Month: January 2014

Send Speelman to Sochi!

Send Speelman to Sochi!

by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

speelmanHelp a black native South African kid go to the Olympics. Sive Speelman qualified and was invited by the IOC to Sochi, but an antiquated racist quasi-government authority has forbid him from going.

Invictus no more.

Nine mostly fat old South African men and only three women, most incapable of croquet, issued a finding last week that Speelman was not good enough to represent their country, noting that he’s ranked 2,290th in the world of skiers.

(I’m ranked 5,497,213,455th. By the way, I would like to point out that the composition of SASCOC with only three women violates the gender equality clause of the South African constitution.)

Click here to sign the petition that at the very least will embarrass SASCOC. And who knows, if enough of you sign, perhaps Speelman will be set free.

And support the kid: like him on his Facebook page.

Here’s the thing, South Africa. The Olympics is not just about winning. It’s about competing, and Sive Speelman can ski circles around your martinis.

Speelman is an 18-year old native South African who actually learned skiing and trained as a skier in South Africa, and that’s not easy. He would have been one of only 7 African contenders at Sochi, (which is terrible by the way).

And of the remaining 6, Speelman would have been one of only two (!) who are truly through-and-through African!

Only 17-year old Kenza Tazi of Morocco was born and lives in Africa (although she trains in France and spends a lot of time, there). Mathilde Petitjean Amivi (Togo) was born in Niger and lives in France.

Adam Lamhamedi (for Morocco) was born and lives in Canada. Mehdi Selim Khelifi (Algeria) was born and lives in France. Alessia Afi Dipol (Togo) was born and lives in Italy.

And 21-year old Luke Steyn, the only real contender, was born in Zimbabwe but has lived virtually all of us life abroad and is currently a student at the University of Colorado.

Speelman was born, raised, continues to live and train in the far eastern Cape, one of the few places in South Africa where there is regularly enough snow to ski.

“Any other nation in the world would jump at that opportunity and I’m as puzzled as many people are… It’s just sad,” Snow Sport SA president Peter Pilz said.

“It has devastated him,” said his coach.

South Africans of all races are sports crazy. But this is even crazier. This is when winning becomes everything, when bucking the odds is tantamount to failure.

And this will be lasting. It changes forever how the world will think of South Africa, now. No longer a toughie, the image has become one of lack of self-confidence, the little guy who will never get better and so just sits in the corner, whines and refuses to compete.

The fear of loss trumps the best there is.

Just as the ANC seems to be finally evaporating from the scene, so will the latent racism that even shackled blacks carry, today, in South Africa, dissipate. This kid was born after South African independence.

He deserves more. And apparently his home country won’t give it to him.

Power Up Da BodaBoda!

Power Up Da BodaBoda!

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BODABODABad BodaBoda. Don’t think the morning commute is necessarily better if cars are replaced by bikes. What you might get is “Mayhem in Arusha.”

The first place my wife and I worked and lived for two years was Paris in the 1970s and the traffic compared to what I’d see later in Bangkok in the 1980s or today in Nairobi and now Arusha couldn’t even compare.

Yet my wife went to work and about town in a “moped” and it scared the living daylights out of me. In those days there were no regulations about helmets or carbon emissions or anything else, and a French moped was hardly more than a small bike with a lousy motor.

My wife and hundreds of others wove in an out of traffic lanes, sneaking between buses, dodging pedestrians as if their greatest challenge wasn’t staying upright but stopping. And it often was. You stopped and it might herald the end of an era. It might never run, again.

More than once I watched from my safe haven in a bus one of these contraptions sail right below me at breakneck speed and continue unabated right through a red light.

They were loud, dirty, dangerous and above all, defiant.

And she always got to work before me.

Fast forward nearly a half century into the little metropolis of Arusha, Tanzania.

“Motorcycles … have been causing lots of inconveniences … due to frequent cases of reckless riding, accidents and unruly behaviour,” claims Arusha’s only newspaper.

Arusha is Tanzania’s main northern city, and mopeds have joined forces with Harleys and Kawasakis to make my 1970s experience in Paris seem like child’s play. The machines are rarely the monster varieties, mind you, and usually hybrids of the most amazing sorts.

In fact a snapshot of the collection of “motorbikes” on the increasingly congested streets of Arusha could easily come out of the imagination of a kindergartener told to draw a motorbike rally.

“BodaBoda” they call them.

Two weeks ago the city councilmen of Arusha in their imminent wisdom banned BodaBoda from the city center “because of their chaotic nature.” The move by Arusha planners followed a successful ban of bodabodas in May by neighboring Rwanda.

Rwanda is a horrific dictatorship. They could ban breathing and the entire city of Kigali would collapse. Let me tell you, in any semi-free place in the world, don’t try to unboda your spouse.

Monday, the “Arusha fathers” rescinded their ban… “For a while.”

In the free (for-all) society of Arusha, traffic management will no longer include laned traffic, speed restrictions, pedestrian right-of-ways, or traffic lights.

When the ban was announced several weeks ago, BodaBoda bikers struck the city hard, blocking traffic with their protest. Worse:

“The riders also threatened to beat up any motorist, pedestrian or any other person who stood in their way…”

And most revealing of all, they said that “police officers have been targeting them with exorbitant fines for …both real and imaginary offenses.”

“They also vowed to beat local leaders of the bodaboda associations who they accused of betraying them,” the newspaper report continued.

The elected “bodaboda union” leaders responded:

“As their leaders, we did not take part in their protests because they threatened to beat us, saying we were siding with the government, though in reality we have been trying to remind them that they were not above the law to an extent of causing anarchy.”

Power to The People!

Power Up Da BodaBoda!

Dropping The Tuna

Dropping The Tuna

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somalifishingI don’t like it but it’s good news. Should a private foundation in Somalia be doing what really should be the responsibility of the U.S. government?

Developing Somalia’s fishing industry is critical to sustaining peace in the region. Piracy was expertly developed as al-Shabaab’s principal source of revenue by enlisting former fishermen who had been systematically raped of their livelihoods mostly by western fishing companies.

Fishing had been Somalia’s main industry prior to the state failing in the 1990s. Numerous studies documented major western fishing companies, the majority from Italy and France, taking advantage of Somalia’s implosion to rape the seas of the Gulf of Aden.

With all the money and effort western powers have spent trying to oust the terrorists from Somalia, I can’t understand why they won’t rebuild its fishing infrastructure. Somehow, I guess, it’s just not militaristic enough.

