Tuberculosis is an infectious disease that most Americans associate with the pre-World War era. It attacks the lungs, essentially disrupting the normal physiology that keeps the lungs clean and clear of too much fluid.

Prior to the discovery of antibiotics the famous “TB Asylum” was the only way to manage the disease, which was basically to quarantine victims from the main population and put them on forced bed rest, in the hopes the body could fight off the bacterium itself.

Antibiotics proved completely effective in treating TB, and only in poorer or remote areas where treatment was difficult was the disease still found.

By the 1970s TB in America was considered an unusual disease. In Africa it had always been an unusual disease.

But the double wallop of the emergence of HIV and the diminishing efficacy of overused antibiotics allowed TB to reappear. What’s important to realize is that TB is a developed world’s disease. It was brought to Africa by the developed world.

Like smallpox which wiped out large numbers of native Americans, TB is now wiping out large numbers of Africans.

TB increased in America in the early 1990s, because that was the height of our HIV infection. As soon as a handle on managing HIV was mastered by the end of the 1990s, TB in America dropped noticeably.

But in Africa the increase continues, despite a similar drop in HIV infections as in America. In fact in sub-Saharan Africa TB is now considered a greater threat than HIV.

There’s a number of reasons for this. The foremost is that TB is a relatively “new” disease in Africa with relatively “old” treatments available. The link with HIV is much more substantial in Africa than elsewhere. And the appearance of the disease was so sudden and so large that the disease seems to be getting the better of newer drugs to treat it.

The many new approaches to treating the disease which are readily available in the developed world often exceed available resources in the developing world.

Our CDC refers to “throwing the kitchen sink” at the disease as a recommended therapy. Basically this means treating the patient with a variety of drugs in the hopes of overwhelming the growing resistance of the disease to numerous antibiotics.

In Africa that’s often too expensive and too impractical for many of Africa’s very rural and poorly developed areas.

South African scientist Valerie Mizrahi from the University of Cape Town’s Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine understands the complexity of the problem better than any person.

Taking a holistic approach to treating the disease on the continent, Dr. Mizrahi realizes that education about the disease to enhance prevention may for Africa be its single-most important therapy, and that training local doctors and scientists who have a vested interest in their communities is a close second.

To be sure, her scientific research on the microorganisms and medicines involved with TB is stellar, too. But her holistic approach was today recognized with a $6 million prize from one of the world’s foremost scientific laboratories, the Institute de France in Paris.

“For me, the most gratifying part of it is that the award committee recognized my commitment to, and passion for, developing people,” Mizrahi said.

So many problems effecting Africa as the younger sibling in a global family require truly holistic approaches, in a way that the developed world just can’t seem to understand with its bulging arsenal of technology and funding.

There are few kitchen sinks in Africa to throw at anything.

So TB is likely going to be around Africa for a very long time: like malaria, until the elusive vaccine is discovered. And managing rather than curing the epidemic is the key to successful public health in Africa, and Mizrahi is leading the charge.

Sunset at the Waterfront. Table Mountain in the background.

The mountain was truly spectacular for me this morning. I’ve been to Cape Town about a dozen times, but I had yet to take the funicular up the mountain. Mostly this was because I’d always tightly scheduled my time, here, and I knew scheduling in the mountain was iffy.

The main website for the cableway starts on the right top first page with the announcement about whether the mountain is “open” or “closed.” And even that is somewhat misleading, because the tram runs even when the mountain is wrapped in cloud, which is about half the time.

Easy trails once on top.

But these last couple days have been so spectacularly clear and wonderful warm in Cape Town, and every morning I’d sit eating my breakfast staring at a perfectly clear mountain top, that I knew it was time.

I got a parking place only about a half kilometer from the tram entrance. That’s not bad, because whenever the mountain is out and especially in the morning every tour guide and tour bus in Cape Town heads for the mountain. It doesn’t matter you were headed to see the penguins or buy trinkets at Market Square or learn about history on a stroll through the Company’s Garden – all that in due course, ma’am. If the mountain’s out, go for it!

Getting ready to lie down on "Belly Rock." Slightly angled up so you can look over the edge 3000' down!

