Month: November 2011

Buzzing Bee Ele Fence

Buzzing Bee Ele Fence

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All we had to do is remember Dumbo jumping away in terror from Mickey Mouse. Instead we spent millions digging earthen moats, sprayed juiced pepper along firebreaks of hay, and I proudly discovered meter squares of steel reenforced spiked concrete. All we needed was a bee!

Five years of research has culminated with a global prize to a young British scientist who has proved how easy it is to keep elephants away from .. well, farmland, schools, roads, in fact anything you want!

Lucy King and Save the Elephants resurrected years old research about how terrified elephants are of bees. Then she intricately studied the sounds bees make, proved that was what sent the elephants fleeing, then combined a productive deterrent with a productive agricultural product and bingo, no eles and lots of honey!

Lucy King’s work has mastered “beehive fences“.

Long before King’s research it was common knowledge that eles flee bees. This upper brain memory in Africa is just like our Walt Disney knowledge of how scared they are of mice. Nice cartoon but .. so what? In fact, it was hard to believe and original science to study it seemed fanciful.

But good science doesn’t mind being embarrassed, and King’s and other’s earlier research showed that particularly in times of drought bees cluster around elephant’s eyes and up their trunks, because of the moisture there. People don’t realize that bees need as much water as pollen to make honey.

King’s research was the culmination of many individual research projects over the last five years, and was awarded the coveted “Thesis Prize” by the Convention on Migratory Species at the annual meeting in Norway.

“Her research underlines how working with, rather than against, nature can provide humanity with many of the solutions to the challenges countries and communities face,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

“Dr King’s work spotlights an intelligent solution to an age-old challenge, while providing further confirmation of the importance of bees to people and a really clever way of conserving the world’s largest land animal for current and future generations.”

King was born in Africa and personally aware of the skyrocketing human/elephant conflict in part an unintended consequence of saving elephants from near extinction. Her work began at Oxford University and the bee studies were her Ph.D. thesis.

It ended in northern Kenya where once all the details of a “bee fence” were engineered, a control study of 34 Turkana villages in a new agricultural area on an elephant migratory route were carefully monitored for elephant incidents.

Seventeen villages were wrapped by newly designed bee hives, and seventeen weren’t. Over a two-year period, the data was striking. Farmland and village domiciles wrapped by beehives went essentially elephant incident free. Unwrapped villages suffered constant incidents.

Originally King and other scientists thought their job had ended a few years ago when they proved that 90% of elephants will flee certain types of bee sounds, mostly those created by the buzzing wings. This sound in turn provokes a very specific elephant alarm call that is not only the sound of a terrified beast running away, but specific enough to cause other elephants in the area to flee as well.

Clearly reproducing the sound was all that was needed. And while that’s technologically easy, it can be expensive and requires maintenance like all fire alarms. Particularly far out in the bush where electricity is erratic.

Boing. Why not do it from the beginning?

Villages now have the added benefit of lots of honey, and the specially engineered beehives designed to increase the longevity of the hive and production of honey are far less expensive and much more durable than electronic sound systems.

Despite all the excitement this isn’t the BEE-all or end-all of elephant deterrents. During periods of drought – which are chronic in elephant land – honey bee populations dive. It might be true that eles get stung more, then, but they also get much less warning since there are far fewer bees making the sounds that scare them away.

So during these frequent periods of low rain bee hive fences lose some of their mojo. King has explained in her research that bees are just one – if the most potent – weapon in a necessary arsenal of elephant deterrence.

Nevertheless, it is clearly the best one so far, and may in fact have a greater application in parts of the world like Asia where human/elephant conflicts are also growing and drought is much less a problem.

Like so much in life, simplicity rules!

War Week 6

War Week 6

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Very little of anything happened last week with Kenya’s invasion of Somalia. Some are beginning to see it as an occupation rather than a specific campaign. Kenyan forces continue to decline engaging al-Shabaab in their fortified towns of Afmadow and Kisamyo.

Kenyans at home who have until now been unwavering in their support are beginning to falter: “In the wake of Operation Linda Nchi, there has been anxiety that there is little action in Somalia… If you are excited by war, the one in Somalia has been disappointing,” a leading Kenyan journalist wrote Sunday.

The 5th week of the war included a flurry of diplomatic activity as well as the invasion of Somali by Ethiopia. I had thought these both positive developments. But many African analysts see it differently.

Tanzanian Evarist Kagaruki of Dar’s main newspaper, The Citizen, claims “there are no signs yet to show that support for Kenya was forthcoming. The whole burden has been left to the Kenyan army [and African Union troops that have been there for a number of years as peacekeepers].”

Kagaruki concludes that the Ethiopian invasion won’t help the Kenyan effort, either. He says that “Ethiopia is not the right “partner” in the adventure” because Somali/Ethiopian enmity is centuries deep. He points out that it was in the wake of the last Ethiopian invasion that al-Shabaab gained so much power.

“It is time Kenya wrapped up the campaign before war fatigue sets in,” was the lead editorial in Sunday’s East African newspaper.

But the military insists the campaign is going as planned. Apparently siege rather that engagement is that plan. Friday military commanders claimed that the last five ships that were at the port of Kismayo had departed, and that the Kenyan air force and Navy would now not allow any others to enter.

Other reports said the Kenyan air force was successfully aggressively bombing al-Shabaab positions.

There have been no more terrorist or revenge attacks in Nairobi, but that isn’t true near the Somali/Kenya border, where multiple attacks and skirmishes have left a number of civilian casualties.

This is clear evidence of the strategy al-Shabaab is employing, a guerilla campaign that is quite content to withdraw from the line of battle into the bushes and hills.

And while increased security in Nairobi and Kenya’s main cities may being helped by many arrests of suspected al-Shabaab sympathizers, the military nature of their detainment is not going over well with the Kenyan population, and certainly not with the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Somali living in Nairobi.

So last week’s glimmer of hopeful excitement is gone.

Our 1st Thanksgiving in Kenya

Our 1st Thanksgiving in Kenya

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Wild turkeys outside my office in Galena.

One of the hardest things to leave behind when Kathleen and I first moved to Kenya many, many years ago was Thanksgiving.

No matter what your religion or politics, Thanksgiving is a major American holiday, all-American so to speak. And even before a third of our society was obese, it was a day of gluttonous consumption. You were just proving how well off you were, even if you weren’t.

So when we finally got settled in a very remote village 3 days travel from Nairobi we immediately began making plans for Thanksgiving. We sent out messages through the bush grape vine that we wanted two turkeys.

Most people had never heard of turkeys, and it was a great mystery to Jozani, our house boy/translator/money market manager and cook. Although he cooked chicken well for us, he was part Maasai, and fowl was taboo.

