Musicians have long waved the banners of the oppressed, and I’m worried that they have abandoned Nairobi’s Eastleigh because of Kenya’s increasing war on terror.
Nothing is ever all one way or the other. Despite Texas Congressional candidates’ assertions, not all Muslims are jihadists.
Many Somalis abhor war, are vehemently anti-terrorist, and many who I know are among the most placid individuals in the world. Many hundreds, even thousands, left Somalia for Kenya fleeing the conflict.
They ended up in Eastleigh, a northeast part of the city now known as “Little Mogadischu.”
When terrorist attacks increased in Kenya, jihadists’ retribution for Kenya invading Somalia and displacing al-Shabaab, almost all the attacks in and around Nairobi were in Eastleigh.
The pacifists fought back … with music. There were some incredibly courageous individuals and bands in Eastleigh who defied terrible and real threats after denouncing al-Shabaab and terrorism.
It began in 2008 with an artists’ collective in Eastleigh called Waayahu Cusub, “New Era.” The young artists wanted to structure a Somali existence in Kenya based on no war. Since 1993 Somalia has been a land of war.
In the beginning they focused on things music normally does, like love and romance. Alla Weyn (Big Dude) was an immediate worldwide success.
But as terrorism increased in Kenya they got pushed into the political front. A 2012 Rolling Stones article said “Somalia’s hip-hop renegades are claiming their war-torn country’s culture back from militant extremists.”
In some regards they had no choice. Radical jihadists normally ban all music. So last year in July Waayahu Cusub’s musicians successfully produced a giant concert for Somali relief.
And there were no more lyrics laced in roses and kisses. The singers challenged al Shabaab in particular to defy their music and painted a red line at Eastleigh.
Then there was the devastating destruction of the Westgate Mall and more recently the terrible massacre at a clothing market.
Waayahu Cusub has gone silent. Their website, once attracting thousands of hits daily, is dead.
The reasons for this are as much in the response to the War on Terror as the war itself, and more of this on Monday.
Like kudzu, loose strife, wolves and coyotes, garlic mustard, Asian beatles and now even Asian carp, this week poorly trained biologists are focusing on the newest of the worst “invasive” species, the “Asian Common Toad.”
“Invasive Species” is bad nomenclature. Most of what hyper, reactive biologists refer to as “invasive” is intended to mean “bad.”
In other words, if some form of life begins to dominate an ecosystem, it’s wrong and “invasive” when its doing so perilously threatens other established species in that ecosystem.
And that’s the rub. “Perilously” is subjective and darn it, give me several examples where so-called “invasive species” have radically and lastingly altered an ecosystem.
You’ll have a very hard time. There’s no question that there are “super” specious, like the toad I discuss below that scientists worry is now threatening Madagascar, but rarely have the alerts proved as prescient as they appear when announced.
(The best example of invasive species is native Americans wiped out by the smallpox brought by European colonists, and even historically I haven’t heard much of an argument that we shouldn’t have come.)
Like my strong but nuanced argument that poaching elephants isn’t the main problem, this takes some intellectual juice to understand, and the best example right now is the alarm that conservationists are raising against the Duttaphrynus melanostictus.
Nature called the event a looming “ecological disaster.”
It isn’t.
The toad is native to much of southeast Asia where it evolved. It’s toxic, so when eaten by other animals (and lots of other animals eat frogs and toads), they get sick and some die.
Discovered recently at a port in Madagascar, conservationists went ape. Madagascar is one of the most precious, unique ecosystems on earth, with up to 90% of the species found there endemic.
There’s no doubt that if left to prosper, Mr. Toad will impact Madagascar’s ecosystem. Just as the Lutherans did on the Iroquois. My point is that these alarms soliciting urgent responses to “control invasive species” are pointless, unnecessary and a scandalous misuse of resources.
“Pointless” because they don’t work. You might have been successful keeping garlic mustard out of your flower garden, but you’ll never get it out of your forest.
“Unnecessary” because mainly it’s pointless. Our failures to control invasive species have consistently and increasingly been spectacular defeats. And even if you believe that this series of defeats is reversible, would it be good for the planet?
Would the world have been better had kudzu really been eradicated? Would teepees be better than arched bell towers?
There are a couple examples in the world, the Galapagos being one, where I concede had the rat not gotten into the shed, or had been exterminated quickly enough, things would be better. But those examples are confined to rare and very small ecosystems of which the world just isn’t mostly composed.
Whereas the alarms of invasive species are overwhelmingly rung in large ecosystems, like North America.
Yet the resources allocated to these efforts, and the machismo with which it infuses the conservationist is not simply unbecoming and unscientific, it’s nonsense.
Take the toad.
The toad “invaded” Australia in the 1930s from climes north.
The fear then, as now in Madagascar, is that birds, snakes and everything precious would eat the toad and die. And many did.
Rachel Clarke and other scientists commissioned by the Australian Government to finally conclude what the toad actually did to Australia in the last century, decided that it had done really very little.
Paraphrasing the scientific report, a frog advocacy group in Australia claimed that Clarke and colleagues basically concluded that it was the “Yuk Factor” rather than any real threat to the ecosystem that drove the initial alarms.
“What’s the evidence for all this talk of ecological catastrophe and biodiversity impacts?” the organization asks then answers, “surprisingly little.”
Yes, many snakes died when eating the toads at first. That resulted in an explosion in the native frog population that was very positive for many other species as for a while there were fewer predators of them. And then, the snakes stopped eating the toads and prospered.
Yes, birds ate the toad and died. And then birds learned to eat only parts of the toad and didn’t die. And some birds, like the sacred ibis, developed an ability to eat the toad and not get sick.
In fact up to 90% of the species of some animals were initially wiped out by the toad in Australia. But then? They came back, learning or evolving how to live with them.
Madagascar is 13 times bigger than the demarcated political land and water area of the Galapagos Islands, but it is no less precious an island ecology. I think it reasonable to try to inhibit the invasion of the toad.
But there are a host of other more serious problems facing Madagascar, both ecologically and socially. If the toad is not stopped, Madagascar will not over time be considerably changed.
And it just isn’t unseemly, it’s unscientific, to scandalize what is actually the virtue of successful natural selection.
A nasty America is emerging in response to new Obama rules to prohibit the sale of ivory within the U.S.
It’s never been fully recognized that the second largest market for ivory sales after China is the United States.
***** EleStip: My necessary interjection whenever I write of poaching or ivory is to stipulate that I don’t believe that poaching is the most serious problem facing African conservation, today, or even elephants themselves. It’s (a) the human/elephant conflict; and separately (b), elephant overpopulation.