Once a top it’s amazing. And not just the views, but the unusual ecosystem found here includes some remarkable fynbos, reeds, orchids and of course, proteas. The best time for the flowering bouquets is August and September. But I was here in the worst time, February, and it was still beautiful.

The mountain’s geology is equally fascinating dating back 600-800 million years. It’s a unique type of unusually dense sandstone. There are wonderful park trails with good signage and you can spend the day up there or an hour. In an hour you can get the entire panoramic view of both the east into False Bay and towards the Indian Ocean, and west into Table Bay and the Atlantic. On truly clear days you can see Cape Point.

Managing the crowds is becoming difficult. My guide actually caught one Korean chipping off a piece of rock, which of course isn’t allowed. The guide explained that Koreans who worship the “Five Great Massifs” of which Table Mountain is one come with concealed rock hammers to chip away a piece and take it home.

And there little old British ladies, I was also told, who nip away the protea buds! Or steal the orchid seeds!

And there are macho Australians who illegally jump off with unlicensed paragliders!

I felt like Polijimmy.

Our trip’s first stay is on the Waterfront. I really don’t think there’s a better place to stay these days in Cape Town, unless you’d like a good BnB or have more time for a condo or villa along the coast. But for a traditional hotel stay, it’s really the Waterfront. The aged Mt. Nelson is too far away from the action.

Everything is at the Waterfront and don’t be discouraged by its touristy aspect, after all that’s why you’re here, right?! All the adventure touring from whale watching to shark diving to sunset cruising starts from here, the famous aquarium is here, although many of the good sightseeing attractions are a few minutes away in the city.

But 80% of Cape Town’s finest restaurants are here, entertainment is here, and of course all the good shops are here. The management encourages minstrels, new bands and juggling troops, pantomimers and all sorts of performance artists to just set up shop willy nilly.
So along with the amazing aroma of freshly fried calamari you’ll hear creative music at every turn.

My choice of hotel is the Victoria & Alfred, simply because of its location smack dab at the beginning of everything at the Waterfront. Table Bay is too staid for my taste and basically reminds me of an old folks home.

But if my pocket’s full and budget doesn’t matter, I go to the Cape Grace, absolutely one of the most stellar hotels in the world, and only five minutes further away from the action than the V&A. And if my pocket’s tight and hotel ambience is really secondary to anything else, then it’s the Portswood, a truly fine value only minutes away by a well marked walkway.

What a wonderful way to begin an African trip!

My #3 Top Story of 2012 is the explosive narrative of African progress, and the #4 story is the significant exception, South Africa. To see a list of all The Top Ten, click here.

“Africa isn’t just a place for safaris or humanitarian aid. It’s also a place to make money,” says New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff. The well respected author then went on to site dozens of statistics showing Africa out pacing the world economically.

Clearly the average African is neither as comfortable or well off as the average American. But that’s not the point. The average African is mountains higher in comfort and well-being than his parents, and there is every indication that his children will share that euphoric experience.

This is, of course, a generalization but I feel a fair one. Including Somaliland, there are 56 countries in Africa. Perpetual doom and gloom persists in Zimbabwe and the Central African Republic. Increasingly bad news in 2012 plagued Angola, Uganda, Rwanda, Chad and Mali. So my generalization applies to the rest.

This positive view stands in marked contrast to America, where the generation to generation comparison is dismal. The graph projected out another generation or two actually has parts of Africa catching up with American median income.

The World Bank explains this succinctly as a wealth of new natural resource discoveries. Like oil and gold.

But that’s hardly the end of the story. The new-found wealth in the ground is a necessary foundation, just as rich soil was to early Americans and oil was to the 1960s Arab in the Emirates.

But on that foundation is blossoming some exciting non-natural discoveries, in high tech and alternative energy, in natural products manufacture and a score of other industries.

It was poorly reported but extraordinary this year that South Africa bailed out Europe. That’s right. South Africa paid $2 billion into a world monetary fund to help with the Greek and other European bailouts. Economically, the First World took charity from the Third World.

And Africa has no qualms about embracing the best of capitalism, thank you. Walmart was welcomed into South Africa with a warmer embrace than most mid-sized towns in the United States provide the retailer.

