Top Ten Stories in 2012

Top Ten Stories in 2012

Five surprisingly dramatic themes and five wondrous individual stories make my list of 2012’s most important news about Africa. It will take multiple blogs to review them all beginning January 3, so be sure to come back to read the details!

Here’s the list:

#1 : The Somalia War Ending
After 20 years of anarchy and terrorist rule, the Kenyan military occupied Somalia and routed its warlords: Al-Shabaab is being replaced by civil servants, pirates have been displaced by law abiding fishermen and one of the world’s greatest and longest conflicts is slowly but surely coming to an end. (Read more on January 3.)

#2 : West Exports War on Terror into Africa
Routed from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia, and now to Kenya, the West’s secret military operations are chasing world terrorists like al-Qaeda into Africa. And while it’s making the west more secure against terrorism, it’s making Africa less secure. (Read more on January 3.)

#3 : African Cultures like Economies Outpace West
African economies did just fine during the recession and their rapidly developing societies are making astronomical leaps in business, women and human rights, and systems of governing. With only a few notable exceptions like Uganda, the future for Africa looks brighter than for the west. (Read more on January 4.)

#4 : South Africa Turns South
But short-term, Africa’s biggest powerhouse, South Africa, is in trouble. As the last of its old freedom fighter leaders plays out as president, Jacob Zuma is not just making a laughing stock of South Africa, but a mess of its political system. It remains to be seen how disruptive this will be to civil society, but dark clouds are forming. (Read more on January 4.)

#5 : Complicated, Sad Increases in Wildlife Poaching
Enormous increases in poaching – especially rhino and elephant – seem linked to China’s growing demand for animal parts like ivory. Corporate poaching – not seen since the 1980s – is back. But there’s more to it. A lot has to do with a growing human/wildlife conflict in developing African societies. There are probably too many wild animals for modern society. (Read more on January 7.)

#6 : Direct Hominin Ancestor from Australopithecine
Because of dramatic advances in paleontology as well as awesome field discoveries, the evolution of man blossomed with wonderful surprises over the last generation. But it made scientists awfully cautious about drawing our family tree. That may have changed this year as definitive exciting science might actually have found our earliest ancestor. (Read more on January 8.)

#7 : China Partners with U.S. for Peace in Sudan
The world’s two most diametrically opposed societies have struggled uncomfortably ever since shaking hands during the Nixon administration in the 1970s. Whether it be over world wars and conflicts, climate change, human rights – you name it, we’ve been at odds. But this year the two adversaries teamed up to make peace in The Sudan. This is terribly exciting. (Read more on January 10.)

#8 : Breakthrough Discovery for Malaria Eradication
The devil is in the details to be sure, and despite a generation of unprecedented research and global aid, malaria finds ways to evade suppression. But this year a new genetic discovery might finally herald a definitive way to eradicate this disease that is so devastating in Africa. (Read more on January 10.)

#9 : African Arms Dealer Finally Prosecuted in U.S.
It’s no secret that you can’t fight a war without a gun. But the west – and especially the U.S. – and Russia have suppressed this evident fact because their war machine economies are so important to their overall economies. So it was striking that finally the Obama administration actually began to prosecute arms dealers in a way past administrations, including back through Clinton and Reagan, declined to do. (Read more on January 10.)

#10 : Les Fisher Goes on Safari at 91 years old
The Don of African Zoo Directors who helped pioneer some of the first American adventure travel in Africa took a small group of friends on a not-so-easy safari into Botswana in the hot season. Proof not just that Africa has been tamed for tourism, but that Americans have spread their wings about as far over the planet as possible! (Read more on January 10.)

Cheetah on Car!

Cheetah on Car!

Cheetah jumping on cars went YouTube viral this holiday season, and traditional criticisms from wildlife managers was starkly absent. Is this OK?

The newest video had nearly a quarter million hits this morning but it is hardly the only one. I stopped counting at 20 separate YouTubes of cheetah on cars, and there are countless stills on Flickr and even more individual photos on private blogs.

My own experience includes at least a dozen such incidents. Most of them were in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, but some of the most memorable incidents were in Tanzania’s Serengeti. The striking difference as relates tourism of the two areas – the Mara is generally very crowded and the Serengeti generally absent of crowds – has led me to believe that there is something hardwired in the cheetah’s brain that gives it a potential pet syndrome.

Hard-wired may be too strong, and I can understand how generations and generations of cheetah being unmolested by people could nurture up the same behavior, but either way, the cheetah is clearly the closest thing to a pet you’ll encounter on a big game safari.

Not every cheetah displays this friendly behavior. I’ve encountered many which are extremely skittish, although none of these frightened little beasts were in the Mara – they were all in the Serengeti or more distant places like Kenya’s northern frontier. The best I can remember virtually every cheetah in the Mara looked friendly.

Why do some, then, but not all jump on the cars?

It’s a pretty simple answer. A hungry cheetah begins its hunt in an incredibly laid-back fashion. The eyesight of the cat is so powerful that it can scan the plains with almost the same facility as a falcon surveying the turf below.

The best view is the higher one.

And like falcons and other raptors, prey is often discovered but then doesn’t always trigger an attack response. I suspect this is often because it’s just too far away, but there’s probably dozens of other reasons as well.

Perhaps the cat’s level of hunger just hasn’t reached the threshold of action, or perhaps the cat also sees competitors in the area and the cheetah is the smallest of the big cats, easily chased off its prey by a host of other animals like hyaena.

