Month: September 2014

African is Better? Really?

African is Better? Really?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

robobeastHere are some wild South Africa inventions, useful and artistic, which in many senses reflect a creativity we often lack in the U.S.

It’s been a long time since foreigners thought of South Africa as a Tarzan abode. The country was prominent and controversial in both world wars, stubborn then creative in subduing its nuclear technology to world treaties and rocketed to fame when the first heart transplant was performed.

Today’s South Africa creativeness is still high tech but there’s a wonderful peasant component that’s emerging as millions of Africans begin to emerge from abject poverty.
wonderbag
The purely South African invented “WonderBag” has proved so popular worldwide it is now available from Amazon – US.

This is a slow cooker for everywhere! Its unique design and astro-fabric produces a heat retention that hasn’t been cheaply available before. Essentially this is a tea cozy for your stew pot, and it works!

The cooking process starts normally in the pot. But rather than continuing the process on the stove or in a slow cooker once the stew or beans or potatoes have reached a boil, the pot is firmly sealed then tugged into the WonderBag and slow cooking begins.

With typical sour grapes, some American product reviewers have claimed the WonderBag is dangerous. It isn’t.

Claims that the bag’s temperature retention is poor are totally unsubstantiated and anecdotal and ignore the fact that you’ve got to boil your stew for a few minutes before promptly sealing it in the pot before bagging. If done to instruction, bacteria are doomed and slow cooking sweetness guaranteed.

encoreSo successful it’s now been enhanced and globally marketed by a British company, the very South African Encore Player was originally designed just as a portable radio but has become a recorder and phone charger in its global iteration.

But the genius of the device lies in charging itself by an extendable solar panel! The panel is brilliant enough to charge the device so that it can then charge your phone!

I left the best for last: what may be the world’s most useful 3D Printer.

Precise to 100 microns, the RoboBeast is an entirely South African creation that brings 3D printing to affordable levels with enormous precision.

The 3dprint.com review site calls RoboBeast “Toughest Printer By Far.” It’s also among the very cheapest, available for around $2500.

indexThese and bunch of other great recent inventions can be found at the South African blogsite, sa-venues.com.

Thanks, South Africa, for putting a smile on life’s curiosities fulfilled!

Hands Off is Hands Dirty

Hands Off is Hands Dirty

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gettinghandsdirtyYou’d never guess which respectful country in the developed world contributes to ISIS’ ability to fund itself through oil revenues.

It’s been an interesting week in the War on Terror and of all the bad news playing out another Groundhog Day movie history came one new glimmer of hope: the global conversation turned a bit towards financially starving the adversary rather than bombing it to smithereens.

From 2011 to 2013 African oil producing countries earned $250 billion from their oil sales, a staggering 56% of their entire national revenues, 2.3 billion barrels of oil.

But nobody is quite sure where all that oil went, or who exactly got paid for it.

That total lack of transparency in the global oil market is exactly why ISIS can sell oil, and probably salt and peanuts, to fund its nefarious world.

“The sale of crude oil by governments and their national oil companies is one of the least scrutinized aspects of oil sector governance,” wrote AfricaFocus in a special report published several weeks ago.

The report documented as far as it could 1500 major oil transactions from African countries in the 2-year period starting in 2011.

The initial findings that record keeping was intentionally poor in order to blur bribes, and that the worst part of record keeping was that the destination of the oil sales was rarely known were not surprising given the level of corruption in the developing world.

What was surprising is what country facilitated this lack of transparency more than any other.

Switzerland.

“Of the 1,500 individual sales we identified, Switzerland-based companies purchased a quarter of the volumes sold by African NOCs, buying over 500 million barrels worth around $55 billion.”

These are not well known companies: Arcadia, Glencore, Trafigura and Vitol are among the most often mentioned. Reuters called these company’s transactions “shadowy.”

They are not companies with super tankers or refineries or thousands of employees. The largest, Arcadia, doesn’t even have a website. They are usually single billionaires trading in commodities and using Switzerland’s lack of regulation and transparency laws to buy with bribes and sell in darkness.

We often think of Switzerland as a placid meadow where everyone respects everyone else and minds their own business and so doesn’t need much governance.

Wrong.

In this case the shy Swiss are extraordinarily evil. And I’m not saying the individual billionaires running the unseen commodity trades are the evil ones. They’re just the players.

The evil is in the system, a system that says, ‘Hey, do what you want! Just don’t break any laws!’ particularly when there are no laws to break.

The funding of ISIS is wrong, but so is the fact that a handful of Swiss fund a huge percentage of Africa without any strings attached. This foments corruption, and in fact, it actually invites corruption.

It’s says I don’t care how you got your money to pay, just pay.

And Ronald Reagan should have applied his trickling down theories here, because trickling down is the corruption, deceit, and ultimately the heinous and cold-handed transactions that fund wars while causing starvation.

It may look like a placid meadow in the Alps. But it’s where The Joker hangs out.

Risky Business

Risky Business

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

hangedKenya’s first execution in 27 years was ordered yesterday of a 41-year old male nurse for a failed abortion that led to a young woman’s death.

The judge said he had taken into consideration the fact that two lives were lost:

“He has killed two people; a foetus and a mother. The only sentence available in law is the death penalty,” Judge Ombija ruled.

Outsiders don’t realize how incredibly pro-Life the vast majority of law in the developing world is. What is even more ironic, though, is that while developing world law is crystal clear on the issue, these laws are rarely enforced.

