Month: January 2011

What does Egypt mean?

What does Egypt mean?

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Egypt’s popular rising by a better educated generation reflects a global interconnectivity that transmits the will of the people as effectively as bar photos. But do Americans in particular understand what these people really want? I don’t think so.

Cries of “Freedom!” are easily translated from most any language, but “democracy” is another word altogether. Americans have consistently reported on African uprisings as “democratic movements.” Some are but most aren’t.

Sunday’s announced results in the Sudanese referendum – long expected – is hardly a step in the democratic process many claim. It’s a step in a process that secedes power in Khartoum to a political group that has been working for it throughout my life time, and in my opinion, well earned. But there is no room in this process for competing views about governance.

And whether or not the northern tribes will receive the fair attention proscribed in the new South Sudan constitution remains to be seen. Unlike truly democratic societies where law is the foundation of governance, that isn’t at all certain in the new South Sudan.

The first spark of popular uprisings in Africa began long ago in South Africa, and ever since the regime changed in 1994 Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, has been firmly in control and often in defiance of democratic ideals like freedom of the press.

Following the horrendous genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the populist uprising of Watutsi mostly in exile in Uganda stormed into the country and took control. Paul Kagame was the military general that led the attack, and he has remained president ever since. In the last election, his opponents were either jailed or killed.

Yet South Africa, Rwanda and now the South Sudan are definitely fulfilling the aspirations of the people who brought them to power. Those aspirations can be summed up in a single word, justice.

Americans misinterpret democracy for justice. We also tend to believe that democracy is more absolute than justice. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The filibuster in the Senate is a case in point. Manifestly not democracy, it prevails nonetheless as just. Ditto for the electoral college, or the ability of our courts to reverse a popular referendum.

The people in the street may be screaming for freedom and democracy to get the attention of CNN, but what they really want is … justice.

And that’s what makes the recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and likely soon elsewhere in the Arab world, to be so problematic. Wealth and opportunity cannot be redistributed as quickly as a Hosni Mubarak can be toppled from power.

And so it’s a matter of how patient the revolutionists will be. Africa is legend for the patience of its people, and that’s why I remain completely optimistic in the future of South Africa and most of Africa in general.

The big question, then, is whether Egyptians have the same patience as South Africans and Kenyans. It’s a very big continent: I just don’t know.

When Right is Wrong

When Right is Wrong

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Not just Gabby shot, but now David murdered in certain part because of the hatred created by the American Right. There are two things I just don’t understand: (1) how can anyone deny this obvious link, and (2) how could we possibly have let these happen? Who will be next?

Wednesday afternoon one of the finest, gentlest and most articulate Ugandans to have lived was beaten to death in his Kampala home with a hammer. Kato was Uganda’s most prominent gay rights activist.

Kato’s death, like Gabriel Gifford’s attempted assassination, was not random. They were both likely done by crazed individuals, but individuals directed if not wholly inspired by hate speech from the American Right.

The incredible attempts by Americans including President Obama to deny this represents a dangerously irresponsible lack of common sense, if not a terrible act of cowardice.

We all know the connection of the American Right to Gabby’s shooting. And hold on! “American Right” is not a person, it is not Sarah Palin. But Sarah Palin is a part of the “American Right,” thousands of individuals and countless organizations who have irresponsibly implied violence (if not called for it outright) against individuals opposing their views.

Val Kalende, the head of a major Ugandan gay rights organization told South Africa’s Pambazuka News shortly after the murder, “The Ugandan Government and the so-called U.S Evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood!”

Reporter Leigh Phillips of the European Union on-line publication EUObserver reported today that some EU States have now “threatened to cut aid funding to [Uganda] as a result of the [anti-gay] legislation, which was introduced after a group of American right-wing Christians travelled to the country in March 2009 to hold anti-gay rallies.”

You can read my own accounts of this terribly developing story, including lots of links and videos at “Trail of Hate Rounds the World”.

I am especially saddened and angered by President Obama. Both in his State of the Union address last week, and in a message deploring Kato’s death he refused to link the heated American Right rhetoric to the acts.

I can understand the special importance that a leader of such power has in reducing tensions – especially deadly ones – but in the State of the Union Obama specifically stated “There is no connection” between heated rhetoric and Representative Gabriel Gifford’s attempted assassination. Not to affirm a connection was wrong of Obama. But to affirm the lie that there is no connection is despicable.

His message about Kato was more circumspect. Denial comes only as inference in what was not said. Better, but no cigar.

With no cap on the lunacy from our leaders, denial of the causal relationship between the American Right’s rhetoric and violence has gone viral in America. We are once again burying our heads in the sand of deceit and fantasy.

This senseless violence will end only when the American Right changes the tone of public debate. And that tone is not – as often suggested – equally created by “both sides.” It is an American Right phenomenon. Only they can end it.

Animals Are Not People

Animals Are Not People

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Animals are not people. Sorry about having to tell you this, they are living things deserving our utmost respect, but there’s not a hippo I know who is really Mama Cass with a preference for long, lacey dresses.

I’ve tried avoiding the attached video, just as I’ve tried avoiding talking about the lion who adopted an oryx in Samburu, or the buffalo gang war that saved junior from the teeth of Capt Cook’s nemesis. But, alas, too many of you have sent me this video.

It’s definitely fun to watch. Wrongly characterized as the local EMT or school-crossing guard, a hippo “escorts” little animals across dangerous places. First a young wildebeest.

Then, a very young zebra, I’d estimate less than three weeks and maybe younger, gets separated from its family as they try to cross through the strong current of the Mara River in the far north Serengeti.

Lost and bewildered, Mama Cass arrives on the scene to escort the darling to a little rock island and watches over it while it regains its strength before sending it striding into its bright future across the final trickles of the stream to land fall.

(Where, I now speculate which is not in the video, it is immediately consumed by a cat.)

The video was shot when a group of tourists including a Tanzanian lodge manager were out routinely game viewing. What was not routine was how that Tanzanian lodge manager has grossly exaggerrated the situation, claimed the hippo “saved” the baby zebra, and subsequently copyrighted the video.

