At last Politics Bites!

December 29, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

For the first time in 40 years, an outbreak of yellow fever has been reported in East Africa, far from any tourist area. Until now tourists’ yellow fever inoculations were political!

That’s right. One of the great irritants of traveling to East Africa in the last 40 years has been the necessity of getting a yellow fever inoculation, when no yellow fever disease was known to exist in East Africa.

The shot is pretty benign for most people and lasts ten years, but it’s expensive. And that’s because, well, there aren’t many areas in the world where yellow fever is a real risk. So the vaccine is rather rare.

The yellow fever hullabaloo in East Africa began in the late 1960s when an outbreak was reported near Kilimanjaro shortly after Tanganyika and Zanzibar federated into the new Tanzania. Unlike malaria, which is a much more complicated mosquito-born disease, yellow fever is a pretty simple virus carried in the blood of day-flying (rather than malaria night-flying) mosquitoes.

Still itching from their loss of autonomy, Zanzibaris began requiring proof of a yellow fever vaccination for all persons arriving in the country, even from mainland Tanzania of which they were now supposedly a part.

It didn’t matter that the bit of the 1960s outbreak was far, far from Zanzibar. If you didn’t have an inoculation, you had two choices: leave, or let a local official jab you. In those days, neither local officials or jabs were very antiseptic.

Zanzibar has some beautiful beaches, and as the island opened to tourism in the 1980s, a number of safari travelers would end or begin their trip in Zanzibar. Irritated by Zanzibari insistence on having a yellow fever vaccination (decades after the little outbreak was suppressed) mainland Tanzania began requiring the shot. I guess the theory was, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

That irritated Kenya. So Kenya, too, started requiring the shot.

From time to time saner minds prevailed, and Kenya and Tanzania dropped the requirement. But they seemed to be dancing separate tunes, and whenever one required it, there was a bit of delay, then the other one did.

Soon fearful that there really was yellow fever, all sorts of countries in southern Africa began requiring the shot if you came from East Africa. Even South Africa! Where the first heart transplant was performed!

(In fairness to South Africa, they figured correctly that if East Africans required the shot, they must have the disease.)

And this little game continues right up to today.

Yes, dear traveler, you need that yellow fever inoculation, because even if right now no one requires it for entry, they might when you actually travel.

And it doesn’t matter a hoot that your chances of contracting yellow fever are less as a tourist in sub-Saharan Africa today than getting meningitis or (amazingly) Rift Valley Fever if you live in the Midwest.

Go figure.

Weird & Scary Wildlife Officials!

December 28, 2010January 3, 2011 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Tommie.Diseased and Healthy — Healthy and diseased female thomson gazelle.

Mutant creatures and animal enigmas will soon be “driving packs of tourists” into Tanzania, according to wildlife officials there. Hmm. Slow news day?

This most recent claim of wild and wooly animal freaks was made by Paschal Shelutete, TANAPA communications officer.

It’s wrong. First of all, the hairy gazelle he’s speaking about was photographed by tourist Robert Berntsen in November, in Kenya’s Maasai Mara; and earlier by Paolo Torchio in August… Again in the Mara, not the Serengeti.

Best diagnosis of the poor bloke Tommie is that she has Cushing’s Disease. The disease is caused by a variety of hormonal or pituary malfunctions and manifests itself differently in humans and animals. In humans the result is often loss of hair, but in animals, it can cause hirsutism, a condition of abnormal hair growth.

The professional level of TANAPA authorities reached new lows this year when they worked to end the current ban on international sales of elephant ivory, and fell in step with the politics driving the Serengeti highway. But this incredible claim by a TANAPA official, wrong on pathology and wrong on geography (his own!) leaves me speechless:

“Mr Shelutete believes the discovery will soon be driving packs of tourists, researchers and other curious observers to Tanzania to witness the discovery.”

Incredible.

Animal mutations, especially with regards to coloring, are rare but widely known. All the photos you see in this blog I took myself, with tiny little cameras since I’m no photographer. In several cases it’s hardly more than a loss of pigment. In others, like the buffalo in the Aberdare, the weird horn configurations are probably a result of inbreeding.

Rhinos Doomed by Rich Men

December 27, 2010December 1, 2015 by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

rhino&dagger — Dagger sold in Sana'a for $15000. The handle is made from rhino horn. The poacher gets $200-1000. Middlemen transporting it to the Horn take about $5000. Skilled carvers take around $2000. Profit in the market more than $7000.

Rhino poaching is exceeding even my own direst predictions this year, and I’m trying to understand why.

The Serengeti is one of the world’s largest protected wildernesses, nearly 5000 sq. miles when combined with the adjacent Ngorongoro Conservation Area. There are now only 4 wild rhinos left in this area, after one was found dead this holiday season – it’s horn removed.

This is the most recent of an extraordinary run of killings, most of which were in South Africa where the poaching is more mafia-like, corporate. In East Africa it’s usually individuals working alone.

I wrote about rhino poaching only a few weeks ago but I’m particularly incensed about this loss in the Serengeti. I’ve personally seen poached rhinos several times in northern Tanzania during my career, and try as I have to understand the poor bloke (poacher) just trying to make a buck, the harder it becomes.

