Month: May 2011

When to go to Botswana

When to go to Botswana

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Linda asks: We are going to Kalahari Plains for 2 nights and Okavanga Delta for 5. When is the best time to go? Is late April, early May too cold at night and early morning game drives? Were originally thinking end of Jan but concerned about
rain.

Dear Linda,

You have chosen the perfect time to go! Don’t change! Travelers often get discouraged by measuring “high” and “low” seasons, “dry” and “rainy” seasons, but both metrics are usually a bad way to help you plan your trip. To be sure they should be considered, but should be given far less of importance than normal. Let me explain.

“High” season and “low” season reflect rates that are market driven. It’s more expensive to go in the high season than low season, because more people want to go then and the demand is greater. But that hardly makes it the best time to go. Consider that the highest season throughout the year is the end of December, virtually everywhere, whether you are at the bottom of the world, the top of the world, or on the equator. So it has nothing to do with season or weather, just when people travel. So never get turned off by the fact you’re considering travel during a “low season”, which is exactly your case for your upcoming trip. Being able to travel in a low season means you’ll get better rates and encounter fewer crowds.

When tourism first began in Africa, it was very difficult to travel during any rainy season. This was because there were few tracks, and those that existed were poorly maintained, and because there were not really vehicles made for safari travel per se. So they did really badly in the mud. That changed more than 20 years ago, but the copying of old brochures into new ones didn’t. I actually prefer traveling during the rains practically everywhere in Africa, because the veld is fresher and less dusty, and the landscapes are far more beautiful. It is usually when there are the most baby animals, too, because nature organizes births during times of plenty. There are advantages to the dry season, too, in terms of animal viewing. The veld is more stressed, so predation is easier to encounter. But my personal preference is the “green season.”

As for your particular concern about temperatures, you’ve actually got it upside down! The hottest time in southern Africa (their summer) is from November – March, and the coldest time is (their winter) from May – August. During most of March and April in Botswana, day time temperatures will be in the eighties and night time lows in the lower sixties. So while I think January — your original date — would be fine, it will be quite hot, touching or exceeding 100 F. (Remember that the great site, weatherunderground.com, has fabulous historic weather data, even for places like Botswana, so that you can check out what the weather was like this year on the dates you plan to travel.) June, July and August in Botswana is freezing! Don’t wait until then if you’re worried about temperatures.

One caution. Global warming has increased the wetness of the world all over the planet. The Okavango Delta is flooding more than ever. Some camps were actually flooded out this March, so check carefully before booking. Ask the specific question, what happened to your camp this March?

So you’ve made the right choice! Don’t be dissuaded!

Regards,
Jim

America’s Faces are now Fabulous

America’s Faces are now Fabulous

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America’s new ambassador to Kenya is a brilliant appointment that ensures U.S. goals and interests while really helping Kenya move into the new era created by its new constitution. A win-win situation the likes of which were unknown before Obama/Clinton took over world diplomacy.

Like many of Obama’s better civil servants, Maj.-General Jonathan Gration is a disenfranchised Republican. (Best example, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.) Steeped in solid conservative traditions, he quietly moved away from the receding cliff that so many Republicans fell off.

The decline of the solid Republican Party gave Obama a real windfall of good folks. Gration was drafted into the Obama campaign early on as an African policy advisor and became our envoy to the South Sudan, where he did yeoman’s work that seems to be paying off.

Gration just replaced another fabulous ambassador in Kenya, Obama-appointed Michael Rannenberger, who like many diplomats worldwide was forced out because of embarrassing classified remarks exposed by Wikileaks.

And as should be the case of all diplomats, Gration really knows his assignment. He was born in the Congo to missionary parents. His first language was Swahili. He rose in the military as a security/terrorism expert. There can simply be no better replacement for Rannenberger.

During the Bush years diplomats were appointed usually as party favors, literally. TV personalities, big time donors and other celebrities drove the art of diplomacy into the realm of country clubs.

I remember Sam Fox’s appointment to Belgium, a man incapable of tying his shoes much less working in the country that was the center of the EU. And he had almost single-handedly funded the terrible “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” ad against Sen. Kerry.

That was typical of all of the Bush era appointments. The Republican slide that he oversaw believed international relations were mixed marriages to be avoided.

How wonderful things have changed.

Gration knows that no major policy changes are occurring with his appointment, and I think that both Kenya and those of us at home familiar with Africa are glad with that. Rannenberger was a stellar diplomat who really moved forward anti-corruption efforts as well as the implementation of the new Kenyan constitution.

I’m not familiar enough with the rest of the world, but if this is any indication of Obama/Clinton diplomacy elsewhere, we’re doing extremely well worldwide.

Life’s Winners This Year Are..!

Life’s Winners This Year Are..!

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And the winners are! A jumping cockroach, an obscure little deer, an ostracized cricket, and a dragon spider whose web can cover a small Michigan lake!

These four newly discovered life forms all live in Africa, and out of 15-25,000 entrants in the annual Arizona State University list of the “Best New Species on Earth”, they all made the Top Ten.

The six non-Africa winners include a TRex leech, a bacteria that eats rust, a flat fish that hops like a bunny but under water, a fungi that creates greenish yellow light, a mushroom that lives at the bottom of the ocean, and a 7′ lizard that eats fruit.

I often listen to kids deride us old folks for having discovered all the earth, mapped the moon and mars, and generally ended the need for the word, exploration. It sends them into dark television rooms and the disease is called PlayStationitis.

But every year there are thousands – tens of thousands – of new life forms found here right at home on planet earth. In fact, the “little deer” is a duiker that was discovered in a butcher’s stall in Benin! And any random handful of them is easily more colorful and interesting than the animated antagonists of Warlords 2.