I don’t know the lodge manager, so I don’t know if he really believes what he says. It could just all be the start of a new children’s book series, and if that’s what it is, congratulations Joe you’ve lucked out.

But if there’s one iota of real belief in what he says, he’s nuts.

Here’s my take. It was a pretty large hippo, so likely a female and even more likely a female which had recently (very recently) lost a baby. This occurred during the wildebeest migration with lots of beef running across streams. Ergo, lots and lots of crocs.

The giant crocs especially along the Mara River are remarkable creatures that basically sleep for ten months of the year, waking for around two to eat. When they wake they are incredibly voracious, sloppy eaters.

They have difficulty discerning between a wildebeest and a baby hippo. In fact, I’ve seen them mistake a car tire for a wildebeest.

It’s a dire time for a hippo to give birth. And what that mother in the video was doing was not “escorting” the baby to the shore; quite to the contrary. What she was desperately trying to do was pull it back into open water and make it dive, below where crocs feed.

That’s the strategy for an unfortunate mother hippo who gives birth during the wildebeest migration. Keep the baby as deep in the water, where by the way it’s born to begin with, until the eating machines are full.

So sorry, folks. This was no cross-cultural bioethnic altruism for the good of the wild. It was just another hippo in a group doing what they do best, trying to survive.

And the cathartic tourists shooting the video were just doing what bad tourists do best, making fantasies out of reality.

Here’s a better way. Nick Brandt is one of the most creative artists working in East Africa. He sticks with black-and-white images, and by so doing does what he does best, makes reality out of fantasies.

His photos are remarkable for not being realistic, but futuristic or sometimes even apocalyptic. And in so doing he conveys stellar truths about elephants and lions and so much more, portraying their intrinsic beauty in almost mechanical ways. But most of all, after viewing these photos you are left more with emotions than explanations.

And that’s much closer to representing the reality of Africa’s wild than misinterpreting instinct for empathy. Animals don’t have empathy. We have empathy.

State of the Union, State of Africa

State of the Union, State of Africa

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As I listened to President Obama last night, I thought of the State of Africa, and I realized that real hope for future justice in the world is squarely with Africa, today, not America.

Many will consider me foolish: yesterday was a day of tear gas, rioting and general upheaval in much of north Africa. But what I see are people uprising, renewed and respirited. And what I heard last night was Obama snuffing out new spirits in America.

Africa has been in the throes of radical change ever since apartheid in South Africa fell almost 20 years ago. Economic catastrophe today is the motivation that carries the spirit of liberty from South Africa to Tunisia. There’s nothing odd about that.

Economic catastrophe has always been a reason for political change throughout the history of civilized society, and so it should be, since it is often caused by the older society unable to adjust to newer social realities.

In Africa this has led to radical changes in the political organizations in South Africa, Kenya, Liberia, Senegal, Madagascar, Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire and the Comoros. I’m not suggesting that the direction of this change is yet fully understood or right now universally good. But it is all fueled by people power. And that all by itself, is good.

Respirited mass movements lead to real recalibration of society. Former winners become losers and former losers become winners. The cocktail party phrase that social change can be a win-win situation is premature. There is too much injustice and prejudice in the world still for that to yet be fully possible.

But it doesn’t mean that the new losers are relegated to the same misery that the former losers might have suffered. In Africa, in fact, it means that the powerful just become a little less powerful. Kenya’s former dictator, Daniel arap Moi, enjoys a wonderful retirement, safe and comfy and in fact respected by a wide section of Kenyan society.

But his ouster by the people of Kenya led to a series of events that has heralded in a new populist who is likely to radically alter the Kenyan economy currently defined by legions of poor. No single movement or leader is capable of changing the science of economics. But Raila Odinga is likely to elevate the condition of Kenya’s poor in the next decade far beyond what I could have imagined, and no doubt at the expense of the rich and powerful.

Who will by all standards, still be rich and powerful. Just not as rich and powerful as before.

This is precisely what happened and continues to happen in South Africa. It began a generation ago, as the richest and most powerful emigrated to the tune of 1800 per month starting in the 1980s, as they realized their lofty positions could not be sustained in a modern African society.

Throughout Africa, populist movements are ushering in more just and equitable societies.

In America, Obama was that symbol as well in 2008. But he failed. He is far behind his times.

Obama’s message is one of unity, and in all fairness, this is no surprise. He has been extremely true to his theories. But that was not what brought him to power. What brought him to power was a massive belief that real change would occur in America.

That may be our fault, not his, but he was complicit. He accepted the mantle of change. He now revels in the temerity of those who condescend to answer a robo phone poll. But he seems too steeped in the past to be pried from his 19th century politics, constrained by dead heroes like Abraham Lincoln, so great for their times but as outdated today as a buggy wagon.

I look at Africa, and my heart beats fast and hopefully. I listen to Obama and grow depressed.

Global Warming Spins East Africa

Global Warming Spins East Africa

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We are just beginning to understand how severe global warming impacts the equatorial regions like East Africa. We know that Vanuatu may flood away, but we now suspect that important parts of East Africa will both blow and flood away, too.

Short rains in specifically defined areas of East Africa failed the end of last year. For those areas, which include large parts of Laikipia (Samburu) and Kajiado (east of Amboseli, parts of Tsavo), crops have failed and hoofed stock losses are projected at more than 20%.

This follows last year’s record floods, which followed a three-year minidrought during which 80% of pastorliasts’ hoofed stock was lost.

Meteorologists are beginning to see a pattern in this jumble of devastating weather. Radical and extreme weather is likely now the “norm” across the equatorial regions of the world, including East Africa.

Much of East Africa is booming economically, especially Kenya, and a large component of this growth is agriculture. Yesterday, Kenya’s Tea Board reported record earnings of nearly $1.3 billion in 2009. This moved tea production above cut flower production ($995 million) and tourism ($850 million).