Why should I – a foreigner from a distant land – be angry with an impoverished Tanzanian who has tried everything right in his life to get a job and support a family, and just can’t? Who has the daring to kill a dangerous animal? Who has the wherewithal to find the onerous black market?

It’s one thing when you know – as I did in 1998 on the crater floor – that it was a well-paid ranger working in cahoots with the Conservator of the park. But it seems different when it’s a single individual who just can’t get a job and has tried.

So this current surge in poaching I originally linked to the economic downturn. But Africa pulled out of the economic downturn long before we did and has been essentially surging for the last year.

And that’s the key.

Like here at home, the rich are now comfortable with spending their money, again. And it’s the rich to whom the rhino horns go. Mostly to Yemen, but throughout the lower Mideast where rhino horns are prized as much or greater than ivory in Asia.

Like ivory, they carve beautifully and buff even better. Traditionally they were used as dagger handles in male rite de passage ceremonies where Dad gives Butch a special present. Now a days they tend to be made into commercial sculptures and sold like stolen Picassos.

These are the culprits, much more so than the desperate father encouraged to make the actual kill. There’s a real analogy here with the illicit drug market in the U.S. For sure the Mexican mafia are bad guys. But it’s the users of cocaine, not the growers of poppy, who are the real satans.

Important Note: black rhino will not go extinct. They are thriving in private reserves, zoos and small, contained wildernesses like Lake Nakuru. They thrive as they have since appearing on earth because they are big and eat almost anything. They have no predators, except man.

But in the wild, the true open wilderness, their days are numbered. Perhaps it’s time to just come to accept this fact of the modern world. At least until the rich and greedy can be controlled. And that I don’t see happening soon.

Holidays at Home Are Best!

December 22, 2010December 22, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Many, many people travel during the holidays. But for me, being home is the best place to be!

Our winter, snowy celebration with a large family begins today. I’ll be back blogging first thing next week!

Meanwhile, and especially for my friends in Africa, I thought you’d like to see a few scenes of the wild animals outside my office in Galena, Illinois, seven miles from the great Mississippi River!

Nairobi Bus Station Bombing

December 21, 2010December 21, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

How sad that I must discuss the bomb blast in Nairobi yesterday during the holiday season, and yet I fear this will be the norm in the years to come. Over many years terrorists have established that disruption during the Christian holiday is a signature they prefer.

As terrorist incidents go, this was not devastating as have been some. Directed so obviously to local African holiday makers, the bombing was outside an overnight bus scheduled to leave from Nairobi to Kampala at 8 p.m., Monday night.

Bus security actually saved many lives. Four were killed and 41 were injured, but the bus was packed, with more than 30 people aboard. Security was checking the luggage as is the routine outside the bus, which alarmed one of the last passengers boarding the bus which intentionally (or not, we aren’t sure) resulted in his small carry-on exploding.

That bomber was killed. In the mayhem that followed, his companion traveler left the bus and escaped.

During the day, Monday, Uganda issued a special security alert that warns travelers in the country during Christmas to be on the look-out for Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists. In July Uganda suffered its worst terrorist bombing ever: 79 people were killed in two separate bars as they watched the World Cup.

Uganda has been an avowed special target of Al-Qaeda for some time, as there are more Ugandan soldiers in peace-keeping roles in Mogadishu, Somali, than from any other African country. Al-Shabab (Al-Qaeda in Somali) currently controls about a third of the country and is fighting hard to gain control of Mogadishu.

So it’s unclear whether the two bombers and their packages were intended to explode in Kenya, or were simply transporting weaponry into Uganda when Nairobi security personnel foiled the plot prematurely.

Nairobi’s central bus station is isolated from the city’s tourist hotels. This was clearly not an attack intended against tourists in Kenya.

Swinging Kenyan Rebels Predicted

December 20, 2010December 20, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Not sure if it was the British or Kenyan rebels who were listening to rock ‘n roll or whether a Royal Air Force officer later to become the UK’s most famous weatherman was the scribe, but a near half-century old document just discovered sheds fascinating new light on Kenya’s independence struggle.

The “Jack Scott List” was just discovered in a musty old cabinet in Kenya’s National Museum. The secret List revealed the names of Kenya’s rebel leaders plus a lot more.

Coming from the 1950s that can mean only one of two things: it derogatorily linked Kenyan rebels to what proper British most despised: Rock ‘n Roll. Or it was compiled by a Royal Air Force pilot who found himself briefly in Kenya who later became Britain’s most famous weatherman.

Since predicting weather remains as exciting as hibernating wood chucks, I will make the unilateral determination that Jomo Kenyatta and Pio Pinto were swingers!

The list was in an old cabinet transported from Lamu in 1981 but never opened until last month. The drawers housed the confidential files of the curator of a Lamu prison where freedom fighters were incarcerated in the 1950s.

No xerox machines in those days in Kenya. These are originals.

Crisp, some moldy, ready to disintegrate into dust, they tell fabulous stories. And the question immediately comes to the fore: why from here? Lamu is an ocean island near the border of Kenya and Somalia. It was far from the bit of fighting that was occurring in central Kenya.

