Month: January 2012

What Price is Too High?

What Price is Too High?

by Arusha ♥ 9 Comments

More than a million and a half viewers have watched the mountain gorilla YouTube. Is this the reason Rwanda has raised the permit price to $750?

I’m absolutely infuriated by this hike. The added revenue is not going to gorilla research, and the bulk of it is not going back into any kind of conservation whatever: it’s going to a very corrupted, dictatorial and inhumane Rwandan government.

There’s no way Rwanda will open its books so that we can see exactly where that $750 goes. The country has become one of the world’s worst human rights violators, thumbing its nose at virtually all organizations demanding public accountability. I’d speculate that $750 is divided something like this:

$125 for gorilla and other conservation
$125 for country-wide development
$150 for security and incarceration of political dissidents
$150 for unnecessary pet projects of political bigwigs
$300 into the pockets and Swiss bank accounts of high officials

Second, this absurd cost to spend an hour with a wild animal continues the transformation of the planet’s wildernesses into a playground exclusively for the rich.

And thirdly, it coopts wilderness conservation from a scientific orientation into a commercial one insensitive to the needs of the Rwandan people, and in fact one which tacitly supports their oppression.

EWT sent some of the very first tourists up Karisoke during the first mountain gorilla visits in 1979. The permit cost was $25. There was one organization involved in the project and Rwanda was anything but a stable, modern country.

Today Rwanda is probably the most modern country in East Africa. Fiber cable has been laid or is being laid to carry the most advanced technologies to virtually every corner of this tiny country. The Rwandan economy – benefitting from a hugely disproportionate amount of foreign aid as a result of the ‘94 genocide – is booming.

And gorilla permits now cost 30 times what they originally did and there are more than a dozen foreign wildlife organizations working in the area. And, very importantly, the population of mountain gorillas has more than doubled to just under 800.

That population is probably near its maximum, because the habitat isn’t large enough for more. I’m sure that many scientists will disagree, but I’ll cynically suggest they are circumscribed by their own over-field population encouraged by Rwandan officials.

I’m sure throughout Africa there is more habitat suitable for mountain gorillas than there currently are mountain gorillas, but in Rwanda specially and alone, I think we’ve reached the maximum. The gorilla density in the Rwandan Virungas has exceeded its natural carrying capacity specifically to encourage tourism dollars.

The evidence of this is the growing size (numbers of individual per family) and the acceleration of family amalgamation and the growing examples of multiple silverbacks in the same family.

Humans in Rwanda are also overpopulated. But the state of the Rwandan people is far from being 30 times better than in 1979. There have been notable improvements in the eradication of some poverty and general overall economic development, but personal liberty and freedom of expression have been squashed like a gorilla stepping on a mushroom.

I’ve watched that YouTube video multiple times. I’ve listened to the person narrating the experience drift with his personal excitement into a world of inaccuracies that he either considered inconsequential or artistically fanciful, as proof we as tourists are being fashioned as the weapons against the local population, and as paymasters of the world’s worst dictators.

The excitement of the tourist in that video is still to me critically important. I’ve now trekked to see the gorillas more than 50 times and I will bring others, still again. Whatever else it may be, it is a haven of natural balance and beauty and every time some tourist bonds with it, we can hope her priorities have been realigned to saving the earth.

But just as we walk the Great Wall or paddle down the Tambopata, we must more than ever be cognizant of exactly what we’re doing, and I don’t mean shooting a video.

I mean wondering where the money we paid ends up. I mean wondering why people who aren’t as rich as we are can’t as easily experience the most natural and pristine parts of our earth. I mean wondering why our clawed Victorian bathtub holds gallons of steaming water while the family of the man who cleans it for us is searching for a teaspoon of clean water to drink.

To me, developing the awareness of this awful conundrum in the so-called “wild” is the most important experience of all. It’s a very personal decision. For me as a guide, the absurdity of the cost provides an easier platform for me to help my clients achieve this special awareness. So not yet is the price too high. But what is too high, then? I don’t know. That’s my own, the guide’s conundrum.

Giants of Gender Equality

Giants of Gender Equality

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Did you hear about women’s boxing coming to the Olympics? Did you hear about women businesspeople becoming village elders in Kenya?

Issues today are global, and it’s fascinating to see their actual quantitative positions relative to the developed and developing world. Wealth inequality, for example, seems to be gaining much greater traction in the developed world, where people are much richer, than in the developing world.

Gender equality, in contrast, is gaining much greater traction in the developing world, where people are much more segregated by race and gender, than in the developed world.

I hadn’t heard that women’s boxing was coming to this summer’s Olympics before the NPR report this weekend. And I have to admit that the instant reaction wasn’t one of liberation. When I finally saw Franchon Crews’ biceps I no longer felt an iota of wrongness or inappropriateness to the idea and was left with just a feeling of oddness.

This in contrast to my positive feelings when I read that a business woman in a rural area outside a secondary city of Kenya became Kenya’s first woman village elder.

(The fact is that Kenyan men in general probably feel the same way towards Catherine Cherop and Franchon Crews, respectively, as I feel toward Franchon Crews and Catherine Cherop!)

When I first began working in Kenya forty years ago, women were hardly seen except toiling in the fields and carrying water. In several cases I met families where one of the wives couldn’t speak the language of her husband and probably would never learn it.

When a large rural school (all boys, always back then) announced they had hired my wife as the first ever woman teacher, they rebelled, struck classes and warned her that she would be killed if she walked through the classroom door.