In any case, the cat on your car roof seems incredibly relaxed, hardly hunting. But that’s exactly what it’s doing. Fat cats – non hungry cheetahs – will never be found atop a car.

There is one exception. Youngsters learning to hunt will often play on the car, hungry or not.

Not too many years ago, researchers and rangers were highly critical of these tourist interactions. Pamphlets were placed strategically on lodge reception counters and I even remember a series of “ranger talks” warning guests not to approach cheetah too closely.

The argument was that the cheetah was easily distracted by tourists, and would therefore often have its hunt disrupted. I found that specious.

But there are definitely reasons to avoid too close an interaction. Cheetah is the only cat whose claws don’t retract, so it has no power to decide whether to inflict a wound or just give you a love swipe if you accidentally surprise it.

I learned this when Kumati, an old cheetah that lived by Naabi Hill, jumped on my car as we were headed to the airstrip for a flight. No matter what we did, we couldn’t get him off. Finally I stepped out of the car and swiped him with my hat, which he ripped back in turn!

Of my many memories of cheetah-on-car the funniest one was with two football players from a prominent American college traveling with their much smaller mother. We stopped in the middle of the Serengeti – virtually all alone for miles and miles – to watch a young family strolling along the plains.

Several of the youngsters jumped on the spare tire on the back of the vehicle. The right guard shoved his mother towards the front of the inside of the car, then ripped out one of my seats and pushed it towards the cheetah shouting, “Down Mother!”

A big male cheetah might reach 90 pounds. Most females are around 60 pounds, and this means they are generally about the same size as your lapdog.

Is there any real harm with all this?

I don’t think so. As I learned with Kumati, don’t try to pet them! But conceding a better view and just enjoying the experience strikes me as mutually beneficial!

Christmas Week – Bluebird

Christmas Week – Bluebird

An American bluebird perches tentatively on a heated bird bath during the Blizzard of 2012. The photo was taken by Carol Mantey. Her home is near mine in the American Midwest.

These birds were nearly extinct before American conservationists began to actively support them. They are cavity nesters like African hoopoes and hornbills, but more and more of their habitat was being destroyed, and even in areas protected as forest reserves, poorly trained rangers would clear away all the dead wood providing no suitable trees for nesting.

American conservationists began building bird boxes and erecting them along cultivated areas and the birds began actively using them. Today in my area of the Midwest the bluebird is thriving.

A little problem, though. When they were truly wild, few remained during winter. They migrated south like many birds, to warmer climates.

As the newly reconstituted species, many seem to have forgotten about migration. So the same conservationists that built their bluebird boxes for nesting now provide food during the winter and heat bird baths (as above) so the bird can have unfrozen water in temperatures that fall to -30C.

Christmas Week – Extreme Weather

Christmas Week – Extreme Weather

In Africa the effects of global warming have resulted in more droughts and more floods, extremes in weather, with rainy seasons and dry seasons often shifting through the calendar.

At my home in America’s Midwest, a half world away, climate change has also been severe. Droughts and floods have seriously impacted the farmers of the area, and snow falls are as often blizzards as simple winter storms.

This was the case last week as depicted in the photo above. For an entire day it was not possible to leave my home, because despite having a good 4×4 car, the roads were packed too high with snow. It took road workers nearly two full days to clear all the roads.

Saving Kihansi

Saving Kihansi

Millions have been spent to save a tiny Tanzanian toad. An incredible story with an incredible bill. Is it worth it?

Needless to say it was not Tanzania that saved the toad. Tanzania had no qualms about replacing a tiny toad with a dam that now produces a sizable portion of its needed electricity.

It was supporters of the Bronx and Toledo zoos and the Wildlife Conservation Society and to me it’s one of the most exciting success stories (so far) in worldwide conservation.

But I wince at the cost, not fully revealed but capable of sour estimation.

The Kihansi Spray Toad Nectophrynoides asperginis was only discovered in Udzungwa in Tanzania in 1996. Udzungwa is one of the most magical places in East Africa, a Tanzania treasure in part because it’s so huge and inaccessible.

I’ve climbed the granite edges of one of its many, many waterfalls and there are incredible similarities to jungles around the world in terms of the density and variety of species, towering canopies and peat laden forest floors.

But quite unlike most of the world’s jungles, this is not a flat place. It’s forever mountainous and cavernous with some stupendous drops. Ergo, waterfalls.

This tiny little creature lived in the spray of one waterfall.

Really?! I think it’s premature to suggest that’s it, although most of the scientific literature says so: that’s it. Five acres. Kihansi’s world is twice the size of the little cliff on which sits my current home. But so much of Udzungwa has yet to be carefully surveyed, might there not be other Kihansi toads somewhere else?

But the scientific community mobilized in the presumption this was it. Five acres. And five acres of misty waterfall sides that would disappear when a dam was built in 1999. And all of this came to pass.

Dam for Tanzanian development. One of maybe hundreds of water falls stopped. Spray ended. WCS scientists monitored the demise of the species after the dam began functioning in 2000, and in five months the population crash was so severe, they collected nearly every last one they could find : 499.

The toads were rushed to the Bronx Zoo, bred quickly and dispersed to five zoos around the United States. Only one other zoo, the Toledo Zoo, was able to create a sustainable population.

Despite multiple scientific surveys of the area subsequently, no toad was seen in 2005, and in 2009 the IUCN officially declared the toad extinct in the wild.