He could understand we Mzungu eating chicken. Mzungu had eaten chicken ever since Britain had a king. Many Africans back then accepted without aversion all sorts of habits the white people had carried with them into Africa. So chicken was OK. He often burned to a crisp our chicken, but he cooked it.

So when we first asked him to find a turkey, I’m sure he had no idea what it was, because he enthusiastically immediately replied that of course he could find us two turkeys. Jozani never said no. If he said no or asked further what I meant, either I might get angry with him (he thought) or make his day far too simple. So he said, of course bwana, he would find and cook for us two turkeys for our American holiday of giving thanks.

I’m not sure how many Thanksgivings passed before Jozani announced one morning with great pride that two turkeys had been found and were coming. At rather extraordinary expense. I had completely forgotten about it but apparently I was the only one who had. That same morning on the walk to the school where I taught, every one was asking me when the turkeys would arrive.

In fact a week or so later, two hours before the turkeys actually did arrive, a holiday was declared at school, and the children lined up as they did for morning assembly to greet the turkeys.

It was hard for me to call these fowl turkeys. They were young birds, true, but they looked more like weasels than turkeys. After close inspection I did approve them, paid the king’s chicken ransom, and turned them over to Jozani to rear. I think we had 5 months or so before Jozani had to cook them.

Turkey dinner turkeys are supposed to grow fast, remarkably fast. The wild turkeys that now live outside my office take more than a year to get large, and two years before the Toms are really large, but turkey dinner turkeys can reach massive maturity (12 pounds) in 5 months. What a ridiculous hope.

At first I was going to name them, and to do that, it was necessary to know their gender. Jozani insisted, however, that they had no gender, so we left them unnamed.

They grew, but not as fast as they ate. They became bold and strong and rather offensive, chasing anyone who came into our compound until one day I saw Jozani walking around the house with a large flattened stick.

“What is that for?” I asked him as he was scrambling eggs.

“It is to beat the turkeys, bwana, they are growing rude.”

They were growing rude. They would try to come into the house and peck at the screening when we refused. Jozani didn’t stay the night, and you’d think that a day time bird would go to sleep. But they seemed to freak at the dogs in the area that barked when hyaenas or jackals were in the neighborhood so gobbled the night away.

The time finally came to roast the birds. Jozani was equivocal. He had decided they were wizards incarnate. And of course it’s either impossible or catastrophic to kill a wizard. But we had invited nearly several dozen colleagues in a wide area to celebrate this so important holiday called Thanksgiving. So I let Jozani know that I’d kill the birds if he wouldn’t.

He killed the birds. And sort of defeathered them.

Kathleen spent days making stuff – or more correctly, like Jozani think he was making stuff. Like Stuffing. Which Jozani felt was the epitome of evil. Throwing a chicken in a frying pan was one thing, but “dressing” a fowl and doing such wizardry things as sticking bread and wine in its hollow stomach sack must have seemed extraordinary.

It was a grand holiday evening. Candles which we now use for effect was all we had. The smell of savory rice, good wine that someone had managed to bring up from South Africa, wondrous puddings and breads infused the evening of delight with the merriment of the finest of Thanksgivings.

And as if on queue it began to rain. The start of the rains had been delayed for all sorts of mysterious reasons, and there was concern that it would become a drought. But lo and behold, that late November evening in far western Kenya, the rains arrived just as the two turkeys did.

The rains proved much more successful than the turkeys. They looked OK if a bit shrunken. But the meat had the texture of something already worked into a piece of clothing. There was a not knife to be found capable of slicing it. We set it aside for a later soup.

So everyone was happy. Our guests probably because of the wine and Kathleen’s remarkable savory rice. Jozani because we didn’t eat the wizard. And the world because the rains had come. So though I don’t know to this day where our two Kenyan turkeys came from, nor for that matter where they went (there was never a soup), I know it was because of them that we celebrated Thanksgiving far, far from home.

War or Peace, At This Very Instant

War or Peace, At This Very Instant

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I started this blog to write about animals. Today, like so many days, it’s about elections and wars. And in this wrap-up blog before our Thanksgiving holiday, the preeminent news is at this very moment in time. Better than I would have a hoped a few moments ago.

It’s so ephemeral. It’s easy to argue that things change so quickly, that news and blog-news is disseminated so instantly, that clearly seeing a trend to events becomes more and more murky. Well, bring it on!

So let me wage a huge gamble about Kenya, Egypt and The Congo – three volatile yet extremely promising societies – which I promise to revisit next week: Last weekend the situation in all three looked nothing short of awful. This morning, at this very instant, it looks different and better.

Kenya’s advancing invasion of Somalia for the first time in six weeks has an optimistic cast. Despite unbelievable clashes in Egypt over the last few days, at this very moment in time the military seems to actually be negotiating away its position to the people, and even in the Heart of Darkness I see glimmers of goodness in the November 28th election in The Congo.

It’s only logical that the Kenyan invasion of Somali begun more than a month ago would fail and strangle the country’s developing economy and polity in the process. And the quick entry, then total abortion of the process which resulted in a Kenyan decampment less than half way to its stated objective, the port of Kismayo, looked threateningly like Kenyan defeat earlier than any could have predicted.

But then chips we didn’t know we’re in the game started to fall into place. The dysfunctional Somali transitional government got in line. Coordination began with African Union forces that have been in the country since its seems the industrial revolution. And last week, Kenya’s sometimes adversary Ethiopia resent troops into the country presumably to fight alongside Kenya.

I am not one to believe wars work very well, but reports this morning suggest that the size of the combined effort by Kenya, Ethiopia and the AU is such that routing al-Shabaab might just be possible.

In Egypt all hell broke loose last week following the military’s very ill-advised November 1 edicts setting the final rules for the election process and simultaneously entrenching itself in a cocoon of immunity from civilian authority.

Like so many countries in South America and Asia in the recent past, military autocracies justify themselves as the only cohesion to otherwise dysfunctional and often ethnically divided societies. It is laughably early for me to post this as the meetings are actually in progress in Cairo, at this very instant in time, but my intuition is on the line. I think the military is going to back down.

The poor Congo was crippled in the 1960s at the very moment of its independence, when Belgium and the U.S. teamed up to murder the duly elected first president of the country, Patrice Lamumba, for fear he was a “communist.” That body blow to its polity has seemed to fester rather than heal.

The current president is the son of the “liberator” who forcibly ousted the long-time ruthless dictator, Sesi Seko Mobutu. But Mobutu had held power for so long that throngs of people and institutions depended upon him. Chaos reigned in the eastern Kivu Province, where child soldiers and blackmarketed Star Wars rare metals fueled Dante’s inferno.

But with a little help from its friends, most notably a little acknowledged provision in the Dodd-Frank banking act, the temperature in The Congo has plummeted to near normal highland rain forest levels. The bad guys have fled north. Next Monday’s election might just actually go off well.

If these possibly irresponsible optimistic predictions come true there is an important lesson I for one should learn and could easily forget if not pointed out, now. Trust youth.