Staffers at ASU’s International Institute for Species Exploration work most of the first half of each year filtering the thousands of new species.

“Most are passed over because they do not stand out in a catchy way, or because they did not meet the requirements to be valid names under the codes of nomenclature,” according to Quentin D. Wheeler, ASU Vice President and Founding Director of the Institute. The 40 or 50 that the staffers finally come up with is then turned over to an international committee of scientists to choose the Top Ten.

About Africa’s 2010 winners!

Saltoblattella montistabularis (the jumping cockroach) was found near the Silvermine area of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa, ten minutes from downtown Cape Town. It hops through the air like a grasshopper, but it eats anything in sight and can run as fast as 50 of its body lengths in a second. Yes, no grasshopper.

It’s a tiny little thing hardly a third of an inch long, discovered by Mike Picker, author of a South African insect field guide. It’s not the only jumping cockroach known to us. But the other one is only known to us from the fossil record. It lived with the dinosaurs!

Philantomba walteri is an west African duiker that’s real cute when it’s not being prepared for barbecue. That’s how it was discovered! In a butcher’s stall in the Benin town of Mangiri! It’s a remarkable find, because this is an animal, a real (small dog) sized four-legged mammal, proof that we haven’t finished the grade school text books on basic life on earth.

Glomeremus orchidophilus isn’t too disimiliar from your every day ordinary cricket, except that this Reunion Island creature’s main purpose in life is to pollinate an orchid! Most of its fellow orthopteras like locusts and katydids and such eat plants, they don’t help them grow! No wonder it’s been kept under wraps for so long!

But my favorite is the Madagascar dragon spider whose discovery is so profound it’s been given the common name, “Darwin’s Bark Spider.” (See top picture above.) I was ready for this one.

Last year I traveled with three scientists, a father and two sons all research biologists, and tried desperately to understand their conversations when our safari in Kenya’s Matthews Mountains was interrupted by the web of an orb spider.

Apparently scientists can synthesize the eight different chemical strands produced by most spider’s spinnerets, but they haven’t figured out yet how to weave them into the super strong strand mother nature decorates our forests with. (Thank you, John Cronan and sons.)

This year’s super spider produces the biggest and strongest web known. Webs of this species span lakes more than 75 feet wide and spin a net 30 sq. feet large! Good grief.

But that’s not all. Its silk has a toughness that’s been measured at “520MJ/m3.” I don’t know what that means, either, but according to the documentation this makes it “the toughest biological material ever studied, over ten times stronger than a similarly-sized piece of Kevlar” and twice as strong as any other known spider silk.

Strong.

So there you have it. More mystery, beauty and perplexing awesomeness than an entire library of video games! And it’s all there, right outside.

America & Magic Help The Congo!

America & Magic Help The Congo!

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

While beating ourselves up over whether Wall Street was too big to fail, the unceremonious application of the Dodd-Frank Act has slowly stopped hundreds of thousands of gruesome murders in Africa, aborted tens of thousands of acts of rape and child kidnapping. The Act has absolutely helped to end one of Africa’s most gruesome multi-generational wars. We really do have something to be proud of.

Technically implementation as regards Section 1502 has not yet even occurred. It is likely to be implemented after August. But the very process of publicizing The Act, requesting comments and holding hearings has so radically altered the economy of Kivu Province, that it appears the war is truly winding down!

Giant world corporations that funded Africa’s longest and most gruesome war have changed their policies. Sony, Intel, Motorola, HP have all publicly adopted new policies that either conform to what they expect the new rules will be, or moved in that direction.

I won’t retell the story or history. But for the full background see my earlier blogs:
Evaporize Goma!
and
We Won!

Essentially your cell phone and your kids’ PlayStations can’t work without minerals previously bought from warlords in Kivu who then used that money to murder, pillage, rape and kidnap Africa’s children to an extent never before seen in history.

The Congo Wars began in the 1980s and have lasted as long as I’ve worked in Africa. They have nearly totally destroyed one of Africa’s most beautiful, magical places. But maybe, maybe there’s just enough magic left to reemerge.

Last month 118 tourists visited Virunga National Park in Kivu Province in the eastern Congo. One of the first and earliest intrepid tourists wrote on the Lonely Planet forum almost a year ago:

“There is a lot of information floating around on different websites saying the Congo is a dangerous place to visit…. At no stage during my time … did I feel unsafe or threatened in any way or form… The villagers we met along the way were the most delightful and happy people you could wish to meet.”

The presumption of peace encouraged many NGOs to increase their assistance. German groups especially began funding the rebuilding of the national parks, in particular, Virunga.

It’s hard for me to imagine that Virunga will ever greet me again with the splendor of my memories there in the late 1970s. The jungle was unbelievably beautiful, and unlike the heat and humidity of the Amazon and Asian “jungles” I’ve visited, this is a highland jungle: cool and spectacular.

Billions of same colored butterflies, friendly and helpful pygmies, unnamed monkeys, okapi, and truly myriads of undiscovered bugs, plants, frogs… I have visited many of the world’s wildest places. This was the most beautiful.

“Last week our team of skillful roof engineers have started on the roof of the main building of the Lodge,” wrote the chief warden on Sunday of the lodge he is building in his new Virunga National Park. He set an ambitious goal of 200 tourists for next month!

And there was massive attendance at a community forum to help with all aspects of the Virunga wildlife region just on Tuesday.

A real sense of normalcy is returning to Kivu. But I’m not quite ready to schedule EWT’s first trip in 35 years to Virunga. The same park warden lauding his new lodge also wrote of ongoing attacks. He calls them “organized land invasions.”

The warlords who took Sony’s money were born during war. They know no other life. And they’ve morphed from international crooks into petty thieves, and as raw bandits they’re very successful.