But unfortunately for Kenya and distinct from its neighbor Tanzania, its agricultural zone is especially vulnerable to global warming. The equator runs right through Kenya, about 40 miles due north of Nairobi. This invisible line seems to be the marker for catastrophe from global warming.

For most of my life, we expected a serious drought in East Africa about every ten years, and when it came, it was widespread and devastating. I remember a drought in the eighties when safaris were hard pressed to find anything but dying cats. An all-day game drive in the crater resulted in one dying hyaena.

Wild animals are particularly resilient, and we know now much better than we knew then that animals know where to go to survive in serious droughts. And men, too, are resilient. A single horrible blow every ten years was expected and unsurprising.

What is happening now is altogether different. Think of the equatorial regions like a blue, red and green quilt. The red areas get drought again and again, sometimes harder than other times but multiple times. The blue areas get hit less far less than the red areas, but often enough, but are then followed by extreme floods. And the remaining green areas are basically wetter than they’ve been in the past.

As you would expect the red drought areas are semi-arid, and these are the areas of the hoofed stock, the pastoralists like the Maasai. Multiple droughts as is happening now is destroying the resilience these people have evinced for milennia. It’s one thing to weather disaster once every ten years. Every 2 or 3 years means whatever seeds were laid by the last grass have completely blown away, along with whatever top soil was left.

But the greatest surprise is that in areas that were normally even more arid than Maasailand, floods are now a regular occurrence. Turkana, far north of Samburu, accustomed to 1 or 2″ of rain annually received nearly 30″ of rain last year. Everything pooled and melted, and now in the throes of a drought, there is little left up there but dust.

Everything is happening so fast, it’s very hard to predict how East African society will adjust to these extremes. Except one thing seems more and more clear: the lifestyle of the pastoralist is doomed.

At least a year’s warning is often possible. The opposing phenomena of El Nino, inevitably followed by La Nina, can predict what is going to happen.

El Nino is the increase in the ocean temperature. About a year after El Nino is diagnosed, heavy rains and floods tumble on parts of East Africa. La Nina is the decrease of temperatures following El Nino, but a decrease below what is normal. About a year after La Nina, rainfall decreases throughout East Africa, causing the specific area droughts over semi-arid land.

The El Nino phenomenon occurred about once every decade in the past. La Nina never occurred. Now, El Nino comes four or five times a decade, always followed by La Nina.

If this becomes a pattern, agricultural production, pastoral life styles and wilderness areas like big game parks, will be rattled to the core.

Another large component of East Africa’s explosive growth is Chinese investment, mostly in infrastructure to develop natural resources like oil. Which is used for factories and automobiles. Which produces more greenhouse gases. Which causes more global warming, more and longer El Ninos and more La Ninas.

This is all happening so quickly in the context of developing economies, that it seems completely unstoppable, even though we possess the science to stop it. The tipping points have been endlessly discussed in the developed world: Cap-and-trade, green technology, electric cars.

But to a Maasai herder surviving day-to-day, or a land owner with oil in the ground in Kenya and three kids who want to go to an expensive university, these are not compelling topics.

The question is, will the land flood away or blow away before enough cash can be acquired to compensate for its loss?

I heistate to underestimate the remarkable resources of the young East Africa, but this challenge looks pretty grim.

Birthplace of Man, and of Slavery

Birthplace of Man, and of Slavery

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The last day that human slavery was legal in the civilized world was June 19, 1865, and every day since extraordinary efforts to understand and document the horrific practice have been unrelenting. Now Tanzanian scientists are debunking several established concepts about the origin and explosion of slavery in the 17th century.

Amistad and Goree Island lead most explanations of the incredible increase in slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries as principally motivated by America’s rapid development, especially the growth of the cotton and tobacco industries.

Most black Americans are descendants of West African slaves held on southern agricultural farms, and until now, documented slave trading from East Africa seemed incidental to the millions taken from West Africa for the Americas.

Last week Tanzanian scientists announced several years of ongoing work in the northern coastal regions of the country has uncovered evidence that the slave trade flourished in East Africa from as early as the 13th century, long before the West African commerce began.

Prof. Edward Mgema has discovered more than 42 sites along the Tanzanian Indian ocean coast near Tanga that appear to be ancient slave trading depots, and likely ones that were used for more than 500 years.

Mgema is challenging older established theories which hold that little slaving occurred in East Africa relative to West Africa, based mostly on the journals of ships trading into the area that rarely listed slaves in their manifest. This fact still remains to be explained if Mgema is right.

The holding areas Mgema reports were nearly all associated with ancient mosques, and the inference is that slaving in East Africa was organized or at least condoned in a religious way that might have kept it off the ship’s commercial records. This has yet to be established.

Slaving was known to exist from nearly all ports in Africa from the earliest times, but none as commercially dynamic as evinced by the slave depots and holding sites like Goree Island, and now, the mosque depots in northern Tanzania. Moreover, if corroborated by further study, the 42 Tanzanian sites predate by hundreds of years any such sites in West Africa.

Several elephant researchers, including Tanzania’s Charles Foley, have contended for some time that slaving was a natural outcome of harvesting elephant ivory. Foley contends that once the ivory was cut from the elephant, the only way to transport it to the coast for its ultimate delivery to Asia and Arabia was by catching slaves to carry it.

There is now and has always been much larger elephant populations in East than West Africa.

Whether slavery was born or ivory harvesting or as a religious practice, or both, Mgema’s recent archaeological discoveries put some real teeth into the notion that East Africa, not West Africa, was where slaving began and likely where over all time the most slaves were harvested.

Mgema has been working in the Tanga area of the north Tanzanian coast for some time. He is also the discoverer of hominid footprints that are thought to be 1.5 million years old.

It will be interesting to see if this extraordinary work by an extraordinary Tanzanian scientist can crack open some misconceptions about the origin and motivation for slavery. It isn’t often that a developing world scientist can effect a massive academic body of work mostly built by westerners.