But after the hugs and kisses were over, Walmart submitted to a labor agreement that Americans working for Walmart would die for. Why are they able to do this in Africa, and not in America?

And “thing development” is progressing no less fast than social and “thought development.”

Consider the media, (I am). A respected global media watchdog claims that Tanzania has a freer and better media than the U.S. This is because of the worst of American media, which pulls down the overall ranking.

But the worst of American media, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and sorts, have made mincemeat of the truth, have thrown civility to the wolves and turned making money into a first principal that cares little about the effects of its nearly sadistic approach to the public need.

In defense some of us Americans would point to many exceptional online services like Wired and Mother Jones and The Nation (and dozens more), and as you examine those “good” media you’ll find out the reason is the same as for Tanzania’s position: youth.

America is aging less than gracefully and its right-winger lying mentality is very much linked to old guys. So perhaps Africa has an intrinsic advantage, since such a large portion of its population is young relative to America’s.

Yesterday was historic for the American Congress: 78 women in The House and 20 women in the Senate. This reverses a trend begun about a decade ago where women in elected office began to decline.

But in Kenya that would be mandated at 145 in The House and 33 in the Senate! Mandated?! Yes, Kenya’s new constitution requires that a third of all elected officials be women, almost doubling in one fell swoop what it’s taken America more than 200 years to accomplish.

The new Kenyan constitution, modeled but improved on South Africa’s new constitution, is quickly becoming a model worldwide. Simple and common sense things like religion banned from schools and institutionalized affirmative action that adjusts to ethnicity and gender as society continually changes puts Kenya on a markedly higher moral plane than America.

I think above all other things socially, though, is the new African attitude towards justice. America is petrified with the concept of sharia Law, for instance if applied in the new Egypt. But Americans understand little of this and can’t even see how any set of laws can be molded to virtually any social model.

Our own Supreme Court has bent and twisted, upheld and struck down, and essentially remolded and unmolded society again and again. American laws on such things as drug possession (marijuana), abortion, gambling and even incest and slavery have gone all over the chart!

There was no direction from the “Founding Fathers” on those issues part and parcel to modern day life. And the irony is that so many Americans think otherwise, that there is some Founding Father out there guiding our every move.

The new Kenya justice will be an amalgam of Islamic sharia and British common law. Some feat, eh? But beautiful and adjusted to the realities of its new society.

But Kenya recognizes – like so much of the world, America excepted – that there is a global morality, today. That there is a worldwide foundation for such things as basic human rights.

Four of Kenya’s most prominent citizens have submitted to charges filed against them at the World Court in The Hague. Voluntarily they will go to The Netherlands for their trial. Now it needs to be said, of course, that these criminals (as I think they are rightly charged) would likely not do so if the Kenyan public hadn’t forced them to. And that is the majesty and beauty of the situation.

An important aside: recently convicted in the World Court, former Liberian leader Charles Taylor in pleading for leniency in his sentencing for war crimes pointed out that he was convicted of crimes no different from those of George Bush in Iraq.

The justices gave no reply.

This was not the case for our own great Justice Ginsberg who dared to speak the truth in Cairo, when she told the Egyptians that maybe the U.S. constitution wasn’t right for them.

The onslaught of criticism that followed, the incredible vitriol from the right, wasn’t just humiliating to us Americans, it was … well, barbaric. It was truly like German Goths grumbling over Roman progressives. Ginsberg is of course right, and fortunately she rather than Senator Kruz is what Egyptians will and are considering for their own new, progressive societies.

But alas, it’s not all good news for Africa. Africa’s behemoth is South Africa. Its economy is multiples of the rest of the entire continent combined. Its history is as complex and fascinating as our own. And hardly 20 years ago it reformed itself into one of the most progressive, moral societies on earth.

But now, things don’t look so good.

Residual racism and neo-apartheidism are sprouting across its non-black societies. I don’t think this is because it was always destined to be so, that there was some kind of intransigent ethic among whites that would eventually surface again, like an old whale on its last sound.

Rather, it’s because the current president has made it so. Jacob Zuma is a joke.