Islamic ruled countries generally leave the consequences of a revealed abortion to the family. Those consequences are often crueler if the cultural edict is carried out. The widely interpreted Koranic punishment for adultery is being stoned to death, and generally any woman who seeks an abortion in the Muslim world is considered adulterous.

But it remains unknown and likely vastly underestimated the number of abortions in the Muslim world that are simply swept under the carpet.

In the non-sectarian ruled countries like Kenya abortion is just as illegal, but there are countless numbers of abortions, anyway. Authorities normally don’t enforce the law. Yesterday’s sentence, after all, is the first ever given.

“Our analysis indicates that an estimated 464,690 induced abortions occurred in Kenya in 2012,” Kenya’s own Ministry of Health reported last year. Each one of those if adjudicated would result in a death sentence.

The Kenyan Ministry report also concludes that the mortality rate of these attempted abortions is so high that it is a significant factor in Kenya’s escalating health care costs.

Many other reports circulating in Kenya indicate one of the reasons there are so many abortion attempts is because contraception is either too expensive or frowned upon by cultural and religious leaders.

Kenya law is clear: abortions are illegal. Legislative attempts to change this, including by women activists who lobbied hard to make abortion legal in Kenya’s revised Constitution of 2007, were all soundly defeated by Parliament.

It was, however, a “perfect storm” for 41-year old nurse, Jackson Namunya Tali, who will now become known as either the first or the only abortion provider to have been sentenced to death.

Tali operated one of probably dozens if not hundreds of abortion clinics in shady areas of Nairobi where police rarely appear. He is a fully trained nurse whose pay under the national health system is likely 1/100th of what he earned at his clinic.

He was much more compassionate than most abortion providers who dump their patients out the front door as fast as they can once the procedure is over.

The particular patient in question had complications, and Tali tried to deal with them for more than a week before he personally tried to race the her to the hospital in his own car. She died enroute, and instead of then abandoning her, he himself called the police.

Clearly the man was empathetic, hardly the criminal type that the vast majority of less well trained and less sensitive abortion providers in Kenya are. He seemed generally distressed that his efforts with this woman failed.

His empathy led to his sentence.

This was not big news in Kenya. In fact the major media outlets didn’t even carry it. And the few comments that appeared in the digital world were mostly in support of the judge.

Time To Call Off The Hounds

Time To Call Off The Hounds

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CreatingJihadistsYesterday, hundreds perhaps thousands of new Islamic militants were created in places like Kenya because of America’s bombing in the Levant.

For ten years Arkanuddin Yasin was a little known Islamic preacher in Kenya working for an also little known pan-Islamic political organization called Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). Yesterday, he and his organization attracted lots more attention by calling on young Muslims throughout Africa to join the fight against the U.S. bombing the Levant.

Kenya has a vibrant, active press. This was not a top news story. Imagine how many more Arkanuddin Yassins there are in Africa much less the rest of the world.

There is a thin line between religious or ideological beliefs and armed revolution. We see it nearly every week at home in America. Cliven Bundy made it onto the national evening news, but there are hundreds more of his kind every single day.

The schism between Islam and Christianity is ancient, but it hasn’t really been elevated to all out war since the end of the Ottoman Empire with World War I. That’s changed. Just as vigilantes on the Texan border have illegally taken over much of the border patrol, there.

It’s not just illegal, but it’s wrong the way ISIS has taken over large swaths of the Levant. It’s not just illegal, but it’s wrong the way Cliven Bundy and the Vigilante Patriots fire their weapons at will.

But the response by the powerful to these groups’ illegal and often immoral actions has made things worse in several ways.

The first mistake by authorities is providing outright support. This is as obviously immoral as the actions the authorities purport to interdict. It includes Saudi princes sending millions if not billions of dollars to jihadists. And in the same vein it includes giving the Vigilante Patriots not-for-profit tax status.

The second mistake is providing tacit support. We learned today that ISIS is earning several millions of dollars daily by selling oil from fields it won in war. Who’s buying this oil? Don’t think it’s so obvious. We know from decades of black market precious metals in Rwanda and The Congo that the principal buyers were Apple and Motorola.

One could argue that poorly managed global capitalism is the second mistake.

The third mistake is over reacting. This occurs in big ways and small ways: It’s the reaction of the U.S. to 9/11 and Kenyan police “roundup” of suspects in Nairobi’s Eastleigh neighborhood following the Westgate bombing.

Overreaction might be understandable but it’s too reactionary to be helpful, and like grade schoolers, we should be taught to contain our emotions. It does nothing but fuel the flames.

There is also the over reaction of getting involved when it’s none of your business. It’s very hard for we Americans to watch someone beheaded on TV without responding, but the fact is that beheadings in Saudi Arabia are common and summary. So how come we’re not bombing Saudia Arabia?

Over reaction is also cowering in fear for no good reason. It’s sending the Dubuque city police to guard the Mississippi river bridge after 9/11. It’s cutting funding for libraries to give the police department armed personnel carriers. It is invading Iraq.

The reason Saudia Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and by the way, Israel, are not fighting alongside the U.S. right now is because their borders haven’t been violated. The reason Iraqis ran from the fight is because there really aren’t Iraqis: Their society has never been formed well enough since we Americans blew it to smithereens.

It’s time to call off the hounds. It’s not an easy thing to do, but how many times do we have to fail trying to do more and ending up making things worse?

Landslides Are Irrevocable

Landslides Are Irrevocable

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tiltingmaseruLesotho is a spot of a country surrounded by South Africa. Is it time to wipe the spot out?