*****
Readers of this blog and other conservationists might not realize that there’s a huge part of America which doesn’t like conservation.
When the Obama administration first proposed the rules in February, there was a huge outcry. Hunters, musicians, retailers and rich grandmothers protested so vehemently that the rules have been toned down.
Fish & Wildlife’s new rules will not formally be implemented until June and can be continually downgraded as the public outcry increases. But I expect they will be severe enough to curtail the ivory market in the U.S.
Sales, auctions, and even gifting of preowned ivory will likely be prohibited.
The theory is that constricting the demand for something reduces its commercial value, which is precisely what conservationists want to happen with elephant tusks.
But the devil is in the detail, and while I applaud the overall move to further regulate ivory, note the alarming exceptions likely to be promulgated with the new regulations in June:
– trophies from shot elephants;
– antique ivory owned prior to 1976; and
– ivory acquired “legally” before 1990.
Those exceptions (and probably others) are so remarkably political in nature that they grossly undermine whatever morality the Obama administration is trying to evince.
It reminds me of the fact that Obama himself is the only chief executive in the history of the world to have issued a waiver to a hunter to bring a shot rhino from Africa back home.
So while the rules are severe enough to massively reduce the trade of ivory within the United States, the few exceptions are the politically powerful NRA, celebrity antique dealers and other rich well-connected families whose inheritances are now more secure.
In other words, big donors.
Worldwide, in fact, the ivory market is constricting. More and more large commercial retailers in Asia are themselves banning the sale of ivory.
This follows numerous moves throughout China over the last several years to ban retail sales of ivory.
I’m sure that these much publicized efforts have their loopholes, too, but it is discouraging that in America, far from where elephants live, the closest to the elite that rule our country and the richest and most powerful are exempt from doing what’s right.
It’s Memorial Day in America, similar to the Remembrance Days celebrated in many parts of Africa.
America’s holiday is intended to honor the memories of U.S. soldiers who have died in action. African Remembrance Days are usually in homage to freedom fighters for independence.
America’s Memorial Day honors all dead soldiers, so in that regard our own revolutionary fighters are to be in our memory as well. But it began as “Decoration Day” right after the Civil War, following a petition by recently freed slaves to honor the Union soldiers who had freed them.
After World War I, it was changed to “Memorial Day” and extended as an honor to all soldiers in all conflicts.
As a young boy it was a big red-white-and-blue festival. We decorated our little red wagons and bikes, just as we would hardly a month later for July 4th. And in those days we were remembering mostly the two Great Wars.
Since then my own personal regard for Memorial Day has diminished. The numerous wars my country has begun have mostly been unfair and unjust. And with the end of the draft when I was in university, the military has changed radically. It no longer represents society as a whole.
Today, the military is composed either of young men who can’t get any other kind of job or who need the benefits once the service is finished, or avowed militarists.
Politicians today use the military not to protect our freedoms but to protect their position in power.
I do stop during the day and think of my relatives in the Great Wars. I think of the way the country ultimately came together to fight world tyranny.
But that was all a long time ago, before I was born. In my life time, there is little in America’s wars to be proud of. They are mostly memories I wish I didn’t have.
Dear Grace & Other Careful Readers
Thanks. This blog is in error. The “petition site” (automatically) contacted me (their deadline for the petition is next week, June 1, 2014) and fed me the links that I took to be current. Fellow bloggers did the same and we contributed to each other’s errors. All the news below is one year old. As far as we know the eviction process is on hold as a result of a suit filed by Maasai leaders which is still alive in the Tanzanian courts.
Petition site organizers believe if they reach 34,000 signatures by June 1, 2014, they will continue the pressure needed to keep the evictions on hold, so please proceed reading and sign the petition. But my apologies to all my readers for syncing off by a year.
– Jim Heck
Desperately needed: your signature on and broadcast of a petition to stop Tanzania from giving away part of the Serengeti to Mideast princes.
Sign this petition and circulate it, now, now. We have little time.
Last year I reported that Tanzania President Kikwete announced that he was going to evict 30,000 Maasai from their homeland in Loliondo in northern Tanzania to enlarge an existing hunting preserve owned by potentates in Dubai and Jordan.
As with the stopped Serengeti Highway, the outcry was substantial, especially locally from the Maasai. Nothing more happened. Until now.
Presuming the resistance had died out, Kikwete announced last week the sale was going ahead.
Manipulating Tanzania’s incredibly corrupt laws, Kikwete has decided to designate this area as a “wildlife corridor” which allows hunting but forces the eviction of the Maasai.
Don’t be fooled by this sinister sobriquet. Kikwete and past Tanzanian presidents have close relationships with Mideast potentates, where most of these old politicians’ money is stashed.
This is a land grab if ever there were one.
And this time the impact is actually less on conservationists and tourists than on local Tanzanians.
“My people’s livelihood depends on livestock totally,” a prominent Maasai politician, Daniel Ngoitiko, told the Guardian. “We will die if we don’t have land to graze.”
And don’t think this means there’s a bunch of dirty nomads running around half naked chasing dying cattle. Loliondo has become an important agricultural hub for Tanzania. We’re talking about modern ranching.
Ngoitiko’s comments could just as easily be said word-for-word by any Texas rancher afraid of a government land grab.
I’m infuriated by Kikwete’s dictatorial stance on this, his total disregard for the Maasai community which is trying so hard and doing so well to modernize.
So just as they begin modern farming techniques, he drives a stake through their back forty. There’s everything in his actions to suggest he’d rather send the Maasai back to the Stone Age than help them develop.
Ngoitiko told the Guardian, “We will fight against it until the last person is gone,” he said. More than fifty local Maasai officials said they will resign if the move goes through, effectively leaving a huge area without any local governance.
In an incredibly condescending dismissal Tanzania’s minister for natural resources and tourism, Khamis Kagasheki, was then quoted in the Guardian article as saying: “If the civic leaders want to resign, they can go ahead. There is no government in the world that can just let an area so important to conservation to be wasted away by overgrazing.”
This is equally a blow to the Serengeti, which the area is contiguous with. It’s a wedge between Kenya’s beautifully protected Maasai Mara and the Serengeti National Park.
Inserting hunting this far into the area could disrupt normal wildlife behaviors.
Please help. Sign the petition and circulate far and wide.
Ever heard of a coup d’etat that’s announced in advance? Ever been to Zimbabwe?