Congratulations to Mgema and his team. No matter how this is accepted in the west, one thing has certainly been discovered at a more contemporary level. There are some really smart people in Tanzania!

Mugabe dying, but not his Empire

Mugabe dying, but not his Empire

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Robert Mugabe, czar of Zim, may be coming to an end. But the era of Robert Mugabe is set to last a very, very long time.

Mugabe remains in Malaysia where he returned unexpectedly following his annual vacation, for emergency prostrate surgery. He was too paranoid to have the surgery in Europe, which is nearer to Zimbabwe, or next-door South Africa where the first heart transplant was performed, certain that unfriendly doctors would kill him. He says he’s 86 years old, but most of us believe he’s 89 or 90. He has suffered from various cancers for years.

Last week, the day after Mugabe left, Zimbabwean troops were deployed across the country, swaggering and arrogant as usual, setting up camps where there weren’t hotels and ordering out without paying.

Mugabe’s illness is being well reported in the Zimbabwean Mail, the only reliable “local” media on Zimbabwe. (It’s published in London.)

Mugabe regularly takes a vacation every December/January, and this time it was to not-so-unfriendly Malaysia. He left on Saturday to return home, then abruptly switched gears and returned to Malaysia for surgery.

The Mail reported Tuesday that the surgery was fairly major removing all of the prostate. The newspaper reported Wednesday that before Mugabe left he ordered his underlings to prepare a new election.

The opposition won the last election according to the few outside observers that were allowed in, but the government overturned the numbers. After some street violence the two sides settled on a coalition government that gives the opposition a face but absolutely no power.

The government uses a voter registration roll of which a third of the names are over 120 years old or already declared dead.

Tendai Biti, one of the opposition faces in the unity government, told a hastily summoned press conference Wednesday that the election will cause a bloodbath.

Not exactly.

Zimbabwe, which is effectively Mugabe, controls everything including whose blood will be drawn at any moment. Rest assured government thugs, militias and supporters will be just fine.

What’s become so interesting about Zimbabwe is a certain purity of evil. Unlike so many authoritarian countries in the world, Zim makes no bones about, say, a voter registration poll. It doesn’t matter to the authorities if everyone knows that people who elect them are dead.

Mugabe’s humility at sitting next to Morgan Tsvangirai, his “prime minister” in the coalition government, is astounding. Tsvangirai has a Mercedes just like Mugabe, but virtually nothing else.

Tsvangirai has been beaten nearly to death several times, has lost his wife in a suspicious car accident, has had all of his assets attached, and has virtually no power to do anything but flee the country, which he has decided not to do.

Mugabe must hate the dickens out of him, but the old man patiently sits next to Tsvangirai especially for the foreign press and listens patiently to a now well-known litany of criticisms, then Mugabe says nothing and leaves the room.

And, so, nothing changes.

An election will cause blood to flow, but it won’t pool in a bath. It’s always a one-directional fight in Zimbabwe. That’s the reason Mugabe wants another election. He wants to rev up the level of terror as he fades from the scene.

The country is, well, not really a country anymore. The joke of the Zimbabwean dollar reaching a quadtrillion mark note was finally too difficult for money printers, so it’s now the U.S. dollar and nothing else. And for this country which was once was the 8th largest economy in Africa, there are now fewer dollars in circulation and in local assets than in Raleigh, West Virginia.

Once one of Africa’s richest agricultural areas, there is not enough food produced to feed a tenth of its remaining population. Mines over rich natural resources are functioning at about a tenth of capacity. Tourism is dead. Most rational Zimbabweans left long ago.

And for many of the same reasons that China doesn’t take a proactive stand with North Korea, South Africa is quite happy to maintain the status quo. A total and complete breakdown of the country would send too many immigrants all at once into South Africa.

And don’t think that the status quo will change if Mugabe dies. There are legions who depend on Mugabe’s intricate architecture of payoffs, and the hierarchy is already in place. His likely successor is Defense Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa.

If not Mnangagwa, then Vice-President John Nkomo. If not Nkomo, then head of the army, General Constantine Chiwenga. If not Chiwenga, then secret service boss Happyson Bonyongwe. And if not Bonyongwe, then Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri.

It’s all neatly diagramed out. And there are a thousand other names that fall further down the tree of power. And every single one of them on the toothpick highrise knows it will come tumbling down if one toothpick moves out of line. And then, there would be a real bloodbath.

But it wouldn’t bring good people to power. The good people are gone. Zim’s problem was that good, educated, decent Zimbabweans left instead of fought. It’s been easier for them over the years to slip down to South Africa, move over to Mozambique or become refugees in far flung places like .. America. All the proactive will for good in Zimbabwean has been beaten out.

Some contrarians (optimists?) believe when the stick house falls that Tsvangirai will plaster the pieces of left over government back together, the way he’s so often plastered up his own skull.

I wouldn’t bet on it.

No Yawn, but not a Scream Either

No Yawn, but not a Scream Either

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Southern Sudan has voted to split from the North in a peaceful, fair election. Minor trouble was reported in the border regions, but all the players took it in stride. It was not and never should have been considered the moments before doomsday.

We have known for 5 years this would be peaceful. George Clooney, of course, didn’t. And that’s understandable. There just wasn’t enough drama to hold his audience.

Exact and official results will be announced in about 4 weeks, as planned. But one of the most reliable sources of news from Khartoum, the Sudan Tribune, published a photo today of Mohamed Ibrahim Khalil, the north’s pivot man for the referendum, announcing to the press that the outcome was for succession.

There were dozens of foreign election observers, and every single one of them has validated the process “peaceful and credible.”

The south, which is much more open and transparent, is being polite to its soon-to-be discarded motherland, by not officially releasing the exact numbers until the north does.

But it is widely believed that over 60% of the qualifying plebiscite voted, and that nearly 70% of both the north and south will have voted for succession, perhaps as much as 95% of the voters in the south doing so.