The position of “elder” throughout all of traditional Africa is near synonymous with councilman or alderman, and it was always a man. In fact in almost all the African languages I know, “elder” is translated directly as “old man.”

Among traditional Maasai, to become a senior elder you must first be a junior elder, and to become a junior elder you must become circumcised and then dedicate 5-7 years as a warrior protecting the stock… (among other things).

From the colonial era through modern independent societies, the evolving community political institutions simply assumed a modernized version of the traditional institutions. In today’s Kenya, village elders in the more modernized less traditional communities are now appointed by higher governing authorities.

You apply for the position the same way you’d apply to be appointed to the school or county board; there are some elections, but many are appointed by higher elected officials or higher governing bodies.

Kenya is implementing a new constitution that mandates almost a third of all public elected and appointed officials be women. Of all the radical and creative components to the new constitution, this one drew very little opposition and reflects now several generations of free education irrespective of gender.

But unlike the much longer transition here in America towards gender equality, older Kenyans living today remember as I do that women weren’t just excluded from important positions in the community, but that they rarely appeared!

This enormous change while not a suprise on reflection, to many older Kenyan men causes the same pause I felt when reading about Franchon Crews.

Catherine is the first at the village level! It may seem odd, but the higher up the political hierarchy you go, the more women have already appeared in prominent positions. Kenya has already had a number of elected women Members of Parliament, has had one woman run for president and a number in the top tiers of the judiciary.

But it’s at the grass roots that culture moves slowest, and Catherine’s revolutionary step is in that sense more notable than if she filed to run for president of the country.

It’s another great part of the wonderful story of Kenya’s cultural leaps and bounds. You can read much more about Catherine by clicking here.

Democracy Without Votes

Democracy Without Votes

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Carton by artists Barbee Fish.
So who’s more primitive? Yesterday Kenya announced modern, near-instant voter registration processes even while 14 American States are implementing new laws making voter registration now the hardest in the world.

With a nearly $10 million infusion by world bodies like World Bank, Kenya’s election monitoring board proudly adopted such instant high-tech registration techniques as retina scans, because according to its chairman, Mr Isaack Hassan, “it was prudent we aren’t left behind.”

Behind who? The U.S.? Hardly. Not a single U.S. state uses biometric devices to register voters.

Hassan said “most African countries, for example, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Burkina Faso and Nigeria, had embrace [biometric registration] and as such it is prudent for Kenya not to be left behind.”

So I guess Mississippi, Tennessee and even glorious Wisconsin and 11 other U.S. states are behind Ghana, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Burkina Faso and Nigeria in running democracies!

“This is a national disgrace,” writes Cokie & Steven Roberts in a blogpost yesterday. Their fabulous blog cites a report released recently by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University that argues as many as 5 million mostly Democratic voters in the U.S. have been disenfranchised from the next election by Republican state governments.

Kenya and all the other African countries cited above except Ghana have experienced recent and violent elections. And all of them are taking radical measures to fix this, and the first and most important fix is to facilitate an easy, quick way for everyone to vote.

The mantra of voter fraud is one of the most primitive, fraudulent claims ever assumed by existing American legislators, and it reflects not some concern about freedom, but concern about losing power.

Fortunately, the Obama administration is forcefully challenging many of these laws in court. But god help us if they fail.

What the hell are we doing? Why are we digging ourselves back into a prehistoric political hole? If you believe in democracy, and I do and most of Africa does, resultant laws will craft it differently and fashion a kaleidoscope of power as different as the Iowa caucuses counts are from New Hampshire electronic tallies.

But don’t tread on me. Let me vote! Facilitate my involvement, don’t impede it.

My grandfather was proud of being one of the few true Republicans in Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s, and he loved telling us his grandchildren why he stopped voting before the war. The last time he tried the election judge looked him right in the eye and said, “Mr. Andersen, sir, you’re dead.”

That was eighty years ago. I thought things had changed.

They have, in Africa.

Our War for Their Peace

Our War for Their Peace

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This week of violent anniversaries leads me to wonder if The West has exported its militarism to Africa.

The West – and I don’t just mean the U.S., for France is a monster military force in Africa – has ratcheted down its military, pulled back from conflicts around the world, even as I watch Africa heating up. And most of the heat involves al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, Islamic Maghreb and similar loosely affiliated fanatical Muslim jihad movements.

Today is the 100-day anniversary of the Kenyan invasion of Somalia. Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the revolution in Egypt. Neither is completed, both look increasingly fragile. Yet clearly the empirical achievement of both is that they have relieved pressure on The West.

The West’s Muslim adversaries – as divergent as the Taliban and Iran – are at the very least distracted by these revolutionary African events, and in the case of Somalia, have actually led to significant victories for The West.

The killing of bin Laden and the routing of al-Qaeda is directly linked to America and France’s covert involvement in the revolutions of the Arab Spring and the later Kenyan invasion of Somalia. The cost to France and the U.S. for these covert operations has been infinitesimal compared either to their earlier adventures like Algeria or Afghanistan. A few stealth gunships in the Gulf, a few drone airfields in Ethiopia, focused air strikes, Seal 6 mission impossibles – pennies.

But these effective covert operations succeed only under a larger public umbrella of traditional war. The cost to the Libyans for the downfall of Gaddafi, to the Egyptians for their unended revolution, or the cost to Kenyans for invading Somalia has proved enormous and strains those national fabrics in a way The West would never tolerate itself.

Have we exported conflict, because we don’t know how to end the fighting, just how to send it elsewhere?