Enormous science was garnered from this little thing. It’s an unusual toad, with its babies born alive, not as tadpoles. One remarkable discovery occurred when scientists desperate to save every last one performed a C-section on a dime-sized mother and learned that babies were at one stage tadpoles, only living within the body of the mother.

So the Bronx and Toledo zoos prevailed through fungus diseases, lighting problems and discoveries that America’s “pure water” would kill the creature. Soon lots of toads were being produced in two zoos.

Meanwhile back at the World Bank which produced the dam which squashed the toad which motivated this worldwide conservation effort, successful conservation lobbyist mined funds to build a gravity-run misting machine in Kihansi Gorge to recreate the original habitat conditions.

Really?!

And in mid-August this year toads were flown back to Tanzania, where they were monitored and nurtured for four months before being freed back in Kihansi Gorge in the spray of the artificial waterfall spray mahine, about ten days ago.

“I’m guessing it’s in the millions,” one of the lead scientists, Dr. Jennifer B. Pramuk, curator of herpetology at the Bronx Zoo, estimated for the New York Times the cost of just the misting machine project.

Here’s my real worry:

Machines break a lot in Africa, even simple machines, and repair isn’t simple, even simple repair. Reconstructed habitats are never what they’re intended. Imagine the global warming changes that have effected the region in the 7-10 year absence of the toads from the area.

If Kihansi truly only lives in this little 5-acre plot, man’s arrival even to “help them” could be all that’s needed to wipe them out. Forget about the dam, or global warming. Just man’s arrival and moving them unnaturally from place to place could be all that’s needed to make them extinct.

We’ll see with time. Remain vigilant, as I will be, because what happens to Kihansi will be fundamental to decisions to save other species in years to come.

Line Up Punctures the Big Top

Line Up Punctures the Big Top

Much like China’s communist party convention, South Africa’s ANC convention that ends tomorrow was supposed to determine who runs the country for as long as the next decade.

South Africa’s African National Congress has run South Africa since the end of apartheid with its standard bearer and first president, Nelson Mandela. The ANC’s history goes back much further than Mandela, though, well back into South Africa’s racist history. And quite often the ANC vied with the much more radical communist party of South Africa for political control.

And it usually won. Nevertheless, over its century of existence the ANC was decidedly leftist and especially recently just before the end of apartheid. Its structural models are larger Chinese, its leaders having been trained in Tanzania by Chinese functionaries.

I think it’s a good model for a developing society, and it’s a model that societies thrust into democracy mode too early often collapse back into; ergo, Egypt. Democracy can’t work unless a good portion of the electorate vote their conscience and a good portion of that have a rational understanding of their own self-interest.

If you don’t know why there’s a drought, and you don’t know how much a pump costs or have any idea how it’s made, and have no clue as to what an aquifer or reservoir is, as a farmer you have no ways to guarantee your own security.

And easier than understanding global warming, or market economy or hydrology, is to find someone who looks nice and claims to know all these things, your neighborhood dictator, who can assume a softer image by pretending to be a cleric or other type of grandfatherly godhead. Stalin was affectionately referred to as Grandpa.

The ANC was traditionally a collection of South Africa’s most prestigious black intellectuals and its central committee, like communist parties everywhere, was the helm of the ship.

And when the ship became the state, so did the ANC. Although an election for president of South Africa happens regularly just like here at home, the choice of the ANC candidates is made at their convention, and since Mandela and the mid-90s, whoever the convention nominates wins nationally.

And that convention is anything but democratic. It has all the bells and whistles of democracy, including women’s groups and youth group’s and worker’s groups, but all these groups are carefully fashioned by the central committee and it’s basically just a reenforcing loop of a small group of powerful men.

All this works more or less tidily provided …

… the guy at the top is sane.

South Africa’s current president is a wacko. In a mature democracy, we tolerate wackos at the top with moderate difficulty, like George Bush, II. It gets harder to do so when their understudy, Dick Cheney, is even more a wacko, but democracy is not as top-heavy as more socialist forms of government, and you don’t have to drill down too far to get to people like Colin Powell and and the legions of good civil servants.

The problem in a top-heavy system like South Africa’s is that it there is no working grass roots. There is no Colin Powell under whom serve a lot of hard-working, dedicated citizens. What you see at the top is what you get at the bottom. And so these last few years in South Africa have been a mess.

While the rest of Africa was growing gangbusters, South Africa was muttering along. Social goals like housing for millions of displaced poor fell decades behind schedule. Labor strife, particularly in its crucial mining sector, continues to be near catastrophically violent.

And the personality of the current president is…. well, wacko. He has multiple wives, believes he can protect himself against AIDS by showering well after sex, unapologetically has pilfered public funds and then publically ranted against cartoonists who portrayed him as unsaintly for doing so.

He’s escaped numerous prosecutions for malfeasance and criminal misuse of federal funds only to flaunt his accusers by building personal mansions with public funds. And the with this top-heavy system, it means that corruption and clowning now occur on a daily basis in the smallest municipality.

And this week the ANC nominated Jacob Zuma to be president, again.

What a joke. But here’s the rub.

A good portion of the South African electorate is democracy savvy. And already local governments in Cape Town and a few other cities have thrown off their ANC shackles.

Maybe, South Africa is ready for democracy.