There are spot countries all over the world: European potentates (Vatican City, Monaco, San Marino & Liechtenstein); scattered South Seas countries (Marshall Islands, Nauru, Tuvalu, Palau); other scattered sea countries (Seychelles & Maldives); Caribbean beaches (Saint Kitts & Nevis, Andorra, Granada, Barbados, Antiqua & Barbuda), regal airline hubs and tax havens like Luxembourg.

In fact, there are 110 of the 252 countries listed by the U.S. WorldFact book smaller than Lesotho.

South Africa’s other spot, Swaziland, is only half Lesotho’s size. So why am I asking if it’s time to wipe out Lesotho?

Most of the spot countries of the world are either too anemic or too essential to mess with: the Seychelles and Singapore, for instance. Few will protest when most of the Seychelles tiny 90 granite islands sink as the world’s ocean’s rise.

But a lot of Asian billionaires and world banks will tremble if Singapore cracks.

Swaziland tilts ever so slightly into the Singapore camp of countries. Its western border is with South Africa, and its eastern border is with Mozambique. There aren’t any refugees anymore from Mozambique, but if there were, this is the conduit.

Some creative accounting is possible for trucking companies depending upon what particularly taxed goods they’re carrying.

In the old days during the very strict moral laws of apartheid in South Africa, Swaziland was the playground of the debauched with lots of casinos and gentlemen’s clubs. Today’s South African laws are less restrictive, but still more restrictive than the g-string thresholds in Swaziland.

These aren’t all necessarily good reasons for Swaziland to exist, but they are reasons. That’s Lesotho’s problem. It doesn’t have any reasons to exist.

The reason Lesotho is Lesotho, and Swaziland is Swaziland, and neither is a part of South Africa starts with their geography. But Lesotho is surrounded by South Africa. Unlike Swaziland’s geographical situational raison d’etre, Lesotho was left alone because it was too high to get to.

Lesotho is almost entirely above the clouds. It has the highest lowest point of any country in the world, 4,593 feet. The rest of it scraggles upwards to a peak of 11,424 feet high. It’s mostly gravel, limestone and granite mountaintops, with a very few meadows that some unusual sheep live in, and one tiny city, the capital of Maseru, that if lifted down to a reasonable altitude would look something like a sprawling mobile home community near Flagstaff.

There are less than two million people widely scattered among its nooks and crags with a third of the resident population unemployed and the rest, two-thirds, all working for the government.

There are no natural resources, and the country only produces 20% of its food. In fact, Lesotho imports 90% of everything it uses.

Essentially all of its wealth comes from its citizens working in South Africa and sending the money home.

This was all honky dory for the two entities, Lesotho and South Africa, for years. Rather than undertake this extremely undeveloped region that needs so much expensive infrastructure, South Africa preferred to let Lesothoans work in South Africa and avoid many of South African taxes, so that the money could flow up to the mountain tops and keep everybody peaceful and quiet.

They aren’t peaceful and quiet, anymore.

People grow up. They get educated. They learn when they’ve got a raw deal, and technically South Africa has maintained Lesotho as a kingdom to save money.

Several years ago revolution erupted. Basically that meant that the 57-member military/police force took over the palace then the legislature.

South Africa mediated a solution that gave more power to the people. But then only a few weeks ago, baton wielding coupest turned into gun firing takeoverists.

What Lesothoans want is to become absorbed by South Africa. Most outsiders don’t realize this. Like Thomas Friedman, they think that all Lesotho needs are few new restaurants.

This has been going on too long, now. In a country with only 2 million people, 30,000 signed a petition then staged a march in Maseru four years ago demanding annexation by South Africa.

When nobody listened, the men with batons hit the street, and now, men with guns are taking over. What had been a peaceful if placated democracy is now another African dictatorship.

Last week South Africa’s trade unions, far more powerful than trade unions in the U.S., decided it was time to annex Lesotho. (A very high percentage of South Africa’s mine workers come from Lesotho.)

“In reality, Lesotho is in the Free State and so it can be an extension of the Free State, or the 10th province,” one of South Africa’s principal union leaders, Frans Baleni, said last week.

He’s absolutely right. It’s time to wipe out the spot.

BodaBoda Brigade

BodaBoda Brigade

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bodabodaBodaBoda means Harley in Swahili and may represent the next East African revolution.

So let me start by saying some of my best friends own Harleys… or did. One of them turned his in for a Kawasaki. And then there’s my niece living in Milwaukee who has managed to grow her business by selling leather items to Harley owners. And good grief, EWT has even operated safaris for Harley packs traveling from Cape to Cairo!
cow-on-a-boda
Kidding aside, the opprobriums attributed Harley owners have more or less died down in my generation. But there was certainly a time when Harley gangs slipped out of James Dean’ book clubs into brigand suburban warfare.

And that’s what’s happening in much of East Africa, today.

Motorcycle use has exploded in East Africa’s cities in just the last few years and the backlash from the ruling classes — all of whom own Mercedes — is astounding.

The menace is called BodaBoda, a Swahili nickname derived from ages ago when small motorcycles were used to ferry travelers between BORDER posts.
sixguys
Often buses taking travelers from a city in one country to a city in another country were unable to cross the border. So these entrepreneurial motorcycle owners would ferry passengers from a bus on one side of the border to a bus on the other side.

