Shifting alliances is an African political art, something we all need to study in the era America is racing through right now.
More than 1500 people were brutally killed in the several-month Kenyan civil war of 2008, thousands more tortured or maimed and nearly 200,000 displaced. Yet less than four years later the widows and widowers, orphaned children and homeless thousands elected as their leader the man who tried to kill them and their families.
This blog is about travel prospects to sub-Saharan Africa, but in preparing it my jaw dropped.
South Africa has a sixth the population of the United States but has tested a million of its people. Comparatively that’s two to three times better than the U.S.
The U.S. handling of the pandemic is a chaotic mess. South Africa and other countries know this, and it’s why the prospects for Americans traveling to Africa is getting worse and worse.
Young, excited, thrilled to be a “guide” showing much older and inquisitive fellow Americans the African veld, a memory was born that I’ll never forget. It was 1980. February. Just south of Kenya’s exquisite tea highlands on the long, straight and wild road into The Mara.
How often have I winced angrily when an African leader decries his out-of-control society for being manipulated by “outside agitators.”
I’ve been in conflicts in Ethiopia, the Congo, Rwanda and Kenya, and virtually every time – 100% without fail – the leaders blame the unrest on outsiders. It becomes laughable. Until you realize that it’s the best way to make things worse. After all, we’re all outsiders.
Sunday afternoon the Tanzanian president urged foreigners to come right now to Tanzania “to visit the wildife.”
In marked contrast neighboring Kenya closed all its airports and just last week all border posts with Tanzania after nearly 80% of all Tanzanian truckers trying to enter the country tested positive for Covid-19. “There is some level of threat from the Tanzanian side,” Kenya’s chief health officer told the press Monday. “We keep out those who [are] positive,” he added.
The carnage of African safari companies grows like a dry season wildfire. Distant Serengeti grasslands are lit with flames of desperation. The dead grasses fueling this destruction are the charities proffered to safari customers as a benefit of their bookings.
The charity these schemes achieved for years has stopped flat out: Anti-poaching units, schools, health dispensaries, food assistance and educational training are disappearing with a level of human suffering that the executives of the companies who concocted them ensured they would never experience themselves.
I’m betting that a vaccine will be ready by the first of the year and that Kenya, South Africa and a number of other sub-Saharan countries will require all travelers to prove they are vaccinated in order to gain entry.
But what will you find once you get in?
I can’t convince myself there will be a second wave. I can’t convince myself that a vaccine will be available the first of next year. I guess in fact I can’t convince myself of much. Except one thing: African tourism is imploding so severely that it will gut the global market for safaris for decades to come.
Half of the 2019 African tourism will not exist in a year. By the end of 2021 there will be an unprecedented transformation rolling back decades of trends. (More on this later this week.)
Strict government actions in Africa to protect the population against Covid-19 make America’s actions look like a slap-on-the-wrist. Who’s right?
Today America errs on the side of economics over optimal minimizing of the infection. It’s absolutely the reverse in Africa. Is this just a difference of perception? Or morality? Is it a realistic debate over long-term well-being? Or something much more insidious, such as the personal well-being of our leaders?
Open up? We privileged have more latitude implementing our morality than our poor bloke cousins. Alas, the current partisan pandemic. The growing impression is that Covid-19 is a rich man’s sickness, and ‘god forbid, let them die.’
No better magnification glass on this painful dilemma than what’s happening in Africa.
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.
The first insurance claim made by an EWT traveler that we know of was March 3. This morning that claimant said they received acknowledgment of their claim but as of today the claim had not been reviewed.
It doesn’t look very promising. The situation is similar with the airlines. Here is a brief summary of what EWT clients have explained to me regarding their various insurances.
When will it be safe to travel, again?
This is the second of three blogs about travel in the era of the coronavirus pandemic. Yesterday’s explained why so much money is tied up, now, in scuttled travel and tomorrow’s will carry my recommendations about what you should do.
South African police and military are enforcing one of the strongest shelter-in-place orders in the world. Airports, rail, buses and all borders are closed. The country just exceeded a thousand cases and two deaths.
Two thousand miles north, Kenya has 31 cases and one death. All international flights are banned and police are rigorously enforcing physical distancing and a dusk to dawn curfew. Are these locally draconian policies proportionate to the threat?
Travelers generally come from privileged classes so it pains me to talk about the unexpected suffering attending travelers, today. But that’s my job. It’s where my life’s been anchored.
Airlines and travel insurance companies are screwing travelers royally. In fact, they’re abusing them. Most larger non-American airlines unbound here by the stricter regulations constraining them on their home turf are exploiting the disastrous incompetence of our government to wave American passengers off with the finger. It’s turned our industry into a pack of thugs.