Careful investigation of the documents has only just begun, but we can surmise that Lamu would make the perfect place not only to house secret war documents, but as already known, some of Kenya’s most prominent rebel leaders.

The Brits correctly understood in those days of poor communication that removing the leaders as far away from the action was the most effective imprisonment. Jomo Kenyatta, later to become Kenya’s first president, for example was held for a long time in a prison in Kenya’s far northern deserts.

Kenya is waiting on pins and needles to see what the documents reveal about the British that isn’t already known.

Recent pride in the economy and new constitution has provoked in my opinion a new nationalism. For example, a coalition of local leaders in southern Kenya has just announced plans to sue the British
for forced relocation of their relatives and confiscation of their land in the 1950s to form Tsavo National Park.

“The [Jack Scott] files are a real treasure as they explain in detail how the detainees were treated,” says Athman Hussein of the National Museums of Kenya without yet revealing the details.

Museum officials have, however, revealed the story of Pio Gama Pinto, an Indian who later became an important political advisor to Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice-president and father of the current prime minister.

Pinto was one of a number of Asians deeply involved in the independence struggle, something many Kenyans still refuse to concede. The Jack Scott List papers describe how Pinto refused Brit “efforts to turn him over” to their cause as a spy.

But museum officials have not yet explained exactly what these efforts were: i.e., was Pinto tortured or just bribed?

The List papers reveal that the Brits were concerned about local Kenyan women, many of them also Asian from the coast. It describes in detail how a rebel, Said Mgunga, was organizing women and women’s demonstrations in the coast that were attracting British scorn.

Another woman rebel, Sarah Sarai, drew extraordinary infective from the Brit author of the List. She was described as “a close associate of the worst criminal elements on record…She is, fanatically anti-European and anti-government and an extremely dangerous character. A powerful dictator … Seeks to use Kikuyu women as a buffer between Kikuyu violence and police authorities.”

Sarah Salai Thara Njomo, born in 1913, has long been a champion of Kenyan women but has never achieved the status that the List papers might now finally raise her to. She died in July, 2003, after a long career of activism that the British found despicable as much for its success as its gender.

“Even under torture, she refused to buy her freedom…and she almost died from the effects of torture and food poisoning at Kamiti [prison]” her 2003 eulogy explains.

It will take a long time to parse the poor handwriting and faded type of these old documents, and while many Kenyans today are criticizing their officials for having displayed “a lack of curiosity” in not having opened the cabinet before now, I say who cares?

Most treasures like this only increase with time.

Give her a Lite!

December 17, 2010December 17, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

NewAfricanSportsFans — Zambia's First Lady Leads the Charge!

Women have risen with modern African society faster than a Robbie Gould 50-yarder!

Every time I blink my eye something radical changes in Africa. The rises in the power of women may be among the most astounding. Feminism as a movement was American and French, but in the last generation America has been left in the wake of gender equality movements elsewhere in the world, including Africa.

No statistics or dull charts this time, other than to remind you that the current star is Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia, the first freely elected woman executive in Africa.

(Elisabeth Domitien was Prime Minister of Central African Republic from 1975-1976 but that was a job her dictator father appointed her to, and Agathe Uwilingiyimana was Rwanda Prime Minister for less than a year in 1993-1994 just before the genocide, again an appointed executive position rife with political overtones and no real power.)

But what caught my attention this time after I unblinked my eyes was how sports stadiums are now filled with women in Africa!

I remember the All African Games in Nairobi in August, 1987. A new set of stadiums that could hold more than 100,000 people had been built, and not a single woman appeared! Honestly, not one!

How different it is today, representing this meteoric rise in the power of women in Africa over only a single generation.

I recently watched the string of fans coming out of the Nairobi stadium following a soccer match, and it had to be nearly a third women. And quite unlike at home, it isn’t mixed. The women go all together, sit together, cheer together, even (presuming) if their SigOth or Partner is somewhere else in the stands!

In a (very interestingly) unattributed article in today’s Nairobi newspaper, the Daily Nation, the reporter-in-hiding declared that sports matches “regularly play host to a bevy of colourful and distinctively feminine fans” who are “skimpily dressed” and he (I’m sure it was a HE) didn’t mean Michael Phelps.

Kenya’s change is amazing, but even more amazing is that it seems to have outpaced the southern countries, where gender equality has been at least a part of the constitution and legislation for a longer time.

That isn’t to say it’s not moving fast down there, too, though!

Women “can be found in the rowdier stands such as the famous ‘Russia’ section of the National Stadium in Gaborone [Botswana] dancing, singing and hurling insults… just like men,” the anonymous author claims.

Malawi’s chief marketing manager for football (soccer), Casper Jangale, told the article, “In the early 2000s many matches …often ended in violence,” which discouraged women fans, but that that’s changed. Jangale now advises sponsors that at least a quarter of the fans are now women.

And in Zambia, football is the prime past time of both First Lady Thandiwe Banda and the wife of the vice president, Irene Kunda.

One thing the African woman will never be able to do that American women already are doing at Chicago Bears’ games: tail-gating brat fests at minus 10!

But that may be all!