Today their role is more indispensable. The car congestion in East Africa’s expanding cities is unbelievable. Rapid highway development just can’t keep up.
SixToSchool
In the safari business we’re now constrained by rush hour. Entire itineraries are designed to allow transit through a city on a Sunday, about the only day that road rage can be avoided.

But local citizens have to deal with this every day, and the fix for the last several years has been to dump your car and get a BodaBoda, instead.

BodaBodas believe they are subject to no laws. So despite the rapid installations of traffic signals in places like Arusha, Tanzania, it matters little to them what color is showing above.
balesboda
They slip through the narrow spaces between miles of stopped traffic.

They make roads wherever they want to. Smaller BodaBodas roar right down the aisles of grocery stores.

As this culture of initial efficiency prevailed a darker side emerged. Police still use cars. Robberies, homicides and all manners of crime are now principally conducted from BodaBodas.

“Boda boda which have brought relief to commuters in poorly accessed suburbs of Arusha have of late been blamed as being behind a series of violent crimes,” writes Arusha’s main newspaper last week.

A third of all road fatalities in Tanzania are now BodaBoda drivers.

In an area increasingly homophobic, courageous women buck their culture by operating BodaBoda taxis.

The Kenyan Upper Class is being rattled. Recently the government announced a number of dramatic “remedies” to the BodaBoda menace:

(1) All women will have to sit side straddle, as proper English did in Victorian times. A woman Kenyan legislator, Caroline Owen, explained that the standard BodaBoda straddle of a bike “was uncultured and deprived women of respect because they expose their bodies to men.”
carryingladder
(2) No BodaBodas will be allowed in Kenyan city centers. Moreover, elsewhere they can’t operate between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.

(3) Only one passenger besides the driver can be on the BodaBoda at any one time.

Fat Chance. If Kenyan authorities think there’s a security threat from neighboring Somali terrorists, just wait for the BodaBoda to Rise Up. And if road construction isn’t sped up quickly enough, they’ll be plenty of BodaBoda traveling on a single wheel, anyway.

Dangerous Plays

Dangerous Plays

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stupidtouristwithlionAs access to Africa’s wildernesses develops and improves, visitors are becoming less respectful and careful. This puts everything in jeopardy.

The photo above of a self-drive tourist in Kenya’s Maasai Mara game reserve last Sunday “posing” in front of a pair of lions was taken by a film crew at some distance from the tourist. Presumably the tourist didn’t notice the film crew.

The series of photos was first published in London’s Daily Mail. Click here for the full sequence.

The tourist spots the lions, which seem to be about 15-20 meters away. He stops the car then exits the passenger’s side (right side) which is the opposite side to the lions.

He then races around the car to place himself between the car and the lions, leans back with a thumb’s up obviously posing for another person in the car who probably takes a picture. He then runs back around the car and gets back in.

The photos capture no reaction from the lions other than an occasional glance at the tourist.

These are certainly wild lions, and why they didn’t react is impossible to say. They appear to be a mating pair as it is unlikely to see only one male and one female alone together.

Lion mating is pretty routine: It lasts about three days during which time the pair often can’t be roused by anything, not even hunger. But not always, and it’s impossible when first encountering them to determine at what stage in the three-day mating process they are.

I’ve encountered a mating pair when the male charged our vehicle. There is often a vicious fight between males for the right to mate prior to the mating commencing, so it was possible we arrived just as that altercation had ended.

I’ve also seen mating lion break apart to join a kill. Once again such an anecdotal encounter could be nothing more than having happened to arrive just at the end of the mating process.

I don’t think it’s possible to conclude why these lions were so passive in this case. I suppose an equally cogent argument to my own anecdotal experience is the clear fact that more and more tourists are seen by lions, now. Generations of lions in places like Kenya’s Maasai Mara are becoming more used to people and learn that they aren’t threatening.

That, of course, is a degradation of the wilderness but one that I can hardly oppose. Without tourists — at least in Kenya — there would be little wilderness left.

We are at an interesting crossroads in the development of African wilderness for tourism. As so clearly illustrated in this example, wilderness is taking on the characteristics of a theme park, one that definitely has elements of danger in the experience which seem precisely to be one of the main attractions.

And at least in this case flirting with that danger is apparently one of the selling points.

There are dozens of stories of tourists going too far and paying the price. Just google “tourist killed by lion” or “tourist killed by buffalo” for a tidy wrap-up.

Many of these tragedies aren’t quite as wanton stupidity as evidenced in the photo above, but many are.

What concerns me most is that as more and more of these incidents occur, lions and other wildlife will grow more and more accustomed to man and his peculiarities. This seriously jeopardizes their own wild behavior.

There are many people in Africa who consider lion in the same regards as Montana ranchers consider wolf. A tamer lion is much easier to kill.

And there will be more and more tourists injuries and deaths as well. These two ends of the stick will burn right through to the middle, and tourist parks like Kenya’s Maasai Mara will either have to become far more restrictive or will simply be sold to wheat farmers, or both.

The result is that there will be less wilderness for us all to enjoy.

Violence is not Genetic

Violence is not Genetic

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

chimps fightingA recent study of chimps in Uganda is being misinterpreted to suggest human murder is natural, and sloppy scientists are reenforcing these beliefs.

Chimps have long been known to be murderers and cannibals. While dominance within many species is often violent and considered essential for the social organization of many species, it very rarely extends to murder and except for chimps, to cannibalism.

So scientists have been at odds for years trying to explain this behavior in chimpanzees. Research came to a head about five years ago when scientists carefully documented chimp gangs that persistently (sometimes over ten years) plotted against one another then celebrated territorial victories by eating their foe’s babies.