It has been us fuddy duddies predicting gloom and doom. We have nothing but history to reference. The rest of our lives would make a very short line.

It’s the youth in Tahrir Square, in Nairobi, and in the jungles of Kivu who have been insisting throughout all the ups and downs in their situations that “we will prevail.” It’s new tour companies that have contacted me from Kivu-Congo, and Nairobi and Cairo.

Tour companies? New tour companies in the midst of fire and smoke?

Egypt’s Complicated Future

Egypt’s Complicated Future

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The political situation in Egypt may be very confusing, but the death-toll now exceeding 35 over this past weekend raises the profile of the current unrest above what it was when the old regime toppled in February. What can we see in the near future?

Weekend demonstrations were nowhere near as large, but just as violent, as earlier in the year. Egypt’s first free elections are scheduled for one week from today. The political parties and individual contestants in that election show no signs of boycotting November 28 or of requesting it be rescheduled, even while they are highly critical of how the election has been arranged.

This makes me believe that if we can get through this troubled week, and if elections are successful, that violence will subside and the political process will move forward. Clearly, though, if anything disrupts a clear and fair outcome, Egypt will take a terrible slide backwards.

There are several different issues galvanizing current protest, and because they’re complicated, the street shout is simply that the current military commander and defacto leader of the country, Mohamed Tantawi, should step down.

This is because he heads in a very dictatorial fashion the council that rules Egypt right now, and that council has promulgated a number of laws and procedures that have alienated large numbers of Egyptians.

The most egregious is Article 9 of the temporary constitution announced November 1. That provision isolates the military as it currently exists from any civilian authority. It guarantees a military budget that can’t be questioned, and it reserves the military’s right to veto any law passed by any government body involving the military.

But there are other issues as well.

Next Monday’s first free elections in Egypt will not be the expected moment of liberation everyone had hoped for. The rules for the election of a representative government became increasingly complicated over the last number of months.

Monday will be the first of three sets of elections, each held in different regions of the country, for the lower house of parliament (similar to our House of Representatives). The last of these lower house elections will not be completed until some time in early January. The military explains this strung-out process as necessary for guaranteeing ballot box monitoring.

The lower house might be seated some time in late January, but since actual law requires a consensus with an upper house (similar to our Senate), that is obviously not possible until the upper house is seated. Elections for the upper house are now scheduled for March. So it is unlikely that any effective government entity will exist before April.

Parliament is charged with promulgating a new constitution and paving the way for elections of a president, tentatively scheduled for a year from now.

But even that has been compromised by military edicts, which right now reserve 80 of the 100 seats in the constitutional convention as appointments. Although not wholly clear, it’s presumed the military would appoint these members. While it remains true that Parliament can accept or reject the convention’s work, the fact that the military has stacked the deck is very contentious.

There are other issues. Following the violence against Coptics recently, the military began a complicated process of vetting candidates for public office, which is intended to guarantee minority representative but at the expense of majority choice.

This obviously won favor with minorities, that therefore tend now to be less critical of the military than the bigger groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. The New York Times called this a “devil’s deal” between the military and minorities who feared the large plurality of the Brotherhood.

And finally one of the most contentious issues of all, which is still being played out, is whether former Mubarak party members can stand for election. Right now they can. But this is a third change of a position by the military since the issue arose many months ago. It is quite similar to what happened with Baath party members in Iraq.

I don’t believe there can be any other plausible authority in Egypt right now than the military. The military sees itself as the guarantor the revolution, and that’s how protestors initially saw them as well. But ruling this highly charged and extremely disparate society has proved challenging.

It’s extremely important to note that despite all the issues dividing the military from those appearing as political contestants, so far none of the main players in next Monday’s elections have called for a boycott.

So there’s a fair chance Monday’s elections will go off free and fair. And if so, and if those expected to win do so, it may be the new freely elected representatives of Egyptian society will simply ignore or otherwise work around the military’s many edicts upholding its supremacy over civilian rule. My sense is that this is what many of the principal contenders currently believe will happen.

That could set up a major confrontation with the military, but some ways down the line, and conceivably a strong enough civilian government would be able to negotiate the military’s position down to an acceptable level before such a confrontation were sparked.

Perhaps by 2013 or 2014 a civilian government could gain enough control of the country’s purse strings, for example, to tame the military.

But if the election outcome is too confused; if there are too many disparate and unallied winners to present any kind of unified civilian government position, then I expect a second violent revolution will arise from the conflict of the military and the then disenfranchised and essentially emasculated electorate.

Following the completion of lower house elections by the New Year, there may be some real signs then as to how the overall situation will play out. But because the process of electing fully the two houses of parliament extends through March, the situation is unlikely to reach any real turning point before then.

So … IF Monday’s elections proceed and appear fair (as I expect, hopefully), AND IF the outcome doesn’t result in an inability to achieve a consensus government (again as I expect, hopefully), AND IF the military does not promulgate any further constraints on the electoral process, we will know in April if Egypt’s current path to democracy is workable.

Stay tuned.

(And there are two best ways to stay tuned right now. Watch alJazeera Live and follow a compendium of real-time Tweets.)

WAR : Week 5

WAR : Week 5

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Little or no advancement by Kenyan troops in Somali this week ended today with reports this morning of 400 new Kenyan soldiers amassing on the border north of Lamu, and a limited movement of the existing forces towards Afmadow.

It’s hard to tell this morning if this heralds a real new military push — which would mean the week which was otherwise one strictly of global diplomacy was successful — or if the Kenyans are simply rattling sabers.

Until this moment the entire week had been quiet. Rains subsided but troops didn’t move. American drones and French naval vessels were completely quiet. It was a week of frantic diplomacy around the world.

And not diplomacy between combatants. Al-Shabaab (al-Qaeda in The Horn) continued to fortify the towns of Afmadow and Kismayo, the objectives of the Kenyan assault. And the Kenyans dug their own trenches.

The diplomacy was between African countries, the U.S. and France. The Kenyan UN ambassador – now clearly seen as more senior than the actual ambassador to the United States – spent a frantic week in Washington courting American generals.

And this morning, Kenyan news sources claimed that the Obama administration had agreed to consider a greater involvement.

The U.S. and France are widely presumed to have participated in the killing of around 50 combatants in weeks three and four with drones flown from a secret base in Ethiopia, and from French naval vessels just off the port of Kismayo. Both the Americans and French denied this, but there’s enough eye witness reports to be credible.

And I believe the silence of American and French guns this week is a reflection of them not wanting to outpace the Kenyans, and for everyone involved to become better coordinated.

In addition to the frantic attempts by the Kenyans to get the Americans and French reinvolved, the Kenyans mastered a situation within Somali that now has all the players opposed to al-Qaeda on the same page. This was not the case in the beginning.