TripDestructor not TripAdvisor!

December 16, 2010December 16, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

What do I have in common with Arthur Frommer and Google? We don’t think you should use TripAdvisor!

You shouldn’t believe everything you read. Verification and consistent fact-checking is the mantra of good investigative analysis and journalism. Experts take time to become experts. Monday Morning Quarterbacks are good for nothing but Budweiser.

You shouldn’t believe a car mechanic who tells you that your breaks aren’t working because your foot is suffering from Fibromyalgia. You shouldn’t believe a cotton farmer who tells you that nylon is bad for your skin. You shouldn’t roll over your IRA into the hot lead penny stock. You shouldn’t believe a Republican who tells you he favors cutting the deficit.

And you shouldn’t believe a traveler you don’t know about the quality of his recent experience.

That’s been my gripe: the wholly and exclusively subjective analysis of TripAdvisor reviews bereft of any expertise whatever.

And Google, now, seems to agree.

Last week the on-line search engine marketing firm HitSearchLimited reported that “Google seems to have removed [TripAdvisor] reviews from sources that do not have a verifiable method of ensuring that each review is written by a verified source…”

Yes! (Not that I’m a great fan of Google or anything that gets this big, but when the bigwigs start to fight among one another, I’ll route for those carrying my view to be sure.)

Time and again I’ve listened to astute clients claim that they are fully capable of reading between the lines, judging which reviews seem more credible.

It’s possible, if you’ve had a similar experience to what the review is about, but still unlikely. At the very least, you need to know the reviewer, as you would know and trust your friends about a travel experience. The known idiosyncracies and prejudices of your friend you’ll understand temper his/her evaluation, and you’ll probably then be in a better position to use the review.

Arthur Frommer has carried on his own campaign against TripAdvisor for as long as I have, and in last month’s blog critical of TripAdvisor he reiterated, “I will not choose the London or Paris hotel recommendation of an amateur who has stayed in exactly one London and one Paris hotel in the course of their entire life.”

The UK based KwikChex, a vetting agency for travel companies, announced in September that it was representing more than 120 travel companies (mostly hotels) in a possible class action suit against TripAdvisor.

This gets much more onerous than just my or Frommer’s general cautions about using TripAdvisor. These 120 travel concerns, one of which I know personally, have been defamed by malicious reviews on TripAdvisor using outright lies.

Kwikchex can be hired to sort things out. With enough documentation, TripAdvisor can be convinced to remove a review and has done so, specifically at Kwikchex’s behest. But the time and expense can sometimes be deadly for a small travel company or hotel.

The ego of many who believe they have “discovered” something is hard to suppress. The reason you don’t buy that tonic to grow hair is because … well, it doesn’t grow hair! Despite the old hairy man on the television who says it does!

As a travel consumer, you need to evince that same kind of discipline. Some of you may, indeed, think you can ferret out the more likely true from the less likely true in a string of TripAdvisor reviews.

I don’t think so.

The Culprits Named!

December 15, 2010December 15, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

A very tense calm reigns over Kenya, today, following The Hague’s naming of the six most responsible for the violence in 2008.

The vast, vast majority of Kenyans today, rich and poor, want this chapter turned over. I don’t predict any wide scale violence, but the streets of Nairobi, today, are extremely tense.

Phones, email and internet and even satellite connections were flooded from the outside world, and much of East Africa was in a communications logjam by the end of its day.

Five prominent politicians and one media personality were charged by the same global authority that tried Slobodan Miloševic’ and the Rwandan instigators of genocide as the principals who caused Kenya’s 2008 violence.

The six represent several different tribes whose alleged unsavory alliance doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense at first. It includes a very powerful Rift Valley politician and former important minister, William Ruto – a Kalenjin – and from a rival tribe, the Kikuyu, Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of the “Father of the Country.”

But that was the point of The Hague’s investigations, not to name everyone who was violent, but to single out those who actively prepared then stoked it.

Three of the six were already widely suspected: Ruto, former (since resigned) national police chief Mohammed Hussein Ali, and Henry Kosgey.

There had been rumors that Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the first president Jomo Kenyatta, was implicated, but many had considered him too westernized to have become so mired in the darker side of Kenyan politics. Kenyatta spent a good portion of his younger life outside the country being educated and was widely considered at one point a modern future leader.

In fact both Ruto and Kenyatta had announced interest in running for president.

Two were surprises: Radio personality Joshua Sang, and Kenya’s secretary to the cabinet, Francis Muthaura.

Three of the six are currently serving ministers in the coalition government, and Muthaura is something akin to the President’s Chief of Staff. President Mwai Kibaki was quick to follow the announcement by insisting they not yet resign public duties. Kibaki also suggested the government might now reopen the question of whether to hold the trials in Kenya, effectively emasculating the power of The Hague.

The Hague issued what amounts to two indictments. The first – against Ruto, Kenyatta, Ali and Kosgey – is for “alleged murder, deportation and persecutions.” The Hague considers the four to have prepared in advance for the violence, knowing full well that the results of the 2008 election would be contentious.

In a horrible additional twist, Kenyatta is alleged to have orchestrated his violence through the underworld using Kenya’s mafia, the Mungiki.