Diamonds Are Forever

Diamonds Are Forever

Botswana has had a remarkably long streak of luck; and lions don’t have enough lives. With less than a generation left of certain revenue, there is concern the stately country could fall into the dustbin of failed states.

Right now Botswana is the richest country in Africa. With a GDP per capita around $15,000, it ranks 65 in the World Bank’s country list of 180.

Eighty percent of this is from diamonds.

When diamonds were first mined in earnest in the mid 1960s, Botswana was among the poorest countries in the world, not just Africa. Being also one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world this tends to exaggerate both the good times and the bad, but it’s fair to say before the 1960s Botswana was nearly nothing.

In colonial times the country wasn’t wanted by anyone. It was of early renown because Livingstone’s earliest journeys went through what is today Botswana, and it became the normal 19th century route to Victoria Falls from South Africa.

But virtually the entire northern half of the country, which is roughly the size of France, is good for nothing but wild animals. This is the Kalahari Desert in various forms, including the magnificent Okavango Delta (which is the Kalahari in flood).

This isn’t a sand desert like the neighboring, great Namib, but it is related. And it means that under a veneer of pleasant-looking bush can be 3-4 meters of sand in the form nearly of dust.

An apple tree would fall down. A house would blow away. A railway would have to be a very deep subway.

The south half of the country loses some of the dust earth and becomes more of a Mojave-like desert. Around World War II significant coal deposits discovered in neighboring Rhodesia spilled over a tiny bit into eastern south Botswana.

And between the great wars, Boer farmers developed wide tracts of land in southern and western Botswana for cattle farming.

But even today, when other mining and agriculture is being developed with all the desperation of a country that sees its horizon, those other-than-diamond industries pale in comparison to diamond mining.

And the diamonds are running out.

I’m always cautious about predictions of some natural resource running out. You remember the OPEC oil crisis, right? We weren’t running out of oil as then predicted, we just weren’t looking in the right places deep enough.

But diamonds are more predictable. Their formation precedes oil. In fact the better, larger diamonds, are likely the older – more than 3 billion years old. There just haven’t been multiple 3-billion year-old cycles for diamond formation, as with oil’s palsy hundreds of millions of years, or coal’s tens of millions of years.

So there is a greater likelihood that predictions that Botswana’s diamonds will run out in 20 years is correct.

What will it do?

Tourism obviously comes to mind, and Botswana’s tourism is outstanding. But defined as it is by the ever-changing, nonsolid Kalahari, these aren’t the great plains of the Serengeti, where tarmac roads follow limestone river banks and great lodges are built on granite.

Roads are hard to build anywhere in Botswana. Lodges are mostly “camps” that are often considered quite temporary.

There aren’t aquifers or lakes or wetlands outside the Okavango itself. And the Okavango’s magic is specifically in its ever-changing character. An island one year is a watercourse the next.

This is universally true, and there are notable exceptions like Chief’s Island and the edges of the Linyanti wetlands, and the great pans of the central east. But add up all these areas and they amount to about a hundredth of the available bed nights in wilderness areas in South Africa.

Which is right next door.

Botswana cannot rely on tourism to take it through this century. Yet there seems little else that’s left.

Us versus U.S.

Us versus U.S.

Easily 20 children are violently murdered in Africa every day. Ten Afghan kids were just violently murdered a few hours ago. Why are Americans so uniquely horrified at the events in Newtown?

My daughter is a teacher in the Brooklyn, and as I heard the news Friday I was viscerally distressed in a way I’m not when reporting deaths in Africa. Why?

The explanation is terror. That word has come to assume new meanings in my lifetime, but essentially it means a feeling of intense fear without explanation. Humans don’t like unexplained things, and especially unexplained fear.

When we as Americans read of the murdered African children we feel no terror. First, it is far away, not just geographically but psychically. It’s in a place that we believe is less civilized, much poorer and less capable of protecting itself, and often Americans believe organized by corrupt governments.

The implication is that such horrific events are to be expected in Africa.

But not in Newtown, Connecticut. It’s only 45 miles from New York. It’s an affluent community with layers of security. Its leaders and politicians are all nice, upstanding people, working for the better good.

So it makes no sense in Newtown. We think it makes sense in Baragoi, Kenya, or Otitie, Nigeria but not in Newtown. And even if it didn’t make sense in Africa, Africa’s too far away to matter to us.

What matters to us, is us.

And it’s precisely our definition of “us” that goes to the heart of the matter. Americans so far don’t want to define “us” as much larger than a small community of their own family or neighbors. So they certainly can’t extend the “us” to Africa.

That inability to expand the definition of “us” is partially the cause of the Newtown tragedy and even of the tragedies elsewhere in the world and as far away as Africa.

No sane, decent person anywhere in the world would continence the violence in Newtown or Otitie. And there are fair and just ways to prevent such violence. But prevention in even its mildest form and no matter for what purpose – even prevention from buying bacteria infected food from a grocery store – is only possible when individuals give up some of their own rights.

And that’s where America is so far behind the rest of the world, even Africa. We are so obsessed with individual rights and so terrified that some authority will force us to do something we don’t want to, that we are steadfastly reluctant to sacrifice for the better good of the community.

And it has a horrible corollary. When a handful of men in turbans blow up the World Trade Center, our response is to blow up two entire countries wholesale with their civilizations in a vengeful response. We can’t parse the hundreds of millions of individuals who are “foreign” into the myriad levels of good and bad.