The Great Dictator, Robert Mugabe, was once again caught on video visiting a cancer hospital in Singapore several days ago.
His visit to Singapore is not entirely secret: spokesmen for the government conceded he’s in Singapore when he didn’t show up for several important functions in Harare.
But the government denied he’s visiting the Gleneagles Cancer Treatment Hospital to treat cancer. He’s there, they say, for an eye checkup.
It’s long been rumored that the 90+ year-old president has been battling prostate cancer.
Meanwhile, back on the ranch, a political rally was held announcing a coup could take place at any time:
“By the time he comes back from his so-called medical check-up in Singapore, we would have taken power,” a widely respected opposition activist told cheering crowds at a large rally Sunday in a poor neighborhood of Harare.
Well, it’s Thursday and they haven’t taken power and if Mugabe’s still alive he’ll be back, soon.
That, you see, is what’s wrong with Zimbabwe. The opposition is so feeble that it must resort to explaining what it could do, rather than what it does.
The populace cheers what it could do, but dares not support what it does, because the one statistic as large as the fraudulent election results used by Mugabe for his current validation as president, is the number of missing activists.
Those like Job Sikhala, the labor leader turned politician who spoke above, travel about in a ring of armed guards. The government turns the occasional blind eye so long as Sikhala uses only the future perfect tense.
Responding to the widely reported rally, a Zimbabwe government official dismissed Sikhala’s remarks as “coming from a political party that is seeking relevancy.”
Touche.
Relevancy. Every time I think of Zimbabwe and Mugabe I just can’t understand how the people there have facilitated his dictatorship for so long.
Thirty years ago when Mugabe was just consolidating his power, the average Zimbabwean was far better educated, independent, entrepreneurial than the vast majority of their counterparts throughout black Africa to their north.
What happened? Why did they cave so completely?
We know some of the answers: many fled. While there was a white brain drain going on in South Africa the last ten years of apartheid, there was a black brain drain growing in Zimbabwe as the 1990s approached.
This was because the constitution forced on Mugabe by Britain and the U.S. guaranteed a white veto of any government action during the first ten years of Mugabe’s reign, from 1980 to 1990, even though whites were less than sixteenth of the population.
That was a mistake and the better off, better educated black Zimbabweans knew this. They had ten years to make their plans to depart, and tens of thousands did.
The second reason is that from the getgo South Africa has buffered Zimbabwe from international pressures to reform. This is because in the 1990s South Africa began to experience a huge flood of refugees from Zimbabwe, and they continue to do everything to stem the tide.
But even so the man who wears dark sunglasses even in the movie theater and his regime is so repressive if not retrogressive I remain highly perplexed.
So perplexed I couldn’t even be surprised if the preannounced coup happened.
Boko Haram and America’s T-Party have a lot in common, and neither will disappear until their adversaries adopt some of their moral pinnings.
Boko Haram is on the rise. For more than a decade it’s caused widespread death and destruction in Nigeria, but with its new found fame, it’s expanding into a neighboring country.
“Right now, we are being infiltrated by Boko Haram,” a colonel in the Cameroon army told an Africa-wide press service last week.
Some argue they are “on the run” from northern Nigeria, their stronghold for more than a decade. Others, including myself, believe they’ve been strengthened by their recent worldwide attention.
The group continues to hold nearly 300 kidnapped schoolgirls from northern Nigeria. Many of the world’s western powers are helping Nigeria try to find the girls and eradicate the organization ever since the world’s media locked onto the story.
Like all politics in the west, Boko Haram has become entertainment:
The world press went ape yesterday announcing that primitive African tribes were now “on the hunt” for Boko Haram.
An extremely articulate, gentle and soft-spoken Boko Haram killer in a scarf-wrapped face was the centerpiece of last night’s CBS evening news.
“Boko Haram’s attacks … should be understood as part of an ongoing political-military campaign …to purge, conclusively, Nigeria’s Northern Muslim society of the source of its culture of corruption, decay and mismanagement,” says a Nigerian expert from King’s College, London.
Boko Haram views kidnapping girls from a corrupt society and turning them into tendrils of antiquated Islam a noble feat. That’s because in most of Africa you have to stretch way back to antiquated Islamism to find societies that were not corrupt.
And those were the precolonial days spoken about so highly by most jihadists. Corruption began with colonialism. It’s never ended.
Corruption in all sorts of forms is the only treatise the T-Party can rationally expound. When it gets into specific issues and policies it becomes mired in intellectual bureaucracy. Purity is the key.
As it is with Boko Haram. Little is ever argued in the academic or religious world about the tenants of Islam, or for that matter, the tenants of Christianity, or for that matter, the iconic folkways of the Irish or Poles.
Rather the purity of those tenants is what is argued. And there is little argument that Africa today, Nigeria in particular, is corrupt.
As is America. Nigerian corruption might reach its apex in a High Court judge taking money from an oil company. American corruption is more likely the Koch brothers airing 10,000 TV ads lying about Obama’s citizenship.
Neither example is more corrupt than the other. It doesn’t matter that one might have a greater impact in its respective society than the other. They’re both corrupt and it isn’t effectiveness but nature that generates the violent opposition of the likes of Boko Haram or America’s T-Party.
More than a year ago the Atlantic ran an excellent piece arguing that Democrats will only achieve supremacy over the T-Party if they adopt some of the T-Party’s ways:
“It is time for Democrats finally to steal a move from the Republican’s playbook… a Tea Party for Reform,” Lawrence Lessig argued in that article.
As more details emerge from Friday’s deadly terrorist attack in Nairobi, Kenyans are condemning western media for suggesting a holiday in Kenya isn’t safe. Do they have a point?
Two of Kenya’s leading tourism executives blamed western media for scandalizing the situation and argued that tourists on a Kenyan holiday are no more endangered by terrorism than tourists visiting Big Ben.
Before we get into this, let’s review what happened Friday:
Ten people were killed and at least 70 injured by two simultaneous explosions in an open-air market in mid-afternoon in Nairobi.
The first IED exploded around 230p at the periphery of what is called Africa’s largest second-hand clothing market. A few minutes later, a small bus filled with passengers exploded on a street adjacent the market.
The market is located about half-way between the troubled Eastleigh community of northeast Nairobi where so many Somalis live and the Nairobi city center.
Two days previously the British and American governments issued travel warnings urging their citizens to leave the Kenyan coast. Nairobi is about 220 miles inland from the coast.
The British secret service, the SAS, may have tipped off both British and Kenyan authorities that something was going to happen.
“Terror attack chatter” was intercepted by the SAS, according to the report in London’s Sunday Star.
