on Tomkins’ article, and you’ll be amazed with the endless number of mouthpieces – all American – for this nonsense. It’s truly depressing.

Facts and science, today, are being cast aside by this quirky segment of America, and it’s one thing simply to call them out and move on. But we’ve tried that. And while fortunately polling is on our side, and scientific facts like global warming and evolution are miserably slowly making their way into the normal fabric of American life, the outlanders are tenacious and vicious.

So while the actual number of creationists may be slowly reducing, those that remain are getting more and more powerful. They are “cleansing” school textbooks of science, for example, and packing it with their nonsense.

Belief in the simply untrue leads people into weird behaviors, not least of which is voting against their own self-interest. So rejoice that the completion of the great ape genome project gives us so much complete science about evolution that it will be even harder to dispute.

But beware the powers amassed to suppress it. And not just because of the denial of evolution, but for the integrity of all science in America.

Eat And/Or Die

Eat And/Or Die

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Published on jimbonham.com's blog.
Organic brats and burgers covered with organic lettuce as Nigeria berated our summer holiday grill obsessions and viciously debated a national law to accelerate the use of genetically modified crop seeds.

If my relatives are any indication, America is turning neon green. We couldn’t even use non-organic salt for the July 4th barbecues. And the meat was hormone free and the veggies had to be certified non-bioengineered.

I can’t blame the younger generation. They are beset by pandemics of autism and allergies difficult to explain. And I’m the first to rate the taste of organic food as far superior to all that processed stuff.

But the world is starving and many of Africa’s leading advocates for increased food production are demanding rapid use of anything that can speed up food production and increase agricultural yields.

Last year both houses of Parliament in Nigeria passed a sweeping law allowing the use of any sort of seed whatever, even those not yet vetted as safe in developed countries.

“Nigeria should be feeding the rest of Africa,” Senator Ayo Adeseu explained at a food forum last week in Ibadan. “But we have been lagging behind due to non adoption of the latest in technologies. ….The urgent challenge before the nation is that we should imbibe biotechnology.”

President Goodluck Johnathan has refused to sign the bill. He has refused to comment specifically as to why, but the bill would allow farmers and their cooperatives to buy seeds from anywhere without the need for any government certification whatever.

The desperation to feed the starving of the world increases every year. This is because some headway is being made, and success breeds hope, and food policies and scientific advances occur more slowly than the death of a malnourished child.

The most critical areas are actually outside Africa. India ranks on top, and yet its economy is growing in leaps and bounds. Last month two scientists in “Tropical Medicine and International Heath” explained this in part because Indians were adopting western lifeways wholesale that, in fact, contribute rather than ameliorate hunger on a macro level.

Fast food, too much sugar, an unbalanced diet when overlaid a population that still has wanton starvation only increases it overall.

But the rapid adoption of western lifeways in places like India can also mean rapid adoption of many of our developed concerns about “being green.” India’s small farmers find themselves twisted into a dilemma about their own survival, the higher cost of genetically modified seed, the certainty of a higher yield but the questions about long-term safety.

So Goodluck Johnathan is not alone, and many in the developed world are impressed with the critics of genetically modified food. The principal criticism is of the increased use of pesticides that can be used against bioengineered crops. Dr. Michael Antoniou of King’s College London School of Medicine said last monththat most bioengineered foodstuffs were dangerous.

The pesticides themselves could kill if not handled correctly, they advanced the immunity of viruses and insects that could be massively harmful to crop yield, and finally Dr. Antoniou worries that the bioengineering itself will create a harmful food.

Everyone stipulates that bioengineering increases yields, and as I survey the area around which I live this year of a drought, it’s amazing to see how bioengineered corn seed has created crops that can survive at least marginally without water!

It’s a race to be sure. But is it a race to end hunger or life?

Circumcise or Die

Circumcise or Die

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Kenyan rappers are being prosecuted for hate speech in the run-up to March’s election. We don’t prosecute MnM but these guys should be clamped.

There is a wide range of laws prohibiting hate speech around the world. We in the U.S. are among the most liberal but developed cousins like the U.K. have rather sophisticated laws prohibiting it.