Osama is Afghanistan is Iraq. It’s all one thing: We have to think of society as groups of “us”es with no variation within.

Gun control is an obvious partial solution to America’s epidemic of mass murders. By the way, that’s the same partial solution for stopping African carnage. Since most of the world’s weapons are manufactured in Russia and the U.S., it’s a rather simple coalition.

But gun control – much more than protection against bacterial infected salmon – requires an expanded definition of “us.” Sadly, I just don’t think my America is mature enough yet for that.

I hope I’m wrong. But I know until we can achieve such a small step for ourselves, the chance of our participation in assisting the world order as a whole is next to nil.

In-Depth Tourism

In-Depth Tourism

Death, destruction, despair and poverty … all for an attractive price! For less than $30 per person you can be guided into Kenya’s most famous slum! Kibera Tours dot com. “Experience a part of Kenya unseen by most tourists: KIBERA The friendliest slum in the world!”

The half-day sightseeing trip in Nairobi promises to visit an orphanage and school, a bead factor and a typical Kibera house before the piece de resistance: the biogas center: “a fantastic view over Kibera and picture-point. You can see that also human waste is not wasted here.”

This is disgusting. Tourism at its worst and most exploitive, revealing the basest inclinations of ourselves and reenforcing ridiculous notions that poverty doesn’t exist at home.

Kibera is the largest of Nairobi’s 7 or 8 slums, which slip around the city in endless tin and fumes. Not even the Kenyan government census can estimate the size, but the best guesses I’ve seen put the slums at several million people compared to the residents in the city at around 3½ million. The slums are a dissimulating fraction of greater Nairobi and would be an incessant inferno in the developed world.

But in Africa they maintain an unusual tranquility. To be sure crime is endemic (see the film, Nairobi Half Life) and ethnic feuds that plague Kenya from top to bottom can produce particularly vicious moments here, but unlike slums in the developed world there is no boiling cauldron of the poor ready to murder the rich.

Nairobi slums are often stepping stones from poverty, completely unlike the imprisonment of slums in the developed world. Emigrants from impoverished rural areas without proper education or training live for a few years in the slums and develop the minimal skills needed to work in the modern world.

Then they move up and out. Not yet has Kibera fashioned a whole class of people forever imprisoned like the old Harlem or Cabrini Green in the U.S., or the Cape Verde barreos of Lisbon. Kibera will indeed become another Cabrini Green if something isn’t done this generation. But for the moment, the slums are relatively too young to have become a blighted institution.

Nevertheless, they look the same. And the nuance I argue above is not something that can be seen on a short visit. But slum tourists don’t come looking for hope.

What do they come looking for? Why does a tourist pay to come here?

I’ve asked myself the same question time and again. It’s identical with the wish to “see a village.” That quoted remark, of course, is an euphemism for seeing dirty bomas with mud huts and animal excrement. Fortunately, by the way, such villages are rare to find, anymore, at least along East Africa’s normal tourist circuit. What has replaced them are sedentary replications intended to make money from tourists.

Why do tourists pay to see them, even though they are clearly not authentic?

Even though outstanding African economic growth and potential is in fact a topic often found on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, I still hear from parents, “I want my children to see the way the other side lives.” Or “I think it’s important we see how fortunate we are.”

You don’t have to come to Africa to “see how the other side lives.” In some places like southwest Wisconsin near where I live, or the Ozarks or Appalachia, or the residual slums of our urban cities, real poverty and its resultant despair and destruction is no less than Kibera’s.

America’s “Kiberas” are not as widespread or large as Kenya’s, that’s true. But this is not a fortune of chance. It’s the result of a human civilization that wants to give everyone a modicum of happiness, that cherishes human rights.

That’s what America was mostly about, and it’s now what the world is mostly about. Kibera’s existence is our failing, just as Cabrini Green was and Appalachia still is.

Poverty is so complicated that it easily befuddles, and I think that’s part of the tourists’ desire to see Kibera or “a village.” They want to simplify the complicated. They don’t want to see poverty as something relative, but clearly defined and for sure, Kibera is.

But there is the same, absolutely identical misery, disease and angst in the unemployed, castaway homeless veteran on the streets of New York as any child walking the mud paths of Kibera.

Kibera, or the imagined dirty African village, or the homeless veteran need not exist. In a world where you and I assumed our basic human responsibility to our neighbor, there would be no Kibera.

So I believe the single-most important reason tourists want to “experience poverty” in Africa is to believe the same identical thing doesn’t exist at home. Or isn’t as bad. Or isn’t as extensive.

If one child is poor; if one veteran is homeless, it’s wrong.

And finally — possibly even worse — the delusional tourist wants to find a smiling child who is dying, so that they can believe that poor is OK, that homeless can also be happy, that death smiles.

It’s OK to live in a multi-million dollar mansion and it’s OK to dab yourself with Chanel. But it’s not OK to live a world that allows Kiberas to exist. Kibera’s existence is our fault; the collective fault of an unjust world order. The children of Kibera can just as easily be the children of Trenton.

It’s not OK to go through life with the fantasy that Africa is besmirched and cursed and that Kiberas exist only in Nairobi and Shaker Heights exist only in Cleveland.

And it’s not OK to think that poor is OK, anywhere. There is no happiness in being poor or homeless, whether in Kibera or 49th Street.

Don’t come to Africa to validate your own fantasies.