Anthropology Professor Jill Pruetz believed for many years that this chimp behavior was aberrant, that it would not occur naturally in the wild were it not for some unnatural interference. Most of the colleagues who agreed with her believed that “something else” was human interference.

It could be chimps mocking human behavior (many chimp studies occur near very violent parts of Africa) or humans stressing chimp’s habitat, but it seemed just impossible to ascribe murder and cannibalism to natural behavior.

Pruetz and most of the scientific community have relented based on a just published study in Nature.

The “study says chimpanzees kill their own as a survival strategy, not due to human contact,” summarizes science journalist Monte Morin in yesterday’s L.A. Times.

And as far as I can tell, virtually everyone agrees.

That’s fine. But what’s not fine and in my opinion absolutely horrible is to use this study as an explanation for human violence.

Arizona State professor Joan Silk wrote an opinion article in that same issue of Nature, which she titled, “The evolutionary roots of lethal conflict,” which says it all.

A closer look at Silk’s opinion may be more nuanced than the title, but her title is what was picked up and replayed time and again in the less refined media. Clearly she committed a grievous scientific error in not adding “in chimpanzees” to her title.

There is absolutely nothing scientific or even rational to presume that behavior in chimps explains behavior in humans.

In what I feel is yellow science Silk invited the comparisons.

“The origins and prevalence of human warfare may be echoed in the search for the answer to chimpanzee adaptation,” wrote one scientific blogger yesterday, and it’s a wholly rational conclusion from Silk’s title, whether she intended it or not.

“Peace-loving anti-war activists call war ‘unnatural,’ but our closest animal relatives show that at least a little bloodshed is perfectly natural,” wrote Rebecca Kaplan in Tech Times, yesterday.

And on and on.

Studies of evolutionary behavior cannot extend back 6-10 million years to the separation of the hominin and ape branches of the hominid evolutionary tree. That’s just too long ago.

Behavior changes infinitely more rapidly than DNA. To claim that today’s chimp’s murder-and-cannibalism as a survival tool means that our earliest common ancestor with chimps had that behavior, too, is ludicrous.

And even if the ECA did, it’s impossible to suggest that our behavior today is still manifest by it.

There is no question that war has been used as a survival tool by humankind. But this is not because it’s ingrained in our genes, which is how the current chimp study is being distorted.

Why human violence evolved is certainly an interesting question, but it’s not biological. And what’s even more troubling is how the uneducated reaction to this study devolves from societies to individuals, suggesting all individuals carry a kill instinct.

I am so upset by this race to justify murder and violence. It slips so easily into the contemporary narratives supporting police using excessive force, violence and abuse against the less powerful like spouses and children, and not least of all, the rush back to war.

These are very troubling times, and scientists need to be very careful today. Joan Silk was not.

How Sweet It Is!

How Sweet It Is!

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

beekeeperYou might be afraid of the mythical African Killer Bee, but there’s a sweet buzz about them in East Africa!

With American and even Chinese honey production at low levels, the demand for honey worldwide has grown so substantially that honey is increasing in price 6% every year.

The 150 million pounds of honey Americans will produce is just not enough for the demand.

Honey production is down because of a terrible virus that while winding down still effects large swaths of wildflower America. This has a further disincentive for honey production as successful beekeepers shift from producing honey to selling their tools elsewhere.

What? A beekeeper in Harrisburg, PA, will triple his annual income if he packs up his hives and travels with them to southern California to pollinate almonds for three weeks.

East Africans are taking advantage of the demand in the market.

Honey Care is a for-profit East African corporation whose main mission nonetheless is to support distressed communities. (Did you register that BP? : a for-profit company with a mission greater and more noble than making profits.)

The company can’t produce enough honey, either, so it’s now begun actively recruiting new beekeepers.

It does this by offering a startup package for $50 of two hives. And most of the time the newly endowed beekeeper doesn’t have to pay the $50 as Honey Care also comes with a loan from a microlending NGO.

Almost all startups are successful. The $50 investment the first year yields $175 annually by the second year.

The program has been so successful that it’s spawned a secondary industry of “professional hive tenders” who travel from small beekeeper to the next tending the hives, if the farmer herself doesn’t want to.

Honey Care then buys, packages and markets the honey. It’s also among the first companies worldwide to use the Swarm Phone App so that East Africans considering a purchase from a grocery store can scan the barcode to find out what kind of flowers produced that particular bottle’s honey.

Since Honey Care is expanding throughout East Africa, it’s become something of a grocery store game to scan this bottle then that one, discovering the first is from wild ginger and the next from purple clover and so forth.

A couple years ago the honey bee got a very bad rap which was mostly fraudulent first incorrectly reported by poor if racist Texas journalism.

That was followed almost as if predestined by a virus in the western hemisphere which has wiped out so much of the organism that the honey producers are now referring to the “new normal” in production at about half pre-virus levels.

That raised prices, and that gives the small land holder in Africa a truly golden opportunity!

Shelter in Place

Shelter in Place

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index“The War on Terror,” Version 163 announced by Obama last week, is taking a significant toll on American tourism and business in East Africa.

This weekend the U.S. embassy in Kampala issued the most serious warning in their lexicon of warnings, “shelter in place,” one step before evacuation:

“All U.S. citizens are advised to stay at home or proceed to a safe location. Shelter-in-place and await further guidance. Follow U.S. Embassy Kampala on Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates.”