He’s vain, and easily set off by criticism. He’s so wrapped up in himself, he’s let the country wander leaderless. He’s patently ignored the courts, acted like a banana republic dictator and all the while the country spiraled downwards.

Many local experts, white and black and left and right, are beginning to see him not so much a central actor separate from the times, but rather the embodiment of something greater:

The implosion of the ANC, the freedom fighter party that won the battle against apartheid and whose marshal was Nelson Mandela.

I think this is true, and that’s why this is my fourth most important story of 2012. Yet it’s with hope that I also see Zuma coming to an end sooner than the constitution would mandate, and of the ANC moving restlessly to get its act together. It may, however, be too late.

So the year ends on an incredibly positive note for the continent as a whole, but a seriously cautionary one for its grand marshal.

South Africa’s African National Congress has run South Africa since the end of apartheid with its standard bearer and first president, Nelson Mandela. The ANC’s history goes back much further than Mandela, though, well back into South Africa’s racist history. And quite often the ANC vied with the much more radical communist party of South Africa for political control.

And it usually won. Nevertheless, over its century of existence the ANC was decidedly leftist and especially recently just before the end of apartheid. Its structural models are larger Chinese, its leaders having been trained in Tanzania by Chinese functionaries.

I think it’s a good model for a developing society, and it’s a model that societies thrust into democracy mode too early often collapse back into; ergo, Egypt. Democracy can’t work unless a good portion of the electorate vote their conscience and a good portion of that have a rational understanding of their own self-interest.

If you don’t know why there’s a drought, and you don’t know how much a pump costs or have any idea how it’s made, and have no clue as to what an aquifer or reservoir is, as a farmer you have no ways to guarantee your own security.

And easier than understanding global warming, or market economy or hydrology, is to find someone who looks nice and claims to know all these things, your neighborhood dictator, who can assume a softer image by pretending to be a cleric or other type of grandfatherly godhead. Stalin was affectionately referred to as Grandpa.

The ANC was traditionally a collection of South Africa’s most prestigious black intellectuals and its central committee, like communist parties everywhere, was the helm of the ship.

And when the ship became the state, so did the ANC. Although an election for president of South Africa happens regularly just like here at home, the choice of the ANC candidates is made at their convention, and since Mandela and the mid-90s, whoever the convention nominates wins nationally.

And that convention is anything but democratic. It has all the bells and whistles of democracy, including women’s groups and youth group’s and worker’s groups, but all these groups are carefully fashioned by the central committee and it’s basically just a reenforcing loop of a small group of powerful men.

All this works more or less tidily provided …

… the guy at the top is sane.

South Africa’s current president is a wacko. In a mature democracy, we tolerate wackos at the top with moderate difficulty, like George Bush, II. It gets harder to do so when their understudy, Dick Cheney, is even more a wacko, but democracy is not as top-heavy as more socialist forms of government, and you don’t have to drill down too far to get to people like Colin Powell and and the legions of good civil servants.

The problem in a top-heavy system like South Africa’s is that it there is no working grass roots. There is no Colin Powell under whom serve a lot of hard-working, dedicated citizens. What you see at the top is what you get at the bottom. And so these last few years in South Africa have been a mess.

While the rest of Africa was growing gangbusters, South Africa was muttering along. Social goals like housing for millions of displaced poor fell decades behind schedule. Labor strife, particularly in its crucial mining sector, continues to be near catastrophically violent.

And the personality of the current president is…. well, wacko. He has multiple wives, believes he can protect himself against AIDS by showering well after sex, unapologetically has pilfered public funds and then publically ranted against cartoonists who portrayed him as unsaintly for doing so.

He’s escaped numerous prosecutions for malfeasance and criminal misuse of federal funds only to flaunt his accusers by building personal mansions with public funds. And the with this top-heavy system, it means that corruption and clowning now occur on a daily basis in the smallest municipality.

And this week the ANC nominated Jacob Zuma to be president, again.

What a joke. But here’s the rub.

A good portion of the South African electorate is democracy savvy. And already local governments in Cape Town and a few other cities have thrown off their ANC shackles.

Maybe, South Africa is ready for democracy.