The less severe (if such a comparison is possible) indictment against Sang and Muthaura is for pouring fuel on the fire once the violence began.

It’s widely known that many more people were involved. The number of people actually killed was somewhere between 1300 and 1500, and those displaced as high as 350,000. It took Kofi Annan and the full press power of the U.S. and the U.K. to stop the January, 2008, violence. This resulted in a now wonderfully working coalition government that just successfully passed through national referendum an excellent new constitution.

The net result of this announcement is to weaken substantially the political side led by Kikuyu President Mwai Kibaki and improve the standing of Luo Prime Minister Raila Odinga. One complication in this simplification is that the Kalenjin, and Ruto in particular, are close allies of Odinga.

Reduced even further, the Hague’s charges if presumed correct corroborate the widely held analysis that Odinga’s election to president in 2007 was stolen by the fortress of Kikuyu power.

But the violence that began was absolutely not ethnic, although that’s how it quickly morphed. But it began because Odinga was a champion of the poor, a true socialist; while Kibaki was the godfather of the establishment, a capitalist to the core.

The violence began in the slums where the poorest in the country had worked so hard to elect Odinga. The ethnic division in Nairobi’s slums is much less clear.

Good News in Fight against Malaria

December 14, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

A breakthrough discovery announced last week by a University of Illinois professor leads the pack in the race to eradicate malaria.

University of Illinois at Chicago researcher Dr. John Quigley announced a possibly new way to foil malaria at the American Society of Hematology’s annual meeting last week by giving the mosquito supreme indigestion.

(Boy, this is simplification that I’m going to regret.)

More correctly, by increasing the oxidative stress in the mosquito’s gut by killing a gene-activated protein intended to minimize the stress. Got it?

Don’t try. It’s nonetheless fabulous and opens up a whole new area for vaccine development at a time that numerous hopeful results are happening in the battle against malaria.

Malaria can be found in the blood of 1 out of every 12-13 people in the world, more than a half billion individuals.

Sixty percent of these are life-threatening situations. Every year 1.5 million people die of malaria, two-thirds of those in sub-Saharan Africa, a child every 30 seconds. More people in the world have died of malaria since 1914 than from any other single disease, war or natural disaster (120 million).

You would think that with all the wonders of the sort Dr. Quigley and others have discovered, that things are better today than in the past. They are better than a decade ago, but they’re no better and in fact worse than two decades ago, or a century ago.

This is basically because malaria is a poor man’s disease, and for several centuries until the last decade, the world’s poor were basically getting poorer and poorer and increasing much more quickly than the non-poor of the world. And there were few scientific advancements in the battle against malaria.

The recent decade’s change has been mostly in scientific advancements, and the last decade has shown some promise in the world’s avowed goal of minimizing poverty, too.

Malaria is a poor man’s disease, because it’s spread by a blood-sucking insect. More bodies with less protection increases the mosquito, which increases the disease. It’s a simple unprotected population increase vector.

It’s also a tenacious disease. Unlike yellow fever or smallpox or measles, the life cycle of the malaria plasmodium is extraordinarily complex, providing natural selection with all sorts of opportunities to beat the human endeavor against it.

In particular, half-completed efforts in the 1950s and 1960s which basically eradicated malaria in the developed world only provided clever fodder in the undeveloped world for the disease to grow resistant.

Moreover it’s only recently that the world has recognized the economic disaster it causes. (Forget about the moral one, most of modern world policy is driven by economic opportunity. ) We’ve now demonstrated that lost productivity and the emergency responses to people sickened with malaria is far more costly than our aggregate efforts to prevent it.

That’s changing.

The RollBack Malaria Group heavily endowed by the Bill Gates Foundation and a growing number of foreign government agencies has raised awareness to the malaria epidemic, funded numerous research projects and vaccine attempts, and spear-headed in particular accelerated efforts to protect children.

And not all the efforts require the beyond-understanding science of Dr. Quigley. Imaginative scientists from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the University of Nairobi in Kenya and the Kenya-based African Insect Science for Food and Health Institute announced this month perhaps the most effective trap ever devised for mosquitos:

Smelly socks and fermenting yeast!

In fact research is progressing so quickly that some experts worry that effective vaccines will be available by 2015, but without any procedures to use them!

These are the kind of problems that are good to have. So thanks, Dr. Quigley, and the thousands of others working persistently to create this increasingly good news.

Does Clooney Help or Hurt?

December 13, 2010December 13, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

The Obama Administration has been balancing American interests in The Sudan deftly and with amazing success. “Winds of War”, George Clooney and Ann Curry might have jeopardized these efforts.

“Winds of War”’s principal success is the message that genocide is likely following next month’s referendum for the south to secede from the north. But the horrible conclusion taken from this is the simplistic and incorrect notion that violence can be prevented.

Entertainment comes in many forms but at the core of most entertainment is the reduction of ideas or situations to attract an audience. Well-prepared bait creates happiness or sadness, fear or comfort, other deep emotions like feeling enlightened, so that you’ll come back to the entertainer and buy more, later.

This is not how the history of The Sudan should be spread among the world. It’s just much more complicated than a 1-hour television special.