So the job is being left to the private sector, which could be all well and good of course, but I fear without government to government involvement, here, a free-for-all is going to develop in these nutrient rich waters.

For several years now as the Somali war wound down, there have been reports of private companies violating fishing treaties and dumping toxic waste, in essence taking advantage of the lack of government (including multiple government, regional and UN) regulations.

The Oceans Beyond Piracy project brought together active western partners in Somalia at a Thursday conference in London which was striking for its positive outlook.

Led by a Danish NGO, Somali Fair Fishing, the conference wants to rebuild not only the infrastructure but the human capital of the Berbera port.

Berbera is Somaliland’s main port on the Gulf of Aden just before the Red Sea. Somaliland and Puntland are autonomous regions of Somalia that have been relatively peaceful for more than a decade.

Functioning as independent states, the two northern regions have seen realistic development over the last decade but been given little outside attention. World aid organizations, for example, are reluctant to promote what would become the fracturing of a former Somalia Republic.

New elections in Somaliland and new policy initiatives in Puntland announced this week, however, suggest that the two autonomous regions of Somaliland and Puntland are newly interested in reintegration.

It makes imminent sense for western powers and world aid organizations to go in full force to develop Somaliland’s Berbera. It’s wonderful what Oceans Beyond Piracy and other small NGOs are trying to do, but it’s just not enough.

There’s no point in developing a fishing industry if there’s no fish. Without reenforcement of existing world treaties about the Somali fishing harvests, and without worldwide enforcement to stop ships treating the Gulf of Aden as the world’s biggest public toilet, there won’t be any fish.

The foundation supporting the Oceans Beyond Piracy initiative is the One Earth Foundation of Colorado. The CEO, Marcel Arsenault, made his fortune anticipating the housing bust of 2008. As a new kid on the block of a growing number of private philanthropy organizations it doesn’t have a long enough track record for any critical appraisal.

But its mission looks good and I wish them success.

As always, though, I worry when private interests trump the responsibility of government institutions.

The Thursday conference attracted a number of giant players, like BP and Maersk. But these mega multinationals are not going to invest fully until western governments decide to invest as much in cranes and drones.

It’s an unending story of failed peace making. Nixon tried lamely to explain to a fatigued America that Vietnam could only be won by building factories, but it was an out of sync suggestion at the time it was made, way too late.

War is expensive. Fishing is much less expensive and far more productive.

Before we lose Somalia again, world powers should see what groups like One Earth and Fair Fishing are trying to do, and learn from them. USAid in Somalia should now be given as much support as AFRICOM.

The Irresolvable Divine

The Irresolvable Divine

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IrresolvableDivineIs last night’s passage of a new constitution in Tunisia a real positive turning point in the struggle for African democracy? Many believe so, but Islamic fundamentalism still has a hook in the document.

As democracy warrants it should. Like Egypt, majority rule government placed very fundamental Islamists in control of Tunisia’s legislature. Like Egypt, the government moved further and further towards Islamic extremism.

As democracy warranted. As the majority of Tunisians wanted.

The new constitution, however, is far more progressive than Tunisia’s population would like. It is more progressive than the failed Egyptian one under the Muslim Brotherhood and more democratic than Egypt’s new constitution that restricts religious influences.

The Tunisian document enshrines Islam as the “state religion” but also guarantees many freedoms that conservative Muslim regimes would ban, like parity for women throughout society.

But the constitution forbids “attacks on the sacred” which gives wide latitude to religious leaders to legislate doctrine, despite constitutional human rights. The dilemma is that neither is preeminent.

A very popular national journalist and cartoonist remains in jail for a political cartoon criticizing the Islamists. Although promised early freedom and an executive pardon, he has been kept in jail until arrangements can be made for his deportation to Sweden.

The conundrum for Tunisian politicians is obvious: He should not be jailed under the new constitution, but were he released unequivocally, there would be riots for condoning “attacks on the sacred.”

Although Tunisian legislators are ecstatic and the world mostly supportive (even Human Rights seems pleasantly positive) I see this as the fundamental flaw that will ultimately crack the nation, again.

Tunisia is one of the smaller, one of the most highly educated, and one of the most developed countries in Africa. There is a real similarity to Lebanon, which has also balanced extreme religious positions and human rights over nearly the last century.

But like Lebanon grand periods of peace and prosperity have been continuously interrupted by terrible civil wars and mass disturbances. I think that’s what will now happen in Tunisia.

The problem is that democracy won’t work when opposing beliefs mutually exclude one another. You can’t have a “state religion” and a state without a governing religion, yet that is precisely what Tunisia and other liberals in the Arab world are trying to do.

Ultimately it emanates form our own democracy.

I believe most of our founders were atheists, far ahead of their times. But religion in America in the late 1700s was so diluted by successive immigrants from widely different religious sects, so attacked for being allied with the British king, and so criticized by the secularists in Frances supporting our revolution, that our constitution’s reference to the divine is incredibly scant.

Almost a courtesy rather than a belief.

But as weak a contradiction as it may be, it is not a dialectic. It remains a contradiction and one that now plagues our own society, again, and most certainly terrorizes emerging societies like Tunisia.

Until developed and developing societies discard religion as having any place in democratic government, democratic government will fail.

Between Life & Death

Between Life & Death

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

bodyorgansforsaleTanzania has embraced a Wall Street Journal suggestion last week that a free market should be created to buy and sell human organs.

“It is none of our business,” Tanzania’s Minister for Health and Society Welfare said yesterday affirming the Tanzanian government’s position that it would not oppose such a market. He then confirmed that it’s perfectly legal for Tanzanians to sell their organs to the highest bidder.

The Journal’s Saturday essay argued that kidney transplants add more than 20 years of life to those in need, and that two kidneys aren’t necessary for a healthy life.

“How can paying for organs to increase their supply be more immoral than the injustice of the present system?” the journal asked.

The authors estimated that an open market for selling kidneys would result in an expected cost of $15,000 per kidney.

That’s approximately triple Tanzania’s average annual income.

In acknowledging the Journal article more quickly than the Tanzanian government normally acknowledges a health epidemic on its own soil, the Minister pointed out that there are already robust donor markets in Iran and India.

Two kidneys might not be necessary for a healthy life, but removal of any organ, even the redundant second kidney, is not without risks. Even if those risks are small the notion of literally selling part of yourself for cash belies desperation.

And in a “free market,” one that is truly global, there’s little doubt that the most desperate in the world would quickly become the suppliers. Suicide bombers and all sorts of other criminals are often little more than lives for sale. Reducing humanity to a commodity is the basest form of oppression.