For us westerners it’s a time for imagining the flowers may soon bloom, again. In Africa, after the adrenalin of liberation, it’s a caffeine downer. The future looks awfully grim.

Way South of Scott Pelley

Way South of Scott Pelley

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Sixty Minutes rebroadcast of “Into the Wild” Sunday night caused many of us experts serious angst. Basically three wonderfully short thumbnails of things wild in East Africa were riveted with inaccuracy.

I’m sure that when a professor of dentistry speeds past a billboard for toothpaste he winces. Nothing wrong really with telling people they need to brush. Nothing wrong really with fluoride in the goop. Nothing wrong with a beautiful woman smiling like a bleached Mayan temple.

But probably lots wrong with everything in between, like how often, how hard, when and with what kind and temperature of water, and who knows what else.

I hope the bristles on my back as I watched the 60 Minutes show weren’t as stiff as a Number 10 toothbrush. (Admission: I watched the tape. I had calculated that the Patriots/49ers game would be less stressful. Wrong.)

There were three segments, and the most egregious was the best and first, about the great migration, the Mau Forest controversy and how it effects the Mara River, and the transformation of some Maasai land into community based tourism projects.

Most egregious because it was very, very close to the situation as I see it, but agonizingly not spot on, providing opportunities for enormous misunderstandings.

Pelley and crew were in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, which represents approximately 5% of the land area of the Serengeti/Mara/Ngorongoro ecosystem through which the migration moves. He was correct in pointing out that the migration was there “for a very short time every year” but arrogant and irresponsible in claiming this is its most dramatic moment.

Some years, yes. Most years, no. The drama moves with the weather, and the simple historical odds will place the greatest drama of river crossings at the Grumeti or Balanganjwe rivers in Tanzania, not the Mara in Kenya as Pelley claims.

Pelley said that the “few days that it takes the herds to cross the river, crocs will bring down enough food for months” implying that the river crossing in the Mara is brief and singular moment for any given group of wildebeest.

Not true. Wildebeest cross rivers back and forth multiple times for no good reason. It’s an instinctive part of their overriding component “to follow.” They might have crossed the river ten minutes ago, and another group is crossing in the other direction, and off they go. A single wildebeest might cross back-and-forth a hundred times the same river in the same year.

The problem here is that Pelley is treating the migration like so many casual observers as the sum of its parts, individual wildes on some monarch butterfly calculus of pretty constant direction. That’s just not the case with the migration.

From year to year the actual movements of the migration change massively. There are even years when it never gets to Kenya, or hardly at all. Unlike butterfly migrations, the wilde aren’t hard-wired with a map. They go where there’s grass. And grass grows where it rains. And over time there are definite patterns to this, and which right now are being dramatically altered by global warming.

I have other serious concerns, but none as important as the above: Pelley’s claim that the migration is predictable and that its “most dramatic moment” is in “late summer” when the herds cross “in a few days” the Mara River in Kenya’s Maasai Mara. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Kudus though, and not of the animal kind, to Pelley for a thoughtful thumbnail of the Mau Forest controversy and of some local Maasai attempts to transform a dwindling agricultural lifestyle into tourism.

Finally, a recurrent criticism I have of American media is their lack of due diligence. The show used three experts for its three different segments. Two of the experts are honorable scientists to be sure, but none of the experts are current leaders in their fields.

Most of the current leaders of field research are no longer found in Kenya, or at their foundations in the United States. They are brilliant, younger and performing exceptional scientific work, many more in neighboring Tanzania than Kenya. It pains me constantly how a lack of effort by American media leads them not to the true sages but to the hack celebrities.

Nuff said. In sum it wasn’t bad. But to be good it needed care that perhaps no American TV is capable of. BBC where are you?

Justice Over Politics

Justice Over Politics

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Not just free trade, but free justice! Africa once again leads the world into a new age. Today, major Kenyan politicians seem to have submitted to the World Court to face charges of crimes against humanity.

They include Kenya’s Deputy Prime Minister, Uhuru Kenyatta, and son of the founder of the country. Also included is a former kingmaker and government minister. The president’s Chief of Staff during the troubles of 2007 is also charged, and finally, a nonpolitican altogether, a radio personality who perhaps unwittingly caused rampant violence.

At 130p local Kenyan time, the World Court at The Hague confirmed the charges and announced the trial will begin.

The Hague is 6000 miles from Nairobi. Nevertheless, over the last two years, those accused have traveled back and forth with their teams of lawyers, have submitted to questioning and accepted the jurisdiction of the court to adjudicate their futures.

Can you imagine Carl Rove standing trial in The Hague for fixing the Florida count, or Rumsfield and Cheney for trumping up WMD? Or for that matter, Deng Xiaoping for the massacres in Tiananmen? More exactly, the slavic genocide of Radovan Karadzic was prosecuted by the World Court, but only after years of undercover missions that caught him as he ran from justice.

Can you imagine any of the world’s notorious criminals willingly submitting to The World Court? The U.S. and China even refuse to recognize it!

This historic day is the first time that powerful men in a distant foreign land willingly go to trial to defend themselves against a prosecution by an entity that claims to represent … The World.

For anyone who doesn’t follow Kenyan politics, this seems nothing short of absurd.

The decision by the World Court is about the violence which followed the disputed 2007 presidential elections in which 1300 people were killed, but perhaps a quarter million injured or displaced, and which included some horrific acts of ethnic violence.

