Month: October 2012

Weather Sandy or the Serengeti

Weather Sandy or the Serengeti

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The capacity for denial in America’s current lemming-like culture makes Africa seem like the real Super Power and we Midwesterners hoakies from Padokie. Super Storm Sandy = Global Warming. When will Americans learn?

Four times weekly starting about 5 a.m. CDT I access the internet to write this blog. This morning, half my links are down. So is the stock exchange. So is LaGuardia airport. And clients we have returning from a safari, half-way around the world, are stuck because their flight is canceled! Because of Sandy!

Because of GLOBAL WARMING.

The storms over the Serengeti are legendary, and I’ve often wondered if my own and other Midwestern fascination with the Serengeti is because we at least share turbulent weather.

As a child in tornado alley in northeast Arkansas I stood with my two younger siblings in the frame of a door watching hopefully as tornadoes passed us bye. That frame was destroyed by a tornado several years after we moved on.

In the Serengeti I’ve had camps blown down, had vehicles ground to a halt on a granite boulder by blinding rain and will always remember a TWA pilot who as a client pointed up to the sky and exclaimed, “That is an altocumulus standing lenticular!”

He exclaimed that the magnitude of that storm would flip a 747 like a dead leaf by a leaf blower.

But times have changed. These tumultuous events are no longer memories of the extreme. Extreme weather is normal, now. Quickly and more forcefully it’s happened than even we staunch heralds of global warming predicted.

A terrible storm whether in Africa or here is no longer unusual. Kenya’s northern frontier is exhausted by drought following floods following drought. The Zambezi River is flooding villages one year then practically turning off the next. South Africa’s breadbasket is being torn apart by desert winds.

And at home we just suffered the hottest year on record along the upper middle Mississippi, and drought was formidable. And this followed a year of incredible flooding. In our little corner of northwest Illinois in my little village several people were killed by floods. No one remembers that happening before.

For the past few years I’ve tried desperately to understand why so many Americans refuse the science of global warming and so many Africans don’t.

Unlike terrorism, the world’s experts know how to impede the coming apocalypse: reduce CO2 and other gas emissions. But because the developing world is developing so fast (thankfully) they proportionately produce more of these gases. The developed world has agreed that the developing world needs to be compensated for reducing their emissions.

So sort of a free ride, eh?

And a sacrifice for those already developed. Yes, that’s probably it. That’s probably why Americans who are the most developed in the world refuse to believe the obvious, and Africans among the least developed in the world, embrace it wholeheartedly.

But you know, if even that cynical view is correct, it’s no different than an old man lending a couple bills to a young lad who fetches his mail each day.

Because if we stop looking at ourselves as competing counties for the river’s stream and stop gerrymandering ourselves for a slight advantage for our portfolios, and start to realize that air blows right across immigration fences, then we’ll realize that this is a challenge that the world together can solve.

But my god it has to begin by simply acknowledging science. Recently several scientists in Italy were jailed for failing to adequately warn a village of an impending earthquake.

Perhaps we should consider jailing the crazies in Alabama who think global warming is a hoax?

To Poach Is/Or To Cull

To Poach Is/Or To Cull

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Is the extraordinary almost unbelievable reproductive rate of elephants in Tarangire National Park driving poaching?

Elephant researcher Charles Foley, whose principal research camp is located inside Tarangire National Park, reported this year that elephants that principally use Tarangire as their habitat are reproducing at a 7% rate.

For a large mammal that is nearly inconceivable. Reproductive rates vary in the extreme in the wild. This is principally because the reproductive rate is impacted so seriously by climate which immediately impacts food source. Wild animals tend not to breed when their normal habitat is disrupted.

And for the last several decades in Africa, “normal habitat” hardly exists except in a few well managed large reserves like Kruger in South Africa. But Kruger is famous for sustainable culling of big game, including giraffe, driven not by reproductive rates but the carrying capacity of the environment.

A stable wild animal population in a stable wild animal environment generally means that the animals which die, naturally or otherwise, are equally replaced by new births. In the Tarangire area we can speculate with some evidence that such a “stable” rate would be about 2%, not 7%.

But that population of elephants reproducing at a 7% rate isn’t growing. Why?

The short answer is poaching. There have been numerous articles recently on the increase in elephant poaching in Tanzania. See my last blog Friday for a summary.

There’s no other reasonable explanation. Tanzanian elephant management has been poor at best despite having some of the finest big game field researchers in the world. The failure lies squarely with the Tanzanian government, although it’s hard to argue their failures in wildlife management are any greater than in government across the board.

So despite many efforts to create elephant corridors that would widen dispersal of various populations (which in turn would complicate attempts to use reproductive rates for effective management) few of these corridors have been successfully implemented.

More or less the Tarangire population is contained. During the wet season a large portion of the herds move eastwards of the park. Individuals are reported traveling between Tarangire and Manyara (I’ve seen them myself on numerous occasions) but probably not in any sufficient numbers to validate dispersal theories.

A huge number of elephants are being poached.

But as I stated Friday and before, this is not a crisis that threatens the overall population, as was the case in the 1970s and 80s. In a weird and ironic way, one might postulate that poaching has become a current ecological component of a stable population.

That’s not a comfortable idea. And it doesn’t mean that poaching is good. But it does mean at least for the present that South African notions of management that aggressively embrace culling won’t work if poaching isn’t first contained.

But likewise, it means if poaching is contained, culling becomes immediately necessary.

It’s an extraordinary balancing act, and we all know that once poaching at this presumed level has become a part of a local culture, it’s near impossible to curtail. The likelihood that Tanzania could get it together in any reasonable period of time to actually limit poaching is as about as likely as finding a tiger in the Serengeti.

Poaching is not good for more reasons than breaking the specific laws against it. The sustained breaking of any laws leads to a lawless culture. The chain of sale of the ivory through the local middleman, corrupt politician and bribed cargo authority spreads anarchy through a social system. The pile of meat that’s left isn’t exactly inspected by local health officials before being dispersed through the community.

And the temper of the elephants being hunted down is exacerbated, and a calm elephant isn’t exactly a friendly beast to begin with.

So I’m not advocating allowing the status quo to continue. But I think it’s extremely important that everyone realize there are two very different sides to this management problem, and that dealing with one alone won’t work.

Poaching is no longer a separate issue from culling in Tanzania.

NPR White Elephant

NPR White Elephant

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

NPR’s reporting yesterday on elephant poaching in East Africa disappointed those of us who know East Africa and cherish its wildlife.

In addition to simple inaccuracies, my main criticism was that the two stories filed by John Burnett were grossly narrow, cherry picking scandalous components while ignoring an essential bigger picture for cheap and trivial stuff that gets quicker attention.