Maul Special

Maul Special

Pretty story but not very effective: recruit Maasai morani – the legendary warriors that are expert lion killers – to protect lions. Sort of like hiring the ultimate teenage hacker to protect HSBC.

Lion numbers are dropping alarmingly, and better than any other great African savannah animal lion are a true indicator of the health of the African wild.

Unlike elephant or rhino – which are being poached at alarming rates even as their wild population increases – lion are the top of a complex pyramid of life and while masters of their position are beholding to the foundations.

Many important studies have suggested unusual reasons for the decline over the last several decades, but it now seems clear that the reason is quite simple: the wild is contracting.

Of the big cats, only the solitary leopard seems capable of adapting to a world increasingly dominated by man. The others – and especially the lion – seem unable to establish any relationship with a world increasingly dominated by homo sapiens except to war with him.

And the greatest battles are those legendary pitched posses of Maasai warriors in Old Testament regalia: Maasai don’t kill any animals for fun or food. They kill in retaliation, as if a lesson can be learned.

When a lion threatens their goats or cattle Maasai go on a war path, and some of the most spectacular stories out of Maasailand are of the greatest and most noble of the lion hunts. In the old days headmen were often determined by those who successfully killed a lion.

And remember, this isn’t with a gun. It’s with a spear and a knife.

Maasai and lion have coexisted for centuries because they use the same habitat. The grazing necessary for Maasai stock is the same that all sorts of antelope on the plains need. When there was enough for all, everyone was fat and sassy. There were enough antelope for the lion that much preferred them to a smaller goat or a larger and lanky cow.

Maasai cattle were bred not for meat but for milk. The cost/benefit ratio of a lion bringing down a Maasai cow compared to a wildebeest was no contest. The wildebeest could be killed more quickly (cats kill by strangulation, and this takes enormous time with a cow) and the dinner table had lots more meat for the effort.

But times changed. And note, too, that traditional Maasai are declining just as rapidly if not more so than the wild animals in their homelands. And maybe for the same reasons:

Shopping malls, highways, schools and hospitals, modern farms.

It takes no kopjes scientist to know where this is going.

So arise the Lion Guardians! This high profile NGO in East Africa was formed by dedicated conservationists “to promote and sustain coexistence between people & wildlife through ecological monitoring and local capacity building.”

IE: Pay Maasai morani to protect rather than kill lions.

It’s noble, yes. And anything that can give paid work to young traditional Maasai who are themselves increasingly threatened, is good. Especially in the West Kilimanjaro area adjacent Amboseli National Park.

This area is a microcosm of lion difficulties everywhere. Amboseli is one of the most important and well-known big game parks in the world famous especially for its elephant. Elephant are being threatened today by increased poaching, but their numbers are still increasing in places like Amboseli, because … well, elephant get their way.

But Amboseli is surrounded by an increasingly developed agriculture, particularly just to its south in Tanzania. The highlands of Kilimanjaro are perfect for wheat and other cash crop farming.

The towns of Arusha to the west and Moshi to the east are expanding rapidly. The roads are being paved.

All of this – not just farming – needs water. This is draining the existing aquifers and Amboseli is becoming drier and drier. This is a death sentence for much game like buffalo and wildebeest. The increased elephant population results in deforestation, and combined with the loss of aquifer power the reduction of forests is terrible for impala, duiker and a chorus of tiny things like voles and mice that animals like hyaena and jackal need to survive.

So you see … or don’t, so to speak, as time passes. No traditional food, Mr. Lion heads south to where Maasai live with their goats and cattle.

Lion Guardians believes in conserving the wild and in promoting tourism. It’s a two-pronged argument that often sticks it to itself. Tourism is one thing. Conservation is another.

There’s no doubt that tourism suffers as there are fewer lions to see in the wild. But tourism is already suffering drastically, mainly from the political situation in Kenya linked directly to the violently unsettled situation in Somalia. We hope this is temporary.

Whether temporary or not, conservation is another matter.

I grow quite sad thinking the day may come when there won’t be lions in the wild as I’ve seen all my life. But it’s hard to argue to save the lion with the same powerful scientific arguments for saving the Amazon rain forest. We know almost everything possible about lions and the African savannah. There are of course mysteries yet to be revealed … but not many.

The forest provides my oxygen. The veld powers my imagination – no small thing – but not exactly biological.

And what we know mostly is that Maasai recruited to protect lions are getting mauled, and in the end, not saving any more lions and not convincing their young teen Maasai not to go to the city and become certified public accountants.

That’s life.

Time to Go Home Now

Time to Go Home Now

Hey chums, time to end the war on terror! We successfully pushed it into Africa! And they’ll do much better once we get the boots out.

The modern war on terror is like suburbanites trying to eradicate deer and geese. Few homeowners are ever hurt by deer and certainly not by geese, but their gardens are eaten and zoysia lawns defaced.

And “everyone knows” of the dog that was bitten by a stag, or the young oak trees eaten to the ground in the precious county forest, or the toddler nipped nearly to death by the hen’s beak, and – horror of horrors – something so truly horrible it must be given an anagram: CWD.

It is precisely the juggernaut of thought about CWD that tips the balance in the county finance committee to hire that sniper to go into the lagoon and start shooting. After all, CWD does exactly what the suburban homeowner wants it to do: kills the deer.

But fashioning goodness from simple reactive evil, the homeowner begins to feel sorry for the poor wasting away antelope. Euthanasia is wrong, but execution is right.

This is so similar to terrorism.