About 50 people were killed during the week of voting, although not even these casualties in the now disputed Abyei oil-producing region can be linked directly to the referendum itself. It seems as I’ve written earlier that the dispute between two militias was actually about who would be allowed to vote in another referendum to be held in this region some time in the future.

Creating two countries out of one is not easy. “The Sudan” has been more or less in tact since 1899. The two sides have been unable to demarcate the actual border, precisely because they have been unable to apportion the rich oil reserves that exist there.

But The New York Times headline, “Roots of Bitterness in a Region Threaten Sudan’s Future” is just another over statement of the current situation, with little credit to the good reporting The Times has otherwise managed from the region. The conflict in Abyei is more akin to a gang war in Watts than a war between the U.S. and Mexico, which is how The Times and others are characterizing it.

Another problem will be the flood of new immigrants into the South, although even that has been steadily occurring for some time.

There are many more positive components of this whole process. Basically, a five-year transition has been on-going. When this peace deal was signed five years ago, separation at that point was a given.

And while Khartoum may ultimately fiddle the numbers to save what little face it can, there’s no doubt the north will validate the result. The important point here, really, is that this was predictable, as so many of us were saying again and again.

But the voices of the little people on the street mean less when the predicted outcome is good and peaceful.

Thank you, Jimmy Carter. And George, I love your movies.

Don’t Evict the Bees!

Don’t Evict the Bees!

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Do you sacrifice a small group of ancient people to promote a larger society? We put Indians onto reservations. Should the Kenyans evict 36,000 Ogiek from their forest?

It’s one thing for an activist to threaten you and your grandchildren with no clean water. It’s another when your kitchen faucet stops dripping.

That’s what’s happening in Kenya, today, right now. Even while giant factories are blossoming like mushrooms in my backyard after a morning drizzle. It’s happening right now as 12-lane highways are creeping across the country.

The water rationing schedule announced each week in the newspapers is as ordinary as a TV guide.

And all the needed water comes from one place: the Mau Forest. It’s the only indigenous forest in Kenya, and by our standards for instance, terribly small, only 675,000 acres, an area about the size of Rhode Island.

The Mau provides 7-10 million people with not only clean drinking water, but water for factories and cleaning. Moreover, the recent reduction of the forest has contributed to mud slides and soil erosions that has been devastating.

The Mau has sinisterly been eaten away for nearly a hundred years. British colonials recognized its rich soil and confiscated huge portions for their settlers. Independence only deepened the problem as corrupt politicians confiscated more.

The deposed dictator Daniel arap Moi may own as much as 300,000 acres of what was once Mau Forest, now tea estates.

Kenya is the world’s largest tea exporter. Take it from me, it’s the best tea in the world!

Then, during the political violence following the 2008 election, hundreds of thousands of people fled to the hills. And those hills were largely the Mau. As many as 100,000 people began to squat in the Mau.

Then came the Developed World’s haughty solutions to global warming. In Copenhagen in 2009, then Cancun in 2010, developed countries proposed not reducing their own greenhouse emissions right away, but rather a sort of Global Cap-and-Trade policy without the Cap called “REDD’’ — Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries.

$30 billion to the developing world by 2012, and $100 billion more by 2020. Kenya’s portion, if it ever comes: a few hundred million. But that’s sizeable to Kenya, and in order to get it, Kenya has to preserve the Mau. There’s no other forest it can “trade”.

Dennis Martinez writing for the Boston Globe calls this “Slow Death by Carbon Credits.”

Colonial land grabbing, corruption politician land grabbing-cum-tea development, internally displaced persons and REDD. And not a drop to drink.

Now what.

In what is really a radical, radical move, the Kenyan government has decided to evict everyone from the Mau. All those colonial land-grabbers, some of the modern politicians with tea farms, all the displaced persons from political turbulence, buying all the previous land owners and squatters new land somewhere else, at billions and billions of shillings (that will still be less than the compensation from REDD).

And, the 36,000 Ogiek who have lived there for a number of generations.

The Ogiek are forest people. The generation before the current one was almost entirely hunter/gatherers and bee-keepers. The Ogiek were themselves displaced from arguably better forests around Kenya in the 1930s by British land grabbers. But when they moved, they took their lifeways with them.

But the Kenyan government policy is without qualification. Everyone goes. Including the Ogiek. And, their bees?

No one is wondering about the bees. Unlike temperate forests here at home, forests in Africa rely much more on pollination and cross-pollination to survive. The diversity of the forest biomass is much greater in the equatorial parts of the world like Kenya. Without a constant diversity, the forests collapse.

The diversity is dynamic to some extent, a sort of constant evolution of new species and sub-species. Quite apart from the morality of evicting the Ogiek, the longest living residents of the Mau, what about the bees?

Money talks. REDD talks. Bees don’t.

Great video below about Ogiek and bee-keeping. Stick with the first 30 seconds which have nothing do with Ogiek or bee-keeping.

A Holiday Great for us & Africa

A Holiday Great for us & Africa

by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

Today is an American holiday, Martin Luther King Day. I am a white man who has spent nearly half of every year of his working life in black societies. I am witness to the change that King’s type of philosophy has made in Africa and at home.

King was America’s black civil rights champion, and what I and probably most people remember of his turbulent last days was nearly unspeakable violence. My most vivid memory is as a very young journalist, penned in under a burning El Stop in downtown Chicago as the city raged following King’s assassination.

I remember gun fire as a regular sound in my low-rent apartment in Washington during the summer of the 1968. Or the unending sirens and tear gas around my apartment in Berkeley in 1969.

King is duly revered for radically changing American society with non-violence? When what I remember most is fire, bullets and ambulances?

It’s been more than 40 years since then. Trauma has a way of finding its small berth among the many more ordinary memories of earlier life. My young student years were lived in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Of the more than 1000 students in public middle and high schools when I was there, there was not a single black. Less than a decade after I graduated, I returned to Jonesboro for a wedding, and learned that almost half the town was black.

I lived in Jonesboro for 5 years. I went to school, groomed pretty dogs at a vet’s, shopped on main street, sipped sodas at the donut shop, cheered at school sports’ matches, went to church socials. I remember regularly seeing only one black, Bessie Mae, our maid.