The increase in elephant poaching in East Africa, most severely but not exclusively in Tanzania, has been on the rise for 4-5 years. It’s not new and it’s not suddenly greater than a few months or years before.

Burnett’s lead story suggested it was something relatively new and newly urgent, and so he neatly avoided the essential and more complex history of what has actually been happening.

This is my sixteenth blog about elephant poaching since March. Simply type “elephant” in the search box to the right for those stories. Journalists from Reuters, the New York Times and AFP have filed just as many over that same period.

This is because as Burnett said poaching is increasing almost as rapidly as in the catastrophic years of the 1970s-80s when 95% of Kenya’s elephants were wiped out and nearly 60% of Tanzania’s. It has not reached that level — nowhere near that level — and many other factors are considerably different.

Let’s start with the numbers, because Burnett has some quite wrong. I tread very cautiously and with some hesitation, because the last thing I want to do is reduce concern for a very serious East African problem.

As I’ve written again and again, the “elephant problem” is central to East Africa’s wilderness and economy. Poaching is absolutely one of the most serious problems facing East African society. But we do our cause harm with untruths.

“Perhaps 70,000 to 80,000 elephants roam” Tanzania Burnett claims.

On January 15, 2011, The 5-year Tanzania Elephant Management Plan spear-headed by such prominent and widely respected researchers as Charles Foley put Tanzania’s elephant population at around 110,000.

How many elephant have actually been poached since then, augmented by a record number of births due to good rains, is hard to estimate accurately, but the overall population is certainly higher than Burnett speculates.

Burnett says that the 70-80,000 number is “perhaps a quarter” of the continent’s population (280-320,000). This is widely inaccurate. Most recent estimates are very much higher. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature puts the continent’s total number at 472-690,000.

Burnett quotes a former conservationist in Tanzania as saying that 30 elephants daily are being poached. Using a conservative estimate that each elephant killed carries at least 100 pounds in total ivory from two tusks, that would mean there was more than 500 tons of ivory poached out of Tanzania each year, and that’s ludicrous.

Shippers of the most creative sort could not conceal even a fraction of that.

These are not minor inaccuracies. The “carrying capacity” of any environment for managed big game depends on precise numbers, not widely speculated ones. Burnett’s high-balling his numbers might enhance the urgency of his report, but it distracts us from possible solutions.

I wonder if as in our politics and grocery shopping, Americans just can’t be mobilized without exaggeration. It’s a sad commentary that NPR has fallen into this trap.

Burnett’s second story was better. He interviewed a poacher.

The story demonstrates that quite unlike the 1970-80s corporate poaching with Sikorsky helicopters using everything from AK47s to bazookas and then chartered ocean liners, some of the poaching today is an individual criminal phenomenon. And like so much crime everywhere in the world, its principal motivation is poverty.

That makes it much less effective and much harder to remedy.

Burnett rightly puts the onus for poaching on Asian market demand that we all agree has been sparked by economic growth in China. The evidence for this is overwhelming. But I’m very disappointed he didn’t describe the exciting new efforts by Chinese and Chinese surrogates to change this behavior.

It means that even the villain knows he’s a villain, and that’s a real start.

Finally, Burnett totally ignored one of the essential if perhaps not the central cause of poaching, today: There are too many elephants.

There are too many elephants not just in Tanzania, but throughout Africa and even in Asia.

This fact is hard to digest. It doesn’t mean there are more elephants than there once were. But for the existing diminished habitat, and in terms of human/elephant conflict, there are simply too many.

And that’s the real problem. It means poachers often get a pass because local officials actually appreciate what they’re doing, because farms are saved and school buildings don’t have to be rebuilt so often.

You won’t hear this from an elephant researcher standing over a carcass recently poached. And you won’t get a Tanzanian official to say as much to a westerner writing an article about poaching. It takes a more cautious and deliberate reporter than Burnett.

The story of elephants, their majesty, their near decimation in the 1970-80s, and now their perplexingly big problem in rapidly developing African societies is one of the most important stories in East Africa, today. It represents almost all of East Africa’s problems and probably contains some of their solutions. It’s as much historical as contemporary.

But jigging up the story with exaggeration while neglecting central facts won’t help. It needs as much attention from Rachel Maddow as the Tea Party.

The Clothes Stink

The Clothes Stink

by Arusha ♥ 6 Comments

By Zapiro, South Africa's most famous cartoonist
The U.S. election dominates much of the media of Africa. Should it matter to American voters what a South African diplomat thinks? Does it really matter to a Kenyan businessman if Obama wins or not?

Yes and yes, but unfortunately that’s almost beside the point. I for one have become so weary about the election that my greatest wish is that it be over. I’m not sure if I or any of my many fellow Americans regardless of their politics cares much about what the world thinks, anymore.

We just want one less week in October.

No place on earth has an election cycle as long and drawn out as America’s. No other democracy spends a fraction of what the U.S. spends on elections. So towards the end nothing really matters but getting it out of sight and out of mind.

That’s not a very healthy attitude.

“The selection of a leader for the US might be in some respects more important for other societies than for America,” writes the respected diplomat, Richard Falk, in South Africa.

Writing today in South Africa, a Jamaican-born Tanzanian activist now teaching in the U.S. writes, “The US … massive debt, devalued dollar and unchecked political and economic power of the banks threaten the entire humanity.”

Quoting Newt Gingrich he concludes, “This will be the most important election in the United States since 1860.”

Perhaps, or perhaps not for us in America. But it’s certainly true for the rest of the world.

My nonscientific survey of Africa suggests that Africans believe they will have a much more difficult and threatened existence if Romney wins. The most attention being paid to the American election is in Kenya.

That’s understandable because Kenya is in the thralls of its own contentious election, and one that is much more significant to their country than ours is today in America. It will be Kenya’s first election under a radical new constitution, and the tension is extraordinarily high; the potential for violence is real.

Writing in Nairobi’s digital newspaper, Njoroge Kinuthia recently said “this democracy thing baffles and befuddles.”

Her analysis of some Kenyan politicians is exactly mine of Romney: “They fight and change” positions “like clothes.

“When they stink– [the clothes are] discarded like dirty rags for convenience… That’s why politicians keep hopping like grasshoppers. That’s our brand of democracy, folks.”

Kenya is deeply behind Obama, but for reasons that would disinterest most Americans. Principally it was because of how the Obama administration — and mostly Hillary Clinton –helped the country dig out of the mire of violence and political chaos of 2008. And then there’s the “distant relationship thing.” You’d be surprised how many Obama relatives have popped up in Kenya.

Kenya built its new constitution heavily with American-like government institutions. It will be tried and seriously tested for the first time in national elections on March 4. Perhaps that’s why Kinuthia seems to have as much ennui as myself. Perhaps it’s the institutions, not the players, which is to blame.