But I’m watching the situation very carefully. A string of positive remarks from young, intrepid travelers last year seemed to end right around the time of the flawed Rwandan election, which makes sense. Rwanda politics is probably the single greatest factor in the stability of Kivu.

And the disintegration of everything that’s good in neighboring Uganda is more bad news. This week’s bit of trouble in the new South Sudan I don’t consider serious, but it distracts NGOs and other humanitarian organizations from their focus on helping the DRC.

And finally, the DRC has called for Kivu’s first elections this November. Amazing, incredibly gratifying if it’s pulled off well, and the single most hopeful sign I’ll be watching for. We can’t expect 40 years of brutal, sadistic war to end quickly.

But yes, it is ending. And probably the single-most important reason was section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act. America, you can truly be proud!

Cows-1 Wildebeest-0

Cows-1 Wildebeest-0

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

The idiot at the bottom of the hill below my house who poisons squirrels isn’t very sophisticated, but unfortunately, help is on the way for him. New genetic studies are unleveling the playing field and the wilderness — in Africa at least — is set to suffer.

Not everyone longs for a vacant plain on the Serengeti over which to spread their soul. There’s a lot of people who truly believe the human mind is the only center of value, and that it’s more or less self-contained, immune to its surroundings or at least protected from them, depending upon how smart it is.

So you don’t need towering mountains or raging rivers, or awesome polar bears or freakish spring hares to help you work out the meaning of life. All you need is Proust. That’s the epitome of the self-centered human.

And then there’s the Obama Mediator Ecologist (OME), trying futilely to bring diametrically opposing sides together by organizing weekend committees to pull out mustard grass from forest preserves. This is, of course, the ultimate exercise in wasted time, but it fools participants into thinking they don’t have to choose sides.

But the sides are impermeable to one another, no matter how many fools are temporarily dissuaded. It’s not possible to intervene in the wild “a little bit.” You either put a ten-foot, electrified brick wall around the forest preserve and inventory every microbe in the ground, or you let it run wild.

Since putting a ten-foot, electrified brick wall around the forest preserve and managing every microbe therein has been until now completely impractical, the wild has persisted. But scientists on the self-centered human mind team have a new strategy terrifying to the wilderness.

Genetic engineering.

I wasn’t so upset with genetic engineering until the announcement last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) about the discovery of the gene in domestic African cattle which if activated will give it the same protection from the tse-tse fly that wild animals have naturally.

This will be a devastating blow to a number of wildernesses, including the Mara, the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. Let me explain.

Virtually all of Africa’s remaining great wildernesses are surrounded by farms and many of them by cattle farms. But domestic cattle (at least until now) can be killed by the tse-tse fly which carries bovine trypanosomiasis or “sleeping sickness.” Wild animals are immune.

So while visitors to the national parks will find funny shining blue or black pieces of plastic flapping off trees near their lodging killing tse-tse helter-skelter, wildlife officials actually nurture tse-tse in other areas of the park. Why nurture this gruesomely annoying little pest? Because it’s the best way to patrol the park to keep out domestic stock.

Domestic stock eat an enormously greater amount of vegetation than their wild counterparts, and if allowed run of the wild would essentially starve the naturally wild animals out of the parks.

Tse-tse are easily eradicated, and human sleeping sickness (which is different from bovine sleeping sickness) has been mostly eradicated throughout much of Africa. Despite its awesome proboscis, the tse-tse is one of the dumbest creatures on earth. Flap some brightly colored cloth in the air and it dives into it proboscis deployed.

Spray the brightly colored cloth with pesticide and it becomes the ultimate insect kamikaze. No need for mechanical spraying strategies or search-and-destroy techniques, just advertise, “Come kill yourself! Come kill yourself!” and the tse-tse dumbly complies.

But wildlife officials have carefully not eradicated all the tse-tse. And this, in part, has kept domestic stock outside wildlife parks.

But now, the PNAS scientists have identified the gene that wild animals use to become immune to tse-tse’s package of death. And they’ve identified it currently suppressed in the greater domestic cattle community throughout Africa and are engineering ways to manifest it throughout the industry as a whole.

I’m sure the intentions of the scientists were pure. They were motivated, the report says, by a $5 billion annual loss in cattle production to bovine sleeping sickness.

And as I always remind myself, why should farmers be given any less assistance than the wild? The great wildlife fence in Botswana, which decimated the wildebeest population in the 1980s, did its trick: it protected and helped increase beef farming so important to Botswana’s economy.

So I don’t really know what SHOULD be done. I only know what IS being done, and it seems a relentless effort to assist mankind necessarily at the expense of the great wild.

Getting Ready for the Next One!

Getting Ready for the Next One!

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Near the Hilton Hotel, Nairobi.

“Getting ready for the next one!” a Kenyan friend of mine told me this weekend. He sells billboard space.

The weekend’s successful end threw into stark contrast the saner religious leaders in Africa and their woealmostbegone American counterparts. Most modern religious Africans – and there are many, Muslim and Christian and may other denominations – despise hocus pocus. Americans thrive on it.

It’s such a switch from the stereotype of not too long ago where yes the American tourist was anxious to see lions but really wanted pictures of a “village” because all the primitiveness and … well, hocus pocus, of Africa was so thrilling.

Maybe one day it was, but ain’t no more.

Now in all fairness, if you really head into the boondocks, somewhere akin to Backwater, Appalachia, you might certainly find some old woman who knows exactly what part of her dead frog will relieve you of an undesired suitor.

But modern, mostly young African churchgoers have no time for American hocus pocus, (even though with pleasure they take their money).

Harold Camping, the now famous Prophet of Doom, founded and headed Family Radio, an impressive network of 68 radio stations with hundreds of thousands of duped American followers. But what is less known is the many radio stations and other services he funded in Africa.