The Journal article touched on alternatives that such countries as Denmark are employing, called “implied consent.” This presumes that everyone who dies naturally allows whatever viable organs remain to be taken and reused.

But such a policy if adopted worldwide would decimate the capitalist alternative suggested by the Journal. As shocking as it may sound, there are likely far fewer natural deaths that would result in viable organ donating worldwide, than there are living persons in the developing world willing to sell their organs.

Imagine if the going rate for a kidney in the U.S. was $150,000? That’s the equivalency with Tanzania’s economy. Imagine advertising this in Appalachia or Flint, Michigan. Imagine white buses with ambulance attendants and Brinks Trucks behind them.

There’s something terribly wrong with this scenario, whether it is in Flint, Michigan or Arusha, Tanzania.

Yet the Journal article is not ground-breaking. HBO Producer of the “Tales from the Organ Trade” and three-time Emmy winner, Simcha Jacobovici, is an aggressive advocate for allowing anyone to sell their organs for the highest price:

“For my part,” Jacobovici writes in the Times of Israel, “I am no longer a dispassionate reporter on the issue… Some suffering we cannot alleviate, but this suffering has a simple solution. While tens of thousands need kidneys, tens of thousands want to sell them. We each have two kidneys. We only need one.”

The fact of the matter is that voluntary organ selling has been occurring throughout Africa for a long time, widely reported from Kenya to Nigeria. But there has been little comment about it until now and virtually no criticism.

The Journal article has forced the topic out, giving advocates of live donor selling in the developing world significant credence to the position that there is nothing immoral to the practice.

It is an incredible dilemma. My first reaction is that there is nothing baser than turning humanity into a commodity. My second reaction is that authority over one’s own physical body is inalienable: how can we the rich tell them the poor not to sell themselves?

Religious doctrine is pretty consistent:

“The answer is a definitive ‘No.’ The selling of an organ violates the dignity of the human being,” according to the Catholic Church, and virtually all major religions argue similarly.

But religious doctrine in my opinion is largely responsible for the multitude of dilemmas Tanzanians currently find themselves in, today:

From the historical condoning of slavery in the pre-colonial era, to the submission to greater force in the colonial era, to the oppression of vicious dictators in the post-colonial era, religion has not been a very good guide for the development of Tanzania.

For many millions in the developing world selling an organ is the difference between life and death. Twice.

Ready, Set, Twende!

Ready, Set, Twende!

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lionbinocGet ready Africa! This looks to be a boon year for safaris, as next looks ready To Crater, pun intended.

Bookings are solid, better than in years, and some chain lodges are oversold. This is because of three reasons.

First, rich people have gotten a lot richer as the Great Recession sets in the horizon.

Second, the northern hemisphere’s lousy weather for the last few years continues this winter. Either it’s Europe or the U.S. that the polar vortex falls onto like a tipped over Scottish cap, and Africa is associated with heat!

Third, extraordinary taxes that go into full force this July are seriously increasing next year’s prices really motivating last minute and individual travelers who are filling every single free bed left.

February is traditionally the time the safari season really gets going, anyway. After the lull that always follows the high year-end holiday season in East Africa, February is “snowbird season” the nickname for northern hemisphere residents who just have to leave home when it’s cold.

It’s always intrigued me how tourist seasons have evolved. It makes perfect sense, for instance, that some living in the cold winter northern hemisphere wants to visit Africa in the depth of his winter. Or how people who can only take their vacation in the traditional season, summer when school’s out, travel then.

touristgiraffeSo nothing unusual about that.

But what is striking is how the industry has then completely lied by insisting the time that tourists want to travel is also the best time to go, too!

It’s usually not.

East Africa’s on the equator, so temperatures don’t change much over the course of the year. The amount of daylight, time for scheduled activities, doesn’t really change. That doesn’t mean, though, that there isn’t a better time and worst time to for the “perfect safari.” But it does mitigate any gross difference.

Not so in southern Africa, where there is more of a distinct winter and distinct summer. South Africa is the same distance south of the equator as Georgia is north of the equator. And we all know how hot Atlanta can become in the summer and how cold, snow cold, parts of Georgia become in the winter.

Yet because summer is most American’s vacation season, many think the best time to visit southern Africa is during southern Africa’s winter!

Of course “best” and “worst” are terribly relative terms. My very personal best time to visit southern Africa is as much into their summer (our winter) as my tolerance of heat and humidity allows me.

Temperatures in the Okavango Delta and the adjacent pans areas are regularly above 100F with frequent thunderstorms when the game viewing is best! Well, that’s kind of tough, although if you can handle that, February is probably “the best time to go.”

(As I age I’ve been sliding a bit further down the season.)

But from my point of view July and August are absolutely not the best time to safari in the south, but it’s one of the highest seasons for Americans to travel there!

It’s a drab and dull landscape, then. The leaves have all fallen to the ground, it’s dust dry and bitter cold in the morning. Although some crazy camps take 6 a.m. game drives, the sun doesn’t appear until around 730a, and it’s dark before 6 p.m.

And believe me, the animals don’t like it, either. You know what a bear does in the winter. Well, it’s not exactly that bad, but there aren’t any babies, there’s a definite lull in activity and I once wanted to put a coat over an impala it was so immoveable.

Now keep in mind that fortunately for the south, there’s much more going on than just safari activities. Cape Town is exquisitely beautiful year-round. Coastal wildernesses like the Tsitsikama Coastal Forest and St. Lucia wetlands are beautiful in the south’s winter! And with very tolerable temperatures that are moderated by the cooling of the great oceans, they’re near ideal in the summer, too!

Festivals, out door concerts, peaks in sports matches, and all the other touristy stuff you’d expect from city planners soliciting your buck are at their peak in the south’s summer (our winter). Of course the great historical spots of southern Africa, particularly throughout Zululand, are the same and fascinating at any time of the year!

There’s been unusual amounts of rain in all of sub-Saharan Africa over the last few rainy seasons, but I have to stop saying this, because it seems like every year in recent memory this has been the case. And if not too much wet, then a drought. Nothing in between.

So a truer statement is that everyone is getting used to unusual weather. Unusual wet. Unusual hot and unusual cold. Itineraries are adjusted to avoid places like Tarangire and Manyara in Tanzania which are getting routinely flooded out. And camps and lodges that are bucking the trend are investing in better tracks.