Nine-Eleven did ultimate harm to 3000+ people, but at the time there were more than 300 million living in the U.S., another billion or so in the countries represented in that awful carnage. So the vast, vast majority of human beings were not effected … except by terror.

By the fear it would, somehow someday, happen to them or those close to them.

The war on terror, though, has much realer consequences for all of us. It’s costly, it allows invasions of our privacies not otherwise possible, and it allows a small handful of people – mostly the president – to assassinate foreigners at will.

The last removed power that the war on terror conveys actually effects us directly. Our own behavior changes when our leader can murder at will.

When you think about, it’s worse than horrible. We have grown complacent about murder.

Numerous analysts last week suggested it’s time for America to end the war on terror. It makes a wondrous peace headline just before the holidays but it carries powerful implications for American policy.

Journalists like Rachel Maddow and Fareed Zakaria have been joined by experts close to the government.

The reason for this is pretty simple: the assault on terrorism carried out especially by Obama has succeeded. Like with deer chomping roses, we have exported the problem to our periphery.

Culling deer or blasting away geese has never successfully reduced either an existing regional population or any population trends. But it does move the problem away – to the edges of your existence.

Culling deer in the Chicago suburb of Skokie moves the problem further out from the city into more rural areas, complicating life there a little bit more as a result.

Obama has successfully routed al-Qaeda and with the weekend’s drone assassination of Abu Zaid al-Kuwaiti in Pakistan, the last of Osama’s Old Boys Network is gone.

With the effective fall of the town of Jowhar in Somali last week, al-Shabaab is nearly gone, too. Somalia, which became the dustbin of terrorists worldwide as Obama’s wars in the Afghan region intensified, is essentially now no longer under terrorist control.

It is under the fragile control of countries like Kenya and Ethiopia, that are now carrying the burden of the war on terror.

Even much smaller and more regional groups like the Lords Resistance Army are on the run, presumably from U.S. Special Forces in the deepest central African jungles.

America’s War on Terror – at least as regards America’s land itself – is over.

The strongest argument against ending the war on terror, is that it isn’t eradicated worldwide, and worse, where it still flourishes (in Africa) the powers there are much weaker than us. I.E.: They Don’t Have Drones.

True TDHD but they will be much more successful wiping up the residue than we were. The so-called terrorists are much closer to them ethnically and historically. There is a much greater need to pacify militants and integrate them into society.

Right now you might think that doesn’t look real good: Terrorists hold half of Mali, most of the CAR and are detonating bombs in Nairobi at the rate of about one per month.

But it’s nowhere near the confusion and destruction that Afghanistan was less than ten years ago, or even that parts of Pakistan are today. Nairobi today is probably nicer than Belfast 20 years ago: Africa will take care of itself, much better and quicker if we withdraw.

That leaves … Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It’s been more than a year since we announced we will be out of Afghanistan in little more than another year. Theoretically we never invaded Pakistan. I’m no expert on the region, but I wonder if eliminating drone assassinations would not actually have a positive effect on our security. When we take our boots out, drones will be all that’s left.

So happy holidays, all. Peace is near at hand?

No Epiphany in Egypt

No Epiphany in Egypt

Democracy is not the right to have it your way. Nor does respect of human rights (yet) include suppression of oppressive religions. Egypt is achieving democracy; let it be.

It nearly makes me laugh when Americans warn of the “Islamic state” Egypt is destined at least for a while to become.

Admittedly, many of these warnings and concerns are from our far right, like the one cited above. More studied observers have recognized Egypt’s direction for a long time, and we aren’t suggesting nuclear rearmament.

David Schenker from one of Washington’s most respected think tanks on Arab events said in July “Egypt is an Islamic state.”

Numerous other scholars realized it even earlier. But University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne leads an aggressive faction of Bolshevik Revisionists the press is sucking up. In June Coyne said “Egypt is doomed” when Morsi was elected, then pitifully asked, “Is this what it’s about?”

Yes, as a matter of fact. It’s called democracy. Put in a way Coyne and others might well understand: It’s called The Right To Make The Wrong Decision.

It doesn’t take a history scholar to know that revolutions aren’t a simple few moments of bad guys being replaced by good guys. Every revolution of note, including our own, took lots of time to settle down.

Whether it was the Bolsheviks being ousted by the Leninists or Maximilien de Robespierre parsed by the guillotine, most revolutions are started by people who don’t get their way … at least for a very long time. Consider how long Chairman Mao was in power.

Yet night after night we get breathless reporting from our celebrity newspeople standing over Tahrir Square waiting to document Egypt’s inevitable situation just like the so-called reporters standing on Jersey’s sand beaches waiting to be slammed by Sandy.

We know already.

Or even my sanity retreats like the New York Times yelling, “The revolution in Egypt is in danger of being lost..”

Are we so steeped in our own rightness that we don’t even have the patience for a major social revolution to play itself out?

Egypt’s revolution isn’t going to be lost. It’s just going to take a while to reach any viable fruition and even longer to achieve the social graces we expect of our own mature democracy.

America should be proud of the restraint we maintain from spanking Iran, for example, or of the slow nudges we’ve been giving Burma. We dearly believe in our country and its liberal society, but we can’t drag the playground brat into our Christmas choir and expect her to sing lovely harmony.

It takes time.

Let it be.

Out of This World

Out of This World

Evangelical preachers have long been on the list of greatest scam artists but five Nigerians with active churches in the U.S. take the cake!