According to London’s Guardian newspaper Camping spent more than $100 million worldwide of his followers’ money on radio stations, billboards and posters, financed by the sale and swap of radio stations in the U.S.

I snapped a photo of a billboard in Nairobi and an even bigger one in Dar, placed at the most expensive place in all of Dar, the matutu and bus terminal.

Kenyan religious leaders and radio station owners, funded by Camping, distanced themselves from the doomsday prediction long ago. They placed displays ads in newspapers around Kenya starting a year ago when the billboards first appeared. The most common one read:

“We wish to inform our viewers, listeners, partners and well wishers that we are not in any way or form affiliated to the US evangelical Christian broadcaster Harold Camping or family radio.com.”

(Of course that isn’t true. They got their money from Camping. But then obtuseness is a religious art.)

Kenyan religious leaders then went on to say certainly there would be a Judgment Day, but don’t alter your schedule for the first week of June.

There is, of course, a serious side to this so far jocular story. While most Africans like most Americans recognized the ruse for what it was, some didn’t. And those like Camping who were to be the saved ended up the lost. But to be lost in Kenya or other parts of the impoverished world desperate for hope is a much worse situation than Harold Camping likely finds himself in this morning.

And that leads to another less jocular aspect of this story. WHY do Americans surrounded by the best tools in the world to discover truth believe in such incredible nonsense? Why is an American so incredibly gullible?

It’s Monday. A week before vacation stretches before us. We’ll leave that to another day.

A Ton on the Menu

A Ton on the Menu

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As Kenyan transforms itself with a new constitution into a modern society the question of what to do with elephants has popped up. Just over there, in the garden.

But the problem is manifestly two-fold: there’s the elephant in the garden, and then there’s the ivory in the airport.

And finally Kenyan lawmakers are having trouble ignoring the problem. (Admittedly they’ve got a lot on their plates in implementing the new constitution before next year’s election.) In the last two months alone more than 330 tusks weighing more than 3 tons representing more than 150 elephants have been seized at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta airport.

All the ivory was headed for Asia, mostly China or Vietnam, and often via Nigeria using diplomatic pouches. Kenya is on to it, though, and not even diplomats are getting through as easily as before.

But the increased black market for ivory belies somewhat the other manifest problem: there are too many elephants.

Believe me if you’re a citrus farmer in Voi, Kenya, you’re likely to welcome a little bit of unmanaged hunting at the outskirts of your plantation.

The very proactive Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) wants lawmakers to change this. They want new laws that would punish the now by standing farmer, and new authority for themselves to police this.

It’s not going to be easy.

Forcing the hand of until now Kenya’s silent farmers may not be a good idea. Following a successful collaring exercise near Kenya’s elephant, Tsavo National Park, to monitor human-elephant conflict this month, farmers became enraged.

Public officials from parts of Taita-Taveta County claimed that more than 500 elephants were terrorizing them. One elected official, William Ikutu, appeared on Kenyan TV allegedly nursing serious injuries following an elephant attack while working his farm in Mwakitau.

Village Chief Crispus Mnyika said the jumbos had imposed a virtual curfew in five villages, and KWS confirmed that more than 100 acres of farmland had been destroyed.

KWS responded with a major air and ground operation to drive the elephants back to their habitat had started involving aircraft, 4 special vehicles and 50 game rangers. KWS will not say how many millions of shillings the operation cost… for obvious reasons.

So Kenyan legislators are getting it from all sides: from wildlife officials wanting stronger laws and greater authority, to Kenyan citizens who want these pesky beasts out of their lives.

All sorts of things have been tried to separate wild elephants from human populations. Personally, I think outsiders – researchers, especially – have complicated the problem by throwing pennies at the problem, spending resources on nonsense.

Nonsense about chili powdered fences is all the rage, now, and patently doesn’t work. Ridiculous attempts at flimsy electric fences supported by hundreds of thousands of dollars from well meaning but poorly scienced NGOs may be even worse.

Large trenches that I’ve photographed myself in Uganda and Rwanda seem to work a little bit, but they require incredible maintenance and generally dissolve in the rainy season.

The only certain barrier I’ve ever seen is the one I recently photographed in Botswana’s Nxai Pan National Park: spiked concrete blocks that surround a public ablution unit at a public camp site. But this must be very costly. Imagine ringing a 500-acre farm with a minimum 15-foot periphery of these! (The stride of a big elephant is, yes, 15 feet!)

The daunting problem for Kenyan legislators, now, is to try to find enough resources to try to manage the crisis.

The Kenyan economy is exploding, and it’s not because of tourism. Energy development, IT including mobile phone companies, flower farming, even engineering and now new mining will likely eclipse tourism in just a few years.

The urgency for providing potable water and good sewage for its citizens, and a good business climate for its development, are issues of far greater importance to the average Kenyan and his legislator than protecting wildlife.

So all this begs the question: is there enough money left to protect elephants?

Uganda is Dying

Uganda is Dying

by Arusha ♥ 27 Comments


Nairobi's GADO says it best: Museveni is like Idi Amin.

Yesterday the Ugandan Wildlife Authority drastically reduced the fee for visiting mountain gorillas. Yesterday 6th term president Yoweri Museveni lambasted the police for being too soft on demonstrators. Get the connection?

I don’t think people realize how bad it’s getting in Uganda. This is in large part because of the clever dictator’s successfully distracting the world’s media by the admittedly draconian “Kill the Gays Bill”. But this has drawn all the attention away from the much greater and more serious human rights violations affected on all Ugandans, increasingly brutal every day.