The warning was issued Saturday and rescinded Sunday, after Ugandan authorities claimed to have foiled a terrorist attack Saturday night.

Then all day Sunday Ugandan military and police went through Kampala ransacking houses and shooting people. This, by the way, is how the Ugandan military works: shoot first, ask later.

It is the same philosophy that gave rise to terrorism in the first place.

It doesn’t work.

Uganda is neither a place to visit or live, right now, and it hasn’t been for some time. That isn’t because of an increased threat of terrorism, but because of the government’s increased militarism.

That seems to be in fashion with U.S. authorities right now.

Kenya is doing a much better job. Security outside the border region is improving, although security along the coast and Somali border is not.

Beheading, by the way, has been a modis homocide among terrorist groups for the last several decades. Recently another Kenyan border village experienced one.

What’s new, of course, is the beheading of westerners. The roughly thousand beheadings of Africans and Arabs didn’t draw any serious attention. But my goodness, we’ve now had three innocent westerners brutally beheaded! Time for action.

Until now terrorists felt that the potential ransom for a westerner was more valuable than the potential public reaction.

They’ve realized now that the PR value of a few beheadings is worth zillions more than a couple hundred million dollars.

We’re now playing into their game exactly as they wish us to.

That’s why they’re winning.

OnSafari: Dispatch from Ethiopia

OnSafari: Dispatch from Ethiopia

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

dispatchfromethiopiaBleeding heart baboons, some of the rarest animals on earth and some of the most stunning scenery, together with Africa’s very ancient culture. That was Ethiopia hosted by EWT owner, Kathleen Morgan, completed today.

They then spent two days in the very remote Simien Mountains.

“The Simiens were wonderful. Incredibly beautiful scenery,”Kathleen emailed.

The group had a “wonderful” experience with the Geladas, the rare (although not endangered) “bleeding heart” baboon found only in these mountains. The EWT group basically sat in a field amongst them, taking pictures and watching them interact.

They also saw the endangered walia ibex and perhaps the rarest of all, the Simien Fox!

Few visitors ever see this rarest of the world’s wolves. There are fewer than 400 and, in fact, most of those are actually found in a southern Ethiopian range, the Bale Mountains, so this group was particularly lucky!

There is only one lodge in the Simien. “The lodge is ok, but it was absolutely freezing. The water heater and underfloor heating are charged by solar panels. Only two rooms had hot water, one had warm water, and the others had only cold water. Everyone’s floors were freezing. We had lots of blankets and duvets and hot water bottles! The food was ok,” Kathleen reported.

While there are not safari vehicles in Ethiopia of the sort common in East Africa, it was necessary to use 4-wheel drive Nissans to climb the 11-12,000′ into the high roads of the Simiens which Kathleen described as “awful!”

“Narrow, barely allowing two normal cars to pass, and all this with a steep drop at the edge of the road – thousands of feet down to the bottom of a valley. The drivers were incredible.”

“The drive out of the park and to Axum is stunningly beautiful,” she continued. They stopped to photograph colobus and vervet monkeys on the way. EWT guest Joan Lieb who is a veteran traveler of Africa and wild parts of the world, said the villages along the road were the poorest she had ever seen.

Ethiopia was the only country in Africa never colonized, and so it retains absolutely intact its ancient culture. That culture is eclectic, a mixture of very ancient Christianity and animism.

The common “cultural triangle” begins in the city on the southwest tip of the great Lake Tana, where ancient Coptic island monasteries are still overseen by native priests who speak and write a language, Gheez, that has existed for more than a thousand years.

On the northeast corner of the lake is Gondar, where some of the first European settlements (in this case, Portugese castles and churches) built as 15th and 16th century missionary priests, mostly from Portugal, tried to find the mythical Prester John.

After the Simien Mountains, the group spent two days in Axum. The priests who oversee the Church of St. Mary’s claim to be stewards protecting the Arc of the Covenant. When Kathleen’s group arrived, the choir was singing and chanting with their drums and sistra because it was a holy day.

The EWT group was beckoned forward into the choir area. The women sat off to the side, but they motioned Ed Walbridge over to a bench amidst the singers. They gave Ed a prayer stick (those tall ones you can lean on) and a sistrum. He stood and swayed and paid very close attention and swung his sistrum at all the right times.

“Everyone thought it was wonderful!” Kathleen emailed, although Joan Lieb and Kathleen expressed serious disappointment when the priests brought out a precious 500-year old Bible to show them and seemed not to treat it with the care of an antiquity.

After Axum the cultural tour ends with its climax at Lalibela. In the 13th century the dynasty of kings in Ethiopia changed when the rebel Lalibela successfully came to power, claiming he was actually more closely related to the Queen of Sheba than the previous kings.

In thanks to god he vowed to build a new Jerusalem in Ethiopia. This was Lalibela. It took 32 years and begins at the top of the ground and goes down as far as 80 feet, eleven churches carved out of a single massive sandstone.

The combination of very rare animals, remarkable scenery and ancient culture is not something easily experienced on an African safari, but Ethiopia is the place to do so!

Dominoes in Reverse

Dominoes in Reverse

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

kismayoforisisCome on, America! You’re not all dimwits! Obama’s announced policy against ISIS is comparable to what he did in Somali, and it worked. And it was wrong.

We’ve apparently been successful knocking down a bunch of dominoes around the world. I guess Obama thinks it’s time to pull a few of them back up for future consideration.

Now so far I’ve probably assisted raising new funds for the Society of Dimwits. But you’ve got to understand as we race pell-mell into war, again.