At the best, in pure reductio infinitum, we can say “at least it’s increased interest.” Clooney seems like a wonderful person. At least Ann Curry thinks so, as much of the special was about Clooney, not The Sudan.

Both Curry and Clooney expend a lot of effort explaining why so much of this story is about Clooney, rather than The Sudan. He is “using his celebrity” to help. I’m not sure he hasn’t. But I’m worried.

The danger of mobilizing the world to an issue like the upcoming Sudanese election by entertainers is that the results will be misunderstood. If trouble occurs, we’ll believe we understand exactly why. In this case: because it was preventable and we didn’t prevent it. That was the single message Clooney and Curry conveyed, again and again.

Preventing violence following the January 11 referendum for the south to secede from the north is virtually impossible in my opinion. But this does not mean that a new country, South Sudan, won’t be established, or that a better peace and situation that now exists won’t occur.

Violence after the referendum can’t be stopped, for the same reasons that terrorism can’t be stopped. In The Sudan as in the subways of London and airports of Seattle, mass destruction waits only for the actions of a single possibly random idiot or ideologue, take your pick.

Throughout “Winds of War” constant comparisons were made to the Rwandan genocide. This is simply straight out wrong. Effective foreign military force was already in Rwanda and could have been quickly and easily augmented, and specific policies in the U.S., France and the UN decided against doing so. It was a single wrong decision.

Sudan 2011 is not Rwanda 1994. The Sudan has genocide going on right now in Darfur. The world has come for better or worse to accept this genocide so long as it stays below a certain threshold.

The UN has (as of October) 9451 military personnel from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and a variety of African countries, spread out over a country that is 100 times bigger than Rwanda, which is basically validating the level of existing genocide.

(Important FootNote: No UN presence is near the town of Abyei where the violence after the January 11 referendum will likely begin. That – I believe – is intentional. Take it from there. If that dried out prairie brush fire can be contained, perhaps the suburbs around San Diego can be saved from the inferno.)

The Rwandan UN Force was heavily European, commanded by a Canadian general over a country that until the genocide began was at peace. He tried – unsuccessfully – to convince a world black-eyed from BlackHawk Down that genocide was imminent and could be prevented. He was right, and the “world” was wrong.

That metric cannot be applied today to The Sudan.

Instead, what I believe the Obama Administration and EU is working towards in southern Sudan is an acceptable threshold of genocide as exists right now in Darfur.

Not an entincing trailer to a film, is it?

Of course it isn’t! It’s a hard pill to swallow. And what’s worse, except through WikiLeaks we can’t admit it. But it may be the only way to incrementally ratchet down Sudan’s century of genocide. Rwanda’s ethnic hatred can be pretty simply explained: two different competing tribes whose animosities were accentuated by a racist colonial era. All we had – and have to do there is keep the genie in the bottle until sanity matures.

Sudan’s 30 or 40 tribes have been massacring one another for two millennia. Fueled by incompetent colonial powers, by enormous resources of oil, and by the visceral global ideological powerhouses of Christianity and Islam. We can’t even get the world to agree there shouldn’t be genocide! Every nation from China to the U.S. wants the oil, wants the religious allegiances and should we begin talking about the continent’s water source known as the Nile?

The Sudan is so important, so fundamental to the peace and stability of all of Africa, that a one-page synopsis or one-hour TV special has the enormous potential of screwing up everything.

The proposed border areas between the north and the new South Sudan will have violence, I just don’t see any other prospect. It will begin in Abyei. This is where so much oil is found. But we’d like to keep the violence in this oil-rich area at levels contained, just as the violence currently in the oil-rich Niger Delta of Nigeria seems contained. If this can be managed, then a society in South Sudan can emerge as it’s emerging in Nigeria.

“Winds of War” stokes the fire. If Clooney’s message achieves ultimate success, when the gunfire begins later next month in Abyei, America will send troops to stop it, and will become as deeply mired in conflict there as we are in Afghanistan.

It’s not working in Afghanistan. It won’t work in The Sudan.

Click here for Frank Lagiftt’s excellent NPR report.

Below for as usual an unbiased report from Al Jazeera.

Wiki Tells It Like It is!

December 10, 2010December 11, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The several thousand WikiLeaks about East Africa so far tell us very little that we didn’t already know or deeply suspect. I actually find it rather refreshing.

Basically, East Africans are publicly affronted by the frankness with which Wiki frames the obvious failings of East African leaders and their positive actions as American motivated. And basically American diplomats are shown as being a bit more juvenile than adult when it comes to getting (or not) their way.

Wiki basically shows that the Big Boy got his way with the little toughs. Good. I’m glad we did. And I think most East Africans are, too. From time to time, the Big Boy ain’t so bad.

American policy in East Africa from the end of the Bush years through the present has been right on as far as I’m concerned (except for one significant item: the soon new Southern Sudan.) In the main, an A- overall.