For travelers heading there now, don’t be too alarmed. Proceed with caution. Keep your eyes on the “Kill the Gay’s Bill” that like flotsam on a dying reservoir won’t go away. See if Museveni actually imprisons all of his opponents, and keep your attention on that rebel rouser, Kizza Besigye.

And especially, keep reading one of the best blogs in Uganda, Mark Jordahl’s Wild Thoughts from Uganda. And hope that Mark isn’t imprisoned like a lot of other journalists.

Today, Jordahl notes:
“Why does a sitting president, who is no longer a member of the active military, wear fatigues to a swearing in ceremony for Members of Parliament? … Does he want to remind people that he can come down on them, at any time, with the full force of the military?”

For tour companies like EWT, and if as an individual you’re now beginning to plan a safari for the future, scratch Uganda off the list.

The Hide is a great camp in what was one of the best wildlife parks on earth, Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. EWT still carries a credit from that camp from our last safari into Zimbabwe in 1999. I’m afraid 2011 has seen our last safari in Uganda.

I can’t remember exactly the straw that broke Zimbabwe’s back for EWT, but I do recall a series of events including growing police brutality that displaced Africa’s beautiful sunsets with red flags: First there was the harassment of journalists. And then the emasculation of other branches of government, starting with Zimbabwe’s until then flamboyant parliament and ultimately killing the judiciary.

And that’s exactly what’s happening, today, in Uganda. It’s a methodically slow and miserable decline.

And the decade which followed EWT’s decision to stop safaris in Zimbabwe didn’t result in any real danger or injury to tourists who still went. But it became increasingly uncomfortable.

At this stage – NOW in Uganda – expect bloody demonstrations, road blocks, crazed police.

And then as the population is subdued the country’s suffering infuses society like lupus: the growing bellies of malnutrition to the long lines of cars at gas stations. For tourists it’s the possibility that gas for your transfer to the airport won’t be available and brunch will be canceled.

Ultimately tourist attractions do suffer. The boreholes so essential to Hwange and other national parks were neglected. Soldiers shot the animals.

We know well how tourists are immune to internal troubles, whether that be Tibet, Nepal or Madagascar. No sides in an internal conflict want to discourage tourists. In fact, tourists become an indication that “everything’s OK.”

And I’ve always believed that travelers should go wherever they want to, wherever their own clever devices can get them. Whether that be Cuba for an American in the 1990s or South Africa under apartheid.

But go with your eyes wide open. Travelers in the future won’t be going to Uganda to see mountain gorillas. They’ll be going to explore a once great society cut to its knees by a maniac dictator.

As Mark warns today to all of us who still love that place: “Uganda needs to be watched closely.”

Three Men Out

Three Men Out

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Say what you believe and believe what you say. Without that credo society breaks down. The cants include Schwarzenegger, Strauss-Kahn, and Wanjiru. These three headliners are respectfully American, French and Kenyan.

They are stars: political and commercial, and sports heroes. Wanjiru at the prime age of 24 was the world’s greatest marathon runner, and he killed himself yesterday when his wife found out about his affair.

Nairobi’s Capital FM radio station put it poetically: “[His] existence was intertwined by the sad pointer [of a] tortured genius, choosing to express himself through an excellent natural gift and reckless abandon in equal measure. Enigmas who no one, even himself knew.”

Gimme a break.

Nothing quite as poetic with the Terminator or Emperor Pretender. In fact once you leave dynamic African society, scandals don’t seem to be scandals, anymore.

My greatest personal disappointment was with John Edwards.

I’m a numbers guy. It’s very hard to get a handle on how many committed couples have affairs. It’s just too all-over-the-place. So-called “respected journals” like The Journal of Couple and Relational Therapy say 50%.

But that’s a European group, and I think their main interest is selling their books and therapy.

Although it’s been a decade since any American university studies, that’s what I’d believe: Judith Treas, a sociologist at the University of California-Irvine, concluded 11 % and pronounced, “There isn’t any evidence of an infidelity epidemic.” The numbers were more or less the same as a University of Chicago study in 1994. Michael Kinsey concurred.

And so that leaves me and my cohorts in grey society all quite ordinary, in a grand majority of all the less influential and colorful bodies on earth. Oh, but wait! Zuma! Jacob Zuma!

The President of South Africa makes no bones about his affairs. He doesn’t have to. He just marries them, and right now, they number 12. It poses great difficulties when he travels on State visits. The Maitre D’ doesn’t know who to put on the place card.

I’m not the only person who’s made fun of the President’s polygamy. In South Africa it’s a serious issue. And the fact he doesn’t have to cheat, he just marries again, doesn’t mean the man “Says what he believes and believes what he says.” Zuma’s in a ton of trouble in that regards.

So is sexual infidelity, which breaks the credo, public infidelity? If you lie to your partner, do you lie to your constituency? to your clients? to your business partners? to your children? to your supporters?

Is this just a goofy topic… or a real issue?

National Enquirer readers want to know.

The Sun Rises on Egypt

The Sun Rises on Egypt

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If you’re interested in a good deal in Egypt, time is running out. Good times in Egypt are on the march. But good deals are coming to an end.

Following a press release from Europe’s largest tour company, KUONI, on Friday it rescinded several of its deals in Egypt over the weekend.

KUONI stopped offering multiple night incentives and cash discounts on many of its upmarket properties and cruises in Egypt. Many of these are still available for mid- and down-market products, but top ranked hotels and cruise ships are now back to rack rates.

This and many other indications suggest that unless there’s some serious reversal in the political situation in Egypt, good deals there may be ending.

Tourism is a great barometer – a leading indicator – of a society’s perceived tranquility. I say “perceived” because as tourism skyrocketed in China, it would be hard to argue that areas of Tibet were “tranquil” or that progressive movements were being liberated.

And it’s perception, rather than reality, which drives tourism.