North Africa is solidly Obama, but “begrudgingly so” as explained so clearly by the Reuters correspondent in Beirut. North Africans are very disappointed that Obama fell so far behind in his promises to reduce the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

But be that as it may, Romney is “too keen to project U.S. military might.” In the part of the world where most of today’s wars are being fought, this is the preeminent concern. And there is very wide consensus across the continent that wars will increase worldwide if Romney gets elected.

The cartoon that appears above is from South Africa’s most famous political cartoonist, a man who like myself is extremely progressive. His cartoon is exactly how I feel.

And of course it ignores the fact that Obama’s inability to achieve his goals is in huge part the fault of the intransigent Congress.

But we focus our democracies so heavily on the executive that we won’t countenance their failure as a leader except as their own personal failure. It’s what the candidates themselves project! They speak as if they alone can determine governmental outcomes.

(Or even more laughably, that they alone can “bring together” the intransigent polarized divisions that have to make the laws they sign.)

Published in the South African blog RAIN, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, Richard Falk wrote two days ago, “When Obama actually won the presidency, it was one of the most exciting political moments in my lifetime.”

But it was downhill from that point, Falk writes. He believes that heavily racist America is to blame. He believes that redneck Americans were so polarized by Obama’s victory that it “gave rise to an Islamophobic surge that revived the mood of fear and paranoia that followed … the 9/11 attacks.”

(See Gary Wills in this issue of the New York Review of Books for a similar analysis.)

And now, Falk argues, Obama supporters like himself frustrated with the President’s inability to manifest his agenda risk losing to a “dangerous alternative,” because their support for Obama is no longer enthusiastic.

Baffles and befuddles. Right on.

Falk’s conclusion is sadly mine as well:

“The stakes in the presidential election have been reversed – the upcoming election is more about fear than hope.”

So trembling I will drop my vote into the ballet box as an inverse image of a mushroom cloud explodes over Iran.

Zap Zanzibar

Zap Zanzibar

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Last night Pres. Obama and Gov. Romney argued whether al-Qaeda was on the run. It is, and it’s central to why Zanzibar is exploding, now.

Yesterday tear gas filled Stone Town as mostly young radicals protested the indictment of a popular extremist sheik who was then held without bail.

The unrest in Zanzibar began last week. There was also significant violence in mainland Tanzania’s largest city, Dar-es-Salaam. Many media reports claimed this was Zanzibar’s “Arab Spring.”

It’s not. Unlike in northern Africa these demonstrations will not succeed in toppling the Tanzanian government. Also unlike in northern Africa, the vast majority of Tanzanians are critical of the Islamic violence.

Mainland Tanzania has shackled Zanzibar ever since the federation in 1964 and most Tanzanians look down on Zanzibaris. This has not been a helpful attitude, in the past and especially now as unrest grows on the island. Be that as it may, the significant point is that mainland Tanzanians are in the vast majority.

But there could be a period now measured in months of unrest not significant enough to stop tourists coming to see lions but enough to seriously effect the beach business. This is because the trouble that’s brewing is on the coast.

And that’s because the coast is where East Africa’s Muslim population is, and much of it has been highly radicalized over just the last few years.

Americans who think of East Africa as big game country don’t understand that more than half of the tourists to East Africa never see an animal larger than a monkey. The extraordinarily beautiful coral coast which extends virtually all the way south of Somalia through Mozambique is East Africa’s real tourist treasure, not wild animals.

Europeans especially use East Africa the same way Americans use the Caribbean, for sun ‘n sand vacations, usually of a week long, and usually transported by charter aircraft that practically land next to your beach view hotel room. There you stay, vegging out on margaritas and reggae bands.

Trouble on the coast is not new. In November, 2002, the Israeli Paradise Beach Hotel was mostly destroyed by a terrorist bomb and a ground-to-air missile narrowly missed an El Al jumbo jet taking off from Mombasa, Kenya.

There has been nothing as dramatic until this year. There had been numerous incidents of small grenade bombs in local bars and several incidents of tourist harassment in the last decade. But none of these critically dissuaded tourists from flooding to Kenya’s beaches almost exclusively from Europe.

But all that changed with the successful Kenyan invasion of Somali just to the north of Kenya. As Kenyan soldiers routed Somali terrorists, the coast began to heat up in much more generic ways that has seriously effected tourism. Tourists were kidnaped and publicly ransomed by terrorists, and virtually all the main beach hotels began to institute extremely strict security procedures.

Then last month, just as the Kenyan forces were about to oust al-Shabaab (al-Qaeda in Somali) from its last great stronghold of Kismayo, all sorts of political turbulence erupted in both Mombasa in Kenya and Zanzibar in Tanzania.

It struck me as an obvious consequence of the successful military action in Somalia. Rebels were running for cover, and the East Africa coast with its radical Muslims provides that, and what assets and hardware they could run with began funneling through East Africa.

Kenya is in the thralls of the last legislation implementing its new constitution before March elections. Suddenly there was a newly reborn political movement in Mombasa that called itself the Mombasa Republican Congress. Its agenda was nothing less than independence from Kenya.

The independent movement in Zanzibar which has been a perennial cause every since federation with the mainland in 1964, suddenly blossomed with new and fancy leaflets, new cars for its leaders and new megaphones for its Friday prayers.

While ostensibly completely separate political movements, the timing of both the emergence of the MRC and the makeover of the Zanzibar autonomy movement struck me as anything but coincidental. Money, methods and Islamic madness was coming from the north.

And then the tinderbox exploded in both Kenya and Zanzibar. Last month the principal radical cleric was killed in a car drive-by gangster-like shooting. And last week, Tanzanian police started rounding up radical clerics. Each incident, though separated by nearly a month, resulted in violent protests.

As I write this blog today Mombasa is calm following the Kenyan government’s very tough actions which involved dozens of arrests and the closing of theoretically unregistered Muslim organizations. The Kenyan President charged Mombasa radicals to “surrender or face arrest.”

But Zanzibar is not calm, today, and depending very much upon what the Tanzanian government now does with its radical Muslims, it may not be calm for a long while. And now what happens in one place is likely to effect the other.

As far as I can see, which is all along the exquisitely beautiful coral coast from Somali to the Mozambique border, this outstanding Indian Ocean venue won’t be a place to vegge out for some time.

When and will all of this calm down?

It depends upon how quickly the Somali mop-up occurs, how peacefully and completely the March Kenyan elections go, and how placated Zanzibari successionists will feel as Tanzania flirts with the idea of a new constitution.

March is the key date. After the March 4 Kenyan elections we’ll have a much clearer picture on which to predict what the coast will look like over the next year.

Until then. Leave your flippers at home. Concentrate on the binocs.