I guess it’s the end of the Great Recession. Like a patient recovering from a near life-threatening disease, the initial feeling of weakness is actually relaxation more than a loss of a power. The juices are strong, again, and confidence is returning..

The Arab Spring has settled into what extreme progressives like myself fear is ennui and may be, but whatever it is, nothing much more is going to change from what we see this morning. And coasting along for a while isn’t such a bad notion, really.

With all the potential turbulence in the Mideast, it struck me that Egypt’s Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the current regime, was one of the first to congratulate President Obama on his reelection with unnecessary gusto:

The politically allied Ahram Online said that President Mursi “hailed” Obama for his reelection. In polispeak that’s pretty strong stuff. I think it means more than just don’t twist the $2 billion life line.

And there’s no question that if Obama’s policies in Iran don’t lead to positive movement, the errant child of Israel, the perfectly bilingual Netanhayu, could pull the trigger. But even he seemed remarkably humbled by recent events. Or maybe more correctly, the tiger’s been caged.

Whichever it is, the tension meter in the Israel/Iran war zone plummeted last week.

I think the area cooled in large part because of clever Mursi of Egypt. Mursi has all his life worked in the background and we criticized him on his democratic assumption of national political office for continuing to do so. But his messages are pretty consistent: no more war. Perhaps even heavy handed: no more protests.

Mursi is not want to restrict his ideology to The Nile. He wants peace in the whole area and he has begun to coalesce his Shia partners in a way that compliments western sanctions against Iran’s crazy Shiites. His efforts are truly masterful and little known because he prefers the shadows.

In South Africa I think the circus which has been its politics for the last decade or so is coming to an end. President Zuma’s long theater of the absurd comes under public review when the ANC convenes next month to decide if he should continue as leader.

It’s one thing to be a dancing bear, and quite another to chase the audience out of the tent. Zuma’s multiple wives (I think for PR purposes alone), his absurd pronouncements about AIDs, his annoying suits against critics and most recently, his gross mishandling of the country’s growing labor unrest has cooked his goose.

South Africa’s doing well, more so when compared to the west and less so when compared to nearer South America but sure enough that Zuma’s incredible even public graft is likely over. Watch the December conference carefully, but I think it will herald in a new, better and more stable political regime in South Africa.

And all pivots March 4 on Kenya, and I will be in Nairobi if briefly, and I expect to hear the olive thrushes not bazookas going off. It’s been a laborious often agonizing process as this remarkable country rereates itself from the devastation of its 2007 violence.

But recreated they have, and while Kenyan politics is forever unknown until the day it happens, the man in waiting to be the next President ever since his unimaginable concession five years ago of his legitimate election as President back then, will likely be Kenya’s next leader. And its first leader of the “New Era.”

New Era, indeed. In America we won’t slip off the fiscal cliff, or if we do it will be short-lived and not significant. This doesn’t mean not without drama. I heard this morning that Dancing With Stars is critically losing viewers, and my 7-1 Chicago Bears forgot last night how to play in the cold and sleet. We need drama in America, and I’m sure the fiscal cliff will step to the fore.

But some of the most radical thinkers in America before the election are remarkably sanguine if subdued right now. That means for the time being the fire’s gone. And maybe, that’s not so bad.

But when it’s all said and done, which will be in a very short time, we’ll all recognize that we were the patients who almost died but didn’t, and whose juices are now flowing stronger than ever.

Original NatGeo photograph courtesy Erin Fitzgerald; art by Tyler Keillor

It’s common knowledge that man and his broader family of primates arose in Africa, but until now it was thought that the myriad of the earliest land life forms – particularly reptiles and dinosaurs – arose on the western hemisphere.

Last week dinosaur guru Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago confirmed that Pegomastax africanus lived in southern Africa about 200 million years ago.

The creature like all of the early dinosaurs at the beginning of their reign was neither large or meat-eating. With a presumed behavior and appearances more like a big reptile, the little parrot-headed creature was less than 2 feet long and hardly the size of a house cat.

It would be another 130-150 million years before the August creatures like Tyrannosaurus Rex ruled the earth, and then for a relatively short dozen million years or so before a giant meteor hit the earth and wiped them out.