The stern travel warnings that ensued prompted Europe’s mega travel company, TUI, to evacuate its British citizens booked through its subsidiaries, Thomson Holidays and First Choice Holidays, and to cancel its regular charter flights from Europe to the coast through October.
A third large European company, Kuoni, while not evacuating tourists canceled all further holidays on the Kenyan coast through October.
I explained in my blog Friday how the unique aspect of British travel insurance forced TUI into the decision. (Kuoni’s decision was for other reasons.) Hundreds of other European holiday makers booked through other companies were not evacuated and remain on the coast, today.
More than half the tourists who visit East Africa never see an animal. They come for the beautiful coast, and the coast of Kenya is as popular to Europeans for a holiday as the Caribbean is to Americans.
But the coast is heavily Muslim and has been so since the earliest histories. Kenya’s occupation of Somali unleashed the retribution which averages three terrorist attacks monthly, although the vast majority of these have been on or near the Somali border.
But the minority of other attacks have been on the coast, several quite near tourist centers.
In the last year a terrorist attack about once every two months has hit the Nairobi Somali expatriate community as well.
“Terrorism is a global threat and not unique to Kenya, with similar risks evident in Britain,” Jake Grieves-Cook, former head of the Kenyan association of tourist organizations, told the press Saturday.
He went on to detail that “the latest British MI5 and MI6 assessment of the terrorist threat within mainland Britain itself is now rated as ‘substantial’,” implying that a traveler in Britain was under as great a threat as in Kenya.
“This was not an evacuation as reported in the press,” Stefano Cheli, founder and owner of one of Kenya’s most successful upmarket tour companies said today. In a broadcast email to western travel companies, Cheli criticized the western media for suggesting the tourist repatriation was a British government operation rather than a TUI business decision.
Grieves-Cook, by the way, spent a long time in his statement explaining the exceptional good, particularly with regards to the near ending of Indian Ocean piracy, that the Kenyan military occupation of Somali has achieved.
He was almost but not actually saying that tourists owed Kenya an unusual latitude of security for what Kenya had secured for the world.
* * *
Vacations fall into a great variety of different categories. Probably the largest one is “R&R,” a reward for successful hard work. As such, the holiday maker wants as hassle free down time as possible. I think most beachcombers fall into this category.
A safari is a little bit different. I don’t think anyone planning a safari thinks it’s going to be relaxing. Exciting is the predominant theme. In fact, a touch of danger is often presumed, the titillation that is often a part of the motivation for booking. Like a sports holiday, there’s a definite aspect of challenge.
But you train carefully for a specific sport, and you believe – whether it’s true or not – that if you follow the rules the lion won’t eat you.
Terrorism is so successful because it’s just that: surprised fear. Holiday-makers don’t train to evacuate. There are no rules for dodging the bomb.
What’s left, though, is Grieves-Cook argument that Britain is as dangerous as Kenya, and the facts might bear him out.
Tourists killed in Britain’s scores of terrorist incidents, or in 9/11, are likely substantially higher than all the tourists ever killed in Kenya. So why not just trust the Kenyans to keep you as safe as the British?
Aha, that’s the answer and it’s not good for Kenya. Trust.
America and Britain have certainly had their share of terrorist acts, but Americans and Britains believe strongly that their governments have protected them against many, many more.
Why should a tourist trust Kenya when Kenya is unable to protect its own Eastleigh (Nairobi) citizens from a serious attack every two months? Facts aside, westerners are much more likely to trust the British or Americans to keep them safe than Kenyans.
It might not be fair. It might not even be rational. But it is the perception which matters.
The U.S. and Britain have issued specially strong travel warnings on Kenya. British tourists are being evacuated from the Kenyan coast.
Personally this is a stinging disappointment. We have multiple trips to Kenya planned; I was scheduled to be in Nairobi for three days in a couple weeks. There are unique and compelling attractions in Kenya found nowhere else in Africa.
Travel to Kenya’s game parks remains safer than it’s been for years. Simple numbers on not just kidnapping or murder, but even petty theft, are at historical lows in Kenyan game parks, probably lower in fact than in neighboring safari countries with average incidents.
But travel to its coast is now likely dangerous, and the overall perception travelers will now have means that travel to anywhere in Kenya won’t render the magical, super, exciting vacation that a good safari must be.
Vacations are composed of considerable amounts of positive anticipation, not just during the day to day events during the holiday, but even more so in the exciting preparations for it. A Kenyan holiday will now lack this essential ingredient.
The reason for Britain’s particularly harsh move was not triggered by any event. There has been no new significant terrorist incident since January 2, and that I almost didn’t classify as “significant.”
It was an improvised explosive device thrown into a crowded nightclub near the fancy resorts of Kenya’s south coast. But it was very amateurish, and the club was not a place tourists would normally go, anyway.
A half dozen other individual and pretty botched disruptive acts by who knows what kind of deranged or forsaken people has been recorded in places like the Nairobi airport this year, but really these were hardly more than fratboys freaking or disgruntled employees swinging.
The serious last “tourist” attack was on the Westgate Mall last September. As I’ve often written, it was not clear that was targeting tourists, but it could have been. Prior to that we have to go back nearly three years for any specifically tourist targeted attack.
So what prompted the Brit warning?
We don’t know, but it’s not always that the Brits and Americans follow each others’ warnings in lockstep as they did this time. Something’s in the air.
And the unique drama this time that highlighted the warnings is the ongoing evacuation of British tourists from beach resorts by the tour companies that brought them there. No other nationals are being evacuated, including Americans, and here’s why.
Travel Insurance.
Americans or most Europeans buying travel insurance pay up to 10% of the amount they wish to be covered for, and in the case of Americans, you can’t insure yourself against terrorism despite what some travel insurance companies may claim.
In Britain, the government guarantees the underwriters of travel insurance and it’s extremely affordable. Most Brits don’t buy it for a single trip, but on an annual basis, and the cost is generally around $250 per person per year.
That does cover your trip investment, health and safety and personal belongings against terrorist acts, but only if you abide by the government’s travel advice.
When the government says “Leave Now” – which the Brits did yesterday regarding the Kenyan coast – it means if you stay you’ll be without insurance. Travel companies carrying these passengers then become liable if something happens.
They have no choice but to get their clients out.
From a non-Brit’s point-of-view, however, this is extremely severe. Britain has never issued evacuation advice before. As I said, something’s in the air and the Brits are convinced of it.
And the Americans, who followed suit within hours, believe it, too.