The transitional Somali government, put in place and supported by Ugandan and Burundi soldiers in the capital of Mogadishu, originally criticized the Kenyan invasion. They now accept and support it.

The 8000 Uganda and Burundi soldiers ostensibly a part of an African Union sanction of peace-keeping publicly indicated their efforts were now coordinated with the Kenyans.

And finally, Kenya announced that it had obtained greater support from other African nations and hinted that a larger “peace-keeping” force was in the works. This Kenyan diplomatic success followed Kenya’s decades’ long reversal not to participate in the African peace-keeping forces that have been in Somali on and off since Blackhawk Down.

My view is that the Kenyans plowed into Somalia believing the element of surprise was more important than coordination with the players on the ground and around the world capable of supporting them. Last week they took a step back and began that process.

The 400 new soldiers on Somalia’s souther border does suggest a new chapter may be opening, but my sense is that the Kenyans will not begin until they feel all the players are in place … including the French and Americans.

But the larger question remains. Even if the al-Shabaab forces in Afmadow and Kismayo are displaced or beaten, what then? Are those militants so weak that a military strike can extinguish the movement?

An excellent analysis by Seth Meyers in South Africa’s Business Daily concludes that Kenya will be successful only insofar that “it avoids the mistakes Ethiopia made” in 2006. Ethiopia tried exactly what Kenya is doing, now, in 2006. The Ethiopian army is much larger and arguably much better than Kenya’s, but after five months the Ethiopians retreated with their tale between their legs.

They did “sort of liberate” Mogadishu and led to the 8000 Uganda and Burundi peace-keepers that have ever since fought daily to retain control of parts of Mogadishu. So there was some success. But it was small.

Meyers believes one of the failures of the Ethiopia was that their Sherman putsch was so bloody that Somalis were alienated not liberated, believing that Ethiopia was worse than al-Shabaab. This could explain this week’s hesitations by the Kenyans and numerous television spots in Kenya showing soldiers fraternizing with locals, passing out food to children and participating in school soccer matches.

There is a massive number of out-of-country Somali news media mostly on the internet, reflecting the huge diaspora around the world. Like the transitional government in Mogadishu, many of these are now supporting the Kenyans.

I concur with Meyers that the greatest threat is a prolonged battle for Kismayo. Kismayo is the heart and soul of Somali insurgency, a large functioning port that is essentially the capital of insurgent Somalia. A quick and successful battle by the Kenyans could be the proverbial nail in the coffin for al-Shabaab.

But a prolonged struggle “risks … the unintended effect of forging a dangerous new “alliance of necessity” between criminal and terrorist networks in Somalia” and by that Meyers means the innumerable pirates, clans, bandits and all sorts of other heavily armed bad guys might rally behind al-Shabaab, something that hasn’t yet happened.

I guess I feel more hopeful this week than in the past. I’m especially glad there were no more grenade attacks in Nairobi bars or tourists or aid workers kidnaped. But this could just be the lull in the storm.

Guided by a Child’s Remembrance

Guided by a Child’s Remembrance

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Clemantine Wamariya, a 23-year old Yale student and Tutsi who lived through the Rwandan genocide when she was 6 years old, has been appointed by President Obama to the board of the Holocaust Museum. Is this wise?

Ms. Wamariya’s life is a fairy tale story, and I mean her no ill will. In time she may mature into this role thrust upon her and become one of the most vital advocates of justice in the world. But that’s going to be a singular challenge likely greater than her escape from being hacked to death in Rwanda in 1994.

Ms. Wamariya appears a gifted person, so there’s hope. But I am concerned that her unusual prominence displaces the masses to such a degree that she will fall prey to conceptualizing the disaster and ultimately rationalizing it … the American way, so to speak.

Because preserving facts that cannot be altered with time is the first important step to understanding genocide. Look at what a mess we have right now between Turkey and Armenia, between teams of scholars arguing what actually happened.

Even the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II comes under constant challenge.

So fixing reality in time is fundamental to any attempt to analyze and ultimately reverse the evil. Ms. Wamariya cannot do that. She was too little.

Ms. Wamariya was only 6 years old when she escaped the Rwandan genocide. No six-year old anywhere on earth has enough continuous memory of the time to be a true witness. I think it much more likely that she honestly and hopefully rigorously has worked to confirm that what she would have been told by others older than her with her at the time, was true.

Step two is to assess blame. In such massive exterminations as took place in Armenia, Germany, Russia and Rwanda, there is blame enough for virtually everyone who was living at the time. Ms. Wamariya’s capacity for functional analysis might be stellar. It’s hard to know that of a 23-year old.

Step three: prevent its recurrence.

Ms. Wamariya may be the smartest person on earth. She may have an intellect uniquely capable of piloting us away from self-destruction. Her infancy in Rwanda may provide some subconscious authenticity to her reasoning, and that would be invaluable.

But she is not a witness. And she is not yet capable of rigorous analysis. She is a product of Oprah Winfrey. And I for one could nominate many others who I know personally, also nationalized American Watutsis, who would be better for the board. Much older at the time, their memory was mature and remains in tact. Reality is preserved with them. It simply cannot be with Ms. Wamariya.

Her subsequent years in refugee camps before being rescued is that part of her story I’ve been unable to establish completely. All that’s in the record is that she was granted asylum in 2000 and came to Chicago and entered a Christian grade school.

Who brought her? Who picked her out of hundreds of thousands?

That’s the red herring, folks. And this has nothing to do with Ms. Wamariya, nor is it a commentary alone on Ms. Wamariya’s performance since or potential from this point on. But as I’ve often written of the many plagues on Africa, perhaps the greatest was the proselytizing by Christianity.

Livingstone’s famous “3 C’s” – Christianity, Commerce and Civilization – says it all. The old explorer was one of the first to know you needed buzz words to raise money, and those three ideas were interchangeable in the European mind at the time. They remain so, today, particularly among the Christian community.

Christianity as redefined by the world’s superpower elite was an untouchable first principal of how to live life. Commerce is capitalism is the paradigm by which Christians condone greed. Civilization is a presumptive elevation of self-esteem, the notion that I know what is right for you.

This soup of ideas is the perfect formula for genocide.

Christianity as carried into Africa was bad for Africa. It’s one of the most important causes of Africa’s floundering in contrast to Asia’s blooming. But Christianity seems to be an important reason Ms. Wamariya bloomed in America.

From then all it took was an Oprah to find her, nurture her and escort her into prominence.

Today’s Morning Edition on NPR featured the touching story. And it did so with all the American proclivity to redefine the past in a better light. I was annoyed, for example, that Renee Montagne claimed the genocide in Rwanda happened during its “spring.” There is no spring on the equator. There is no universal rebirth as in New York city in April. The contrast is meaningless, but was not intended to be.