Take the current civil violence between Muslims and Christians in Egypt which broke out, again, this weekend. And last weekend was worse: 12 Copts were killed following a peculiar rumor that they were trying to force a Muslim woman to convert. (There were an estimated 65,000 tourists in Egypt last week.)

But on Christmas Eve before the revolution, 22 Copts were killed in the same type of religious violence. This was the highest of high tourist seasons in Egypt. An estimated one million tourists were in Egypt at the time, and that news story didn’t effect travel there one iota.

Coptic/Muslim violence has been ongoing in Egypt literally for millennia, but the story has rarely percolated into the world press. But Egypt is in the news, now – as it should be. Coptic oppression, like the oppression of women and Muslim activists, will make world headlines, now. And perhaps this new spotlight on problems the country has suffered for a long time will hasten resolution.

I think tourists know this. And the growing numbers of tourism to Egypt suggest it.

Egypt is just a bit smaller than South Africa. Last year’s hosting of the World Cup in South Africa help to boost its annual tourist figures to nearly 9 million. Before the revolution, Egypt welcomed around 12 million visitors annually.

This year South Africa will likely reach 9 million again, and Egypt will fall back to around 6-7 million.

That’s a lot of tourists! A lot LOT more than was expected only a few months, ago. And it’s likely a harbinger of good times to come.

On April 28 the U.S. State Department dropped its travel warning to Egypt, replacing it with a milder travel alert.

The U.S. move followed by about a month similar moves by most European countries.

Is tourism to Egypt as safe, now, as it was last year before the revolution? I think so, particularly if we speak of the main tourist areas like the Nile between Luxor and Aswan. But it’s extremely important to understand the caveat that I’m speaking of reality, not of perception. No, Egypt is not yet perceived as safe a destination by tourists as before the reveolution, even though it may, in fact, be.

But given the numbers trend, it may not be too long before that par, too, is reached.

And the MU’s Have It! … All!

And the MU’s Have It! … All!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Time is running out on Uganda. Slowly drifting into dictatorial oblivion, its soul is being bled to death by its vampire ruler. Uganda is becoming the next Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe is so exhausted it will not respond to the African Awakening. And Uganda is on the very threshold of being unable to as well. These two once beautiful places have been laid to waste by power-crazed dictators: MUgabe and MUseveni.

Understandably, the world news about Uganda is almost exclusively about the unimaginable “anti-gay” bill floating like invisible toxin in Uganda’s Parliament. For us in the tourist industry it’s a death knell. If passed, simple knowledge unreported of a gay person becomes a crime.

Casual chatter in a safari vehicle about gay friends or gay society, or god forbid, a gay customer must be reported by the driver to the police, or the driver can be imprisoned. It’s unclear what would happen to the foreign visitor.

And that’s hardly the most draconian aspect to the bill which in one form proscribes the death penalty for certain gay acts.

But I think this horrid legislation is being used as a distraction by Yoweri Museveni from the final cementing of his dictatorship, his swearing in for a 6th term as Uganda’s president.

His elaborate ceremony yesterday was replete with tumbling fighter jets that nearly crashed into the presidential stadium, out-of-tune competing bands, tens of thousands of supporters, and a remarkable list of other Heads of African States gingerly trying to avoid being photographed by the few journalists left in the country.

Museveni is now the longest ruling dictator after Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who has ruled that enervated society for 31 years. Now I’m not one to believe in term limits, but give me a break.

Mugabe – who last year was allowed to travel only into the Vatican and Malaysia – arrived the swearing-in ceremony to raucous and well orchestrated jubilation before taking THE privileged seat next to Uganda’s powerless Chief Justice Odoki (who swore Museveni in), who sat next to the First Lady, who sat next to The Emperor.

Like in Zimbabwe, Museveni came to power legitimately. In fact his recent 6th election was probably fair enough that democracy technicians are required to anoint him (although by nowhere near the two-thirds he claims).

But the election campaign was not fair or democratic. The government controlled the media, imprisoned or killed opponents, dispersed demonstrations in hellish ways, and broke, tortured then temporarily exiled his main opponent, Kizza Besigye, by refusing to allow Kenya Airways flights into the country.

And while all the world bites their lip about what’s happening with the anti-gay bill in the Ugandan Parliament, the fact is that the Ugandan Parliament is becoming a pitiful and powerless entity. No journalist could figure out, today, what procedures are in play with regards to the bill. No one could even say if Parliament were over, or not.

This is because it’s Museveni pulling the strings, and he’s dangling this putrid piece of legislation to distract the world’s interest from the iron crown he just forced the Ugandan population to place on his head.

What happened in Zimbabwe is happening in Uganda. An educated, respectful population torn by recent ethnic conflicts is being manipulated into submission by a heathen dictator. It’s too late for Zimbabwe. It might be too late for Uganda.

Brainwashing U.S. & Nigerian Kids

Brainwashing U.S. & Nigerian Kids

by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments


The first job I got fired from was after I reported to my Yugoslavian boss (during the Cold War) that UNESCO’s proposal for funding Sesame Street for Cuban National Television could be used for political, not only educational purposes. Guess what? USAid is now funding it for Nigerian State television.

And guess what else? Besides the Washington Post which originated the story, the only other major city media that carried it was the Kansas City Star. And Kansas is one of a handful (but growing number) of States that impede the teaching of evolution and promote creationism.

So would you please click here to sign the petition promoted by 17-year old high school student, Zack Kopplin of Baton Rouge, who is trying desperately to stop his state legislature from doing what Kansas has done. After which, I’ll put all these paragraphs into a meaningful idea.

Done?

Nearly 40 years ago when working for UNESCO in Paris, I realized that despite my liberal leaning that there were powerful tools that governments could use to attain acquiescence to almost anything. We dared not call it “brainwashing” but that was exactly what they were.