Regional and local marketing is developing aggressively. African tourism is a volatile market. It’s always had extreme ups and downs.

This year is a definite UP. Next year, especially as price squeezes budget and trips get shorter many worry that only the highlights are certain survive. It might just be a 3-day safari of nothing but the [Ngorongoro] crater!

Hurrah for The Ban!

Hurrah for The Ban!

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THE WOLF OF WALL STREETThe Wolf of Wall Street has been banned by Kenya and Uganda, along with much of the rest of the world, and as a result will probably be the most watched movie this year in Africa.

Free speech isn’t relative, it’s immutable in Africa’s young societies. In contrast for example with China where government institutions are strong and decisive, Africa’s societies are run by weak governments.

They have a hard time collecting taxes and an even harder time banning films.

In fact, they aren’t really banning films. They’re banning the collection of film royalties, really, and so I say, “Here! Here!”

Last Thursday just before the scheduled weekend premiere in Kenya, the country’s film board banned the film. For the Kenyan film board, this was pretty harsh. It has banned only a handful of films, most of them outright porn.

In Uganda where banning films is a pastime, the global Cineplex theater in Kampala had the film on its marque Saturday and had actually sold tickets and seated customers when an announcement came that the film had been banned there, too.

The film will likely be banned in more than half the world’s countries, almost all in the developing world, Africa, Asia and the Mideast. In many others editing out scenes has been negotiated with the film producer to allow the performance, notably in India.

According to a spokesman for the Kenyan Film Board, the film’s producers didn’t reply to their request for special editing “leaving them no choice” but to ban the entire film.

India is a much bigger market than Kenya.

The irony in all of this is twofold. First, the result is that more people will see the film.

“I am actually watching it right now,” a Kenyan Facebook user posted after the ban. “Maybe the Ayatollahs in your board should come to the year 2014 and discover something called the internet.”

Not just the internet, either. Pirated copies (which are actually very decent in Kenya, I know) were selling like hotcakes.

“The pirates went into overdrive,” wrote Kenya’s favorite journalist, Obbo. He talked with an “underworld” pirateur who “dashed to make 25 copies, sold 20 within minutes – a record.”

Sold at about Ksh50/ or 50¢.

That’s the second irony. The film will now be seen by more people than ever. Many millions of Kenyans cannot afford the $7 it would have cost to see the film in the theater, and while that by itself would not have stopped pirating, there would simply not have been the demand.

So in underworld off-the-chart internet sites and on every corner of Nairobi the film is being passed from one person to another to another. It’s providing a reasonable income for unemployed techies and Scorsese, well, he won’t get his share.

The Kenyan Film Board is useless, the producers of Wolf are out of pocket.

Hurrah for Free Speech!

To watch a grilling Kenyan television interview of a spokesman for its Film Board, click below

Weary Dreams

Weary Dreams

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MLKDay14Today is one of the most important benchmarks in the American calendar, the Martin Luther King federal holiday. It’s especially important this year, the 50th anniversary of King’s famous “I Have a Dream!

” speech.

Yet in America over the past year King’s dreams have retreated into the fog of self-righteousness. His detractors, America’s Right, has rolled back many of the voting freedoms he had fought for a half century ago, assisted by a conservative if vindictive Supreme Court.

And King’s supporters seem to have hunkered down and conceded defeat. As America wiggles slowly out of a Great Recession there is less and less stomach for fighting.

And this seems true around the world. In Africa the “Arab Spring” and “Twevolution” are fizzling out.

African dictators are on the ascent, again. Oppressive laws are raising their ugly heads.

Africa, and America, are weary. War weary and poor weary.

Dr. King is ascribed in history — like Ghandi — as a champion of non-violence. But what I most remember of King’s turbulent last days was unbelievable violence. My most vivid memory is as a very young journalist penned under a burning El Stop in downtown Chicago while the city raged in reaction to King’s assassination.

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

Those days ended in victory for my side. The Vietnam War came to an end. Civil Rights and Voting Rights leaped forward. There is much violence in America, today, but it seems to occur without a cause.

Gun violence in America is horrific, today. While the number of households with guns has been declining, the actual number of guns has been skyrocketing. There are now almost a quarter billion guns in private citizen hands and countless murders daily.

This is not what Dr. King had in mind. So today we celebrate his 85th birthday, wishing sorely that he were still here to explain.

Clicked into The Wild

Clicked into The Wild

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reintroducingThe pressure of rapidly growing human populations has stimulated exciting new research on how to keep Africa wild.

All over the world developed communities flirt with the wild areas they erase. Of the 25 “greenist cities” in the world, Vienna is at the top followed closely by Singapore and Sydney. Hong Kong is 4th. Rio is 5th and London is 6th.

London is actually the largest city in area of that list above, so its nearly 40% green space is impressive. (There are five American cities on the list of 24: New York, San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles and Chicago.)

But all that “green space” isn’t exactly what Africans are trying to save. London’s exquisite gardens are mostly maintained by progressive income taxes and as with the taxed’s ancestral gameskeepers, thousands of green space workers hired by the city clip, fertilize and weed with the precision of a diamond cutter.

‘If a fox don’t belong in Burnham Common, best get the damn thing out a’ there.’

It’s much different in Africa.

Nairobi National Park, which is a growing favorite of the sentimental generation of which I consider myself a part, has no grass mowers. Very little intervention management occurs.

Rather, most efforts are concentrated in simply keeping the wild area from shrinking. Since much of developed Africa like Texas is grassland or scrubland, dainty-ing-up the hedge row isn’t one of the chores.

No, the principal focus in Africa is not with the green space, but the wild space.

East Africa sits about in the middle of the Great Rift Valley, and this is earth’s cornucopia. A fifth to a quarter of all animals (excludes birds and fish) are found in the Great Rift.

More and more protecting this biodiversity means expertly treating orphaned animals and refining ways to reintroduce them into the wild. Dame Daphne Sheldrick’s famous elephant orphanage at Nairobi National Park is the most well known, but by no means the largest or most important.

Almost all the largest animals found today in Kenya’s Nakuru National Park have been reintroduced or are descendants from reintroduced animals.

That’s quite impressive and includes dozens of rhinos, giraffe, buffalo and more. They live a totally unmanaged, wild existence, despite the massive fence that confines them to the 73 sq. miles, larger than the city of St. Louis.

These animals are as essential to the African ecosystem as the bromelias are to Hyde Park. So Africans have a bit more of a challenge than London gardeners.