“God is good,” says Forbes magazine, “especially if you’re a Nigerian pastor.”

Two with special attachments to Texas and other blind congregations that vote against their medicare benefits, hate blacks and throw the last bits of money they have at these jokers, are David Oyedepo and Chris Oyakhilome.

They’ve most recently been ensnared in a loud African debate over why so many pastors own private jets.

Forbes estimates Oyedepo’s worth at $150 million and Oyakhilome’s at $30-50 million. Oyakhilome actually has a greater presence in the U.S. than Oyedepo and it totally befuddles me that people will write him checks.

Oyakhilome runs Christ Embassy. There are a number of affiliate churches in the U.S., many in Texas and almost all of them in the south, and many directed to American youth on college campuses.

“Oyakhilome’s diversified interests include newspapers, magazines, a local television station, a record label, satellite TV, hotels and extensive real estate. His Loveworld TV Network is the first Christian network to broadcast from Africa to the rest of the world on a 24 hour basis,“ Forbes revealed.

His regular “rivals” throughout America’s south garner millions and millions.

He recently plead no-contest to a $35 million money laundering scheme that siphoned cash from his network of churches into foreign bank accounts. The individual stories are beyond laughable. It’s absolutely incredulous that people believe him.

Take the most recent $5000 “disappearance” of church cash which he tries to pin on another jet-setting millionaire Nigerian pastor, Chris Okotie. (Forbes says Okotie’s estimated worth approaches $10 million. Guess that’s not enough.)

One American Christ Embassy church member “lamented” that these factitious warring evangelical pastors are “soiling our image.”

Why do so many people, in Africa and in the U.S., supports these crooks?

The question is really not so different from why do these same people vote against their own self-interest, deny that Obama was born in the U.S., disbelieve global warming and think evolution is a plot by bad men to deny the existence of god.

So it’s a fun exercise in exasperation, but there’s little to do about it. It isn’t as if these guys aren’t exposed. They’re exposed in all sorts of publications, and not just headliners in Forbes. The good Nigerian press is constantly on them.

But the attempt to unmask them is the very stuff they use to build their support. There is such distrust in the world of our given institutions, like government and the media, that clever artisans can twist allegations into alleged lies and be believed.

So I suppose in the end we are responsible. We’re responsible for allowing our established institutions to degrade to this point, and to having neglected social education to the point that good people are unable to see the obvious fraud for themselves.

I think Africans are awakening compared to Texans, though, and it may be why so many of them are redirecting their efforts here, out of Africa.

Why are Africans awakening and the citizens of Houston aren’t?

Send me your answers. Make them brief.

Blood All Over the Place

Blood All Over the Place

A good scientific paper on lion population declines embarrasses NatGeo and provides evidence that recreational hunting of lion may soon be illegal.

The excellent scientific survey by Duke scientists published Tuesday in the journal of Biodiversity and Conservation shows serious contractions of African wilderness with lion decline as the principal indicator. But NatGeo’s exaggeration of the problem in order to raise money is appalling.

The research was funded by the National Geographic Big Cat Initiative, but what disturbs me is that National Geographic itself has grossly distorted the findings (or ignored them, not sure which).

The study concludes that there are about 32,000 lions remaining in Africa, today. NatGeo’s “Lion Decline Map” shows only 20,000 (less than two-thirds the science) with a projected “???” intended to mean “0″ by 2020. The glitzy web presentation ends with requests for donations.

This pandering to fictional catastrophe fits the current NatGeo model embedded in the current lineup on its cable television channel, which alters between the interesting, scandalous and soap-opry. NatGeo is making bundles, scientists still depend upon it, but it’s gone Ruperty.

Meanwhile, the Duke study is important.

While there is nothing particularly surprising in the study, it confirms that lion populations are in serious decline (32,000 today compared to 100,000 in the 1960s) on the continent as a whole, and where relatively stable for the “long-term” are in diminished areas.

The 27 “strongholds” where lion populations are expected to prevail for the long-term are all in sub-Saharan Africa in the countries we know well:

1. Tanzania
2. Botswana
3. Mozambique
4. South Africa & Zambia
5. Kenya

A sliver of stronghold area slips into Zimbabwe, but the enormous absence of lion in Zim today is a testament to the tragedy of conservation that has occurred there over the last generation under the murderous rule of Robert Mugabe.

The study used satellite imagery but through careful digital analysis and increased technological resolution was able to debunk earlier reports that certain areas were much healthier than they really are. These most critical areas are all in the northern part of the continent.

One of the study’s leading scientists is Stuart Pimm who has produced tomes of studies in his lifetime and who is probably the world’s most valuable African environmental statistician. Through the body of his past studies this one is credibly able to point to diminishing habitat and human competition for protected habitat as the principal cause.

But the study dares to confront another sensitive issue: big game hunting.

Without actually saying so, there is every implication throughout the study that recreational lion hunting should be prohibited.

I don’t know if there is coincidence to be found, or scientists and government officials tiptoeing on the tightrope, but last week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it was reviewing the African lion’s status on the endangered species list.

This is the first step to listing lion as endangered. And if that happens, big game hunting of lion would effectively be over.

That seems only reasonable when African governments are now arresting local people for hunting lion, not to put a furry head above their fireplace, but to save their herds of goats.

Good work, Duke! Go to it, Fish & Wildlife! And put your pants back on, NatGeo.