A Real Kenyan Oscar

A Real Kenyan Oscar

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The Kenyan entry for this year’s “Best Foreign Film” continues an incredible story about East Africa’s blindingly fast social changes and overwhelming tragedy in the struggle to become a modern society.

It isn’t just that “Nairobi Half Life” tells a powerfully realistic story of urban Kenya, but that the story is finally “being told” by Kenyans.

Rather like the Olympics, Oscars often cite a film as coming from a certain country even though the film is actually made by outsiders. Case in point is Slumdog Millionaire, which raised India out of the Bollywood marsh into the real global film world, even though the film was financed, directed, screen played, tecked and in many cases (excluding the lead) acted by British.

The main problem is financing. Even what the Iowa State Film board would consider a low-budget Indie film is a fortune in Kenya. So financing is likely to always come from film capitals like LA or London.

But this year the Kenyan entry for “Best Foreign Film” is almost exclusively Kenyan except for its financing. The techies, actors, supporting personnel and most importantly, the director, are all Kenyan. This will be David Tosh Gitonga’s second foray into big screen directing.

His first — as assistant director of the tear-jerking, soul uplifting, smile plastering masterpiece “1st Grader” – is absolutely one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

Both films portray a real and rapidly changing Kenya. “The First Grader” is set in rural Kenya right after the government declared education a universal and free right. The star is a wonderful old Kenyan who in his 80s is impoverished but proud particularly of his history as a freedom fighter. Unable to read a letter he receives from the government, he shows up the first day of the new term at a primary school in order to learn how to read.

Much more sinister but just as true and realistic, “Nairobi Half Life” follows a young rural Kenyan who migrates to Nairobi to become an actor. But like so many rural immigrants into the city, he is subsumed by the underbelly of a giant modern African metropolis, made hostage to the crime and drugs of its slums.

The film has been shown only at festivals and through a limited release in Germany but film goers are ecstatic. And its promise comes from the very respectable Durban Film Festival where lead actor Joseph Wairimu received the Best Actor Award.

It was not too long ago when Kenya produced nothing but wildlife films. And no criticism intended, they were extremely good.

But what is happening in Africa, and especially in Kenya, is truly mind bending for those of us who have lived and worked there through much of the last half century. But we can’t begin to imagine how it must be effecting Kenyans themselves.

Every single Kenyan is impacted in the tornado of change: The old, like the character in “The First Grader” and the young, like the lead in “Nairobi Half Life.” And unlike what we westerners consider the classic literature explanations of East Africa, Out of Africa is neither real and hardly any more relevant to what happens every day in Kenya now.

Good luck Kenya!

General Ndugu Obama

General Ndugu Obama

by Arusha ♥ 6 Comments

Drawing by PSMandrake.
Many will be surprised that America has grown increasingly militant in Africa. Because Africa is where most world terrorists now locate, American policy on the continent is defined overwhelmingly by the American War on Terror.

Obama’s massive military involvement in Africa is mostly covert, so not readily understood. But the policy is public if difficult to ferret out, and Ralph Nader said yesterday on Iowa Public Radio that Obama is far more militant than George Bush, who got us mired in two major wars.

Nader’s right. But Nader neglects to explain that Obama’s militancy is predominantly covert. Using drones, very secret special forces that come and go quickly, and massive support of African proxy armies, Obama has exceeded American military involvement in Africa under George Bush almost exponentially. But not in soldiers. So Americans don’t feel it, and mostly they don’t know about it.

Africom, the Pentagon command for Africa, now has more personnel and overall resources than all of USAid for Africa. The command manipulates deployed drones that have assassinated a dozen African militants and been critical to successful African military operations in Somalia, Uganda, the DRC and the Central African Republic.

That is not, of course, the be-all and end-all of American foreign policy in Africa. There has been continued assistance throughout the continent on a wide range of issues from clean water to malaria eradication; the Obama administration has been particularly supportive of African initiatives in the UN and World Court; and on highly political issues (several regarding Rwanda) the Obama Administration has come down swiftly and correctly on the sides that we progressives champion.

But the bottom line is that Obama looks much more like a general than a philanthropist to Africans, today. It is unlikely he would be nominated today for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I remain certain terrorism cannot be eliminated strictly militarily. That results in two options: (a) don’t try to eliminate global terror, just do the best possible and learn to live with what remains; or (b) simultaneously work towards eliminating the cause of terrorism.

That [b] has gained the euphemism of “nation building” starting as early as the Vietnam War, and it remains hard to define, very open-ended nonmilitary support that is often squandered or misplaced. But there is no question Obama believes in the policy for Africa, despite the emphasis on militarism.

So as the veteran African diplomat John Norris pointed out in Foreign Policy earlier this year, “this president’s approach to Africa look a great deal like business as usual.”

It’s hard to fault a leader who had to dedicate most of his time to staving the collapse of the entire global economic order for being uncreative with new African development policies. But it’s not hard to critique his aggressive militant approach to Africa’s terrorists. That’s not “business as usual.” It is a considerable ratcheting up of war in Africa.

But fatefully or coincidentally “nation building” in Africa is proceeding at a rapid pace as well, albeit with little direct American support. The implementation of a new constitution in Kenya, a recharged South African political debate about basic social and commercial policies, glimmers of constitutional change in Tanzania and Malawi, might all be that is necessary to balance Obama’s militarism.

And it puts us progressives and peaceniks in a compromised position. Terrorism might indeed be on the wane in Africa because of Obama’s increased militarism, but the policies are not the ones we would have advocated in the beginning and the question of their shelf life remains dubious.

Is Obama an African war monger? Yes. But global peace maker, too? That is the crux of today’s African foreign policy debate.

Old Man or Best Loser?

Old Man or Best Loser?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Our Supreme Court considers reigning in contentious affirmative action policies just as Kenya implements the policy in an extreme way.

Last week CNN reported that “race-conscious admissions” as a policy for determining university admission “appeared to be in trouble.” The report filed by Bill Mears suggested that Anthony Kennedy’s swing vote on the conservative court could preserve the general policy while striking down the specific plan from the University of Texas under particular review.

However broad or narrow this particular decision might be, there is no question that affirmative action in the U.S. is in decline, even as there is near unanimity among academics as well as commercial managers that policies which create diversity are over time very beneficial to everyone.

America stepped into affirmative action gingerly and took a long time to fully embrace it. That has lasted about a decade or slightly longer, and it now seems as though we’re gingerly stepping away from it.

Kenya on the other hand is going from a society almost exclusively managed by men to a forced society where at least one-third of the country’s power elite must be women in the course of a single election.

Although the debate and legislation has been confined to the make-up of Kenya’s government, there is little doubt that a one-third female Kenyan government will if not actually legislate rules for the private sector will certainly powerfully effect it.