The charges claim that these individuals orchestrated the ethnic violence with money, with direct orders and with violence themselves.

For over a year Kenyans debated whether or not to try the accused in Kenya. Parliament was twice deadlocked. There were demonstrations, pro and con. Ultimately, the Kenyan populace deferred the issue to The World Court.

Why on earth would still popular politicians willingly submit themselves to a foreign justice that could incarcerate them for the rest of their lives? Because Kenyans want it that way.

Alright, why on earth do Kenyans want it that way?!

Because Kenyans know – and I dare say even some of the supporters of these accused truly believe that their flawed system of politics is self-destructive, and that only by excising some of its components might … freedom reign.

And there is an absolute analogy with the political situation in many parts of the world, including my America: Try as we might to reform campaign laws, try as we might to impose term limits, try as we might all to restrict lobbying … try as we do to wrest control from an elite of politicians and businessmen and politically appointed justices, time and again we lose.

The only way to move out of this self-perpetuating status quo is to … move out! Is to eliminate the barriers to justice in the same way we so proudly eliminate the barriers to free trade. No preconditions but a simple due diligence that to whomever we submit there will be fairness.

This is nothing short of a pipe dream, I know. To think it might occur in America in my life time is thrilling but probably idiotic. Nevertheless, the new age of the twevolution of Africa and the Mideast is not a flitting moment in history.

It will continue, and years from now if there is peace in the world, this day and the Kenyans who created it will be forever cited as moments of political brilliance.

The #1 … Place To Get Hurt

The #1 … Place To Get Hurt

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

Opposition Leader, Kizza Besigye, after another brutal police action yesterday.
We all know print media is on the decline, but no better example than the once stellar Lonely Planet naming one of the worst countries in the world #1 in its Top Ten Destination List.

Lonely Planet named Uganda #1 explaining, “It’s taken nasty dictatorships and a brutal civil war to keep Uganda off the tourist radar, but stability is returning and it won’t be long before visitors come flocking back.”

That was in November. Stability has not returned; it’s getting manifestly worse. And tourism has sunk to levels not seen since Idi Amin, and rightly so.

Yesterday Uganda’s main opposition leader, and in fact all opposition politicians in Parliament, were arrested without charge, following another (how many now, 24?) brutal battle on the streets of a Kampala suburb. (Most politicians, including the leader Kizza Besigye, were released late today.)

This is not a place you want to visit. Demonstrations have continued since the current dictator’s rigged last election more than a year ago. Tourism has plummeted. The road from the international airport at Entebbe to the capital of Kampala – the only road from the airport – and thence to the rest of the country is lined with police and military.

And even as some of the country’s other lower corrupt politicians try to join the twevolution of Besigye, Yoweri Museveni’s grip is tightening. This week he simply ignored Parliament’s initial moves to impeach him, and there is every indication he will jail anyone associated with moving such legislation forward.

He has jailed, fired and reappointed cronies to Uganda’s judiciary. Patent corruption of the highest kind, giant under-the-table payments from oil companies and huge swindles of private land, are widely known. But today Uganda’s newly reconstituted courts threw out all attempts to allow Parliament to investigate further.

The pattern is identical to the early days of Zimbabwe, and I must admit having traveled in Zimbabwe during the same period, there. Travel right now – if you miss a demonstration and take extra time for military check posts – can actually be an incredible value, since tourist costs have dropped so much.

From a safety point of view, if you miss the demonstrations tourists are more or less being left to their own devices.

But like Zimbabwe, the demonstrations will increase before the country settles into a state of awkward misery, where fuel and sometimes even food becomes scarce. Where officials like park rangers go on the take just to stay alive. It’s hard to predict exactly when such a time occurs.

Lonely Planet’s list was eclectic at the least. Myanmar and Switzerland also made the Top Ten.

About the only truth to Lonely Planet’s naming Uganda is that Uganda is even more lonely than before.

Field of Nightmares

Field of Nightmares

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Young Uganda school boys amazingly won the all-African baseball championship and thereby an invitation to the U.S. for the Little League World Series in Williamsport this past summer. But they didn’t come. The American consulate in Kampala denied them visas.

So the day before yesterday, the Canadian little league winners who were scheduled to play the Ugandans in the first round last August, played the Ugandan kids in Kampala. And lost.

In times past, which means before 9-11, the Ugandan schoolboys would have gotten visas. But the sloppiness of their application process, and the fact that they didn’t have the money to hire someone locally who could have helped them, doomed them from the start. If I can’t say it was wrong of the U.S., I must just lament how the world has changed.

Personally aghast at what had happened, Phillies super star shortstop Jimmy Rollins bankrolled the Canadian Little League winners who flew into Uganda last week with Rollins. Rollins wasn’t the only American to help the Ugandan kids. The team had long been coached and funded by American, Richard Stanley, who owns several AA minor league teams in the U.S.

The heart-breaking story is a simple one. The goodwill and extraordinary charity, including not only from stellar individuals like Stanley and Rollins but also from several branches of the U.S. government that funds much of school sports in Uganda, all were trumped by …

… national security.

And who is to say it should have been otherwise? We know how children particularly in Uganda’s part of the world have been coopted, or more truthfully brainwashed, by hideous forces like the Lord’s Resistance Army. We know that as unlikely as any of them might have been active terrorists, that the enormous love that would have been showered on them as individuals from unsuspecting Americans could have been so easily manipulated into odious ways.

None of this might have posed an imminent threat, but the level of resources that would suddenly have had to have been dedicated to monitoring the affair and its endless aftermath was simply “beyond budget.”