USAid is funding Sesame “Square” on Nigerian state television. There are 13 independent television stations and networks in Nigeria, but none can compete with NTA, the massive state-controlled network which unlike PBS or the BBC is a real mouthpiece for the government.

Mouthpiece. Nigeria has a lot of explaining to do, both currently and historically. And one of its most effective devices is NTA.

And now, it can develop in its children – with U.S. help – a tool for imbibing its messages.

America’s problems are manifold but I think easily reduced into this statement: we have empowered the ignorant.

The ignorant of America are wealthy, know how to spell well enough, and have developed social and political tools to lord over us infidels while flagrantly promoting contradictory ideas, and worst of all, embracing nonsense like creationism.

We can’t – we shouldn’t – outlaw ignorance. It’s our own fault. We didn’t pay the teachers in Oklahoma or Kansas, or for that matter anywhere, enough to do a good job. We created a generation of ardent believers … in nonsense.

The only skill you need to believe deeply in nonsense is how to read. Especially in today’s unreal, surreal and political contrary world.

Learning tools like literacy are not the same as acquiring analytical skills. That’s what’s lacking in America, and now possibly in the next generation of Nigerians. Masses of skilled kids will be made just literate enough to believe the nonsense of their autocratic rulers.

USAid could have funded Sesame Street in Nigeria in other ways – on competing networks clamoring for a voice in the country. But they didn’t. They propped up a corrupt and secular regime with a powerful additive: brainwashing.

Deserts Awakening Everywhere!

Deserts Awakening Everywhere!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The African Awakening is unstoppable, even in Libya and Syria, and maybe coming to China after Saudi Arabia. But did you ever expect it to emerge full force in little Botswana?

Well Botswana isn’t little in terms of geographical size: about the size of Texas, but whereas Texas has about 25 million residents, Botswana has only 2 million. And Botswana is undoubtedly used by those infamous Texas high school textbooks as a model of stability.

Well… not quite.

Botswana is in the midst of a very successful national strike that among other things is closing hospitals, schools and borders. Tourists, for example, may not be able to travel overland into neighboring countries from April 18-29.

“There are different ways to take over governance, and that includes by force,” Agence France Presse reported today that the strike leader, Duma Boko, told a rally in Gaberone.

“If we can come together we can take our government as it happened in Egypt and Tunisia.”

As it happened in Egypt and Tunisia there was a lot of violence, and that won’t happen in “little Botswana.” But change will, and for Botswana it could be quite profound.

The current topic is over wages, not governance. Government jobs account for a sizeable portion of Botswana’s otherwise diverse and historically vibrant economy. The wages have been frozen for 3 years, and strike leaders are demanding a 16% wage increase just as the Botswana government must go sheepishly to the world markets increasing its public debt.

Botswana is not skilled at raising debt. Diamonds, especially, and other mining makes it one of Africa’s richest countries (in terms of GDP or percapita income.)

But the world depression hit luxury goods like diamonds very hard. The industry has been relatively slow to recover.

But the history of the current political turbulence is not strictly economic. A side issue which threatens to emerge as the most potent political outcome is the struggle by bushmen to regain control of their ancestral home in the Kalahari.

It’s a long battle whose ideological complexities are being highlighted by the current strike. In 1996, the London-based Gem Diamond Company discovered a huge streak of diamonds in the central Kalahari; in fact, inside the already proclaimed Central Kalahari Reserve, Botswana’s largest protected wilderness.

The government then leased an area to the company, in contravention of its own law, and later offered the mega tourism company, Wilderness Safaris, a lease to develop the first camp in the Kalahari, also otherwise illegal without Bushmen consent.

The Bushmen sued and prevailed in Botswana’s high court in 2006. Gem then threatened to sue the government of Botswana. Wilderness Safaris (working hard to create a good “ecotourism” image) stuck its tail between its legs and moved to another part of the giant reserve and has only sporadically operated a semi-permanent camp, there.

But the Botswana government continued to harass the Bushmen. As recently as last year the government was still trying to forcibly move out the Bushmen.

This “political” issue has gained new traction with the country’s unions and likely could be the ideological basis of bringing down Botswana’s government for the first time since its Independence from Britain in the 1960s.

This is a great story. It’s filled with ideas, not guns or commercial lies. It’s the epitome of what the African Awakening is all about: significant nonviolent political change.

Pathetic Fear of the Wounded

Pathetic Fear of the Wounded

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East Africa: beware! You are reacting to the fall of bin Laden like a Republican U.S. politician, and you should know by now that’s absurd.

Until now I’ve felt that East Africa had handled terrorism threats – particularly from Al-Qaeda and its franchises – better than the U.S. But that may be changing now that bin Laden is dead and East Africa is emerging as a powerful young society.

East Africa has probably suffered as much if not more from the machinations of Al-Qaeda than the U.S. Don’t forget: it was the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that were blown up in 1998 by Al-Qaeda that presaged 9/11.

Fringe Muslims had been blowing up things in Kenya since the early 1960s when the then Block Norfolk Hotel was bombed because it was owned by Jews. Somali shares a 500k border with Kenya, and Al-Shabab (Al-Qaeda in Somalia) controls much of it. During the World Cup last year almost 100 people were killed when two sports bars in Kampala were blown to smithereens because Ugandan troops aid a UN peacekeeping effort in Somalia.

And there’s much, much more. I won’t be foolish enough to count up the bodies, East Africa vs. the U.S. from Al-Qaeda, but the comparison is serious.

And until Obama, American politicians used terrorism incidents to beef up the military industrial complex and prop up their own careers. Sounds harsh? Yes, it is terribly harsh, but it is not spurious, it’s true.