Americans are wont to deny that anything is wrong. On the one hand that’s probably a positive component of optimism. But when things do go wrong, Americans more than others retreat into the fantasy that “everything will be ok.”

In my early grade school days, there was a lesson as a common denominator that was carried from grade to grade and after school from aunt to aunt. “Don’t complain, child!” (I guess I did.) And that polemic has its own good and bad inferences, but as I lived in different parts of the world I came to see America more and more as a place where if it weren’t true that things were the best in the world, we had to believe so, anyway.

The appointment of a yet to fully develop Mozart as a custodian of one of the most horrendous moments of mankind’s past may make us feel warm and fuzzy. But it misses the mark by a good decade or more.

Hot Time in the Old Town

Hot Time in the Old Town

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

There is probably nowhere better on earth to see and learn about volcanoes than Hawaii. But it’s in Africa where you can risk your life to get close!

And that’s the important phrase: risk your life. I’m not sure it’s either wise or appropriate no matter who you are, but right now the officials managing a track of Congo national park are organizing trips up to a cliff just above the erupting Nyahamiru.

Nyahamiru – which you’ll find spelled in a variety of ways – is the live brother of the dormant volcanoes lived in by the mountain gorillas in Uganda and Rwanda. It is the western most volcano of this range. And for my entire lifetime it has been a live volcano moving in and out of dormancy about every 10-15 years.

In the days before the Congo wars, we traveled up and down Kivu province with abandon, and there were mountain gorillas in several different places. In Kahuzi-Biega national park literally adjacent Nyahamiru, there are the eastern lowland gorillas, gorilla berengei graueri, lives. Not too long ago Kahuzi-Biega was its own live volcano.

So this is beyond doubt the land of volcanoes. Some of my closest associates in the tour business in the 1970s and 1980s were volcanologists. Together with Hawaii, the volcanoes on the western Rift of Africa (this place) are the most spectacular and interesting in the world.

Which is probably why I’ve never personally climbed one, or a mountain beside one, as currently promoted in Congo tourist literature.

In fact one of the conservateurs (top officials) of the eastern Congo parks is personally inviting us all to join him on the plateau just above the volcano. And people are doing it. And I won’t admit whether I would like to do it or not, but you shouldn’t.

There’s no other place in the world with as loose or nonexistent tourist safety regulations as The Congo, so essentially you can do anything you want. Right now, the Congo’s wildlife sanctuaries are simultaneously its hunting reserves.

So the “Conservateur” of the public land on which sits this giant volcano has invited everyone to come and see it … up close.

This should not be disseminated on college campuses.

The conservateur has found a flat piece of land about 300 feet above the molten lava, and in a position where prevailing winds always carry lava spews in the opposite direction. It’s been given the scientific seal of approval by selected by volcanologist Dario Tedesco who heads the Goma Volcanological Observatory.

I’m not sure this is wise, but then if you’ve even just found yourself in The Congo you’re probably unwise from the getgo.

Here’s what one Scandanavian traveler recently posted on a blog:

“The Nyiragongo is an omnipresent view from the streets of Goma: a smoking giant during the day, a surreal glowing shadow at night. With a group of 7 tourists we started our ascend (sic) through the foothills of the volcano through dense jungle, after about an hour the forest gave way to an old lava flow, which according to our guide originated from the 2002 eruption, which burned down half of Goma.”

You got that last bit, right? Burned down half of Goma.

“After this point the landscape varies between lava flows, jungle and African alpine vegetation. The last leg of the journey is by far the toughest, a 20-30 minute hike up a 45 degree angle mountain mostly consisting of loose scree. But when you get to the crater all your weariness is forgotten, one of the most amazing sights you will ever witness welcomes you with warmth (literally).

“All your senses are stimulated by the loudly boiling, red-hot glowing, warmth radiating and sulfur smelling lava lake, the largest in the world.”

There is a reason that there aren’t too many tourists traveling into The Congo yet. The numbers going in never equal the numbers coming out.

An African Movie Book

An African Movie Book

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

There are more African cocktail table books than of any other continent, and that’s neither a surprise nor news. So it’s no surprise either that one of the newest productions picture books is multi-media, employing every modern IT trick available. Is this the preview of all future picture books on Africa?

The Kalahari Dream by Chris Mercer and Beverly Pervan is certainly good but nothing outstanding for either its pictures or text. But the compelling story is about rescued animals in the Kalahari all of which have happy endings. The couple worked there for seven years, and this is their joyous report.

Movie Book, is how the world is now beginning to characterize it, and if you download to your eBook reading device, it’s a seamless process to link to the more than 100 photos, videos and audio clips complementing the text.

Some day, of course, all books will be like this. I’m delighted it seems to be starting with Africa!

War : Week 4

War : Week 4

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

The Kenyans never said how long it would take, but it’s taking too long. And while opinion in Nairobi remains ludicrously supportive analysts outside the country are painting a gloomier and gloomier picture. The Kenyan invasion might have given a terrorist organization its first opportunity to win a conventional war.

There was little fighting last week. The military commander explained that they were giving civilians time to get themselves out of harm’s way, and pacifying the areas they now control, but analysis suggests otherwise. The heaviest rains have ended, but the roads remain a muddy mess, not easy for military equipment to travel.

Moreover, the Kenyans may have decided that a wave of diplomacy launched by Kenya’s Prime Minister simultaneously pleading for more western help while starting a second if diplomatic war with Eritrea needs some time to develop. The Kenyans accuse Eritrea of supplying weapons to al-Shabaab.

The 2-3,000 Kenyan soldiers (we haven’t been given a firm count yet) are equipped with 1980s military equipment, mostly HumVees and old mini-tanks called “technicals.” The New York Times’ >>> estimates al-Shabaab fighters in Somali at 25-30,000. So that’s ten times the Kenyan forces.

But there are also 8,000 African Union troops supporting the tiny Somali Transitional Counsel’s military, so the true numbers might be around 10,000 invaders to 30,000 locals.

The invaders, though, have the assistance of America and France. America has been very infrequently but significantly sending out drone missile attacks to areas in and around Kismayo. The French Navy has twice bombarded the port. So with this additional support the Kenyans position is probably better than it looks by the numbers.

Reports of al-Shabaab softening its pitches among the local population and kindly asking elders of various clans to allow their sons to join “the resistance,” as well as finally allowing outside aid organizations to distribute food, is an indication al-Shabaab believes it still has influence if not total power.

Or that they are legitimately worried. The Kenyans only real advance last week was from the south, its second front. There a smaller contingent, followed by two miserable Kenyan Navy boats offshore, pushed militants out of southern towns to about 100 km south of Kismayo.

As a result the Kenyans claim to have stopped piracy, indeed all shipping, into and out of Kismayo. (Undoubtedly with the help of rather larger French naval vessels nearby).

But the main force that entered from the west almost 4 weeks ago is stalled. Afmadow 30 km to the north of this main force is where al-Shabaab is concentrating fighters, and Kismayo, 80 km to the southeast remains the objective.