Do I really believe all that malarkey? Of course not. They were children, easily contained, easily watched. All you had to do was photograph and fingerprint. It’s an absurd and heart-wrenching story.

What exactly was the State Department worried about?

It seems that the principal concern was that birth dates and names didn’t register with the personal interviews of the applicants by the U.S. consulate in Kampala.

African kids change their names all the time, and few know when they were born. That discrepancy is an honest one that would never occur if a double-agent or dedicated terrorist tried to get into the U.S.

Even Stanley said he accepted the State Department’s decision. And a filmmaker instrumental in publicizing the Ugandan kids’ great baseball story, Jay Shapiro, agreed, too, with the Americans’ decision. They’ve both caved.

A kid with a mitt won’t take down the Twin Towers.

Is this a reflection on the Obama administration, on the budget, on the paranoia of America?

All the above.

Public Auction To Murder Rhino

Public Auction To Murder Rhino

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

See this cartoonist's blog at http://cartoonsbymiles.blogspot.com/.
If you believe in culling, does that mean it’s OK to invite casual sportsmen into national parks to hunt big animals for a fee? I don’t think so, but South African officials do.

There are two related but very different stories here: the first is the growing number of scandals in the South African government; and the second is the issue of culling and hunting big game like elephants.

I’ve been trying to formulate an opinion on the first for some time, and I can’t. Jacob Zuma is the third president since the end of the apartheid era and one of the last of the old boys who were instrumental in the apartheid struggle with Nelson Mandela.

He’s also the most clumsy, the least intellectual and quite rash. His charisma is more chutzpah than boldness. But payback for being a revolutionary is winding down, and people seem more tolerant of his antics than I would expect presuming he’s on his way out.

And South African society in my opinion is doing remarkably well for having made such a gigantic transition. But scandals are one thing, and the new, growing attempt by the government to centralize power are quite another.

Zuma’s revenge for being made such fun of by the local press seems to be, among other similar acts, shutting it down in patent violation of the constitution. And the courts seem reluctant if reticent to battle him head on.

So in this climate of buffoonery morphing into odious politics, many lesser officials feel a bravado more typical of banana republic magnates than of major democracies.

So very lesser officials – nevertheless very publicly associated with Zuma and his ANC party – who oversee one of KwaZulu Natal’s big game sanctuaries, recently invited outside sportsmen to bid for the right to kill a white rhino in one of South Africa’s most famous reserves, Mkhuze.

Technically the rhino auctioned away to the highest traveling bidder was not within the exact confines of Mkhuze, but in the adjacent Makhasa private community reserve, and this provided the loophole for the overseers of this reserve to be so bone-headedly bold.

Readers may understand this better by a similar association in a more popular area, Kruger National Park, where the adjacent Sabi Sands private community reserve actually draws more American tourists.

Makhasa, like Sabi Sands, is governed to a large extent by the wildlife laws of the adjacent federal authority, between which there is no fencing. It is a single ecosystem. Kruger and Sabi Sands are in the interior far east of the country. Mkhuze and Makhasa are on the coast northeast of Durban.

Southern African wildlife management, particularly within South Africa proper, is likely the best in the world and is packed with professionals who are the stars in their fields. For a very long time they’ve believed in culling derived from intricate notions of “carrying capacity” that they believe they understand better than anyone.

Indeed, they may. The health and sustainability of southern African reserves is far greater, for example, than in East Africa. There are many more species albeit much less drama provided by the large numbers of animals seen in East Africa.

It is precisely the large numbers of animals that South African scientists see in East Africa that they insist will be East Africa’s ultimate downfall, the “tipping threshold” reached when too many unmanaged animals compete for dwindling resources. The crash that can result is often catastrophic and irreversible.

So southern African officials cull. For as long as the reserves have existed and been well managed (Kruger since 1926) culling has regularly occurred, and when the culling is of a springbok it makes much less noise than when it’s an elephant or rhino.

More scientifically, it is rare that a single elephant is culled. It is more likely (wince now) that an entire family is culled babies and all, since elephants are so social that to separate them from their family unit is generally untenable. But single rhinos are regularly culled.

Never, until now, has this excision been opened by auction to sportsmen tourists.

The winner of the auction, referred to anonymously as a “businessman” paid just over $110,000 for the right to shoot the white rhino, which by the way is an extremely docile beast, quite unlike its cousin, the black rhino. Conservation advocates screamed bloody murder, of course.

There are to be sure far too many white rhinos in southern Africa. They breed like cows and basically live like cows. You can virtually pet them. But they’re bigger than black rhinos and magnificent looking beasts. Killing them doesn’t take much skill.

There are so many of them, you can buy a white rhino for less than $10,000 although the transport and maintenance lifts that considerably. Many South African ranchers buy and breed white rhinos so they can then be hunted, and the going rate for legal hunting of such white rhinos is around $50,000, less than half what this anonymous businessman paid.

Add to this the fact that there is an epidemic of rhino poaching occurring right now in South Africa, and it’s been going on for more than a year. That bastion of extraordinary wildlife management, Kruger, has the unmitigated embarrassment of having had 11 rhinos poached this year.

So put all this together and you have to ask yourself who the hell would pay twice the going hunting rate to shoot a rhino in a protected reserve?

Answer: Someone who hasn’t a clue about most everything, e.g.: how much it usually costs, how much furore it would produce, and likely is paying quite a lot more under the table.