Unlike the possibly too careful approach by America, I’m worried that Kenya’s might be too uncareful. The new constitution now being implemented is the driving force. The problem is that this very difficult section, which mandates the one-third rule, has only now begun to be addressed, less than five months before the next election.

Most legislators and public commentators promote the obvious way, which has become known as the “best loser rule.” When, for example, less than a third of the new legislature elected is female, then some of the duly elected male winners will be somehow automatically replaced by women closest to having won.

But how this metric will be calculated remains to be determined. Which district will be the sacrificial lamb and which female candidates will then be elevated? Will it be determined by actual votes or percentages or pro-rata?

The complexity of the issue is so great some argue it is too great to solve before March, when the next election occurs. Seventy, or one-fifth of the new National Assembly, will be appointed. This unappointed one-fifth was intended to be reserved for noncompetitive leaders like wise diplomats or career unionists who are appointed by the executive and National Assembly.

One argument suggests all seventy should be reserved for women, but then what if the gender level is still not achieved?

That’s probably a bad idea, since the unappointed legislators is itself contentious, a holdover from Kenya’s former constitution intended above all to achieve stability after a close election by allowing the narrowly won to beef up their control. Plus if applied in its purest, the appointments of legislators would themselves have to follow the affirmative action rule which was must be applied on its flipside, too: there can’t be more than a two-thirds gender dominance.

The issues in the Supreme Court University of Texas affirmation action case are no less or more complex than Kenya’s gender rule. But the scope of each is hugely different. And it represents the level of risk each society is now willing or not willing to take.

In the global arena today, America moves like an old man afraid of falling. Kenya jumps with abandon like a kid on a trampoline. The risks of failing govern America. The passion for more Olympians governs Kenya.

Really Wild Intervention

Really Wild Intervention

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The wild gets less wild, and we begin to manage the great African savannahs like a zoo. Is it our bleeding hearts or our brainy conclusions? Should we intervene in the wild to save big game from natural calamity?

In May and again last week, researchers in Zambia and Kenya intervened to save elephant that were mired in mud. Had they not intervened both elephants would have died. Now, both elephants are completely well.

This intervention is a seachange in the way researchers have interacted with the wild for centuries.

Rachel McRobb heading a team of The South Luangwa Conservation Society pulled an elephant from the mud in May and attracted enormous attention worldwide. The story made front pages in the London tabloids.

Writing in her own blog, McRobb conceded that “Most conservationists believe that man should not meddle with the natural order and that we should allow nature to run her course however cruel.” And without any further explanation as to why she no longer adopts the rule, she admitted, “We simply could not stand by and watch them struggle and slowly die.”

Last week in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park the exact same story:

Researchers with Cynthia Moss’ Amboseli Trust for the Elephants rescued an eight-month old calve from a deep muddy well hole after using Landrovers to chase the mother away. Landrovers and ropes were then used to rescue the juvenille and it was ultimately reuinted with its mother. Click here for the video of the event.

“We shouldn’t intervene where animals are dying of natural causes. In fact, human interference can have implications for other wildlife or ecosystem processes that rely on animal carcasses. It’s important to let wildlife be wild,” Australia’s Victoria State government natural resources ministry in Australia states in its SOP guidebook.

Most wildlife authorities continue to adopt this age-old viewpoint. The elephant rescues described above may beg the questions that global climate change or human/wildlife interactions or even outcomes caused by tourism contributed to the mud and hole but it would be a stretch to do so.

But McRabb’s honest admission and the rescue last week in Amboseli suggests researchers are changing their minds about this maxim, not just rationalizing it.

Oscar Horta at the University of Santiago de Compostela published one of several “seachange” position papers two years ago, arguing in meticulously logical detail that wildlife intervention may now be the right moral course for researchers to take.

But whether these decisions are coming from the gut as with McRabb or the frontal cortex as with Horta, there is no question the trend is gaining wide acceptance.

The days of Albert Schweitzer might be at hand.

Yet the much respected Nature magazine, which has been undertaking a lengthy discussion of this issue for several years, suggests otherwise. In its final position paper this year “Ethics of Wildlife Management and Conservation: What Should We Try to Protect?” biologists as well as ethicists from universities in Texas and Cophenhagen labored to reduce the complex conversation into five major issues.

I’ll let you follow the link for the minutae but I think they’re self limited conclusion still remains obvious: “We do maintain that explicit consideration of the values at stake should underpin careful debate about … whether constant human involvement in … wild areas is desirable.”

I don’t think they do think it’s desirable and I know they’re terribly worried about what a stink this will make.

For many years I was no board with what I think is Nature’s foundational conclusion. But I, too, am changing.

It’s not because I’ve grown more sensitive to animals, and I worry very much about the anthropormorphization of wildlife that occurs with this assumed growing sensitivity. Rather, I think it’s an admission that the wild is just not the wild, anymore.

There is already too much intervention in almost every nook and cranny of this planet to argue that there is anything unimpacted by development or human activity. It takes no scientist to know this. More people, more industry, more cabon dioxide, less of everything that was once in the beginning natural.

And given that state, however nostalgic we may be for the Garden of Eden, saving life and perhaps evening increasing life’s happiness becomes almost a first principal.

Fight For The Present

Fight For The Present

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Acting as a true global, singular power, the UN has vowed military action if rebels holding most of Mali don’t surrender.

This is an astounding world development and I’m even more astounded about how little press it’s being given in the United States. America likes to portray the United Nations as a leftist thorn in its side and The Right in America sees it as a communist ploy.

But late Friday the Security Council acted unanimously at their Six thousandth, eight-hundred and forty-sixth meeting which lasted a deliberative 23 minutes. The conflicted communists of China, the gangsters of Russia, the existentialists of France and every one the 15 non-permanent members including the pitiful Pakistani and the angry Azerbs said “Go to war!”

And they all looked up from their down-turned heads at the American representative, Susan Rice, to ask for money for ammunition, which we will likely provide.

So exactly what has created the first global crusade since the Balkans?

Al-Qaeda.

Western moralists forever seeking validation of their soul are arguing that the cold-hearted Asians have been convinced to act because single mothers with bastard children in the African deserts are being stoned to death by the extreme Islamists.

True, but not the reason for consensus.

Eastern equivocators argue the west has finally given up its moral pandering for the practical possibility of stability by supporting the doesn’t-matter-they’re corrupt but effective leaders of what is left of a Mali government in Bamako which at best resembles a quiche not cooked long enough.

True, but neither is this the reason for world consensus.

And Azerbaijan argued that it will pave the way for a less strident Eurovision Song Contest.

That was uncertain, but neither is it the reason.

The reason such disparate polities have reached consensus to go to war against the rebels in Mali is because this is the first time in history that a globally organized power, originally stateless, is about to become stated.