But Wiki takes the charm out of the politics. When all the polite language is peeled from the events, when “convinced” becomes “bribed” and “suggested” becomes “threatened” there’s no question any more that American power bludgeoned its way in East Africa over the last few years:

We bribed Kenyan leaders to be democratic and we bribed them to fashion a more moral constitution. We threatened sanctions if they didn’t bring the proposed new constitution to a vote. We targeted Kenyan youth with a campaign not dissimilar to Obama’s get-out-the-2008-vote, because they were the most energized and least likely to actually vote. And so we got them to vote ..the way we wanted (which was the right way).

We raised a normally behind-the-scenes ambassador to a very public level. We did everything short of leaking ourselves the names of top Kenyan politicians we believed were principally responsible for instigating the violence following the 2007 elections, to the point that these guys became so universally known that real criminal prosecutions against them in The Hague may begin shortly.

Once outed, our ambassador was given other public tasks we hailed as “transparent.” When food that we were delivering to a famine area of Kenya was delayed at the Kenyan port of Mombasa because the bribes paid to off-load it weren’t enough, our dear ambassador took a camera team onto the gangways and started off-loading the grain himself.

We lamented that so much time had to be spent with Kenya’s growing up into a full democracy that we have let Uganda and Tanzania slide. But that doesn’t seem to matter, because they are neither as powerfully geopolitically or as economically powerful as Kenya.

OK. Take a deep breath. Wiki just ratted on the Teacher to that troublesome but promising Pupil. The rest of the class (Tanzania & Uganda) always knew Kenya was the favorite and that it was a tense relationship.

But it’s working, if you concede that current American interests are almost as vital to East Africans as Kenyan interests. I do.

So… This has all been good. Good for East Africa and good for America.

So, WikiLeaks, what was bad?

What Kenyans are currently all upset with is the derogatory name calling carried by U.S. diplomatic cables. Both the president and prime minister of Kenya are called beneficiaries of a network of old boy corruption “feathering” their fortunes “with impunity.”

Yeah. So?

That’s not news. It’s been said in public by many former officials world-wide, much less Kenyan journalists themselves. Frankly, I think this, too, is changing although it was much less evident earlier this year than now. So, anything else, Wiki?

We and Britain publically decided to embarrass Kenya in October, 2008, when a ship carrying 33 Ukrainian T-72 tanks was hijacked by Somali pirates, then freed (after ransom) off the coast of Kenya. Kenya claimed at the time that the tanks were for Kenya, despite journalists claiming otherwise that the Kenyans were creating a corridor for arming southern Sudan.

As then, I still have this intuitive feeling that we’re involved in this, but Wikileaked cables suggest we were affronted by the revelations. The cables paint Kenya as the culprit and us as the surprised school-mom and either way, this is enraging Kenyan leaders who are working so hard to making the January, 2011, elections in southern Sudan work.

I don’t like war, anywhere, but without some military hardware southern Sudan will not survive any attempt at Independence.

Wiki also underscores something I’ve been saying for a long time: China is beating America at the Africa game, the East African parlor in particular.

There’s a lot of name calling, again. One top diplomat, Johnnie Carson, referred to China in Africa as a “pernicious economic competitor with no morals.” (Agence France Presse). “China is in Africa for China,” Carson said as well to a group of Nigerians, insisting there was nothing moral or altruistic in their very large recent economic involvement in Africa.

Yeah. So?

Why is the U.S. involved in Africa? To bring righteousness and moral rectitude to the Dark Continent? Why did Stanley broker for the malicious King of Belgium? Why has any foreign government ever been involved in Africa… or anywhere else foreign for that matter?

In diplomatic niceties we say “self-interest.” When the niceties are dropped, Carson goes on and on castigating China for trying to buy UN votes and other allegiances, something that America is the ace at, especially during the Cold War.

I think this is revealing. I think this is something we as Americans should study. What these leaks reveal in the unrelenting American diatribe against China in Africa is that we’re jealous. We don’t have the cash, anymore, and China does. For years – especially during the Cold War from our government, and right until the economic downturn from our megamonolithic corporations, America spent more in bribes than anybody else.

Now, Wiki explains, China does.

We’re jealous. But the great revelation is the following:

China is spending OUR money. The money from the purchase of toys, car parts, solar panels, and kitchen utensils.

It’s ironic and terribly revealing. We’re still bribing, but not necessarily in our own interests. Rather, in China’s.

Hmm..

AFRICA, Show us The Way!

December 9, 2010December 10, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

In this age of belt tightening and budget angst the impoverished State of Kentucky is going to give $37½ million dollars to a wacko anti-science group to build a creationism theme park.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the cradle of mankind. The earliest known hominid, our direct evolutionary ancestor, is at least 6 million years old. Olduvai Gorge, where so much of these marvelous discoveries were made, is top on my list of things to see on safari.

Natural selection is not immediately intuitive. It takes some study. But once you get into it, the rush is unbelievable! The majesty of living things, and man’s unique position within that, is awesome. Complexity and simplicity seem to merge in an array of life forms that is unbelievable.

No doubt what many describe as art which consumes and inspires is relational to the patterns and designs of the natural world. “Beauty” is natural engineering at its finest. To me much of the greatest beauty of the world is in Africa, where it just stands to reason, so much of it began.

Roll your cursor back and forth over the graphic below. African flower mantids have so remarkably adapted to African flowers that without a graphic like this one you’d never in a million years find them! This is beauty, complex mathematics and natural selection all rolled up into a powerful single lesson.