I left that society for the turbulent 60s, then left the turbulent 60s for Africa, and when I returned how things had changed!

King’s philosophy of non-violence, like Gandhi’s and to a much smaller but significant extent, Mandela’s, were not eras of no violence. There was incredible violence, and this violence, as with the sizzling El Stop that nearly fell on me, will be blazoned in our memories forever. But with time we’re able to reflect that that violence was the reaction to those heros’ methodical, unswerving actions for a freer, fairer society.

Those movements as a whole were not violent. But the reactions to them were hideously violent, and then sometimes when Watts or Chicago burned, the frustration of the oppressed boiled over. But mostly it was not that. Mostly it was unarmed hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators being tear gassed and shot by police.

And why? Because it was the desperation of trying to stop the inevitable. I really believe there is more good in the world than bad. Justice will ultimately prevail.

We are a deeply rooted Chicago family. My father was sent from Chicago to Jonesboro to start a factory owned by an Illinois company to avoid the growing union movement in the north. One of the first things he did was pack up us three young kids in the car and drive us into the cotton fields west of Memphis, stopping the car, saying nothing, and making us watch black share-croppers toiling in the summer sun.

Try as I may, that and Bessie Mae, are the only blacks I remember as a teenager, living in the midst of them.

Today, my President is black. My Attorney General is black. My closest friends, many in Africa, are black. My rare return to Jonesboro encountered many blacks. Memories created of life, today, are no longer monochrome or technicolor, they are just wonderfully vivid.

Social justice does prevail. In some places, throughout Africa for example, it seems to take longer than in my more developed society, and perhaps that’s the reason. The messages get around more quickly. So in my life time, the personal sacrifices of Africans are understandably greater than here at my home.

But the sacrifices of each individual are the same. And what King taught us is that they’re effective. All you need to do is rise to the needs of your community above the needs of yourself.

I am so fortunate to have lived long enough to see King’s work transform the bad in my society to good, almost as an imperative. An imperative that I believe I now at this very moment see happening throughout so much of Africa.

Happy Birthday, Martin! You’d have been 82, today!

Poorly Guided Tourists Hide Wilde

Poorly Guided Tourists Hide Wilde

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

This week the Huffington Post said the “migration was delayed.” True. It was delayed. About as long as getting stuck in Chicago traffic delays a dinner engagement.

“I can assure you the raingods are smiling,” the owner/manager of Ndutu lodge emailed me this morning. “The animals have streamed back onto the plains!… Everything right now is sprouting, growing and sparkling with life!”

The Huffington piece was written by a very respected conservationist, Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club.

Pope’s problem is the same as any other tourist who believes they are Robert Burton searching for the source of the Nile. TripAdvisor is full of this nonsense.

“…gazelles are waiting on the southern grasslands, but the short rains failed this December. The million wildebeest that drive the world’s greatest wildlife spectacle have not yet scented enough rain to trust their destinies to the grasslands. The migration, which follows the rain, must also wait for it,” Pope writes.

Poetic but untrue.

I am fan of the Huffington Post and consider myself allied to anyone who calls themself a conservationist. I’m not saying Pope was lying. His mistake – a very serious one – is suggesting that his one brief perspective from one small area puts him in a position to make such gross generalizations.

It was not immediately clear where Pope had been, but I dare say he probably wasn’t there very long and didn’t have a very good guide.

The Serengeti ecosystem is nearly the size of New Jersey, but unlike New Jersey it lies nearly astride the equator. Weather systems are fabulously complex, there, and especially now with global warming.

There can be small pockets of drought surrounded by areas that are flooded. Right now the northern districts of Kenya are suffering another drought. Perhaps he found himself in one such small area in the Serengeti, but the overall Serengeti is just fine, and actually, quite normally fine.

Pope’s assumption in his article that the herds are drawn by the “scent of grass” or sensitivity to rain is uncertain; we don’t know exactly what prompts the migration. Moreover, grass disappears for other reasons than drought. It can be eaten. By cattle as well as wildebeest, a serious ecological battle raging these last few years at the edge of the Serengeti with Maasai range lands.

He also suggested as typical of a casual tourist that the migration is a single thing — entity — that either moves or not. A million animals does not a marching band make! They are often split up all over terra firma.

He said the “gazelles were delayed.” Thomson’s gazelle often don’t migrate. Some do, some don’t. I see literally tens of thousands of Thomson’s gazelle on the totally desiccated plains north of Olduvai at the driest time of the year, July and the first of August. These marvelous creatures don’t need to drink, and they survive quite nicely by eating the roots of grass.

Pope marked his visit in “December.” But the information I have for December was that light rains began over the grassland plains of the Serengeti December 18 and 19, and the following week saw normal rain patterns. This is about 2-3 weeks late, no more. There was then a let up at the end of the year, as is also normal, and now as the Ndutu owner explains, everything is beautifully green.

Blogs posted by other travelers and tour companies suggest that the bulk of the wildebeest moved through the northern part of the Serengeti out of Kenya as early as the end of November/beginning of December. Right on schedule.

Several weeks later, perfectly positioned to profit from the first rains of the season, the herds were mostly divided widely between the Kusini plains to the west and the Gol Kopjes to the east.

This is the real magic of the migration. Until these first rains fall germinating new grass, there is simply no understandable motivation to draw the large herds into the area. Yet they come, year after year after year. Many believe as I do that it is a homing instinct triggered not by “scent of grass” or of rain, but of a lack of grass whence the herds came.

Whatever it is, this wondrous magic is diminished when respectable media like the Huffington Post publish reputable writers like Pope who offer tiny personal experiences as adequate accounts of complex situations, acting like experts when all they are, are poorly guided tourists.

Sudan Update: Going Well

Sudan Update: Going Well

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Half way through the referendum election process, the birthing of South Sudan is going well. Folks are voting, militias are firing, and U.S. celebrities have egg on their faces. (Or should I say, posho on their jowls.)