Al-Qaeda has been in retreat for a while, and especially since the assassination of bin Laden and so many others of its leaders. But it is a pure ideological movement. It is the American Republican Congress at an even greater extreme: compromise is out of the question. It is the New Hampshire state motto with “free” replaced with “right” and right as defined by extremism so acute that first principals are reduced to three or four-word sentences.

There is no question that al-Qaeda will fight to the last man standing. In their convoluted retreat from Tora Bora they have left a world in disarray which in many regards resembles the Taliban world of the 1980s, turning back the global ideological moderation of the 1990s and putting everybody on edge.

They’ve been whipped in Afghanistan, blown out of Yemen, are being scrubbed out of Somali and recently slithered through the Central African jungles finally regrouping in the African desert. Their deft manipulation of several rebel (and mostly ethnically based) groups in northern Mali which has plagued the area for perhaps a century has been absolutely amazing.

Like what they might even now be trying to do in Syria, what is left of al-Qaeda fed on the experience of their organization of the basest of human inclinations – greed, racism, egocentrism – to knock down and take over Mali rebel groups that had been making trouble for generations but never really succeeding.

So now they control a piece of world real estate the size of France. Much of the world cared less for the last year, even as some of the world’s greatest treasures in Timbuktu were being bulldozed into desert sand.

Not enough sentiment was mustered against stoning girls for showing their lips, either, but then the Security Council member, Pakistan, knows all about that.

But as what is left of the colonial construction known as the government of Mali erodes with each desert breeze, al-Qaeda is poised to actually assume the right to a seat in a global auditorium right next to North Korea and Belarus. Were they to deign such publicity.

Thus, unanimity among the members. All hail the United Nations.

You get my sand drift? When a threat to the status quo of an existing state is demonstrated by an erstwhile stateless entity, it will be squashed out, regardless of that entity’s or its target’s ideologies. It matters not right or wrong.

Not incompetence or torture or lying and deceit or sucking the life out of the poor or machine gunning all protesters or mushroom clouds over melting ice caps. Just a simple little demonstration that a king can, in fact, be displaced by knaves.

What a wonderful calculus for change.

The Democratic Challenge

The Democratic Challenge

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

Two of Africa’s wisest old men have echoed the same cautions that America’s founders gave a young democracy about its elections. Beware: Bad elections are the greatest threats to democracy.

Yesterday Kofi Annan and Ngugi wa’Thiongo focused on the upcoming Kenyan elections as a marker for world democracy and reflected on America’s distortion of elections as something to be avoided by younger countries.

Annan is a well-known world figure, one of the most prominent Secretary Generals the United Nations has ever had. Like Jimmy Carter who remained remarkably active after leaving office, Annan’s role in global negotiations has never ceased. In fact, it was Annan who led the Kenyans out of the mire of the violence following their last election in 2007.

Ngugi has adopted America as his home after a career as a professor at Yale and New York universities. He is currently the Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Univ. of California in Irvine. Until 2004 he lived intermittently between Kenya and the U.S., and in Kenya is heralded as a famous revolutionary and writer.

What Americans obsessed with their own election need to know is that huge new parts of the world, especially in Africa, are adopting democracy and America’s form of democracy to govern their young societies.

This is a major change from hardly a generation ago when just as many new countries were adopting forms of Chinese communism or heavily top-down managed socialism. It’s a testament of course to the end of the Cold War, but also of the preeminence of capitalism in the global economy.

Old countries like China might be able to fiddle with capitalism and not disrupt their mechanisms for governing, but new countries can’t. The power of the economy is so critical with emerging countries that it often trumps other moral and social issues.

A case in point was Ngugi’s violent condemnation yesterday of Kenya’s decision to use English as the predominant language for governance. Ngugi is Kikuyu, the main tribe in Kenya and was imprisoned as a freedom fighter under the British. He is himself a master of the English language but he has written scholarly novels in Kikuyu, and he believes preserving multiple languages is critical to an advanced society.

It is something of the inverse argument in America as to whether Latinos should be validated by a greater use of Spanish in government.

Arguing that the current Kenyan leaders are “child abusers” for denying “mother tongues” Ngugi says, “To have a mother tongue … and add other languages … is empowerment. But to know all the other languages and not one’s own is enslavement.

“The post-colonial government and the entire [Kenyan] elite have chosen enslavement over empowerment,” he concludes.

The problem, of course, is that the violence that followed the 2007 elections turned ethnic. It is completely understandable that current politicians wishing to avoid anything much beyond a dull election want to steer clear of languages that are specifically ethnic.

In America as in Kenya when one person speaks a language that another person doesn’t understand, enormous suspicions arise, conjecture becomes almost as credible as fact-checking, and literally all hell can break lose. Unlike in Canada or Belgium where multilingual democracy flourishes, in most of the world multiple languages breed distrust.

(N.B. What puzzles many in the Kenyan situation, though, is why English was chosen rather than Swahili. Swahili belongs to no specific tribe and so is clearly universal among East Africans. The problem is that Swahili is a lingua franca and suffers thereby from a sore lack of precision. Tanzania tried to use Swahili as the formal language for many years, slowly giving way to English. It’s near impossible in Swahili to say succinctly, “Federal zoning regulations with regards to clean and safe landfills will preempt county council laws with regards to individual ownership.”)

(N.B. continued: Swahili in my view, by the way, is one of man’s most wondrous cultural achievements of the last several centuries, creating poetry of nearly every statement while maintaining a universal morality far superior to many popular western notions about right and wrong. But that’s another blog, and in this case I think Ngugi is wrong.)

Annan didn’t mention language, but in virtually everything else the two scholars said yesterday there was agreement.

Annan who is Ghanian was in Kenya yesterday. He referred to his fears that money is buying power in Kenya, as in the world over. “The infusion of money in politics … threatens to hollow out democracy,” Annan told CNN in September.

Annan understands the importance of capitalism in the world, today, but he also sees it as a threat to democracy. Many of us wait expectantly for his treatise on how the twain should ever meet, but for the time being I suppose we should presume he simply wants aggressive regulation.

In Kenya today he sees a brazen challenge to its young democracy by its rich leaders. Four of Kenya’s richest men and political leaders, including the son of the first president Jomo Kenyatta, are on trial in The Hague for inciting the violence of 2007.

Yet two of them, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, are running for president. (Not yet officially, but in Kenya “officially” comes quite close to the actual election.)

Annan sees this occurring not because the Kenyan people want it to, but because these individuals are so powerful, and because they are so rich.

Ngugi concurs: “Unregulated money in politics undermines …confidence in democracy… The explosive growth in campaign expenditures … strengthens fears that wealth buys political influence.”