This is the kind of folly happening in South Africa right now in many areas of its society. It’s almost like a free-for-all. We can only hope the days of the old boys can be auctioned off as swiftly as was this white rhino.

King, Racism & Obama

King, Racism & Obama

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

EWT is closed today but most businesses are open. Many African friends believe this is racism. Is it?

Martin Luther King Day is one of ten federal holidays, but in the United States it’s quite possible to have a near normal workday even on a federal holiday. The stock market, the post office and banks (which require a federal charter) are closed. But in many places — particularly in America’s south — life and work goes on nearly normal.

One of the most vocal opponents of gazetting the MLD holiday was Senator John McCain, the last Republican presidential candidate.

MLK Day is one of only two federal holidays celebrating acclaimed individuals. The other is Presidents Day. Neither holiday is observed as universally as the other eight federal holidays. Today about a third of American businesses that close on the weekends close on MLK Day, and about half on Presidents Day. So can we really claim that businesses which remain open today are racist?

Yes, of course. Particularly in today’s horribly politically charged environment. There can be no more telling confirmation of this than the behavior of anti-Obama forces, today. From the right comes the most vitriolic yet inane criticism of Obama ever sullied a sitting president. From my point of view, there is no other explanation. Obama is the catalyst.

I am a white man who has spent the majority of his life in black societies. I am witness to the change that King’s type of philosophy has made in Africa and at home.

What I most remember of King’s turbulent last days was unbelievable violence. My most vivid memory is as a very young journalist penned under a burning El Stop in downtown Chicago while the city raged in reaction to King’s assassination.

I remember gun fire was a regular sound in my low-rent apartment in Washington, D.C. during the summer of 1968. Or the unending sirens and tear gas around my apartment in Berkeley that fall.

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

All of that was a long time ago, approaching a half century, two generations. Trauma has a way of finding its small berth among the many more ordinary memories of earlier life. My teenage years were lived in Jonesboro, Arkansas in America’s south.

Of the more than 1000 students in my public middle and high schools, there was not a single black. Less than a decade after I graduated I returned to Jonesboro for a wedding and learned that almost half the town was black.

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

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

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

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

And why? Because it was the desperation of those who knew they were going to fail. I really believe there is more good in the world than bad. Justice ultimately prevails. But the unjust will hang on for as long as they can.

I come from a deeply rooted Chicago family in the northern State of Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln. My father was sent from Chicago to Jonesboro, Arkansas, in the South to start a factory owned by an Illinois company to avoid the growing union movement in the North.

One of the first things my father did was pack up us three young kids in the car and drive us into the cotton fields west of Memphis. He stopped the car, said never a word, and made us watch for what seemed like an eternity black share-croppers toiling in the summer sun in a field owned by a white.

Try as I may, those faceless share-croppers and Bessie Mae are the only blacks I remember as a teenager even though I was part of a small minority, living in the midst of them.

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

Social justice does prevail. What King taught us is that nonviolence can achieve liberation and justice. But what he didn’t say was that nonviolence works only after provoking incredible violence against it.

Today, in America, ethnic, religious, political and racial tensions are seething. Economic stress brings out the worst in us. It would seem like there could be no harder time to stop work, but we must. We need time to stop, to reflect, to have a day of peace.

Happy Birthday, Martin! You’d have been 83, today!

Which Witch Wins Winston?

Which Witch Wins Winston?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

A Nigerian witch is coming to America to save us! Not sure she’ll make it in time for the conservative bigwig meeting this weekend in Texas, but that’s where she’s headed!

Yesterday, 14 people were rounded up outside Durban, South Africa, and charged with cold blooded murder of a 60-year grandmother who the gang claimed was a witch.

Witch-cleansing has not yet come to America. We’re still in the witch advocacy stage, and like so often American subintellectual naivete will likely be subsumed violently in witchy acts before we loosen gun control laws further so we can eliminate the yet-to-be determined vermin.

How liberally sarcastic, Jim! Alright, alright, cut off the vigilantism at the pass, and bring on Helen!

Nigeria’s notorious witch hunter, Helen Ukpabio, is coming to Houston’s Liberty Gospel Church. A call has gone out far and wide to us afflicted to join “Lady Apostle” Helen in March. In order to attend her assembly we must own up to suffering from one or more of:

– untimely deaths in the family
– barren and “in frequent” miscarriages
– health torture
– chronic and incurable diseases

… or if you’re doing OK healthwise, you can also qualify as a sufferer of:
– bondage
– bad dreams

… and if you’re healthy, not abused and sleep like a kitty, perhaps things aren’t going so well at work:
– lack of promotion with slow progress
– facing victimization and lack of promotion

… or ok, you’re healthy, not abused, sleep like a kitty and have a secure job, but maybe you just blow that paycheck every Friday, you suffer from:
– financial impotency and difficulties

No? You actually save a bit of your paycheck. Praise the Lord! Well, undoubtedly you might still in your heart of heart suffer from:
– stagnated life with failures, or an
– unsuccessful life with disappointments

All the above are caused by “witches, mermaids or other evil spirits.”

And Helen has come to exorcize them from us! Hallelujah!

All levity aside, Helen is a monster. Her church in Nigeria has through bribery or who knows what (certainly nothing supernatural) been able to cause mayhem in less educated communities, has kidnapped children deemed being “witched” by parents, and yet has been exonerated by Nigerian magistrates. The account of this victim is heart-breaking.