This is catastrophic for the Kenyan tourist industry. Indeed, all the activity now may lead to a prevention of any terrorist act, hopefully. And if so, we’ll never know the reason. We’ll never know if it’s legitimate.
But I trust the Brits and Americans with regards to their travel advice, today. I didn’t always.
Persons contemplating an East African safari should steer clear of Kenya, now.
Travelers already committed to Kenya will have some tough decisions. No one should go to the coast, now, but as I’ve said, the game parks seem very safe. Anxiety will be weighed against losing deposits.
It is a horrible fact in our world, today, that “improvised” terror striking as disparate communities as Boston and Diani Beach can determine not just the fate of holidays but the fate of entire economies.
“Terror” has become part and parcel of our daily lives.
Revolutionaries make lousy politicians, and that’s why South Sudan is so unstable.
Five theoretically democratic countries in sub-Saharan Africa were born of revolution: Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, South Africa and South Sudan.
(Modern Rwanda, which rose from the pyre of the 1994 genocide, never pretended to be democratic. Kenya’s election violence was too short-lived and geographically contained to be considered revolution. And The Congo and Somalia aren’t finished, yet.)
Of the five, South Africa is doing just fine if awkwardly so. Ethiopia is a far, far distant second, and Uganda and Zimbabwe are now lost causes. South Sudan, the newest, is still figuring out its peace land legs and right now, doesn’t look too good.
These five countries provide an excellent study of modern day transition from revolution and suggest what South Sudan must do to succeed.
All five countries sustained a revolution against their previous regime for a generation or more:
South Africa’s ANC was the revolutionary, fighting arm against the Nationalist government that blew up the factories and staged a couple fire bombs while figuring out ways from time to time to close the mines. The ANC is now in control of South Africa’s politics and has been since Independence twenty years ago.
The Ethiopian regime is composed of a segments of rebel groups pursued by the Terror Triumvirate, which assassinated Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.
The current Ugandan and Zimbabwean regimes consolidated power after violent ousters of repressive regimes (Idi Amin in Uganda and Ian Smith’s UDI in Rhodesia).
The South Sudan is the newest, created from a 2005 peace deal with (north) The Sudan that led to independence in 2011.
All five countries pretend to be democratic and are founded on constitutions based on democracy. Only South Africa is.
Uganda and Zimbabwe are iron-clad dictatorships. Ethiopia is more communist than dictatorship albeit with a pretty wide net of political involvement across various segments of Ethiopian society.
We can predict what might happen to South Sudan based on what happened to the other four.
In all cases, the men (and it’s exclusively men) who shot guns and murdered adversaries of the ancien regime are now the political leaders. As George Washington summed it up when leaving a single term in office, soldiers do not make good democratic leaders.
Foreigners are eager to cast these country’s difficulties as ethnic, and to be sure the internal adversaries are clearly ethnically different. But I think as suggested by Hilary Matfess in an article in Think Africa Press, today, there are other more important reasons.
Once fault lines occur in a society, ethnic groups tend to congeal on one side or the other, and that’s certainly what’s happened in South Sudan. But that doesn’t mean the ethnicity or racism is the actual cause.
Ms. Matfess argues that it’s the constitutional makeup, but I argue that the constitution was made up by soldiers, and that’s the problem.
In a country as diverse, successful and developed as South Africa, soldiering onto the political stage worked well for the ANC, but soldiering into governance is not working so well. Nevertheless in South Africa, autocratic moves by politicians have been checked.
South Africa will do just fine as soon as these old soldiers go, and they are slowly but surely dying or being forced out.
Uganda and Zimbabwe, however, weren’t able to make the transition that I’m sure South Africa has, and both have devolved into despotic regimes.
I see Ethiopia as trying very hard not to slip into a despotic character, and the way it’s trying to do so is by a very restrictive, highly controlled mostly communist system that is forcing the old soldiers to stay at bay. Certainly without this very powerful central authority in Addis, the country would start fighting, again, and one or other of the soldiers would come to power as the despot exactly as Museveni and Mugabe have in Uganda and Zimbabwe.
This is South Sudan’s option, I’m afraid. Lacking the development and diversity that South Africa had historically, South Sudan must figure out “how to keep the old soldiers at bay.”
The only way is by a centrally restrictive “communist” government. All that democracy will do is facilitate war.
This is exactly the opposite of what Ms. Matfess believes, even though I’m using her argument to suggest it. But democracy cannot work until the population is educated enough to engage its mechanisms.
So if The West wants peace in South Sudan, it’s going to have to accept communism.
I love this story! African “Killer Bees,” media ingrained mythical honey bees, may be what saves elephants from extinction!
My truck with many conservation organizations today is their scandalous exaggeration of elephant poaching, albeit I stipulate that elephant poaching is a growing problem.
In status quo (which includes increased elephant poaching), elephants are not going extinct.
But if extinction — or even seriously significant decline is postulated, the cause is not poaching. It is the human/animal conflict that is besetting virtually every major African game park on the continent.
Rapidly increasing human populations — particularly agricultural communities around dwindling protected wilderness habitats – is the main cause.
Combined with sluggish economies, massive unemployment, and a growing Asian demand for ivory, the conditions are ripe for increased elephant poaching.
I believe that by minimizing human/elephant conflicts, poaching will decrease.
Despite a couple television specials notwithstanding, elephant poaching isn’t easy. A savvy band of criminals takes considerable risk trying to down a jumbo. Once down the ivory harvest isn’t easy, either.
Many poachers are seriously injured in the hunt, and going to a medical clinic isn’t exactly possible unless the practitioner agrees to overlook the cause of your calve gash, which she isn’t supposed to do.
Many injured poachers get medical assistance from local villagers.
Very special knives and other tools for extracting the full tusk must either be uniquely forged by local blacksmiths or honed by artisans. Again, this requires those tradesmen to “look the other way.”
Community sympathy for poachers facilitates poaching… might be necessary for it to happen at all.
That sympathy comes from two different places:
Foremost are the farmers in those sympathetic communities adjacent wilderness areas who are trying so desperately to grow corn and water melons, two of the favorite foods of wild elephants, today.
Joining them are headmistresses, community leaders and clerics who are incapable of convincing a jumbo not to walk through their building.
Secondly, the sympathy comes from the politico enraged with the government’s inability to compensate farmers and preachers and school boards for their elephant damage, while generously financing more and more upmarket tourist camps.
The threat to elephants is that they live in a place where people no longer want them. Tourism revenue continues to decline as a portion of African countries’ wealth. Agriculture, education and media are now all more important.