American politicans’ penchant for personal stories about their early impoverishment is mostly malarkey or at best irrelevant to their current control of wealth. The vast majority of successful American politicians are rich. The cost of entering politics defies many startups. Over $1 billion will be spent by candidates and their surrogates in the current U.S. election.

Both men see the poor, the less privileged, the disabled and geographically disenfranchised as likely a majority of African voters that can be deftly ignored in a modern election:

Ngugi: “Too often, women, young people, minorities and other marginalized groups are not given a full opportunity to exercise their democratic rights.”

Democracy is today widely popular throughout new African countries and embraced as the best way to protect and govern themselves. But the messages that Ngugi and Annan delivered yesterday to a promising young African country resonant here at home just as much.

Democracy is never achieved; it’s simply strived for. America has used democracy for nearly two and a half centuries, yet the corrupting power of money, the difficulties of implementing democracy to a multi-lingual population, and the ease with which the underprivileged can be disenfranchised are threats as great today as they were in the 18th century.

Nor any greater a threat in Kenya than here.

Redistributed Marriage

Redistributed Marriage

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

We should be incensed by the privileged often American tourist to rural Africa who characterizes want and poverty as some kind of pristine Garden of Eden that should just be left alone.

After her “first visit to Kenya,” a recent American tourist asked in her blog: “The Maasai culture and traditions are pure, so why would you want to change them?”

The question makes me scream: because the Maasai want iPhones, and sleeper posturepedic mattresses, and Brita filters, and slim notebooks and a hope for a better life. Anything wrong with that?

Today, the UN and hundreds of other organizations worldwide, celebrate the Day of the Girl Child which specifically condemns child marriages and which pointedly teases out much of American conservative ambiguities about freedom and individual rights.

Most forced wedlock for girl children occurs in Asia, but a close second is sub-Saharan Africa and specifically in East Africa’s still deeply rural areas.

“Some people sell their daughters at a tender age so they can get food. It’s common but people are silent about it,” a rural Kenyan told Reuters TrustLaw.

The Reuters TrustLaw story interview also described Somali traditions intended to preserve virginity prior to wedlock by arranging very young child marriages.

Now to some that may seem all so noble, right?

Such practices as female circumcision, child marriage and prostitution, and even child slavery are time and again reported in equivocal ways.

“Here’s a troubling fact: 60 million girls world wide are forced into marriage before the age of 18…,” that American tourist wrote in her blog, “But when it comes to cultures that practice child marriages, not everyone agrees that change is a good thing.”

Exactly who is everyone? A few locals you photographed on your $10,000 safari while being completely incapable of speaking to them them in their own language? Might their smiles had something to do with the 200 shillings you gave them for the shot?

I concede there are issues specifically relating to children that teeter on that sharp fence separating individual from human rights and perhaps this contributes to why some Americans believe that poverty and deprivation is fated to “just be left alone.”

Few argue that each child is different, capable of assuming independence at earlier or later ages. The UN and many organizations, though, set 18 years as the first age societies should presume a child is fully able to assume whole responsibility for herself.

Only a few generations ago, that was absurd. My grandmother married at 13 years old, a lost immigrant from Croatia. If she had not married she would likely have died in the mayhem that followed the flow of thousands of immigrants out of Ellis Island.

But that’s the point. That was more than 100 years ago. Although communities in Bangladesh or Mogadishu may not seem much different today than Ellis Island was at the turn of the 20th century, the global awareness of poverty and deprivation has increased enormously.

Fortunately, we all now care more about one another than ever before, if for no other reason than we’ve the tools to see further and deeper, everywhere.

The resilient human spirit, which burns greater in my opinion among the poor and deprived, will find moments in even the most awful situations for satisfaction and happiness. The beautiful nostalgia of my own boyhood may indeed not be so different from that of a successful African businesswoman of her own childhood in a rural hut.

But the effrontery of we privileged to wonder if earlier she might have chosen to remain deprived and under privileged is astounding. I believe it’s evil. It’s racist and the result of greed, a fear that to make things better for others means they will be made worse for ourselves.

Redistribution. Shudder at that word.

And the point there is that redistribution is only the beginning. With more of the world raised from deprivation, the productive capacity will be so remarkably increased that there will be more for all.

So get a grip. Redistribute some of that wealth that got you to Kenya to the poor little Maasai girl who would very much like to visit you in Columbus.

Greyed Out Bird

Greyed Out Bird

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I am a loving pet owner. But I would never imprison a wild animal and then call it a pet. African Grey Parrots belong in the wild, not in a cage.

The majority of African Greys kept in the United States may have actually been born in captivity. In a sense they were manufactured to be pets; they’ve never soared over Africa’s great forests.

But be that as it may, are you sure that your bird was captive bred? And even if it truly was, do you realize that your keeping the bird in a cage is contributing to its extinction in the wild, where it much more truly belongs?

There are many as 30,000 loving owners of the Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus) in the United States, which for the first time this year was listed as “vulnerable” by the scientific organization (IUCN) used to determine which animals are in danger of extinction.

If the decline in the African Grey Parrot continues, and if the IUCN ultimately classifies it as “endangered” and if the CITES convention then adopts its recommendation, international trade in the bird would stop.

But the politics involved in this would be extraordinary. So there is real concern that at the point the bird is classified as threatened, it will be too late.

The IUCN explains the rapid decline in Africa’s most famous parrot because “It is one of the most popular avian pets in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East due to its longevity and unparalleled ability to mimic human speech.”

IUCN says that over the last 30 years “a million birds” may have been removed from the wild in Africa. Most of these are removed illegally, although a good portion have been captured on licenses given by corrupt African governments.

The market in the U.S. has existed for decades, but a new and vibrant market in China has also emerged as a result of China’s increased wealth. And unlike the U.S. and Europe, there are no laws in China that restrict the importation of wild birds.

Today, an African Grey Parrot in the U.S. sells for an average of $1,000. Good statistics are not available, but successful breeding of captive African Greys is a very lucrative business. Reputable companies like PetSmart routinely sell them, and eBay and Amazon both offer them.

But since there is no exact certification of what is truly a captive-bred bird, it’s likely today that many are illegal imports.

Many of these birds are smuggled out of Africa through poorly monitored ports like Windhoek, Namibia. Last week the Namibian Avicultural Association adopted new rules to try to stem the flow of illegal birds through the country.

The association claims that bird dealers in the country “do not seem to know that buying a parrot without [proper certification] may represent a bird that has been illegally caught in the wild.”

Like outright poaching, I can sympathize with Africans desperate to make a day’s wage, and capturing birds isn’t as difficult as it seems. On the Windhoek black market as throughout Africa, National Geographic estimates the poacher receives about $30 a bird.