Genius comes from challenge, and as counterintuitive as it seems, researchers at a monkey sanctuary in Kenya have discovered ways to “train an animal to be wild.”

“Clicker Training” is right out of Pavlov, behavior modification. An orphaned monkey at the Colobus Conservation Centre in Kenya is “taught” to be “untaught.”

After being nurtured to health, the monkey learns to do what its trainer wants for the reward of a peanut. The animal subsequently learns that the peanut reward occurs when there is a “click” from a relatively unoffensive clicking device.

Once ingrained the peanut reward can actually be removed, and the monkey continues to behave as managed by the click alone.

Slowly, the trainer clicks the monkey higher and higher into the canopy of the forest, where it begins to find its own food. The clicks can even be directed to move the monkey away from curious visitors.

Ultimately, the clicks can train the monkey to ignore the clicks.

From unwild to wild.

Lammergeirers over the Narok plains, elephants into Tsavo, hyrax into the frontier, chimps back to the Kafue … dozens and dozens of organizations in Africa today are doing everything they can to protect the continent’s treasured biodiversity.

And if the great metropolis of Nairobi can tower over Nairobi National Park without destroying it, Africa will become as modern as New York but remain as wild as the Congo.

Twinkle or Spark?

Twinkle or Spark?

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BesigyeAs much of the rest of Africa cuddles with a troubled peace, Uganda’s potential for violence increased substantially yesterday. Whether the iron-fisted ruler Museveni can bash it out before it flames is the question.

As I’ve written before, fights for political reform are ending throughout the continent: Africans are war weary, and in some cases like Egypt, see substantial compromise as the best they can do, now.

Even political unrest that exploded into all out war in places like the CAR and Mali is over, at least for the time being.

Places like the DRC-Congo where the conflict has been ongoing for 20 years now see large territories with no fighting at all.

And in places where global terrorism is a certain factor, like Somalia and Nigeria, the news is promising.

So what’s different about Uganda?

Uganda is one of the diminishing number of African countries run by an iron-fisted dictator. But unlike its nearest cousin, Zimbabwe, Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda keeps sticking it harder and harder to the opposition, an opposition like in Zimbabwe which had all but fizzled out.

We old safari guides know when it’s time to leave the embers die on their own. Stirring them impatiently often flames them up.

Museveni is at least 15 years younger than Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s dictator. Perhaps he sees a long life ahead of him, and perhaps that’s the difference.

Yesterday, the all but forgotten, decades-long courageous battler for Uganda’s better side, Kizza Besigye, told Ugandans to forget the ballot box, it’s time to rise up.

And his otherwise quiet speech during the funeral of an Ugandan entertainer was headlined and featured and broadcast across the country by one of its largest newspapers.

That in itself is telling. There are so many laws today in Uganda against free speech that the Observer’s gall in irritating (and probably from a Ugandan legal definition, libeling) the current regime is amazing.

Besigye called for an “Arab Spring” style uprising, but stopped short of announcing an armed revolution. Among his suggestions was that farmers withhold foodstuffs from Kampala and that the population as a whole engage in national strikes.

Besigye has been successful in organizing such movements before. Three times he actually ran for president against Museveni, each time losing in clearly fraudulent ballot counts. This week he announced he would not take part in an election, again, but will now concentrate on disrupting Museveni’s regime.

At first I couldn’t see Besigye’s call to his fellow countrymen getting very far. The poor man has more scars and broken bones than you can imagine, having been tortured numerous times.

The recent laws passed in Uganda against gays and other fringe social activity put Besigye in an odd situation of having to ignore them, as most of rural Uganda supports such oppression.

But the recent coverage given Besigye by daring media that absolutely threatens their own survival and safety, and the courage that Uganda’s remaining intellectuals have begun to show is new.

Like Cairo where we now understand the roots of the Egyptian rebellion were literally completely contained, it could be there is enough fire power in the Kampala area alone to spark something.

If it doesn’t, Besigye and whatever is left of Uganda’s opposition, is toast.

Black, Blackie or Blacker?

Black, Blackie or Blacker?

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

KillToSaveTexas hunters, National Geographic, President Obama and one old hippo in the Cleveland Zoo .. My gosh, what a ‘tail to tale!’

By now you must have heard about the Dallas Safari Club’s auctioning off
a “black rhino hunt” in Namibia that fetched $350,000 … for black rhino conservation.

I just don’t get what all the fuss is suddenly about. This isn’t the first time. The exact situation happened before and the Obama administration even blessed it. No problem then. Why so much attention, now?

Do you know how wonderful the Redwood smells? I think we should start a campaign now on MoveOn to auction off a few trees from Muir Woods and then donate the proceeds to Redwood conservation.

And I think we can just keep the ball rolling, then. Based on personal experience, I’ve also always felt that if you just get rid of a few of us old farts now rather than wait for us to keel over, society would be so much more attractive!

We have entered, truly, the world of the absurd: Kill it to save it.

Yet it isn’t the first time, folks! It’s not the second or tenth time, in fact. And such lofty characters as National Geographic and the Obama Administration have been fully invested in such ideas until now.

“Kill it to save it” is not a new concept. And it is the principle by which so much hunting – including in Africa – has been done for years and years.

Deer harvests are the most obvious example. Deer hunting has been a carefully regulated and nurtured social activity for six to seven generations, and today management of the deer population is a science extraordinaire. Were deer hunting to be summarily banned, there are plausible arguments that the entire population would crash.

And with a crash in one species, a panoply of similar and related species are jeopardized. Everything from their predators and scavengers (like wolves and crows) to the plants they consumer (like mustard garlic).

Of course it begs the question why hunting deer was ever nurtured then regulated in the first place. But that takes us well back into the 1800s and is such a lengthy period of human management of nature that the explanation is probably mute.

In Africa big game hunting, of which the black rhino was once an essential ingredient, was always regulated in a way that at least appeared to contribute to conservation.

Hunting reserves whether intentionally or by default surrounded the fully protected wilderness areas where no hunting was allowed. Those areas became known as the “buffers.”

Big game hunters in Africa are notoriously tyrannical. I have little doubt that when they lose their jobs they became commanders in blood diamond wars. So the “buffer” area around the national parks was policed in ways African governments could only hope could be the case inside the parks.

That protected the parks from poachers.

More to the point, people pay so much to kill a big African animal that the revenue stream into Africa was simply too much to refuse. This revenue stream was at least in part supposed to be used to nurture the fully protected parks.