I’ve labored for years with people and clients who don’t believe that natural selection explains life on earth, most of whom squander in the cartoons of creationism. Only 39% of Americans believe in evolution. This is worse than embarrassing. There is no other educated population in the world with such a miserable statistic.

And the number is increasing, not decreasing. We’ve countered the limited beliefs of the critics fact-by-fact. We’ve politely and consistently tolerated the position of those arguing against evolution, giving “equal voice” to nonsense. I know, now, how wrong that was.

Creationism is wrong. It’s a lie. It’s perfectly legal to believe lies, so I’m not so insane as to suggest that people who believe lies should be somehow punished. But the time has come to firmly not reward them.

Kentucky already has a Creationism Museum that commercially is doing very well. It’s not certain and will never be known if its financial success is for the same reason that people used to pay to go to freak shows, or if there really are believers in support. But either way, institutions like it should not be subsided by public funds.

In other words, I guess we can tolerate lunacy but we sure ought not support it.

The weakness with which scientists, teachers and politicians have defended such concepts as natural selection against fringe idiots has produced a terrible legacy. Natural selection is just one of many issues like woman’s rights and child poverty and national health care that have suffered in my lifetime because their advocates have cowered to baseless critics.

Our legacy of poor defense has resulted in the U.S. dropping from Number 1 when I was in high school to 18th of 36 nations whose high school students graduate on time.

And those who do graduate are getting dumber and dumber.

As you enter the gates of the United States Grand Canyon National Park, you can purchase in their shop a “guide book” that says the Grand Canyon was formed by Noah’s flood and is only a few thousand years old.

In the last year alone, the Texas State Board of Education has ordered text books used in public schools there to question the American separation of church and state, to remove Thomas Jefferson as an influential political philosopher, to study the “unintended consequences” of Affirmative Action and Title IX, to replace “capitalism” with “free-enterprise system” and to describe the U.S. government as a “constitutional republic” rather than “democratic.”

This is the state of education in America. It has struggled to reach this nadir for more than a generation. We have allowed it to sink, because we haven’t defended with the vigor of certainty that which is science.

There is a lot of talk these days about compromise and purism. We made a mistake in my life time by tolerating as equals those who disbelieved evolution.

I don’t know if there’s time to turn it around. But if there is, there can be no compromise on the struggle.

EndMANTID — Thanks to http://dududiaries.wildlifedirect.org/.

Marx vs BoA in East Africa

December 7, 2010 by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

One of the most conservative banks in the world has just stated that the fundamentals of liberal East African economies are better than the U.S.’ capitalist one.

I’m certainly oversimplifying Standard Charter Banks “Outlook for 2011” and I don’t pretend to suggest I’ve combed carefully its 128 pages. But there are certain conclusions this world economic expert was forced to make that beg any more complicated explanation.

Standard Charter is important, because its involvement in sub-Saharan and East Africa in particular is among the greatest of any world bank. There are, of course, many other analyses of the global recession and annual predictors of world financial situations. But Standard Charter is most relevant to East Africa.

The bank starts by predicting GDP growth world-wide: East Africa will grow between 6.5 – 9% per annum, while the U.S. will be between 2-3%.

“Emerging economies account for one-third of the world economy but are accounting for two-thirds of its growth. This shift in the balance of economic and financial power looks set to continue, driven by their better fundamentals, policy actions and increasing confidence,” the report contends.

The detailed explanation of what “better fundamentals” and “policy actions” are reads like a text book description of Marxist/Leninism:

— China seems to be doing everything right to stay on top by its capacity to shift economic policy at a moment’s notice, unburdened by democratic dynamics, even if it is “unfair” and risks collapse if its economic domination isn’t secured worldwide.

– Emerging economies like Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are certainly benefitting from newly discovered and mineable natural resources, but also from an aggressive and liberal monetary policy that discounts the importance of inflation and prints lots of money so that banks can loan out infrastructure development.

There is, of course, much more. But even a stiff collar Scrooge sitting on Bank Street had to state the obvious. In this economic downturn, the economies that are doing best are those that could be maneuvered quickly in ways that are not popular with electorates. Ergo, non-electorate societies will prevail.

At least for now.

This is good news for East Africa, where fiscal and monetary policy is still tightly held by those in power and not really subject to the democratic process. Debt, interest rates, currency policy and even trade and tariff policies are simply not a part of the public lexicon in the way they are in the U.S. and the U.K. In fact these government policies are much more likely to be controlled by western institutions like the IMF than by local opinion.

And normally conservative IMF, like normally conservative Standard Chartered Bank, cannot now impose western values on economies that are doing two, three or four times better than western ones.

It remains to be seen if this is a global economic game changer, or just the anomaly of the sort that appears after a major world economic trauma.

And even if the latter, I believe the sacrosanct presumption that unfettered capitalism is the best the world can do — especially the developing world — is on its way to the proverbial graveyard of antique thoughts.

Africa Answerman

Sharing the beauty of African life today. Adventurer. Conservationist. Owner of Explorers World Travel.

Month: December 2010

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