As I said last week, al-Shabaab’s brilliant military move to consolidate Afmadow means the Kenyans could fall victim to a pincer action is they continued onto to Kismayo. This is the real reason they’re stopped. Roads are bad, equipment is old, and they may be overall better outfitted than al-Shabaab, but al-Shabaab currently is winning the war of strategy and has already won the war of numbers.

There’s a lesson it’s taken America a dozen wars in my life time to learn: you can’t win without the locals.

Tourism, Come Clean!

Tourism, Come Clean!

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

Yesterday was World Responsible Tourism Day, until yesterday in my view one of the greatest tourist scams in my lifetime. But finally yesterday, Cape Town authorities saved the concept from the dustbin. Nevertheless, tourists beware!

WTD began nearly 20 years ago with a mania by tourist companies to be labeled “ecotourism” companies. This was the buzz word. The concept was simple and appealing especially to those of us working in Africa and other wildernesses of the world: tourist service providers promised in no way to compromise the environment, and in better cases, to actually contribute to renewing it.

But with time and increased use of the world’s wildernesses, too many visitors disrupted cheetah hunts, too much trash significantly altered species survival, too many boots unhinged Inca ruins.

From the start it was nothing mroe than a self-serving goal and nowhere as evidently as in Africa. What was particularly offensive about the concept from the getgo was that we had no choice. If we wanted the industry to thrive, we had to preserve its attractions.

The purpose of “ecotourism” was to fool the consumer into thinking it was a strategy of choice not necessity. And it favored the little guys, and that was always a warm and cozy feeling. It was a lot easier for a single standing property to change its sewer system into something greener, than a large chain of established companies. And true to form, the smaller company would then tout its accomplishment mostly by pointing out the deficiencies in its competitors.

But there was no way for the consumer to undertake due diligence. Several organizations tried to become certification organizations, but it never materialized and was evident from the beginning that they were just self-serving organizations looking for a cause.

A number of reputable media companies – mostly international magazines – gave awards, but despite some highly credentialed judges nominees were either received from biased consumers or from the companies themselves.

There has never been and never will be a good way to check the veracity of what an “ecotourism” company claims it is.

Moreover, the cleaver that supposedly severs ecotourism companies from nonconformers just isn’t as neat as you might think. Just as smaller companies can reform their sewer systems faster, larger companies can produce more revenue and jobs faster: theoretically what successful ecotourism is supposed to achieve. This conundrum forces ideas into very specific and opposing sides; there isn’t a good compromise. If you’re for cleaner sewer systems, you’re against more jobs; if you’re for more jobs, you’re against cleaner sewer systems.

Greenies will argue otherwise, and their arguments may be cogent in a longer time view. But business is not wont to project too far into the future; in Africa we work on three-year rates of return. These arguments will be valid only when governments take specific action, essentially regulating and leveling the playing field. That hasn’t happened. There is no Tourism Protection Authority.

Recently the Peruvian government significantly increased tourist fees to its attractions like Machu-Picchu. The stated motive was to reduce tourism numbers to protect the sites of antiquity. But it’s not at all clear this is the true motive. Tourist numbers have been plummeting, train tracks have been covered in avalanches, and it could be that the world economy and global warming is the real advocate here.

And so, alas, ecotourism was on the wane well before the world recession. As early as 2004, hardly a decade after it became fashionable, science was documenting that much ecotourism was simple foolery, and in some cases outright counterproductive. Statistics began to show that ecotourism no longer had a marketing advantage. And that was good.

So by 2010 in a Yale University publication professor Geoffrey Wall simply and neatly explained that ecotourism was too hard to analyze, to soft to measure and basically that the concept was too deficient to be either realistic or useful.

I believe it was as ecotourism was losing stature that the next lofty concept was concocted: Community Based Tourism (CBT). The idea was that local communities that either legally owned or by proximity controlled areas of wilderness tourism should be manifestly involved, and that in their subsequent profit, they would become the best natural trustees of the environmental assets they controlled.

There is something terribly dishonest about this since behind the concept is the manifest need to vacate the ownership or legitimate control of any resource if the owners don’t act environmentally responsible. I think this is an interesting idea and well worth debate. But it was not presented as such, nor debated. It was a single-sided coin that always fell heads-up.

CBT in its best form was intended to convince owners to use their resource in a greener way. Thus Maasai herders would be influenced to build a lodge rather than a wheat farm. The great flaw in this best form was that tourism was never able to achieve the asset wealth that its alternative could. There are a couple exceptions, but in the vast vast majority, this was the case.

Ecotourism and CBT are empty, self-applying, self-rewarding concepts. In the real world, they can’t be evaluated, so they effectively can’t exist except in the minds of the scammers.

This doesn’t mean that to be green in anything – tourism included – isn’t noble and right. Or that to increasingly involve the locally community in projects that take place in their community isn’t a great idea for all parties involved.

What it means is that generally good ideas were hijacked and misshapen into supposed attributes that made one company theoretically better than another. And it worked at first. But with time, common sense prevailed.

There is one concept I feel is worthwhile that has emerged from this mess. “Fair Trading” is an United Nations concept that insists that a higher proportion of the revenues generated by a tourism service are retained by the local community and owners, as opposed to alien middlemen and distributors. This is refinement of CBT, a real metric applied to it.

Unfortunately, it has gained neither the traction nor recognition that ecotourism or CBT did in the beginning. That’s probably because it sounds too much like them.

But it’s definitely something you tourists should consider and ask about.

And that was the one good thing about “World Responsible Tourism Day.” It used the right words. And the Cape Town authorities were asked to usher it onto the world stage in London yesterday, where thank god at last, “ecotourism” and “community based tourism” were replaced by the simple, more general, more honest, good-feeling term, “Responsible.” Right on, Cape Town.

Our Most Brilliant Traveler

Our Most Brilliant Traveler

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

I sit here watching a miserable cold rainy day waiting for snow. Birds (and “sunbirds”) living here in the Midwest have all but gone. But one remarkable bird in southern Africa defies this classic “going and coming” in a most spectacular way!

The southern carmine bee-eater is not only one of the grandest and most beautiful birds in existence, but it defies all notions about what bird migration means. Right now it’s heading south, but in hardly a few months it will head north further than where it started from! Then a few later, west, and finally, east! It zig-zags in a definite way, but why?

Conservationists tend to think of bird migrations as one-way reversibles. In other words, at one season they travel thata-way, and on the other season, they go thata-way backwards! Well that’s mostly true, and it seems to us that the birds are following the weather. We think, for example, that cardinals own fur coats but that little warblers would just freeze to death if they stayed.

Wrong. Temperature has absolutely nothing to do with where a bird wants to be. Birds follow their food. Reductions in temperatures reduce the food supply for many birds, like warblers eating bugs. But cardinals don’t eat bugs; they eat seeds and berries, and they’ve adapted to finding them even in the snow.