There is fighting along the proposed border near the oil-rich Abyei oil fields, and this should not be discounted but it is not yet significant enough to alter the ongoing referendum and certainly doesn’t presage George Clooney’s warning that a new civil war is about to begin.

The irony at the moment is that the two militias involved, Abyei’s Dinka Ngoc tribe, and the alleged attackers, the Arab Misseriya militia, began fighting not to disrupt the referendum but over who will be allowed to vote in a planned but not yet scheduled future referendum into which country (north or south) the disputed Abyei region should be assimilated.

Right now, neither the Khartoum government or the SPLA (the south’s military) are involved, and UN Peacekeepers are rushing to the scene as mediators. Clooney’s claim has some validity, and that is that the Darfur genocide has been conducted by militias as well, and it’s true that Khartoum often carries out its dirty work through militias.

But it just hasn’t reached the scale of Darfur fighting, not yet. And unlike Darfur, serious fighting in the south before the cease-fire agreement five years ago was mostly between the two armies, not militias.

Perhaps the greatest controversy is whether the presence of George Clooney and his battalion of friends and additional celebrities is good or bad. Read my earlier blog about Clooney and South Sudan.

The excellent NPR reporter, Joshua Keating, wrote rather disparagingly about Clooney, yesterday. His piece is very much worth reading.

The NGOs on the scene are very critical of Clooney. I had to stop reading most of the blogs, because, in fact, they started to become rather juvenile, although Clooney’s made-for-movie macho response is just as bad.

My feeling is that in balance Clooney helps, although as I said in my earlier blogs, I’m very concerned why this is true, and I very much worry that celebritizing a conflict might emasculate its solution. Once it’s no longer glitter and stars, the world could pull back the long-term and methodical support required.

Clooney and friends are probably overdoing it, now. And it’s the height of irresponsibility to warn of a war that at the moment really doesn’t appear likely. At the moment, I hope for the foreseeable future, Clooney has egg on his face in this regards.

And fortunately, for the moment anyway, the greatest heat in the conflict zone seems to be from the overwrought satellites as Clooney & Co. compete with Agence-France Press and World Vision for their use.

Religious Partition to End Wars

Religious Partition to End Wars

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Until now many efforts towards peace in troubled parts of Saharan Africa have focused on fomenting coexistence betweenf Islam and competing religions. What the Sudanese referendum says is that coexistence of Muslim and non-Muslim ideologies won’t work.

When the election in The Sudan ends this weekend and shortly thereafter South Sudan declares itself sovereign, Muslims will be in power the north and non-Muslims in the south. But that’s not the end of it.

I expect a migration is going to begin in both directions between the two entities not so dissimilar to what happened in the Hindi/Muslim breakup of India and Pakistan (later, Bangladesh) after World War II. In fact the Sudanese migration began when it became apparent that the process was going to end in partition. More than 50,000 immigrants already turned up in the south in just the last few months.

This migration won’t be as large as the one following India and Pakistan’s partition, because there aren’t as many people to begin with. But it will be substantial enough to notice. And it will further polarize the individual societies at each end.

In America we often read about the religious competition as between Islam and Christianity, but that’s not the case. The perception comes mostly from the large presence of Christian missionaries and aid societies in The South, but the fact is that the majority of The South is not Christian, despite a half century of Christian proselyting.

Neither do I think it fair to call it “animist” as is often read as much as “Christian”. In fact, the two are often combined. I don’t think it fair-minded to say “animist” because that label carries a ton of derogatory inferences from the colonial era.

The fact is that most southern Sudanese are not religious in any regards by modern standards. They revere their family ancestry and create religious ideologies often unique to very small geopolitical areas.

Christianity is probably the largest single recognized religion in the south, but it is far from being a dominant ideology among the majority of southern Sudanese.

What it is truest to say is that the majority of southern Sudanese characterize themselves as anti-Muslim. And this characterization of oneself as anti-something, rather than something-something, is telling.

It is the basis for the conflict not only in The Sudan, but in Chad, Mali, Spanish Sahara and to a lesser extent elsewhere throughout the Saharan belt of the continent.

Religious ideology always tries to dominate government, even at home in America. Less modern societies are less capable of keeping this motivation at bay in part because emerging societies need forms of government that will be readily and quickly accepted by their people.

Muslim ideology with its male-dominated, polygamous hierarchy fits perfectly into many more traditional African societies. This week a Nairobi newspaper published a feature article on how the well-known and very traditional Maasai tribe was accepting Islam in surprising numbers.

The current president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, is a deft survivor of a number of court schemes and military coups, and his current long reign can be linked directly to his decision to make Islam’s Sharia law the law of Sudan in 1983. There’s no question in my mind that this is what has kept him in power since.

And quite unlike a legalistic foundation — even one as entrenched as I feel the U.S. constitution is — the opportunities for amending law in Muslim formulated societies are infinitely less. Some may argue impossible.

This draws a line in the sand, (and in the case of the Sudan, that line goes right through the oil fields). Muslim above the line. Non-Muslim below the line.

There is a huge problem in dividing up the world by religious ideology. It tends to divide not only ideas and faith, but wealth and health. But as with India and Pakistan, the motivation to minimize conflict was a vital one that has been served more or less well, even while they haven’t exactly become bosom buddies.

So if this experiment with The Sudan is successful, which I think it will be “more or less”, then a new formula may emerge for reducing Africa’s troubled conflicts.

No Bribes for Boeing

No Bribes for Boeing

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Wonder what the hotel manager got for this one?
Wikileaks’ cable publication confirmed last week what we already know: that the Obama Administration has reversed the Bush Administration’s questionable bribing policies and that Tanzania has not changed at all: business by bribes still prevails.

Corruption is hardly an African exclusive and hardly less a Tanzanian exclusive, but as countries throughout Africa increasingly move away from it, Tanzania seems to be moving closer towards it.