This, in fact, is the argument used by Safari International. In October, though, CBC radio unmasked the real intention in a thoughtful interview of the safari auction’s lawyer. He admitted that the main reason hunters want to conserve anything is to be able to kill them, later.

Abe Lincoln once said something about being able to fool people but not always. Well, the public has been fooled for a very long time about hunting. You don’t kill something to save it.

In the current situation, the Dallas Safari Club’s most invoked second argument (after the first argument that the proceeds aid conservation) was that the rhino chosen was an old marauding male that was interfering with otherwise expected successful breeding in his community of wild rhinos.

Uncle Tom at a dashing 75 could charm the buttons off every prom girl in his community, and there were members of the family who wanted to bump him off, but we prevailed.

Don’t end this story, here. Remember that it was President Obama’s administration which was the first in the history of the Endangered Species Act and its worldwide equivalent, CITES, to issue a presidential waiver to a hunter
 in Wisconsin to bring back a rhino he had killed in Namibia.

That hunter purchased his Namibian rhino hunt at a safari club auction.

The argument used by the administration was that the money the man had spent on the hunt would contribute to rhino conservation.

And more recently, National Geographic criticized attempts to “list lion” as endangered and thus stop all lion hunting, because according to this lofty magazine, hunting can contribute to conservation.

The Obama Administration’s action was abhorrent. NatGeo’s arguments were as thin as the Dallas Safari Club’s.

But it gets worse with NatGeo, because this time around they’ve criticized the Dallas auction. So add hypocrisy to abhorrence and you get absurdity.

So what do we do with old creatures no use anymore to procreation?

We do exactly what the Cleveland Zoo did for decades of agony to its budget. Yesterday, the oldest hippo in North America, Blackie, died at 59 years old.

Blackie was a pain. When I was first introduced to him he tried to attack me. Years later he just floated in an off-site enclosure that was built at great expense and tended to with the greatest care.

But he was alive. And zoos and real conservation organizations are interested in life.

The Dallas Safari Club, the Obama administration and NatGeo, seem to have more important priorities.

Wildly Expensive

Wildly Expensive

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

cozytentonsafariIf you’re planning a safari next year, prepare for some of the largest price increases in the history of safari travel.

Large new taxes in all but one of the countries in East Africa come on line by July, and safari prices will begin flirting with the $1,000 per person day level.

Newly implemented V.A.T. in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya, will push 2013 safari prices up a quarter by 2015.

Tanzania remains the lone holdout, and the pressures on that country to join its neighbors Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda are mounting.

Uganda’s 18% began last year. Rwanda’s 18% will begin next July. Kenya’s 16% tax was passed last year then rescinded for many tourism products, but then reintroduced at the end of the year.

Uganda’s was the first tax to come online, and local operators are now convinced it decimated tourism. Uganda has a lot of other problems contributing to its decline in tourism, but these large taxes are absolutely a cleaver to whatever was left.

A normal pricing formula moves a 16-18% in source prices to an increase of a quarter in retail prices. American safari wholesalers have been averaging around $700 per person per day, which would move that immediately to $875. An average 11-day safari that was selling for $7,700 will become $9,625.

“Average” or “midmarket” safaris have been dramatically declining ever since the great recession, leaving much if not most of the American market buying only high priced trips. So average priced safaris are often hard for Americans to find, today.

American wholesalers won’t offer them, so a first-time consumer is usually forced to buy directly, searching for companies in East Africa. That requires additional due diligence, of course, and sometimes may encounter language problems. (Tanzania’s greatest single safari market comes from France.)

In the early 2000s midmarket safaris represented about half the market, with budget safaris representing a quarter, and upmarket safaris representing a quarter. But today upmarket safaris represent more than half the business from the U.S. and budget safaris are nearly nonexistent.

This means that an initial search by a first-time American consumer preferring to buy a trip from an American wholesaler will have difficulty locating a safari under $10,000.

When the taxes were first announced, Kenyan and Rwandan operators said they would absorb some of the costs, but that’s become too difficult.

Most of the profit of traditional safari transactions is earned by the foreign wholesaler. The markup prior to retailing can be as high as 50% in America. (Retail agents have been in decline in America for some time and are becoming an insignificant factor in most safari transactions.) The vast majority of American safari travelers buy directly from an American wholesaler.

Profit at the source in East Africa is very volatile. Property owners rarely have consistent occupancy rates, but even business plans well designed to traditional seasonal occupancy patterns are not meeting their goals as the overall market for safari travel declines.

The result is the safari investors are earning less than 10%, diversifying their interests into other businesses like transportation and conventions, and increasingly relying on the local and regional markets.

Midmarket safaris will be the most to suffer. These are the larger lodge chains like Sopa, Marasa and Serena. These are good, very reliable companies whose package programs still price around $5,000 for an average 11-day program.

If they wish to sell to American consumers, they’re going to have to massively upgrade their websites and begin aggressive direct marketing campaigns. This they are reluctant to do, because while the American market is important, it’s never been as important as the European or Asian markets which continue to rely on more traditional selling patterns.

European and Asian agents would likely dump one of these midmarket vendors for their competitor if it became too obvious they were selling directly.

But they are also the most price sensitive and the ones certain to be hurt significantly by the V.A.T. increases. I don’t think they have any choice but to begin direct marketing.

The decisions by the governments to move ahead with V.A.T. suggests several things.

First, tourism is becoming less important as new natural resource wealth is discovered. Second, there’s a belief that safari prices are already so high, going higher isn’t really going to matter.

To a certain extent that’s true. For the western world budget safari travel has all but dried up. But for the emerging travelers in Asia, budget travel is critical and I think this will have a crippling effect on a market that was growing substantially and fast.

All eyes are now on Tanzania. I think it near impossible for the country to hold back. For the time being Tanzania has an enormous price advantage over its neighbors, although it has been enjoying the advantage of being free of the terrorist incidents Kenya has endured and free of the horrible political turbulence of Uganda.

I actually think that Tanzania’s reluctance to implement V.A.T. has a lot to do with its corrupt tax collection system, and that increasing this type of revenue would exacerbate an already horribly corrupt system at a time when European powers have been specially public about Tanzania’s naughty ways.

Safaris have always been an expensive vacation. But compared with other trips, safari prices have increased far more quickly. Forty years ago when I began my career and right until the middle 1990s, the cost of your safari was about the same as the cost of your airline ticket to get there.

Today a safari averages four to five times the cost of an airline ticket. That metric more than any other shows how exclusive safari traveling in East Africa has become. For the vast majority of travelers it’s now just out of range.