The carmine bee-eater’s there-again, back-again migration is linked in the same way. The bird is a specialist: it eats bees and other flying insects, and in southern Africa flying insects – particularly bees – are very much linked to when it rains. And the rain pattern in the southern part of the continent as I often explained is very complex.

And to make matters more extreme, the carmine nests in burrows of sand often on flat sand banks, digging a tunnel up to 6-feet long in which to lay its eggs. You can imagine this would not be an ideal strategy if it were raining.

So breeding occurs at the driest of times, along the great southern rivers like the Zambezi and Kavango, in August and September. There’s no drier time anywhere in southern Africa.

Eggs hatch, chicks emerge, rain comes, bees flourish all up and down the Zambezi as the ground bushes and native flowers in particular bloom presaging honey. But this doesn’t last long, because the rains grow intense, the temperatures rises, and many of the species of plant flower for a very short time and then just blossom out in bushels of thick green foliage.

So now in November the carmines move south. It’s probably started to rain south in South Africa by now, but down there many of the flowering trees like the jacaranda bloom before heavy rains, unlike the bushes along the Zambezi, and this attracts billions of bees.

One of the most beautiful sites on earth is the carmine bee-eater flying around a purple jacaranda tree! Its mostly crimson body blends into a deep teal head and underside, and with a sea-faring like deep black bill more normally associated with terns.

OK, so it’s spectacularly beautiful, but that’s not all. Its flight is magical. It’s in the class of birds that, true to name, eat bees and other flying insects. It plucks its prey right out of the air, nabbing that darn honeybee while it’s in flight.

This leads to all sorts of gymnastic swoops and backups, sometimes seeming to turn 180-degrees in midflight. And it seems to use its wings very little, a sort of effortless soaring that with a few facile flaps turns it upside and backwards, or sends it in exactly the opposite direction.

But one of the most amazing things about this bird is its migration. So right now it’s in South Africa with its new fledglings doing a job on the jacaranda. That only lasts a few months, and heavier rains and other factors bring much of South Africa out of bloom by February.

The fledglings are then fully grown. The birds actually maintain social groups even while migrating, and the young boy carmines have stayed with their mom and dad, and the girls have gone off to another group. And they get ready for the big migration as the flowers fall in South Africa.

They now travel long distances, sometimes right up to the equator. That’s nearly 2500 miles. I’ve seen them around Lake Victoria in February and March.

February is the lull in the single rainy season throughout most of East Africa. It’s actually more than a lull in Kenya, where it becomes completely dry, but I’ve only once seen a carmine north of Nairobi, and that was a single so obviously errant bird.

The lull in the heavy rains allows so many plants to bloom! In East Africa it isn’t just bushes but trees as well, and sometimes the many varieties of acacia will actually bloom a second time (most acacia bloom just before the rains begin in December and January).

So, lots of bees.

The rains end earlier in southern Africa than East Africa, so the carmines stick around in East Africa until like the wildebeest they’re forced to move because it gets bone dry. Wildebeest move north; carmines move south.

The carmines have 2-3 months now of little pickings, but there’s enough. Flying insects other than bees become their main diet, and there’s enough to build a new home and have new chicks.

In the end, the carmine has traveled as far as many of the longest distance warblers. It’s just not up and down, but a zig-zag through the remarkable ecology of this magical continent.

War : Week 3

War : Week 3

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

It’s clear that a major battle is brewing, but it isn’t at all clear who is going to win. America is worried. Kenyans are growing increasingly anxious. More deaths, including tourists.

The Thursday afternoon killing of a safari vehicle driver in the Shaba Reserve, and the wounding of a Swiss tourist inside, has no clear motive. There is no clear evidence that it is linked to any retribution from those Kenya is fighting in neighboring Somalia.

The safari vehicle was on a routine game drive and was returning to the lodge when several gunmen opened fire. The driver accelerated the vehicle but there was a second batch of gunmen waiting and they pummeled the vehicle with additional gunfire.

The driver was killed, the vehicle rolled over, one tourist was hit by a bullet and one was uninjured. Kenyan Wildlife Service agents at Archer’s Post were first on the scene.

Nevertheless this is exactly the area that I warned was unsafe only a a month ago. Whether these were bandits or ideologue militias doesn’t really matter. Kenya’s rule of law is falling apart as all its resources are funneled to the conflict in Somalia.

Go back and read the hostile comments I suppose understandably left by Kenyans who read that article. But wouldn’t it have now been much better if all had taken heed, and the tourist was now not dead?

Definite links have been established, however, with additional kidnappings around the border area of foreign aid workers, and of a grenade attack on a church in Garissa, a major town not far from the Somali border.

Meanwhile, the Kenyan offensive seems stalled. This is my view, not the view expressed by the Kenyan military, which claims to be on track in its liberation of Kismayo.

The army, though, has not yet even taken Afmadow, a northern town distraction that Kenyans learned was being fortified by al-Shabaab militias, and which they announced they would first have to pacify before continuing the progress towards Kismayo.

In the course of last week, French fired from naval vessels into Kismayo and America launched drone attacks from a base in Ethiopia. Kenya claimed a number of small skirmish victories, but its army does not seem to be moving.

This could be because of new reports of how heavily fortified Kismayo has become. During an African leaders conference last week, Prime Minister Raila Odinga literally pleaded with the west for more assistance.

Meanwhile Kenyan society is growing increasingly anxious with the war.

“The worst case scenario,” writes blogger Abdi Sheikh, is that Kenya gets deeply embroiled in the “conflict for years and disenfranchise both Kenyan Somalis and Somali refugees living in Kenya.”

“Any major mistake will bring the conflict into Kenya,” he goes on, and “may also stir xenophobia against Somalis living in Kenya.”

That may already have happened. Additional police are seen regularly in the densely populated Somali suburb of Eastleigh in Nairobi. New government policies demanding Kenyan Somalis disarm themselves are likely only going to inflame the situation.

Several newspapers reprinted old publications of WikiLeaks documents of American embassy dispatches detailing al-Shabaab recruiting within Kenya.

One thing everyone seems to agree on, which I don’t think is quite as evident as presumed is that “Kenya has taken an action that is irreversible” (Abdi Sheikh). “It has sparked a war with a shadowy group that has no clear frontline. This means those responsible for military action must think carefully not to create new enemies or inflame the conflict further.”

And yet if it isn’t reversible, it may be doomed. Sheikh reminds us, “There has been no foreign military invasion that has ever been successful in Somalia.”

The Evolution of Republicans

The Evolution of Republicans

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

By the Philadelphia Inquirer's Tony Auth.
Sometimes I wish American politics would just hang clear of my Africa, but how naive I guess. Evolution is founded in, based in, spectacular in Africa, and it’s increasingly a hot-button issue in current Republican politics. I’m embarrassed to write about this, but the amount of ignorance among potentially very powerful people is flabbergasting and increasingly terrifying.

