Kathleen and I inserted ourselves when we were 24 years old into the most autocratic, terrifying society that I believe has ever existed: Idi Amin’s Uganda.
We traveled the country in 18 days. There was hardly a night without gunfire. Dead bodies might be found anywhere. We had to hide our vehicle in jungle before stopping it in order to eat our sandwiches or dying children with inflated bellies would surround us.
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Illinois and Iowa friends, please use the following links NOW to organize your vote. Illinois friends in particular, don’t be negligent because our state is historically Democratic. There are other forces unguided by history.
As this and many more apps came on-line last week, I started thinking of the terrifying election experience I lived through in South Africa nearly twenty years ago.
These apps are good. They won’t guarantee your vote but like travel insurance they lower your risks against being uncounted. One addendum: take a picture of your filled-in ballot. Whether you mail it in or actually vote in person, create evidence that no one can ever take from you. From us.
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Absolutely wonderful and absolutely fascinating. Four well-established conservative thinkers at a virtual round table:
Political commentator George Will, first and foremost. Historian Anne Applebaum whose just published book proves she takes no second place to any contemporaries. Journalist Canadian-American David Frum who more than any other living reporter documents the preeminent importance of compromise.
With… Joe Scarborough, the Trump anti-thesis, yet a TV personality to rival Trump. The four of them were on “Morning Joe” today. Their unusually long panel together reminded me (hopefully) of the African clergy who were so essential in bringing real democracy to the continent.
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According to Kenya’s Star Newspaper, “Trump knows that if he loses the election he will spend the rest of his life in court, possibly even in jail. An October Surprise is practically guaranteed.”
The sentiment expressed this week in Nairobi is similar to what’s found throughout Africa. They hate Trump. They know his “bizarre behaviour – the endless, shameless lies, the narcissism, the suggestions that people should inject bleach, etc –“ is crazy and yet, there are still enough Americans who support him to make a reelection feasible.
The tension between opening up and mitigating the virus is worldwide. From large German street protests against wearing masks (and other restrictions) to South African restaurateurs arguing that shutting restaurants kills more people than the virus, it is an organic, confusing debate.
The debate reached the streets immediately outside where I live this morning. We had trouble walking the dog because so many cars were parked end-to-end with at least 30 people converging in a small garage for what in America we call a “garage sale.”
The first week of August is the most important week in my business. I’m usually home from safari, I settle down in front of tons of reports, access to my meticulous notes of more than twenty years, screens of internet and I survey the African political landscape.
Looking for upcoming elections. Once found I have to place a couple bets. Will they be violent or non-violent, and if non-violent will they still be disruptive or not? Then I place my bets and make the final touches on my winter safaris.
Is your cable bill paid up? Are you ready to confront the week of August 23 as the most surprising yet of America’s last four years? Then all you need is this little blog, a little prep on the story of how John Magufuli became the president of Tanzania, crushing the certain hopes and futures of millions.
Some tunnels of empathy lead to condescension. An event this week in South Africa triggered my epiphany that I’m among the guilty.
Planning totally unconventional. Nevertheless an MOP was established over the years that I used religiously.
Whenever the date for an African national election was announced, I pulled out a pile of yellow pads and started figuring out how to keep my clients from being there when it happened.
Sometimes it’s better to let your brain suppress your gut. Better than Rolaids. It’s what I have to do when contemplating the virus in Africa.
There’s an enormous disconnect between what my gut tells me about the dangers of Covid-19 and what my brain does. The numbers on the continent are – and I suppose this is the point – ridiculously low. But numbers in Africa are like snow flakes in a cotton field. They rarely appear and when they do, they’re very hard to find.
You’d think it was a Gucci purse. Large pocketbook size, beautifully encased in a thick wet brown leather case stylishly pierced symmetrically, its oversize steel buttons were actually easy to open, hard to close. Wish now I’d saved it, but when the antenna broke I ditched it.
My Grundig Shortwave Radio. I’ve been thinking nostalgically about MGSR recently as I read with increasing terror the “professional” advice that we should consume less media in this time of such unrelenting stress and anxiety. The fact is that we should all be consuming more.
“Is theese Bwana Jimmee?!” the crackling telephone kept screaming at me, to which I replied in French, that yes, I was the safari guide, Jim Heck, to which the enthusiastic person on the other line screamed again, “Is theese Bwana Jimmee?!!!”
Didn’t know what to do. I’d really been looking forward to a few hours off, basically just reading in my little room in the Mille Collines. I’d sent my group out on their own to stroll Kigali. I started to lose interest until the message changed, delivered by the same high-pitched screech, “Friends arrested!!”
America, your weak, lilly-white specious religious and facetious democracy with its high faluting quasi morality is in complete meltdown. Wide-eyed Africans watch in disbelief. The “trust” and “transparency” and “morality” of the self-styled always-correct America that kept them at bay are evaporating into thin air like the last drops of water in a burning world.
I can find only one – not two – pardons given by any African chief executive in the last century that comes a mile close to what Trump did yesterday. But guess what. They’ll be rolling off the equatorial alabasters, now.
Today is America’s Presidents’ Day Holiday. It celebrates the office as much as the individuals who held it. It celebrates the closest thing a democracy can be to remaining a monarchy.
Does this mean that America is three times as bad as Kenya and has now devolved into a third world culture?
The Human Rights Watch’ “World Report 2020″ implies exactly that. “In 2019,” the report states, “the United States continued to move backwards” towards the cabal of wicked dictatorships and failed states. Have we really fallen that far?