So it seems to me that if we can find some wonderful way to keep elephants where they belong, poaching will become harder and harder to accomplish.
We’ve been trying everything:
Fences.
Electric fences.
Massive electric fences with big moats.
Pepper spray.
Siren horns.
Air guns.
The best ever I’ve found I just experienced a few weeks ago, again, in Botswana’s Nxai Pan National Park: surrounding the toilet and shower complex for the public camp site in the park are a dozen rows of cement blocks fabricated with tiny towers that have a steel rod piercing upwards from the middle.
Elephants really don’t like that. But it’s way, way too expensive for anything but a tourist who has to go.
Beehives every ten meters linked by special trigger wires, so that when an elephant only lightly touches the wire, the bees are enraged.
Save the Elephants, the University of Oxford and the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund collaborated on this huge and very successful study.
You see, elephants have bought into the myth that these are “Killer” Bees.
Well, actually, researchers noticed a long time ago that elephants avoided eating their most favorite tree, the acacia, if bees were on the blossoms.
“This was followed by behavioural experiments demonstrating that not only do elephants run from bee sounds, but they also have an alarm call that alerts family members to retreat from a possible bee threat,” project leader Lucy King told AllAfrica.
Hey. Anybody out there can design a chip to scream out an elephant bee alarm?
Boko Haram. You need understand little else than the name to understand the situation: “Western Education is Sacrilege.”
‘Boko Haram’ is a Hausa language derivative, which lays blame for the misery in the world upon the educational systems created by the successful, developed world.
Of course there are many in the successful, developed world who agree with this:
In the United States, the number of home schooled primary and secondary school kids increased from 850,000 in 1999 to 1½ million in 2007 (1.7-2.9%).
Boko Haram believes that traditional western social values as evinced by public institutions are wrong. The schoolgirl kidnapping in Nigeria is an expression of moral indignation at gender equality.
Most western homeschoolers also believe women are inferior to men, or in a persistent homeschool jargon, “more godly” if they pursue a subservient relationship to men.
So in a real sense western homeschoolers and Boko Haram are comrades in arms.
What begins with the gender fracture continues into other aspects of society, like money and power.
Boko Haram, like the IRA, the Basques and numerous other ethnic-derived rebel movements, is fighting for a redistribution of wealth and power.
They arise from a portion of Nigerian society, the north and mostly Muslim part, which has benefited hardly at all from the development of the Christian south.
The less people have, the less they have to lose, the more likely they’ll put their life on the line.
Boko Haram, like all rebel groups, can’t survive on its own. Exploiting the undeveloped roads and vast forests of northern Nigeria, they hide not just in the neglected and undeveloped topography but among the millions of people who share a common misery.
Even the barbaric LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) received sanctuary from communities that felt they were being neglected to the point of desperation.
In a strange but true sense, American homeschoolers have likewise been neglected. And they find themselves not only bereft of basic understandings of and skills for the real world, but generally at the bottom of the economic ladder as a result.
If these movements are successful and ascend to power quickly or suddenly (take the Muslim Brotherhood or the Iranian ayatollahs), they’re unable to evolve more rational and moral positions. Instead, they reenforce the conservative myths around which they first organized themselves.
That’s the real danger to a just society. So what to do? Suppress them with every gun you’ve got? Imprison thousands? Or from the liberal side: spend billions quickly but carelessly to remedy such failings as their education?
Something in between, I suspect. Perhaps the IRA and Basque separatist movements are models. But what they both clearly show is that these “struggles” are long ones. There’s no quick fix.
Africa poses an additional challenge. The cleavage in so many African nations between the educated and well off, and the uneducated and impoverished, is greater than anything Marx could have imagined, or that ever existed in Belfast or the mountains of northeast Spain.
Boko Haram has been around for more than a decade. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, over 10,000 people have died in Boko Haram violence.
The Nigerian school girls have captured the world’s attention, but they are only a fraction of the horror and misery throughout the whole world.
South Africans today “stayed the course” with the bungling ANC in control, but just barely. Change is in the air.
Three weeks ago I predicted that the ANC, which won 70% of the votes cast in 2004, would win less than 60% this time.
With 98% of the votes counted, the ANC has won 62%. Click here for current, updated results.
I was routing for an ANC loss. I wasn’t hoping for any other specific party’s win, because there are so many other parties and the ANC’s main rival, the Democratic Alliance, seems incapable of organizing the wide and disparate opposition to the ANC and so seems destined as a minority voice, forever.
The ANC’s problem is its top heavy leadership, steeped in buffoonery, bribery and bungling. Whether it’s President Zuma’s dozen wives or former President Mbeki’s certainty that AIDS is not a virus, these are the former freedom fighters who obviously never took Civics 101.
Except for Mandela, they lack any skills except survival.
In the 20 years since Independence, and the 12 years since Mandela left taking rational governance with him, the ANC has squandered South Africa’s resources and turned its political hierarchy into the same old self-serving idiots that lead a number of developing African countries.
And that’s the point. South Africa need not be a “developing” country, anymore. It’s rich, prosperous and filled with opportunity. But all this potential has been extirpated by the last two presidents and their cronies in scandal after scandal.
So my 2% mistake in calling the election you can rack up to hope.
Read my recent blog for my explanation as to why South Africans still support the ANC.
The ANC, however, is definitely on the decline. In the province of Gauteng, where Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria are located, the ANC won only 54%. With its mining, banking and other industry, this is South Africa’s most important province.
In the second most important province where Cape Town is located, the ANC won only 34% of the votes. There the Democratic Alliance holds solid control.
What I’m concerned about is that several very radical if incendiary parties, like the one led by Julius Malema, are growing in support. These are radical groups that would significantly alter South Africa’s democracy.
Malema’s EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters Party), showed some significant improvement this year, winning just under 7% of the vote. But it won nearly 13% of the vote in the mining provinces where it commands huge support from the miners.
And the EFF’s first plank is to nationalize the mines and most everything else.
Just as in America, where the evangelical T-Party rose from the ashes of a generation of economic stagnation, so the EFF rose from a generation of poor governance.
It’s unfortunate that “clean government” legitimately can often be associated with authoritarian rule, the beneficent dictator who might feather his own bed but rarely allows others to do so. That’s how I, and I think many hard working South Africans, see Malema.
Nationalization, rapid redistribution of wealth, clamps on lying media, exchange controls … all values some of us hold but which never seem to work too well in practice, particularly in today’s capitalist world.