The African middleman who pays the poachers smuggles the birds out of the country in horrible conditions. The majority die in crowded and dirty little containers that may have squashed hundreds of birds. The African middleman likely earns around $50 per bird.

The birds that survive the smuggling are taken by wholesalers in the U.S., Europe and China that launder their origin and sell them to companies like PetSmart. The wholesaler probably makes $300-500 per bird.

So while I can empathize with the poacher, it’s not possible to condone the knowingly illegal work of the middleman.

Ultimately, this horrendous trade will stop only when the market stops. Without a listing by CITES as endangered that’s impossible in places like China.

But at here at home and in Europe, let common sense prevail. Get a dog.

Early Dinosaur in Africa

Early Dinosaur in Africa

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Original NatGeo photograph courtesy Erin Fitzgerald; art by Tyler Keillor
One of the first dinosaurs to roam earth lived in southern Africa and the discovery announced last week raises considerably Africa’s evolutionary importance.

It’s common knowledge that man and his broader family of primates arose in Africa, but until now it was thought that the myriad of the earliest land life forms – particularly reptiles and dinosaurs – arose on the western hemisphere.

Last week dinosaur guru Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago confirmed that Pegomastax africanus lived in southern Africa about 200 million years ago.

The creature like all of the early dinosaurs at the beginning of their reign was neither large or meat-eating. With a presumed behavior and appearances more like a big reptile, the little parrot-headed creature was less than 2 feet long and hardly the size of a house cat.

It would be another 130-150 million years before the August creatures like Tyrannosaurus Rex ruled the earth, and then for a relatively short dozen million years or so before a giant meteor hit the earth and wiped them out.

But the creatures that attract museum members and figure prominently in child’s play all started much smaller. Large dinosaurs have been found in Africa, but few compared to those in the western hemisphere.

And Pego was actually found in 1983 and then its fossil got filed away in a Harvard cabinet. Sereno was recently combing through old fossils in Cambridge when he discovered this critically important piece that had been considered insignificant at the time.

Pego’s importance aside from its curious own anatomy and significance in filling the many gaps in the early dinosaur evolutionary line is that Africa now provides a similar age range of dinosaur finds that until now has been restricted to the western hemisphere.

Current science suggests the dinosaurs emerged in South America about 230 million years ago. The oldest finds have been in Argentina and they were similar in anatomy and size to Pego. As a species, though, paleontology suggests they exploded in North America around the time Pego lived, and over the next hundred million years or so began to radiate all over the world.

Well, perhaps not. Perhaps Africa provided parallel evolutionary tracts to South America, or perhaps Africa even contributed somehow to the emergence of the grandest beasts in North America.

Speculation might have to be left to us untrained enthusiasts, though. Looking back that far in time reduces the certainty of many presumptions. It’s just harder to know the actual weather, geology, existing full ecosystems than we can with the much later evolutionary story of primates to ourselves.

And the more primitive the life form (however big it might have been) may also mean that its ability to radiate was greater. It might have been easier for a reptile-like creature to have been thrown across the ocean on stick than for a monkey-like creature to have crossed a large lake.

Nonetheless, the great strides palaeontologists like Sereno have made in just this generation are truly mind-boggling. Early earth was much more elaborate show than we might have thought when I was a boy.

And Africa seems to be holding its own through virtually all of its wondrous ages.

Obama/Neanderthal/Romney Debate

Obama/Neanderthal/Romney Debate

by Arusha ♥ 7 Comments

Animus in our culture is pervasive and not just in politics. Recent awe-inspiring discoveries about Neanderthals have enraged the Right, once again.

The various emotions I feel following the Obama/Romney debate are complex, but all so similar to the same emotions provoked by the angry outbursts of creationists over new and exciting Neanderthal discoveries.

Harvard and the Max Planck Institute have been meticulously studying the DNA of Neanderthals for several years, now. Discoveries understandably come out allele by allele, and this week they announced a real breakthrough:

Neanderthals interbred with modern humans a lot more than previously thought, and the two sub-species likely lived peaceably side-by-side for tens of thousands of years. The “disappearance” of the Neanderthal was not a wipe-out by a more warring subspecies – us – but likely assimilation by romance.

As much as 4% of modern man’s DNA is Neanderthal, and that’s incredibly significant. Recent studies also confirm that modern Africans carry less Neanderthal genes than non-Africans, and along with other microbiology and genetics, further confirm relatively stable Neanderthal assimilation into our current species, rather than anything more dramatic.

Regrettably, I now concede one of my most powerful stories given during my lecture at Olduvai, where I wow my clients with the notion that we (homo sapiens sapiens) might have eaten the Neanderthals up!

It was a great story and a plausible notion for years, and the wow came not in some Carl Sagan notion of our intrinsic animus but rather that the Neanderthals, while “smarter” (their brain/body ration might be larger), they lacked something “we” had that allowed us to conquer them. For many years that was presumed to be better language.

The possibility that most of our direct African ancestors were capable of a better manipulation of language than Neanderthals has become more contentious over the years, but it’s not yet fallen from complete grace. So until recently it was a wonderful notion that language trumped IQ.

I concede, but there are enough wow moments in the evolution of man that, other than having to redo my lesson plan, I still have full faith in the energy of the lecture!

But not for creationists. The recent discoveries have just angered them, further.

A couple weeks before the Harvard/Planck study was announced, there was new archaeological evidence that Neanderthals were peaceful, and separately, that Neanderthal decorated himself with bird feathers.

That was not so profound from my point of view, but the creationists went ape about it:

“More breaking news from this week about Neanderthal man, they found feathers in his living arrangement and it was not there by accident rather it was there by intelligent design!”

The quote above is from one of the leading creationists. Take a minute to scan all the recent posts under his rubric of “archaeology” and you’ll collect his enormous animus.

You’ll note reference after reference about science’s notion of Neanderthal as an oaf. When quite to the contrary, for years there’s been nothing in scientific discovery to suggest Neanderthal were less smart than us! In fact, if the brain/body weight argument regains traction, it can be plausibly argued they were smarter!

This creationist isn’t a god-fearing man displaying disdain or arrogance about science’s mistakes about the heavens. It’s an animal filled with anger. And it brings me back to the Romney/Obama debate, because the collection of emotions are similar.

Truth matters. In fact it apparently matters so much that it creates anger in those who deny it. And when that anger is sufficiently mobilized by celebration, the dynamic begins to be powered by less, not more, truth.

So just say something again and again that is a lie, or claim you don’t believe something you do (or once did), and you’re right on the same squad as Darth Nader, denying the truth and somehow remarkably gaining energy from doing so.

And at this point rational debate goes to pot. Evil trumps good.

We ought to take some lessons from our early ancestors. There was less animus and more romance than we ever thought possible.

Is this Obama’s secret? But will it win the House?