Is there an alternative? Sort of: South Africa provides numerous opportunities for good budget travel. It just doesn’t have the quantity of animals or expanse of wilderness terrain found in East Africa. But for a midmarket budget, that will now become the only available destination.

South Sudan like them all Crumbles

South Sudan like them all Crumbles

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

military-democracy1Add South Sudan, Central Africa and Libya to Iraq and Afghanistan and you have the most costly failure in human history to make undeveloped parts of the world in the image of its superpower.

“Most costly” is an understatement. None of us can begin to imagine the 20 years of military hardware costs, personnel deployment costs, global policy orientation costs … except perhaps Eisenhower’s impugned “military-industrial” complex.

And even if that impugned component could be economically conceived as contributing to America’s growth, how do you economically measure the human tragedies? It’s arrogant to simply refer to American military casualties, since the human toll is a hundred, perhaps a thousand times, perhaps ten thousand times American injuries and deaths.

Yesterday, Assistant Secretary of State Linda Thomas-Greenfield told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee that South Sudan was “in danger of shattering.”

None of America’s experiments in democracy abroad was as promising as the South Sudan. Unlike elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East, America’s contribution to its generational civil war was mostly limited to diplomatic involvement.

Which was true of the other side as well. We supported the rebels. Russia and China supported the mother country, Sudan. And when Russia dared to send more than a Mig or two, Clinton bombed a Khartoum factory and Russia agreed to toe the unspoken diplomatic line to not arm the factions in the war.

So the war went on and on and on, very much like Darfur continues in the western Sudan, today. Rather than planes from Russia and tanks from the U.S., guns and hand-held missiles came from arms dealers in Jamaica that had mastered the insecure arsenal of the downfall of the Soviet Union. That wasn’t good, but it kept the war at a lower grade.

The emergence of the new South Sudan nation was a joy to the world, and especially to America. Politicians and celebrities all took credit. Although landlocked, the country’s potential was uniquely good, because it sat on so much oil, because so much of its land was unpopulated and fertile, and because its long civil war had leaders ready to go.

What happened?

Two things. First, democracy. Second, tanks.

DEMOCRACY
It’s one thing to nuke Afghanistan because its leaders bombed the World Trade Center. It’s quite another to suppose you can remake that part of the world in your own image.

We are learning again and again that America’s form of government — indeed lifeways, altogether – doesn’t work in the undeveloped world.

There are dozens of fundamental reasons why. But consider just this: America itself has had constant and serious problems with implementing its own democracy literally from the getgo.

We’ve mastered democracy, perhaps. But from Congressional gridlock to politicians’ lies to the uncertainty in counting votes to the complexities of voting at all … these are complicated, intricate problems created, analyzed and remedied by very modern and often high tech solutions.

I can blithely mention the “unimagined cost” of our mistakes, but even the carefully imagined costs of mistakes in the South Sudan result in that country’s own immediate deaths and destructions.

In America our mistakes are often manifest far from our shores. Not in places like the South Sudan. There is a simple line from a politician’s corrupt actions to the deaths of thousands of his fellow countrymen.

Writing today in African Arguments, Andreas Hirblinger dissects what’s left of South Sudan’s constitution and government and shows that little is left but the authority of the current “democratically elected” president.

Democracy doesn’t work in undeveloped places. This is a lesson the entire era of the “Arab Spring” is finally teaching us.

TANKS
Give two thugs AK47s and you turn a brawl into a war.

So pleased with their creation of the new democratic state in Africa, the western world began pouring in funds without strings.

What did that money buy? Communication systems from IBM? How about urban development consulting from J.D. Powers? No? Almost all the money went to Halliburton and it wasn’t just for catering services on oil rigs.

Not long after George Clooney and Hillary Clinton attended the unveiling democracy in Juba, the U.S. and its allies wittingly or not began arming South Sudan to the teeth.

Surprise! Huge new fighting began with The North. The war was supposed to have been over.

We need worldwide gun control. And that, because it’s so dearly linked to manufacturing and concomitant economic growth, is the harder problem.

Imagine suggesting to a country dominated by such an entity as the NRA that the UN should enforce a ban on all weapon transfers. Yet that is exactly what’s needed.

Fights are organic parts of any social development. Words don’t kill. Fistfights rarely kill. Give a newly emerged nation whose population is still mostly illiterate and has lived for generations by subsistence agricultural an arsenal of modern weapons …. well, I think anyone can understand this argument.

But will we do anything about it?

Maybe. I think Gates’ memoir, statements by Thomas-Greenfield and actions by Kerry have many lines to read between. I think America may be learning this critical lesson about democracy.

No chance we’ll stop the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower was spot on.

Important Stories for 2013

Important Stories for 2013

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Important 2013 StoriesMisreported elephant poaching, a changed attitude against big game hunting, enduring corruption, a radical change in how safaris are bought and sold, and the end of the “Black Jews” in Ethiopia are my last big stories for 2013.

#6 is the most welcome growing opposition to big game hunting.

It’s hard to tell which came first, public attitudes or government action, but the turning point was earlier this year when first Botswana, then Zambia, began to ban big game hunting.

Botswana banned all hunting in December, 2012, and a month later Zambia announced a ban on cats with an indication they would be going further. Until now big game hunting revenues in Zambia were almost as much as tourism’s photography safari revenues, that’s how important these two countries are to hunting. (Kenya banned all hunting in the 1980s.)

The decision to ban a traditional industry is major. While some animal populations are down (lions and elephants) many like the buffalo are thriving, so this is not wholly an ecological decision. Rather, I think, people’s attitudes are changing.

Then in October a movement began to “list lion” on CITES endangered species list, which would effectively ban hunting of lion even in countries that still allow it. There was little opposition in the media to this, except surprisingly by NatGeo which once again proved my point the organization is in terrible decline.

The fact is that public sentiment for big game hunting is shifting, and from my point of view, very nicely so.

#7 is the Exaggerate story of elephant poaching. I write this way intentionally, to buff the hysteria in the media which began in January with a breaking story in Newsweek and the Daily Beast.

Poaching of all animals is showing troubling increases, and elephants are at the top of that list. But in typical American news style that it has to “bleed to read” the story has been Exaggerate to the point that good news like China’s turnaround is ignored and that the necessary remedies will be missed.

Poaching today is nowhere near as apocalyptic as it was in the 1970s, but NGOs are trying to make it look so, and that it infuriates me. Poaching today is mostly individual. Unlike the horrible corrupt poaching that really didn’t nearly exterminate elephants in the 1970s and 80s.