Yet that is exactly what Malema or incarnations thereof will do to South Africa if the ANC continues its buffoonery and reasonable alternatives like the Democratic Alliance are unable to forge strong alliances.
Bottom line? (1) Disappointment that the ANC showed slightly more support than expected or hoped for. (2) Some hope that the ANC’s dwindling support might be a bucket of cold water dumped on some hot heads. (3) Revolution in the wings.
Photographer AcahayaAfrica is a dynamic place: sometimes even violent but always rapidly changing. The end of my two months there gives me fresh perspectives on how best to travel to this amazing continent.
Although I spend about 4-5 months annually in sub-Saharan Africa, the single two-month stretch at the beginning of the year gives me the most holistic perspective.
Basic recommendations I’ve had for years are unchanged:
For the first-timer principally interested in game viewing, East Africa is where to go, hands down. But once you visit the spectacle of East Africa, don’t miss southern Africa! It’s radically different but just as awesome.
For the first-timer whose interests are much broader than just game viewing, southern Africa is the place to begin.
The decline in lion populations is significant and noticeable on a safari to either area. Only a few years ago a ten-day safari to East Africa saw well over 100 lion; a similar trip to southern Africa usually found about twenty. Today, it’s half that in both places.
But the rest of the animals, with some interesting exceptions like topi, are on the increase. And this includes elephant which if all you do is read conservation organization flyers you’d think otherwise. In fact I believe the “elephant problem” is quite simply that there are too many of them.
The great migration in East Africa just gets better and better. In fact it’s improving so much and so quickly I’m getting worried. I wonder if we’re reaching some carrying threshold where the numbers might suddenly tank.
Global warming has significantly effected safari travel. As elsewhere in the world, seasons are now exaggerated: The wet seasons are wetter with much flooding. The dry seasons are drier with devastating droughts. The hot and cold seasons are much hotter and much colder.
To me this means the end of the first wet season (which is also usually one of the hot seasons) is the best time to go, because the exaggerations are minimized. For East Africa this means March and April. For southern Africa this means February and March.
But take this recommendation cautiously: Global warming is happening so fast that I can see this changing even year to year. And the fact remains that an outstanding safari can be done at any time of the year if properly designed.
Prices in southern Africa are increasing. Prices in East Africa are moderating. The demand in southern Africa is on the increase, but tourism in East Africa is decreasing.
I think this has to do with the fact that southern Africa is more stable. For a trip of a similar caliber and level of accommodations, a southern African trip is now about a quarter more expensive than an East African one.
With regards to specific countries, not much as changed except for Kenya. I’ll be returning to Nairobi in about a month to confirm what I have to predict, now.
I believe Kenya is ready, again, to safeguard tourists. It’s been four years since EWT actively promoted Kenya or since I’ve taken by own guided trips, there.
But there has been very significant positive change from a tourist point of view there recently. You may think this crazy if all you do is read the headlines: small grenade and other bombing attacks are actually on a slight increase in and around Nairobi.
But those attacks are directed exclusively at the Somali community, and the attacks of the last five years on tourists were different and have subsided.
Since the Westgate Mall attack last September and the Nairobi airport fire the month before I haven’t been able to find a single, however slight or botched attempt, directed at tourists in Kenya. And it’s not completely certain that tourists figured very much in the calculus of either of those attacks.
The fact there haven’t been any tourist kidnapings or violent robberies or lodge or camp attacks is a significant change from just a few years ago.
Those attacks were by common criminals given free reign when police and other local security personnel were pulled from many tourists areas to aid in the Somali war effort. And in the case of the specific tourist kidnapings around Lamu, those were by Somali terrorists when the October, 2011, war began.
That war is over. (Though the occupation by Kenyan troops continues, which is why the attacks are directed against Somali Kenyans who live mostly in and around Nairobi and on the coast.)
Police and regional security personnel have returned home. Normal policing has started, again, and improved. In fact I worry that the new security procedures put in place by the current government are too draconian. Be that as it may, it means tourists will be safer.
I now see Kenya very much as I saw Britain during the IRA wars. I remember, for example, visiting my daughter in the mid 1990s when she was studying at Oxford.
My subway went dark and out for three hours after the IRA bombed London’s Piccadilly Line. Nobody was hurt as the object of the IRA in those days wasn’t to kill civilians but to make a point.
Today in Kenya the object of the terrorists is to hurt Kenyan civilians of Somali descent. But the exclusion of harming outsiders seems similar to the situation in London 20 years ago.
I will be the first to reverse course if things turn south in Kenya. But there are so many unique attractions in Kenya that when tourist security arrives at the level I believe it has, today, it would be terrible to miss them.
As Kenya improves I grow increasingly vigilant of Tanzania.
Tanzania is wrestling with a new and very contentious constitution, the same issue which spiraled Kenya into unrest in 2007. The most recent attack specifically against tourists was in Zanzibar, so I’m recommending against travel there.
Right now Tanzania excluding Zanzibar remains one of the most secure places for an African holiday. But I’m watching it carefully as the future does not seem as bright as Kenya’s.
Uganda is out. The country now prosecuting its first gay trial is increasingly overseen by a madman. Not yet as bad as Amin, I can see Museveni becoming as bad in just a few years.
Rwanda is an authoritarian state, horrible for its citizens and absolutely as safe for tourists as China today or Russia during the Cold War. And I’m watching The Congo carefully. Things are getting better, there.
Virtually all of southern Africa except Zimbabwe is as secure for the tourist as a visit to most South American countries. Even the security situation for visitors in Madagascar is improving.
As I said, Africa is a dynamic and sometimes violent place. It’s always been so, and it will remain so for some time. Travel to Africa has never been, and isn’t today, a Caribbean cruise.
But I think it’s slowly getting safer. And it remains more exciting than ever. Read my many previous blogs about my just ended safaris and I hope you’ll understand why I think so!
The wild is not just unpredictable, it’s always spiritually rejuvenating. That doesn’t normally characterize a Caribbean cruise!
My Cape/Botswana safari this year tracked nearly exactly my experience for the last eight years running: fabulous Cape touring then moderate though diverse game with several truly exciting experiences, ending at VicFalls.
I really don’t think Cape Town needs much promotion. It’s my second favorite city in the world, absolutely gorgeous, and the historical, cultural and wilderness opportunities I think are unmatched except perhaps by San Francisco.
So if like most Americans your Cape Town experience is augmented by a game viewing experience, that’s what you analyze and compare.
Eastern South Africa (Kruger) is fine for game viewing, but Botswana is much better. Not necessarily for the quantity or variety of game, but for the exceptional scenery and geography, and for the exclusivity.