Most people would agree that there should be no freedom to shout “kill” or “fire” but the dispute begins when crazies picket the military funeral of a fallen hero with signs and chants, “God Hates Fags!” It should be regulated, just like hedge funds.

The theory is pretty simple. “God Hates Fags!” is not the same as “Kill the Gay!” We all so stipulate. But (1) is our sophisticated media delivery purporting the same idea, or (2) is there evidence that raising the tempers of these warped supporters will trigger violence?

Yes to both counts, your honor.

In Kenya three of the country’s most popular rappers, millionaires (in shillings) for the sales of their CDs and one even a gospel singer, have now sold tens of thousands of copies of songs that clearly incite the same ethnicity that nearly brought the country down in fire in 2007.

Although the firecrackers that started the holocaust was the age-old friction between the haves and have-nots, the rightests and the leftists, the pyres were ethnic. It always seems to be that way: the poor versus the unpoor in Ireland; the oppressed versus the rulers in Arabia.

I began blogging at that time, because it was an unbelievable undoing of Kenya. The silver lining came 3-4 months later as Kenya was forced to recreate itself from the ashes, and the recreation has been nothing short of magnificent.

The design is done. The scaffolding is being torn down as the structures are in place, and the election that will complete the process is on March 4.

Click here to listen to this most egregious rap. You’ll have to scroll forward about 2min 16sec to get to the actual song that was sold as a CD.

This Kikuyu rapper is trashing the leading candidate for president in the March election, from the arch rival tribe of the Luo. We had hoped the ethnicity would now be incidental, but it isn’t. It is for the younger generation, but not for the older.

It doesn’t help, either, that the Kikuyu’s choice is Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of the Father of the Nation, Jomo Kenyatta. It doesn’t help because Uhuru is currently on trial in The Hague for Crimes Against Humanity. There is evidence that he was personally involved in torching the country in 2008.

It’s Kikuyus’ failing they won’t come up with anyone better, but a stark statement about how many of them still feel about democracy and other such foolish notions. Many, many Kikuyu would rather blow up themselves and the country to boot than lose power.

And now it seems one of their spokesman is a gospel rapper.

Here is some of the song, Uhuru ni Witu (Uhuru is Ours) by gospel rapper, Kamande wa Kioi, as translated by one of the thankfully many younger Kenyans who despise what’s happening, Amkeni Ndugu Zetu.

(Important background reminders: “Uhuru” is Uhuru Kenyatta, presumed candidate for President and son of the father of the nation and on trial in The Hague. “Raila” is Raila Odinga, the current Prime Minister and front runner in the current campaign for President, a Luo.)

“I bring you a message from all Kikuyu musicians. This is a message from God. Uhuru is the Moses of the Kikuyu nation. He is meant to move Kikuyus from Egypt to Canaan. Do not agree to be divided. Let all votes go to him. He is ours. He is anointed by God, poured oil on.
“Raila, there is a call.
“You thump your chest about Hague, is Hague your mother’s? There is a curse from God. Philistines who do not circumcise cannot lead Israel. When Abraham stressed God, he was told to go get cut, even you General of Migingo, your knife is being sharpened.”

Kikuyus circumcise; Luos don’t.

I can’t image a more egregious lyric. Wa Kioi is not especially young, I imagine he’s in his late 30s. He may be on the dividing line between Kenya’s inspired and educated youth and the Old Guard, but his influence extends far and wide. Many young people of all tribes listen to him; he’s a super star in Kenya.

Together with two others the country’s election oversight board has now charged them with hate speech under a criminal code that requires jail time if convicted.

And there’s a horrible twist to the story as it plays out in Kenyan courts. Wa Kioi’s clever lawyer asked the court to read aloud some of the lyrics of the song under question. Court is held in English, because of the many tribal languages in Kenya.

The lawyer chose a portion which was simply repeating Bible scripture, and as it was translated into English, the court room broke into laughter. The intention, of course, was to fool the court and it seemed a successful ploy:

A second-rate digital media story about the testimony was picked up by major global news sources as if it, too, were gospel.

But hopefully Kenyans won’t be fooled, especially its youth. And hopefully, this so-called man of faith will be slammed behind bars to contemplate the Golden Rule.