Poaching today also carries an onerous new component that has nothing to do with elephants. It’s become a revenue stream for terrorists, and the hysteria to contribute to your local NGO to save elephants completely masks this probably more urgent situation.

And so important and completely missed in the headlining is that there are too many elephants. Don’t mistake me! I don’t mean we should kill them off. But in the huge difference in the size of African people populations in the 1970s and those of today, the stress of too many elephants can lead to easy local poaching, and that’s what’s happening.

#8 is a tectonic change in the way safaris are being bought and sold.

The middle man, the multiple layers of agents inserted between the safari and its consumer have been eroding for decades. But in one fell swoop this year, a major South African hotel chain sold itself to Marriott, leapfrogging at least the decade behind that Africans were in selling their wares.

Most African tourism products are not bought by Americans, and so how safaris were are has mostly been governed by buying habits in such places as Europe. America is far ahead of the rest of the world in direct tour product buying, and the sale of Protea Hotels to Marriott signals to all of Africa that the American way is the world trend.

#9 is a depressing tale. After a number of years where Africa’s overall corruption seemed to be declining, last year it took a nosedive.

The good news/bad news flag came in September, when France’s President Hollande ended centuries
 of deceitful collaboration between corrupt African leaders and the Élysée Palace.

Many of us jumped on this as a further indication of Africa’s improving transparency, but in fact, it was just the reverse and Hollande beat us to the punch. In November the European union gave Tanzania a spanking for being so egregiously corrupt.

And then Transparency International’s annual rankings came out. It’s so terribly disappointing and I’d like to think it all has to do with declining economies, but closer looks at places like Zimbabwe and South Africa suggest otherwise. I’m afraid the “public will” has just been sapped, and bad guys have taken advantage … again.

#10 is intriguing and since my own brush with “Operation Moses” in the 1980s, I’ve never stopped thinking about it. The last of Africa’s “Black Jews” were “brought home
” to Israel October 31.

A tribe in Ethiopia referred to as the “Falashas” has an oral history there that goes back to the 3rd century. Israel has always contended they were migrants from the land of the Jews, possibly the lost Tribe of Dan. Systematically, through an extreme range of politics that included the emperor Selassie, to the Tyrant Mengistu to today’s slightly more democratic Ethiopia, Israel has aided Ethiopia.

For only reason. To get the Black Jews back home. And whether they all are or not, Israel formally announced that they were on October 31.

#5 : Climate Change

#5 : Climate Change

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

climatechange.13TOP5There are American politicians wallowing in our current deep freeze as evidence there’s no global warming, and there are African farmers planting three times annually who think everything’s just fine.

It isn’t.

Climate change in Africa is my #5 story for 2013 in Africa.

The incremental warming of earth neither stops great variations in weather or singularly increases what was bad before. Still, African farmers seem a lot less stupid than some American Senators.

One effect of incremental global warming is to make the equatorial regions wetter. The equatorial part of Africa is one of its principle food baskets. But it’s only been in this generation that agriculture has grown in any significant way from just a subsistence industry.

So there are fewer good farming techniques and poorer seeds, less mechanization and irrigation, significantly no crop insurance, and basically a farmer’s harvest is beholding to Mother Nature.

I spoke with several African farmers over the last several years in Kenya and Tanzania who know that planting maize or millet three times a year is ruining their soil, but with the added moisture now available, “subsistence” is trumping “sustainability.”

There’s another reason they do it unabashedly. The common effect of global warming around the earth is to make the extreme moments of weather even more extreme.

So when a drought comes to equatorial Africa, as it normally has done forever, it’s worse. In the past small harvests were common in common droughts. Today everything is lost completely.

One could say that global warming is winning the race against modernizing agricultural in equatorial Africa.

Cyclones and typhoons (“tropical depressions” and “hurricanes” in western hemisphere jargon) have always been very rare in equatorial Africa because the spread between very hot and very humid and very cool and dry required to create these phenomena just doesn’t exist.

Not only have they been on the increase, they’ve crawled right up the Red Sea! That’s almost like Hurricane Sandy winding her way down the St. Lawrence into the Great Lakes!

Last year these kinds of unusual winds and storms in Rwanda, Tanzania, Somali and Ethiopia produced enormous devastation.

Farms are destroyed, towns are washed away, whole communities are dissolved … literally. In Kenya and Tanzania, where tourism is still a very important part of the economy, rains so heavy that they were off the charts quite nearly destroyed Lake Manyara National Park.

Farmers are anxious for solutions, and some may be coming. The most talked about one is called “re-greening” which represents numerous small-scale initiatives for dealing with climate change.

But it’s uncertain any techniques can deal with the speed of things changing. There’s just not much you can do when the entrance to a national park is covered by a mud slide.

Victoria Falls is one of the greatest tourist attractions not just on the continent of Africa, but in the world. It has always cycled from low water to high water, but about the only effect was to create a season that was safe for white water rafting.

Now the low water cycles of the falls are so low that many travel professionals are advising against a trip to the falls from September through December, the normal low water period. And conversely as well, the high water which normally comes in March – May is sometimes to great that the mist is so intense you can’t see anything.

That essentially reduces tourism to the falls by a half year!

And this cycles right back from tourism to agriculture. With such a ridiculous variance in flow from the Zambezi River that produces the falls, there is now a serious battle between the countries in the area that want to dam it to better regulate their own needs.

African politicians rightly see global warming as the real war on earth, far more important than the War on Terror.

First, Africans didn’t cause this but they’re being made not to contribute to it, and this stifles traditional development.

The developed world will not invest in African countries to mine coal, for instance. But coal is abundant throughout Africa. But there’s plenty of investment for extracting oil, which can contribute just as much to global warming as coal, because the developed world still lusts for oil.

Second, extremes in weather increase social conflict. There’s a good case to be made that the whole problem in Somalia might never have happened if the area’s agriculture hadn’t been decimated by global warming (and if the country’s fisheries hadn’t been exploited by western powers).

Even on a much more local level, the stress caused by frequent droughts followed by frequent floods leads to considerable tensions. Increased Kenyan police action in the area of the country where the desert meets fertile ground has grown exponentially. This year the military was sent in to keep warring factions apart.

I wonder if a science fiction writer in the 18th or 19th centuries looking forward into today would paint what is simply typical news to us as apocalypse.

The world can no longer deny climate change, but Africa is the poor cousin that fears being sacrificed to save the lovely pumpkin farm in the Hamptons.