Twice in the last four years I’ve watched a wild dog hunt, and that’s breath-taking. Four of the last five years I’ve seen wild dogs. Wild dogs is becoming Botswana’s signature attraction. (By the way, it may also be Kruger’s. There are now a reported 500 dog in Kruger.)
We saw two lion kills, both of buffalo. And really most uniquely of all, our two days in the Okavango Delta and three days in the Pans represented game viewing experiences that simply have no comparisons elsewhere in Africa.
Those of us in the safari business are loathe to compare one area with another, or even compare the same area in different seasons. But I realize this is an important consideration for the consumer, particularly the first-time consumer.
In addition to the extraordinary experience on two separate game drives of two different wild dog families, the week-plus game viewing safari included a dozen lion; hundreds-plus elephant, Cape buffalo and impala; dozens-plus giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, springbok, mongoose, hippo, kudu, lechwe, baboon; and multiple sightings of hyaena, warthog, reedbuck and sassaby. – Bill Banzhaf
We all also saw a wild, reintroduced white rhino.
Certain of us also saw crocodile, sitatunga, monitor lizard, bat-eared fox and eland.
There were some very special sightings as well: Gorgeous, almost super zebra that were red-maned and beige-and-red tailed. With two exceptions, the dozens of times we saw elephant they were all male.
We watched for some time two inter-acting and very large impala families, an extremely curious situation that led some of us to wonder if it were a single super family exchanging harem masters.
The first lion kill was an extraordinary scene. Somehow the three harassed lionesses with a single vulnerable cub successfully hid their buffalo kill from the rest of the world (except us) keeping vultures, hyaena and competing lions away. – Bill BanzhafThe weather was perfect for northerners racing from a terrible winter. The hottest days, perhaps touching 90F were in Moremi, where there were also the coldest nights (likely in the lower 50s). But the majority of the days didn’t exceed the mid 80s or sink below the mid 60s. Skies were mostly crystal clear with enough dust for absolutely breath-taking sunsets.
(Note: I actually prefer about a month earlier, when the game viewing is even better. But the temperatures are 5-10 degrees hotter. The dramatic afternoon thunderstorms at that time I consider a real plus.) – Bill Melville
The two extraordinary days in The Delta, with minimal game viewing, gave us the unique experience of a desert in flood and all the beautiful water plants and marsh birds of a special part of the world, of exceptional species like the painted frog, and with opportunities for fishing.
The Pans (Makgadikgadi and Nxai, among many other smaller ones) are equally unique. These are salt pans formed over centuries of heavy water run-off followed by rapid evaporation. So during the rains they are the heart of Botswana’s game viewing, attracting hundreds and thousands of animals.
But year-round the scenery which they define is hard to explain and its stark beauty hard to exaggerate. There is, indeed, a monotony to “starkness” but when properly absorbed it’s spiritual.
Far fewer animals are seen on a Botswana experience than East Africa, although about the same number of species. But the quantity of wildlife in East Africa is so much greater.
When compared with a game viewing experience of similar length in East Africa, this was much more relaxed. Perhaps only half as much time was actually spent game viewing as we would do in East Africa, although the activities were more varied than the vehicle game viewing that dominates an East African experience.
But that needn’t be the case for everyone. East African participants can easily exclude themselves from some game viewing to benefit from the down time that is normally written into a Botswana experience. And enthusiasts in Botswana can with some effort increase their activity time.
On a Botswana safari there is much less interaction with the local people (outside of the staff, of course), in part because there are so few people in the country to begin with. There is virtually no city or town experience of any kind. It is strictly bush. – Steve FarrandYou fly from camp to camp in Botswana, never drive (with rare and usually down-market exceptions). Most of the time you’re driving from place to place in East Africa, through populated countryside, towns or villages.
But though you fly much more in Botswana than East Africa, the planes in Botswana are much inferior to those in East Africa. That’s a criticism I’ve been leveling at Botswana for years: their planes are configured much too small for the average traveler.
In East Africa your driver/guides meet you at the airport and remain with you until you leave. In Botswana you pick up a new set of driver/guides at each camp.
There are more upmarket accommodations in Botswana (though a good number in East Africa, too) and they are generally better (and more expensive): that usually means larger rooms with more furniture that is also more comfortable. Bathrooms are usually more modern and spacious in Botswana than East Africa. Electricity and wifi is usually more available and reliable in Botswana than East Africa.
The staff and food in both areas is professional and varied, but expect generally better local guides in Botswana than East Africa. On the other hand, guides are very specialized in Botswana, experts in small regions and usually not as familiar with the culture, overall wilderness and current affairs as your guide will be in East Africa. – Brad Heck
Exclusiveness is more likely in Botswana than East Africa. On our safari of 8 days we encountered vehicles other than our own and those of the camp only three times and then very briefly. In Ngorongoro Crater on virtually any day of the year, you’re likely to encounter dozens of other vehicles, sometimes all competing for the best position at the lion kill.
Now having said that, I hasten to add that personally I feel very sensitive about this and usually conduct an East African safari where half or more of the time there are none but my own vehicles. But in a few important places like the crater, that’s impossible to arrange.
Botswana’s scenery is wonderful if mystic. But East Africa’s scenery is more grand and dramatic, from highlands to volcanoes to the expansive plains of the Serengeti.
So the comparison is made but flawed: for your first safari go to East Africa. But once Africa’s taken over your soul, you’ll have to visit Botswana, too! – Steve TaylorAnd, oh by the way, what a wonderful group of travelers I had this time! Remarkably special for me, and something I’ll always remember!
As my two months guiding in Africa comes to an end I’m of course very anxious to get home. But it’s hard to leave the African wilderness.
As a friend and good client, Steve Farrand, said to me, today:
Africa resets your soul. No matter where you’ve been in Africa or where you find yourself next, it’s a spa for the heart and mind.
I think the African wilderness remains so digestible yet unpredictable that you can more easily set aside the nagging responsibilities of the modern world without turning off the inquisitiveness and excitements that earn us success in the modern world.
Simply, you come to fully appreciate the here-and-now. I’ve always wondered if this is true only of the foreigner who finds himself removed to a distant and beautiful place or is equally true of the Africans who live here.
Of course I’ll never know: You can’t enter someone else’s soul. I only know it’s true for myself. – Bill Banzhaf
Musicians have long waved the banners of the oppressed, and I’m worried that they have abandoned Nairobi’s Eastleigh because of Kenya’s increasing war on terror.