Tanzania’s mounds of corruption leak themselves, so they’re so enormous and so stunning. They include bribes to high public officials for buying an anti-defense missile system for Dar that was obviously not needed and never installed, and a pile of corrupt deals with its energy ministry which last week erupted again in Texas courts.

Corruption in Tanzania is like a fermented jar of unused jam that finally bursts its seal. Even so the details come slowly, from good local reporting that is usually suppressed by the government.

So it’s refreshing when something straight-forward like a Wikileaks’ cable simply tells the raw story.

The most recent such account was published last week in the New York Times.

Times’ readers may have been more interested in the top of the story about Arab kings’ interior decoration preoccupations of giant aircraft. And although the revelation about Air Tanzania was found pretty far down, it was big news in East Africa.

Not because it was news, but because local news sources could at last report it without fear of government reprisal. And what’s striking is that since the publication on January 3, not one word has been uttered by either Air Tanzania or the government that owns it, about the leak.

In a nutshell Boeing was trying to sell an aircraft or two to the constantly beleaguered, totally mismanaged Air Tanzania. Why not? No one flies Air Tanzania unless there’s absolutely no choice, and even when passengers want to fly Air Tanzania it usually doesn’t.

But the government of Tanzania said it was in the market for new aircraft, simultaneously with a limp wrist effort to find an international investor to turn the miserable company around.

There is a modicum of business truth to this. No investor in their right mind could turn around a company with the state of (or non state of) aircraft currently owned by Air Tanzania.

So Boeing aggressively started the sale.

The compilation by the Times of numerous, separate Wikileaks’ cables shows how aggressively the new Obama administration helps American companies, to the point that a side story to this is that Europeans are claiming some trade agreements might be jeopardized.

But when the Tanzania government showed interest and then told Boeing it better find an agent, and that the agent Boeing better find was a hotel executive in Tanzania, the U.S. embassy in Dar fired off cables more or less warning Boeing about going too far.

That was a major change from the Bush Administration, and Boeing then rightly towed the line:

A Boeing spokesman told the Times, “It is not just a matter of abiding by U.S. law and laws internationally but a general sense of business ethics.”

Air Tanzania bought an Airbus.

It really doesn’t matter if Air Tanzania buys an Airbus or a Space Shuttle, the company will never be solvent, and it’s truly sad that the business oligarchy in Tanzania profits from this.

The last several weeks in Tanzania suggest things might be turning around. That Tanzanians are getting fed up with a closed government notable most for its corruption.

Putting Ourselves in the Crosshairs

Putting Ourselves in the Crosshairs

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Violence is largely an “American” thing. Not African, not Chinese, although some of the worst violence in mankind’s history has occurred there. But organic violence, violence allowed free reign to grow, is distinctly American.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and others murdered in Tucson is why I say this.

If you’re reading this instead of the billions of other blogs about Giffords, it’s because you know my life has been spent in Africa. And when it hasn’t been in Africa, I spend a lot of time talking to other people who aren’t African about how Africa isn’t really as violent, isn’t as murderous, isn’t as corrupt as … well, America.

And here’s why.

First, let’s start with just the ultimate violence: killing. In my lifetime, Americans have been involved (either as the killers or the killed) in killings in the world more than any other nationality.

Add up the Rwanda genocide, the slaughters in the Congo, the political killings throughout China and North Korea, the secret killings in Argentina and Chile, the Balkan slaughters, and the ongoing and endless civil wars in the Horn of Africa.

It still doesn’t equal the involved killings in all the American wars of my lifetime. Likely it doesn’t even add up to the involved killings of the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

In the generation before me, this supreme total wasn’t America’s. It was Europe’s, with the holocaust and the Balkan genocides such as Armenia. (A close second was the prolonged killings of the Stalin regime.)

Not Africa. Not then, not now.

Violence as a true act of self-defense is a bitter morality. But during my lifetime violence in self-defense (WWII) has morphed into violence as preemption.

I don’t think that Giffords’ accused murderer was a sane activist. But he was influenced by the hate and vile (vitriol, as the Puma County Sheriff explains) of the Right.

Fact: Sarah Palin removed her website of “targeted” Congressional seats, where crosshairs were used to designate the Congressional districts the tea party should beat, within hours of the Giffords’ shootings.

Sarah Palin knew it was inflammatory. Removal so quickly was an admission it was wrong to begin with.

A number of other sites came down quickly from the Right as well.

Likely there will always be violence. Poorly brought up, abused, neglected children often turn violent. Abused, neglected, tortured and impoverished adults often turn violent. I believe society should try to rectify all this, but even without doing so, in the past these unhinged people did not direct their violence against Government.

So often it was against women, wives and daughters.

So often it was against other ethnic races, immigrants, other religions, people who aren’t like you. Sometimes it was against animals, or glass because it makes such a clatter shattering. Sometimes it was random.

But in my generation, in America, it’s turned from all of those to… Government.

That’s new. We have never had as many Timothy McVeigh or Jared Lee Loughner wannabees as before. There were some. Nearly one out of every four American presidents has been assassinated. But nowhere near as many Oklahoma Public Buildings, or Maryland State Buildings, or airplanes, or churches… or public officials “targeted in crosshairs” as today.

A junior Congressmen from Idaho didn’t have a body guard when I was child. It didn’t take me two hours to check-in at O’Hare. I wasn’t allowed to bring an unconcealed gun into the Davenport city council meeting, or into my Econ 101 lecture at the University of Iowa as a part of my “right to self-defense.”

Sarah Palin isn’t the cause. She’s just another symptom. She transferred her violence from herself to the public at large. Society couldn’t make her happy. So better than beating a grandchild, she beats Government. There’s a certain bitter-sweet logic to this. And by the very nature of her public scope, she transfers this violence to millions.

We can’t live without Government. We can’t live without Big Government. And we can’t live without Big Government doing a lot more than just “defense.”

Government is Society, Community, the Group of Us. By our neglect of Society, Community, the Group of Us, we have become our own targets. We have become socially suicidal. Americans have put themselves in the Crosshairs.