But the creatures that attract museum members and figure prominently in child’s play all started much smaller. Large dinosaurs have been found in Africa, but few compared to those in the western hemisphere.

And Pego was actually found in 1983 and then its fossil got filed away in a Harvard cabinet. Sereno was recently combing through old fossils in Cambridge when he discovered this critically important piece that had been considered insignificant at the time.

Pego’s importance aside from its curious own anatomy and significance in filling the many gaps in the early dinosaur evolutionary line is that Africa now provides a similar age range of dinosaur finds that until now has been restricted to the western hemisphere.

Current science suggests the dinosaurs emerged in South America about 230 million years ago. The oldest finds have been in Argentina and they were similar in anatomy and size to Pego. As a species, though, paleontology suggests they exploded in North America around the time Pego lived, and over the next hundred million years or so began to radiate all over the world.

Well, perhaps not. Perhaps Africa provided parallel evolutionary tracts to South America, or perhaps Africa even contributed somehow to the emergence of the grandest beasts in North America.

Speculation might have to be left to us untrained enthusiasts, though. Looking back that far in time reduces the certainty of many presumptions. It’s just harder to know the actual weather, geology, existing full ecosystems than we can with the much later evolutionary story of primates to ourselves.

And the more primitive the life form (however big it might have been) may also mean that its ability to radiate was greater. It might have been easier for a reptile-like creature to have been thrown across the ocean on stick than for a monkey-like creature to have crossed a large lake.

Nonetheless, the great strides palaeontologists like Sereno have made in just this generation are truly mind-boggling. Early earth was much more elaborate show than we might have thought when I was a boy.

And Africa seems to be holding its own through virtually all of its wondrous ages.

Working every day under the threat of massive censorship, South Africa’s still vibrant press has systematically reported both the corruption of its government and bumbling of its leaders. But until now it hasn’t seemed to matter much.

Last week the country went ballistic. Even ardent supporters of the government grew critical and those who defended it either lied or blushed.

News leaked that $22 million dollars (203 million Rand) had been spent to build a new home for the current president, Jacob Zuma. This was not the official residence, but a complex built in Zuma’s rural homeland that is not intended for official use.

Zuma is in trouble for a lot of things, and the ruling ANC party will meet in December to decide whether he should continue as president. The recent mining strikes which became quite violent set on edge many ANC members and lessened Zuma’s ability to stay in command.

The rapid building of a new resort home strikes everyone as what it probably is, a wounded politician trying to collect as much as he can before he’s booted out.

The public works minister lied exactly as Romney lied — no holes barred — claiming that the project was in perfect compliance with the “Ministerial Handbook” or rules of governing in South Africa.

It isn’t. The lie isn’t as boldfaced as Romney saying he won’t enact a $5 trillion tax cut despite his own website to the contrary, but it’s almost as clear:

“Although members can designate a privately-owned residence for use as an official residence at the seat of office, the handbook states that the public works department will only be responsible for making available general cleaning services in private residences used for official purposes,” Faranaaz Parker, a reporter at South Africa’s Mail & Guardian explained.

This is the leader, remember, who proudly displays multiple wives and claims that his extramarital sex with underage girls is both legal, and safe from HIV, because he showers afterwards.

South Africans have tolerated this buffoonery for too long. The patent misuse of public funds to create Zuma’s golden parachute into a resort paradise is a tipping point, and brings into sharp focus the ongoing corruption of the ANC.

That corruption manifests itself principally by the awarding of uncontested government contracts. Several days ago the BBC interviewed a whistle blower who had been fired from the administration of education in Limpopo for revealing that millions of dollars allocated for the purchase of text books had gone missing.

The report caused such a stir including threats against the BBC that yesterday the BBC published an even greater in-depth story further documenting more than $2 billion dollars gone missing in South Africa’s school system.

The textbook scandal might be the one that penetrates the ennui of so many South Africans to their incompetent government. Protests are growing.

But the textbook scandal is only one of many such examples of illegally awarded government contracts.