My point is that something as bizarre as this finds a place anywhere there is sustained suffering when victims reach their wit’s ends. And as many of the suffering credentials Helen purports above show, it’s almost always economic suffering.

Yes there are many situations of witchcraft in Africa, but also in Appalachia and close to where I grew up in the Ozarks. Anywhere where hard work and earnest direction leads nowhere.

And it’s very enlightening to realize that Helen’s outreach has reached Texas. That place where so many jobs were created under Governor Oops.

It might be fun to poke at Helen, but it’s time to get rid of her. And not by some hocus pocos, but simple social compassion. Like, maybe, more stimulus? Jobs bill? I better stop. I feel that mermaid spirit creeping in.

Keep Hiding, Matilda!

Keep Hiding, Matilda!

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

A great scientific discovery in Tanzania made two years ago, announced yesterday, remains cloaked in secrecy because Americans are likely to kill it!

The Wildlife Conservation Society’s super field guy, Tim Davenport, has discovered an extremely beautiful, unusual and genetically important venomous bush viper, which he found somewhere in southern Tanzania and he won’t tell where.

Davenport, who was also the discover of the rare kupinji in 2005, has named the snake, the Matilda Horned Viper. (Note that there have been fewer new snakes discovered in the world in the last half century than primates.)

The discovery sheds important light on the evolution of snakes, and separately, on Tanzania’s own history of endemic forests and may ultimately contribute to the debate about why forests declined in Africa, and/or why early man contributed to this decline.

Wow. Lots of good stuff here. But Davenport says there are probably less than “dozens” of these snakes still alive, and so he won’t say where they live.

“It is often the case that the first few specimens of a newly discovered bush viper can be worth a high price and … a sudden rush to collect as many specimens as possible could actually extirpate the species in the wild,” WCS explains.

The genetic study WCS has carried out is sufficient evidence for the snake being considered an endangered species, and if finally ruled so, trade would become illegal. But getting the snake listed will take time, and in the meantime reptile collectors – mostly from America – would likely wipe it out of existence!

This is the really sad.

What exactly would happen?

Well, it starts with the scientific publication of where some new reptile has been found, and that’s why WCS “have agreed with the editor of the scientific journal … where the species description is published to keep the locality as vague as possible.”

Nevertheless, there are lots of clues, and unscrupulous reptile businessmen collectors will probably figure it out. WCS is worried. “Collection from the wild … has reached a level whereby it represents perhaps the biggest threat to Tanzania’s amphibians and reptiles.”

So Davenport is doing something extraordinary. He’s been breeding them, and that’s one of the reasons there’s been such a delay in the announcement. If he breeds enough, WCS may even put some into the commercial market to lower the price and the unscrupulous demand.

The problem is acute in America, because unlike other countries, there are few federal laws regulating owning exotic animals. These laws are largely left to the States, so some have good laws (like New York) and some have no laws whatever (like Oklahoma).

So it’s from Oklahoma that you can buy almost any snake in existence from companies like General Exotics which often goes out of business, then into business and back out of business, avoiding various state law agencies with jurisdiction over citizens who bought from them.

And the owners of General Exotics and dozens of other such unscrupulous companies hold wildly popular “fairs” constantly across the country. And of course when they come to Chicago they can’t bring exotics that are illegal under Illinois law, but they can still take your order!

These are not zoo people or even what I would call animal people. They are cutthroats who don’t care very much about what they’re selling.

But the problem, of course, isn’t them. It’s with the buyer.

The motivation for owning an exotic animal strikes me as wholly strange, but numerous analyses have suggested it falls in that macho category of indescribable subintellectual orgasms akin to anything which tempts fate like fast driving or polishing a gun.

I don’t know. I love to see them in the wild. And what they tell us about our prehistory, and how they contribute to our future lives is an immeasurable joy that you needn’t be a scientist to feel.

So keeping hiding, Matilda!

Broken like Most Everything at VicFalls

Broken like Most Everything at VicFalls

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A young Australian tourist who miraculously survived her bungi chord snapping over Victoria Falls New Year’s Eve is back in a hospital in South Africa.

Her traveling companion took a video of the failed jump and it’s going viral on YouTube.

Her survival is miraculous. Remember, your feet are bound when taking the plunge, and she recounted at one point that this binding got caught on something at the bottom of the raging river, so that she had to swim under water to untangle herself.

The video ends showing many of her cuts and bruises. She was a day in a local hospital and then resumed her travels but has since been reported in a South African hospital with a possible collapsed lung.

I’m restraining myself from making too many assumptions about this, because it easily fits into a growing dysfunctionality in Zimbabwe and with all tourist interests that are associated with Zimbabwe. The company providing these services actually functions also as a wholly Zambian company, but its roots are distinctly Zimbabwean.

Unlike here, or where bungi jumping began “Down Under” there is no government regulation or oversight of significance at Victoria Falls. No certification of the operators, no examination of the equipment, no good review of rescue plans.

Discard the yellow journalistic claims that she plunged into a crocodile infested river, by the way. There are lots of crocs in the Zambezi. My 42k canoeing trip in 3 days passes upwards of a thousand, but not where she fell. Crocs don’t like raging rivers, and she fell into the river just after it tumbles off the falls.

We are further hampered by no good bungi jumping accident statistics. They’re likely pretty good. The operator’s contention that an accident is more likely “driving to the bridge” where the activity occurs than on the activity itself may be true.

But if my interest were principally bungi jumping, I wouldn’t do it at Victoria Falls, just as I wouldn’t rent a car there or book my canoe trip right now. And if my principal interest was seeing VicFalls and this came as a secondary interest, I’d suppress it. It’s a lot safer to look at than to look back.