The incredible difference in the way the Obama administration has handled the end of Osama, compared to previous (mostly Republican) administrations that used torture, disseminated grizzly pictures and turned our national security into a contest for new MnM colors, tells me that we’re finally getting it right.

Ideas, Joe, not guns and their human debris. Plans, not fear.

But now I’m worried that East Africa is following the same wrong course that America followed in the past.

“As the world celebrated the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan Sunday by US Special Forces, East Africa stared at a possible new political nightmare,” warned popular East African columnist Charles Onyango-Obbo in an OpEd this weekend.

Onyango went on to terrify his readers with the same balderdash dumb politicians have used for centuries: fear of the wounded devil. Wounded but not killed, his vengeance becomes greater than ever.

“Most analysts agree that the Al Qaeda threat has not been buried with him,” Onyango writes of the obvious, even though it isn’t. Many analysts believe this and many other successes against terrorism recently herald the beginning of the end of Al-Qaeda.

Terrorism expert Peter Bergen claimed on CNN the bin Ladens’ death marked “the end of the war on terror” and a number of experts as critical as Foreign Policy’s Daveed Gartenstein-Ross cautiously agree.

I don’t think it’s necessarily that definitive, but my point is that there is not universal certainty among those who should know, that bin Laden’s death increases the threat level of terrorism anywhere .. including in East Africa.

The most repressive government in East Africa, was the most enthusiastic about the “new threats.” Details hadn’t even been released about Osama’s demise when on May 2 the Ugandan government “stressed the need to beef up security following the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Matia Kasaija, the internal affairs state ministersaid Uganda should not be caught unaware.”

It’s an old tactic, for morally bereft governments and uncreative journalists: scare the hell out of the audience to get their loyalty and attention.

It’s what we did in America for nearly a generation, and we now realize what a terrible mistake that was.

East Africa, beware. Don’t jeopardize reality just to score some extra points.

Ice Cap Covers Botswana

Ice Cap Covers Botswana

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

April 26, 2011, southwest Okavango Delta. These are supposed to be dry roads.
The ice cap is moving onto Botswana and the Kalahari Desert. No, this is not a Fox News report.

I just returned after nearly two months (on separate trips) into Botswana, and I’ve watched with trepidation albeit excitement a natural event which has not been recorded before. The Okavango Delta, one of Botswana’s most important tourist attractions and one of the most unique ecosystems on earth, is going bananas.

It isn’t a surprise. This is the third year running that the Delta has reached dangerous levels but the latest predictions made in mid-April suggest this year will be the worst ever and that it will continue to get worse and worse in the years to come.

This is extremely dangerous mostly to the fragile human populations eking an existence on the trail of water leading back to the Angolan Highlands, where it all originates.

But dangerous as well to the serious investments many have made in Botswana’s tourism industry.

And dangerous or at the least very disrupting to tourists. My account on this is first-person.

First, some necessary background:

The Okavango Delta is essentially the Kalahari Desert flooded. Excuse the non sequiturs, but it’s not my fault, it’s the vernacular that called central Botswana a desert. The Kalahari isn’t really a desert. It gets more rain per year than much of America’s southwest. It’s a Mojave plains, or high sierra butte that doesn’t get a lot of rain, but lots more than a desert.

But unlike the Mohave or high sierra, its ground base is grey-white powdery sand, the result of millennia of flatness and repeated rapid evaporation in a severe climate where summer temperatures can exceed 110F and winter temperatures can sink below freezing.

This has led to an extraordinary unique ecosystem, with plants fantastically adapted to grabbing and conserving the rain that does fall.

And every year unbelievable amounts of water spill into its upper regions. And as global warming melts the ice caps, there’s more and more water. Where the water spills onto the Kalahari is the Okavango Delta.

The Delta doesn’t dry up when the surge of water coming out of the Angolan Highlands ebbs as it does every year with the end of the Angolan Rains. The effect of millennia has been cumulative. At all times of the year there is a marshy, swampy, river run Delta. It has grown or receded over the centuries but it always bloats the first half of the year and shrinks back a little the second half of the year.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA) issued the latest comprehensive scientific report several months ago, and the more recent and detailed graph below is now in circulation.

This year will exceed the highest ever flow of water into the Delta.
All indications point to worse years in the future.

The bottom line is that many of the camps, campsites and tourist lodges in the Delta may be in peril this year.

In early March I visited the northeast Delta. The airstrip at Kwara camp was flooded. The managers made the mistake of trying to keep the camp open by transporting passengers 2½ hours from the next nearest workable airstrip.

But the tracks from that airstrip to the camp were also flooded. The vehicles flooded out. In one incident, water was above the floorboard as we stared a small crocodile in the eye.

The edge of my cabin in the Delta. Note the gardening hose normally used to water the grass is under water.

A month later I visit Jao Camp in the southwest Delta. Twenty-four hour pumps and a three-foot high ring of sand bags around its airstrip barely kept it functional. I watched a Cessna 208 slip as it landed. The water lapped at my cabin deck and game drives were as if in partially submersible military vehicles.

Both these camps are operated by very good companies, and their experience is shared by virtually every camp in the Delta. It’s critically important these two camps not be singled out from the other 53 in the Delta that all face the same problem.

True “water camps” as Delta camps are locally known, are understandably positioned to experience the unique delta floods. It’s just that no one expected the ice cap to melt this quickly.

This is quite serious. Two of the three “pushes” or surges of flood waters that occur each year are over, but the third is yet to come. So even as the rainy season ends in southern Africa (usually right about now), the flooding of the Delta will continue. Last year waters did not begin receding until August.

I have great sympathy for Delta camp owners and investors. Kwara, in fact, has rebuilt both the airstrip and camp to higher ground.

But will it be high enough?