Herbert Cain hasn’t said, and that’s the point. He’s going to have to, soon. He can’t maintain his lead without addressing these issues which are part and parcel to the beliefs of those who will choose the candidate.

And by the way, Cain has a few other problems at the moment.

Jon Huntsman is the only major Republican candidate to embrace evolution. “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming.” Jon Huntsman is also the only major Republic candidate without a chance of winning.

Mitt Romney accepts evolution as science. But his mission to stay afloat in the hurricane season in the Bermuda triangle forces him into multitudes of qualification. “God created the universe” and evolution “created the human body.”

Detailing exactly what he believes would probably wreck his campaign.

Only Newt Gingrich can out hedge Romney. When asked specifically about evolution, he angled his response, “I believe that creation as an act of faith is true, and I believe that science as a mechanical process is true,” Gingrich told reporters in May. “Both can be true.”

And have absolutely nothing to do with one another or evolution.

Rick Perry concedes that “evolution is a theory” but “with gaps in it.” No, there aren’t his kind of gaps in it, but more important, he pulls no punches in terms of what he’ll do if he can: “I am a firm believer [that] intelligent design … should be presented in schools. “

He’s been successful in Texas, where intelligent design has been incorporated into middle school text books and evolution qualified. It’s a huge and horrible story in itself.

Michele Bachmann “supports intelligent design,” and supports it by lying, “There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.”

Well, of course that’s not true, as is the case with much that Bachmann says day after day as though it’s gospel. (Maybe that’s the problem with her followers: they make up gospel.)

Unequivocally as his best credential Ron Paul states, “There is a theory… of evolution, and I don’t accept it,” Paul said.

Then there’s the bottom of the evolutionary chain, the last link so to speak. Rick Santorum makes the ridiculously untrue, not-even-a-metaphor pandering parallel that belief in evolution means you “are a descendant of a monkey,” and goes on to insist this nonsense is just one of “the many other liberal beliefs [of] Democrats.”

As a Senator from Pennsylvania he proposed the “Santorum Amendment” to the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act that would have forced public schools to offer the creationist perspective in science classes, and to call into question the scientific evidence supporting evolution. That amendment was rejected.

That’s what we got to work with. One reasonable man without a hope who isn’t really a Republican, one man hiding on the run, two ducking and three wackos.

The candidates are driven by the right-wing Christian media, particularly talk radio. And the last few weeks have taken the ridiculous into the abstract sublime. You just won’t believe what right-wing talk radio is discussing these last few weeks with regards to evolution.

The current evolution topic is whether Darwin’s theories of natural selection contributed to Hitler’s Nazi holocaust.

Say what?

And so, therefore, Hitler was not a Christian.

Of course.

I know it’s unbelievable. I actually felt it was better to just not to wade into this, because the threads of logic were so knotted up.

“Nazism was not science-based,” Univ. of Minnesota biologist PZ Myers wrote last week, “Hitler was a true Christian.”

Somehow, whether Hitler was a Christian depends upon whether Christians believe in evolution, but evolution is science and if they don’t, then they aren’t Nazis, either? This is the new litmus test for Republican candidates. Can you phrase it better than me?

This ridiculous dispute became so prominent lately that University of Chicago professor Robert Richards issued a White Paper, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?“ with 45 pages of careful history, heavily annotated, in order to conclude “The only reasonable answer to the question that gives this essay its title is a very loud and unequivocal No!”

And Monday, the respected Philadelphia science journalist, Faye Flam, wrote that serious historians today “agree that any whiff of Darwinism in Hitler’s speech or writing was merely window-dressing.”

But we all know in today’s world that facts and logic don’t mean very much, so why try? We try, because it keeps us sane.

I just hope the election will fall however marginally with the sane.

Back to Life Time!

Back to Life Time!

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Photo by John Sullivan in the Maasai Mara
Rains in Africa bring rebirth unlike anywhere else on earth. I don’t mean things just start to grow again. I mean dead things come back to life!

Admittedly, most of these creatures are just fooling us to believe they’ve returned from the dark side. They aren’t really the same thing, but the children of things that died when the rains last ended. But there are a few true miracle creatures that defy all sorts of normal zoological physiologies.

They’re called “mudfish” and … well, for obvious reasons. See the main picture above, although that was taken at the end rather than beginning of the rains. It’s easier to find them like this, captured in wiggling pods as they tried to avoid the marabou stork’s gullet, but before they’ve hibernated for the dry season.

The narrow picture to the right is one of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s several priceless ancient African sculptures praising mudfish. This one is titled, “Rattle Staff: Hand Holding Mudfish (Ukhurhe)” and can be found in gallery 352. And it’s now — at this time of the year — that they reemerge.

They’re an important but small family of earth’s creatures widely referred to as lungfish. Up to 6′ long, they’re mean predators: They can bite off your finger. They breathe with lungs, not gills. They can walk on land. They’ve been on earth for 100 million years and are the direct descendents of the 450 million year old fossil creatures that first walked fish out of the sea.

AND they can live 100 years BUT they regularly die just as many years as they live.

Say what?

At the end of every dry season, they wallow as in the picture above, frantically trying to discourage predators as their home evaporates. Then one night, they wrap themselves in a self-made mucous cocoon and become desiccated with the mud. Almost all their bodily functions cease.

Unlike bears or caterpillars changing or a 17-year grubbly little cicada in a shell under my oak tree, these creatures actually come to a near complete halt.

Until the rains return.

Those of us who know where to look after the first big rains … we’ll find them! They don’t emerge necessarily altogether like they are above. Usually the water has to be a bit deeper to break their hard cocoon and release them, and at that point they’re wholly under water.

A whole bunch of things in Africa actually behaves like mudfish: Toads, true frogs, salamanders, and dozens of insects and smaller carp-like fish are born, live their cycle, mate and die in a single pool of water.

That’s the difference: those creatures die leaving eggs to carry on their species. But mudfish don’t die, exactly. They, well, come back!

This rebirthing quality gave mudfish a divine character with early Africans. Particularly in the more developed early west African societies mudfish was often considered sacred and often the guardian or guide for a royal personage from this world to the next.

In Benin it was associated with Oba, the king, who had achieved the power of life and death of his subjects because of his divine association with the mudfish. In later more modern times, mudfish were prayed to, and petitioned especially for acts of healing.

In the northern west we often chastise equatorial and sunbird people for not appreciating the “change of seasons.” Well, there’s no snow on the equator, but in the wildernesses still preserved where dams, irrigation and boreholes have not disrupted the normal seasons of rain, change here can be much more dramatic than a leaf turning red.

The meaning of water falling from the sky is much more profound. Things come back to life!