OBLstatementTake a look at the statement to the right and guess who said it. Read this blog through to the end to find out, but try to guess, first.

I was watching my favorites on MSNBC parse the Obama speech for analogies with past African policy in Yemen and Somalia, and they got the facts terribly incomplete. It’s astounding that three years after the Kenyan invasion of Somalia, nobody knows about it.

Before the Kenyan invasion on October 18, 2011, U.S. special forces and even regular forces had been spotted on the ground in Mombasa and Lamu, two of Kenya’s coastal cities near Somalia.

French naval forces had penetrated the unofficial stay-away limit from the Somali shore.

A week after the invasion, 90 U.S. soldiers were cheered by Ugandan crowds as they entered Kampala on their search for the terrorist, Josef Kony.

Drones – relatively new and untested back then – were flying all over the African heavens.

We knew something was up, and it was. Later we’d learn about all the equipment and training that the British and Obama had given until-then a useless Kenyan army.

Obama had chased the meanest of the Afghan and Iraqi warlords and terrorists into Yemen and Somalia. They found greater purchase in Somalia than Yemen, where no real government had been in place for more than a decade.

So while the war in Yemen has never ended, it’s much less international than in Somalia. The war and the terrorists in Yemen are almost all Yemeni. Not so in Somalia. They came from Afghanistan and Iraq, mostly.

Someone made a decision in late September, early October, 2011, to deploy everything possible short of the perceived “boots on the ground” against the fugitive terrorists from Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s now three years later. What’s the score?

The Kenyan Army took less than a year to get rid of the terrorists who were, in fact, controlling most of Somalia. As I wrote on October 12, 2012, ‘Mission Accomplished: Now What?’.

From afar the score today is pretty much in America’s favor. More than two dozen terrorist leaders have been “eliminated.” Somalia while not yet fully pacified has its first functioning government in 21 years. (There’s even a dry cleaning store now open in Mogadishu.) Piracy in the Gulf is almost nonexistent.

And …

Kenya continues to occupy Somalia. It has suffered the most horrific three years of terrorist attacks on its own soil imaginable. Its economy, prior to October 2011 and in fact right through the Great Recession, which was robust, is now weak and possibly crumbling.

Somalia has a government, but its Parliament building is rather regularly destroyed by suicide bombers. There’s less piracy in the gulf off Somalia, but now a phenomenal increase in piracy in the gulf of west Africa.

The short-term strategy to make America safer, however slightly since our fear isn’t invasion but surprise suicide bombings, worked. And I expect it will work against ISIS despite all the naysaying.

Our policy, Obama’s policy in Iraq and Syria, will make America slightly safer at the immoral expense of making Iraq and Syria much, much less safe … and all for the short-term.

Exactly like the Horn of Africa, where our safety – incrementally better in my view – came at the horrible expense of the safety of our so-called “partners on the ground.”

And so once we complete the mission in Iraq and Syria, with the wars there incompletely finished, then we’ll have an even better score, and we’ll be able to start another war just like it in, oh say, Nigeria.

And after Nigeria, maybe Mynamar? How about Tibet at last? Why, my goodness, we could be remarkably SAFE with the rest of the entire world burning up!

Click Here for the answer to the question about who was quoted in the red box above.

So get it right, Rachel and Chrisses. The policy did work. And it’s wrong.

Round ‘n Round the Mulberry Bush

Round ‘n Round the Mulberry Bush

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

piracyHow many times around Africa, or the world, can you chase a terrorist? Piracy has now moved from the Gulf of Aden to the Gulf of Guinea.

Fans of the superb movie Captain Phillips will understand better than most (except readers of the New York Times or London’s Guardian) how high seas piracy is instrumental as seed money for “new” terrorists.

Then, once they get established, funds come from all over the world, starting with disgruntled or religiously extreme Saudis and spanning a wide range of bad people all the way to Hong Kong gangsters.

Then, they get their hands on big weapons and, game on.

But that seed money is fundamental. It comes from piracy or kidnapings or both.

We can’t ransom James Sotloff, but god forbid that we lose any oil or Camry’s. Yesterday, the Hai Son 6 secured its release from Nigerian pirates. The press release said the pirates got away with “some cargo” but I doubt that was the end of the story.

Almost every big ship that’s pirated is ransomed, and not with a handful of millions of dollars, but with dozens of millions of dollars.

Obama and Hollande successfully chased well-funded terrorists out of Somalia over the last several years, and our proxy army of Kenya occupied their main port, Kismayo.

Now, they’re on the other side of the continent.

Almost two years ago, when the fight against al-Shabaab in Somalia began in earnest, Europeans immediately began seeing piracy not seen before in the Gulf of Guinea.

The European Union immediately set up a committee and fund with about $6 million to help Gulf of Guinea states combat piracy. No takers. Until now.

Yesterday in Cameroon the French ambassador (giving the money), all the big wigs from the Cameroon government (taking the money) and the Brazilian ambassador … Brazil? Yes, almost all the container traffic between Africa and South America occurs between Brazil and the Gulf of Guinea states.

What prompted these weak States to take more direction from Europe is the radical increase in piracy. Last year there were 32 pirate attacks of giant ships and 24 were “successful.”

“Successful” means the pirate’s got a ransom.

A month ago, authorities noted a “game changer” attack of piracy on a container ship in the high seas, much further off-shore than before.