Zambia’s not so bad at the moment, but Zimbabwe is a mess. VicFalls is shared by them both, and anything to do with the river in particular is a joint administration, and given the terror of today’s Zimbabwe, essentially no administration, no safety gauges and no safety assurances.

Right now? OK to look at. Terrifying to look back.

Pets, For the Love of Money!

Pets, For the Love of Money!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Jess DuPloy with her new pet warthog on New Years Day in South Africa.
I can’t think of a single animal in Africa, not one, that someone didn’t make a pet out of. And some were extremely dangerous, and many ended up killing “master.” So why are we so obsessed with taming the wild?

I think there are two completely different reasons.

The first I’m sure comes to mind to everyone: a pet that bonds with you trusts you. In today’s world, especially, where there is so little trust between people and institutions, trust is cherished possibly to an extreme.

Many animal lovers will expand this into a variety of more universal themes. John Balzar, Senior Vice President of the Humane Society of the US says that pets “teach us about humility and empathy and loyalty. Their eyes hold the spark of life, the same as ours.”

That’s actually a lot less romantic than some get. But however you cut it, this notion of pure love and loyalty is really one of trust. And we need trust, and if we can’t get it from Mitt or Herb, then we definitely need to get a Lassie. That sounds sarcastic, but it’s filled with truth.

The other reason is less prosaic. It’s become a major part of the developed world’s economy, and PetSmart and PetCo and a thousand other pet cemeteries and pet pharmacies and pet devices have exploited our need for trust. They have mined our innate need to consume.

I walk my Lab, Morgan, in the dark in the morning, long before America is awake. It’s now quite dark. So I went first to PetSmart to buy some kind of light that would hang from his collar and was given a mind boggling choice, and I finally chose a red light, because I didn’t think a white light would be as noticeable. But I didn’t realize until I got in the car that it was in the shape of a heart.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I then went to PetCo and they had a great simple rectangular light that snapped onto the collar. Yes it was white, but by now I had been commercially maneuvered.

When the first dark day came I started with the PetCo white snap-on. Only, it snapped-off, as my Lab loves to dig to China whenever he senses a vole in the area. He’s never gotten a vole, but I’ve seen it run away from him when his head is completely buried in the hole he’s dug. Snap-on bites the dust.

So on went the heart-shaped red light. Well, this one doesn’t just shine, it sparkles. I didn’t feel warm and snugly, I felt like a migraine was coming on. Heartless, now, we walked in the dark.

And $20 had been thrust to the wind.

It reminds me of several years ago when our first feral cat began to approach me, and I spent long summer hours enticing her with food, until now she sits endlessly on my lap purring constantly. But this took a long time, and part of the process was to fashion her a place outside when she was in a winter’s transition.

I took our animal traveling cage and outfitted it with a heating pad and waited anxiously to see if the cat would domesticate herself.

Getting up early one morning, I noticed movement in the cage, got my camera and below is what I so joyfully discovered.

Accept, or Die. Nigeria, today.

Accept, or Die. Nigeria, today.

by Arusha ♥ 6 Comments

Nigeria is blowing up. There’s martial law in four of its 36 states, bombings and other violence is escalating, and religious war threatens to inflame shaky Chad, Niger and even Mali.

Economic instability always, always produces political instability, and Nigeria as one of the leading world oil producers has economic graphs with low and high points that are remarkable for their spread, showing extreme potential and extreme fragility.

During the relatively prosperous years of most of the last several decades, the country has developed significantly. In fact its economic development sped right past its social and cultural development, and this led in its own way to serious corruption that only recently was considered its greatest challenge.

No more. Nigeria’s challenge right now is to avoid self-annihilation. And tiresome as it seems, it is the classic battle between Christians and Muslims. One which permits no compromise. Accept, or die.

I’ve spent my whole life in Africa watching religion tear apart Africa and mostly as a battle between the world’s two greatest religions, Christianity and Islam, and now I even have to enduring watching it creep into the daily life of America.

One wonders what would happen if youth’s greater perception of the impoverished theologies of the world took hold. How fast can we hope this will develop? Yet if suddenly, miraculously, religion were removed from the bombs of the world, would something else take its place, like ethnicity or poverty?

That’s a question way too complicated to think about right now. In Nigeria, Boko Haram, the underground, illegal but increasingly organized terrorist group proudly affiliated with al-Qaeda, takes responsibility for much of the violence, today. Sharia oriented, today they demanded all Christians leave the Muslim north.

And Nigeria is far more developed than neighboring countries like Niger and Chad which also suffer from Christian/Islam battles. Many Nigerian Muslim clerics are screaming for peace, recognizing that all Nigeria has gained economically is at stake. But the economic gains, the level of prosperity, may not have been enough fast enough to help these clerics get their messages accepted.

The fuel inflaming this always simmering religious battle is the economy. The President of Nigeria has begun to eliminate fuel subsidies, and the scale of the reaction is unprecedented, even in this turbulent country. Many think these will now be rolled back, but it may be too late.

Religious conflict, pricked by economic decline, is happening round the world. In the more developed west fortunately the tone of the religious conflict is moderated into a less violent social/cultural one. Instead of Jesus fighting Mohammed it’s abortionists fighting evangelicals, but in the end it’s all the same.

It’s intolerance, a battle empirically governed by those who have the money and power and are fearful of losing it. When will we ever learn…