Perhaps most disturbing is that South Africa’s much revered independent court system is being emasculated:

In one of dozens of similar cases, the Gauteng Provence High Court nullified a $1.1 billion dollar ( 10 billion Rand) government grant in August to middlemen dispensing social security payments. It was a bold move when the judge declared the award “illegal and invalid” but a lot less bold when he refused to “set it aside.” In South African jargon, that means it’s wrong but nothing will change and implementers will not be held accountable.

It is typical of the massive transformation of South Africa’s previously powerful courts into platforms of ANC control.

I don’t know if this latest scandal really is the tipping point of ANC power, and the ANC is being extremely clever by floating the idea they will get rid of Zuma before the control boils over.

But I do know it’s a tipping point for something.

Police conceded that at least 34 admittedly aggressive strikers at a platinum mine in the north of the country were killed when things got out of control. The number is probably higher.

While the protest was ostensibly over wages, the weeks leading to the outburst were more of a battle between two labor organizations, the official union for the mine and a renegade self-styled militant union that is passionately communist.

I use that term with caution but deliberately. Communism in a truer and less autocratic way than adopted by the Soviet Union, for example, has been a significant part of South African politics for more than a century. Its leaders would be considered moderate by the style of historic European communism, more like American communists in the 1920s.

But lately South Africa – and the world – have taken significant right turns, becoming more conservative socially and fiscally. And in many places in the world, such as the U.S. under Bush and a number of European nations under current conservative leadership, it’s been downright dictatorial.

It never seems that way at the time. When America invaded Iraq, my own liberal heroes were behind the invasion. But with time history is revealing what a small number of men, motivated not by facts but ideology, actually made the decision.

It was affirmed by a greater segment of society, but the die had been cast. Society as a whole had neither the guts or power to oppose it. Even our “progressive leaders,” or in the case of South Africa, union leaders appear to capitulate to the rightist dogma.

In South Africa, the mining weasel popped. And it wasn’t pretty Thursday.

Earlier this year South Africa almost nationalized the mines. That, too, is a perennial topic it seems in South Africa, but this time they got closer than ever to doing it, and in fact the renegades have expressly said they hope this violence will make the country revisit the issue.

Nationalization would be a thunderclap in the world. Even as a diehard liberal I think it would be far too serious a jolt. This is because South Africa’s reservoir of gold and other precious minerals is too large. In one fell swoop it would alter the way energy is consumed in the world. Moreover, in South Africa it would empower a currently corrupt political leadership that could be spun out of control with their dizzying new responsibilities.

But nationalization was a real topic because blue collar workers are being shafted, just as they are in the United States, and as they are most of all in places like China. It’s a very hard argument to make, because workers are better off, today, in South Africa and China than they were two decades ago.

At the expense, I might add, of American workers.

But without the long analysis needed (read Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites) the point is not so much that workers are being shafted, but that the capitalistic balloon is busting.

The right side of the balloon is the rich owners radically pulling their salaries and dividends even more to the right. But it can’t be pulled that way without pulling the left side an equal distance “shafting” the poor.

We guys in the middle just tread water and wait for the pop.

South African mine workers aren’t, really, too off-center compared to where they were a decade ago, or compared to many other workers in South Africa, today. But from their central location they see their families over there in the poor left being vastly distanced by the owners and stakeholders getting fabulously rich by the platinum they are pulling out with their hands.

New York Times reporter, Lydia Polgreen, nailed it: “The shooting left a field strewed with bodies and a deepening fault line between the governing African National Congress and a nation that, 18 years after the end of apartheid, is increasingly impatient with deep poverty, rampant unemployment and yawning inequality.”

This is ripe stuff for an explosion. Particularly in a society where workers – especially miners – have a history of activism. It isn’t just that they want higher wages, they’ve actually seen their own country’s politics radically moved by their activism.

The violent confrontation, of course, does not make South Africa’s poor richer. But it did make the rich more poor.

So this isn’t the end of it, folks. Where unions still have some power, like South Africa, there’s going to be more and more labor unrest. Relatively rich countries like South Africa will either ultimately nationalize giant industries like mining, or the global capitalistic gyroscope will reset somehow, reversing the trend of the last half century. The richer will become poorer and the poor will become richer.

I vote for the latter. It will be much less violent.

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.

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.