“The attempted boarding of a vessel underway, especially at night and this far out in open seas, is a tactic … associated with highly motivated Somali pirates,” said Ian Millen, Chief Operating Officer of Dryad Maritime.

It was reminiscent of Captain Phillips: three speedboats overtook then boarded the vessel.

The reason it was a tactic “associated with highly motivated Somali pirates” is because it was undoubtedly carried out by highly motivated Somali pirates.

Because they were chased out of Somalia.

Game changer? They’re just playing on a different side of the board.

So now begins a lengthy time of European and Gulf of Guinea States chasing them away. And they will earn millions and millions of dollars, and be richer than they are now, which is richer than they were in Somalia.

And they will be chased from the Gulf of Guinea to Gulf of Tonkin to the Davao Gulf, etc., etc.

Until “rich” is stopped, this will continue ad infinitum. This means you don’t ransom ships, you arm merchant ships to defend themselves (currently highly restricted) and you stop the money chain.

Swiss banks can no longer be so anonymous. The Caymans can no longer be so indiscreet. China must allow regulation outside itself of Hong Kong banking.

Ultimately, you’ve got to deal too with the reasons terrorism exists in the first place. Try these on for size:

Poverty, Depravation, Oppression

British Aplomb

British Aplomb

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

whitezimsMugabe of Zimbabwe told the remaining whites this weekend that they better leave soon.

Although it isn’t the first time he’s made such a statement about the estimated remaining 40,000 whites in the country, this time seemed more serious.

He made the announcement in a convocation of regional chiefs. In Zimbabwe where government doesn’t exist except as Mugabe decrees, local governance is in the hands of regional chiefs that his administration appoints.

In farming communities that were almost exclusively white 20 years ago, many savvy black Zimbabweans took the white land Mugabe allowed them to conviscate, but they continued to contract the previous white owners as managers.

It’s the only reason the country hasn’t totally and completely collapsed.

But this weekend after his proclamation at the chief’s convocation, Mugabe warned that he would “remove those” chiefs who still undertook this arrangement.

“Don’t enter into contract farming with whites. It’s a dangerous, dangerous arrangement that we don’t want,” Mugabe warned.

Britain, however – which is the homeland that most whites could return to – isn’t so accommodating, anymore.

British law allows anyone who was born there or born of British parents to claim citizenship. That includes most of the remaining Zimbabwean whites who were forced to renounce their British citizenship to remain in Zimbabwe.

That alone piques the British aplomb.

But more fairly, the British have been accommodating returning white Zimbabweans for more than two decades. There is a feeling back in London that the ones who have remained had so many opportunities to return before, that there’s no reason to be nice, now.

So the British embassy in Harare which processes returns is charging outlandish fees to do so. By deciding to use the blackmarket rate for the Zimbabwean currency, rather than the official one used for all normal business, potential returnees are being charged 15 times as much.

London’s Daily Mail said the government “defended the move, saying [it] was obliged to recover all its costs worldwide.”

What needs to be pointed out is that many of the whites who remain really have nowhere in Britain to return to. They are multi-generational Zimbabweans, whose fathers and grandfathers and great-grand fathers all retained British citizenship but who never lived there, so were technically born of British parents. Maybe Ancestry.com could find them a connection, but nothing realistic remains.

I see the problem as much with British policy as with the notion these are people who tried to play both ends of the table.

Moreover, a large number of white Zimbabweans are falling into terribly poverty. The costs of processing return citizenship, much less the costs of airline tickets and other resettlement costs, are likely beyond a large portion of them.

This means it’s unlikely many of the remaining whites will heed the old man’s call.

And that’s kind of scary, if old man Mugabe really wants to have his way.

What’s the Point?

What’s the Point?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

adangodaneAmerica has likely killed Ahmed Godane. Do you care?

Ahmed Godane, if dead, was the leader of al-Shabaab for four years. Al-Shabaab is al-Qaeda of sorts in Somalia, although like so many terrorist groups the affiliation is tentative at best.

But al-Shabaab is among the larger and more successful terrorist groups in the world, because it is what’s left of the council of warlords that had run Somalia for a decade or more before American and Kenyan military sent them running in October, 2011.

Godane replaced Adan Hashi Ayrow who was similarly killed in an American drone attack in 2008.

Whether true or not, Godane claimed responsibility for staging the two mass killings in Uganda and Kenya in 2010 and 2013 (Kampala bar of people watching the World Cup; and the Westgate Mall).

The missile attack certainly obliterated an awful lot, and if Godane was anywhere near this herculean attack, he’s certainly gone. Reuters called the attack “a hail of missiles.”

Locally Godane is presumed killed. The local Somali media picked up a tweet that seems legit: Shabaab announcing the “demise” of their leader.

The reasons Americans aren’t confirming the death is because there’s nothing left to check. The “hail of missiles” was so intense that there’s no evidence left.

Much of the good Somali media, the ones not affiliated to the warlords or terrorist groups, are hailing the American strike and predicting a “game changer.”

But not necessarily for the better. These same Somali media are warning that Godane’s death will foment “potentially more dangerous splinter movements.”

This makes me dizzy. This is what we now propose to do to the leaders of ISIS. Taking out leaders doesn’t do anything. There are dozens in the next village waiting to assume control.

When our president is assassinated, as seems to happen at least once a generation or two, America doesn’t stop.

And it’s particularly true of the decentralized nature of terrorist groups, today. Unlike America, they are often composed of many smaller groups, each with equally competent and trained leaders.

So what’s the point?

Vengeance. That’s no strategy.