Some tunnels of empathy lead to condescension. An event this week in South Africa triggered my epiphany that I’m among the guilty.
Category: Politics
Corona Cascade
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.
Powers of Memory
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.
Outside Logic
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.
Corona Canting
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.
Corona-Cognizance
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.
Corona Chloroquine
I know something about chloroquine. It was the reason I first got malaria.
It’s also the reason I’ve lost about 50% of the vision in my right eye. I listen with malaria shivers to a TV president espousing chloroquine as our vial of hope, and I’ve come to realize that it isn’t just evil that’s destroying our world, today. It’s also hope.
Corona Closeness
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?
Corona Containment
Withdraw into our shelter-in-place and our vision contracts. Personally I find it harder and harder to concentrate on Africa. My children are much closer.
This week’s winner for best current phrase is, “Let’s keep politics out of this.” Don’t conflate “politics” with “truth,” “trust,” or “experience.” Don’t allow phrases to replace thought. We’re near the point of a federal collapse, a mushroom cloud of dollars blown off the tips of skyscrapers onto state and local authorities that are running helter-skelter below swinging nets trying to catch some.
Corona Crisis
Oh my. A careful reading of the Presidential Proclamation limiting travel starting midnight Friday, and Homeland Security’s accompanying brief shows how woefully inadequate and perhaps intentionally baneful the action is.
The limitation does not apply to Americans, green-card holders and a host of others including most NGOs, cargo and health workers, nor of course the crews and staff of airlines or other transport companies. These exemptions put in certain doubt the effectiveness of the ban.
Corona Collapse
I’m not a scientist or a medical doctor. I’m a safari guide entrusted not just with the safety and enjoyment of my clients, but with the integrity of their prepaid travel. What do I do?
This isn’t hypothetical. I have a safari scheduled for next week to Tanzania. Because the African vendors there will share the financial miseries, I’ve postponed the trip. Why?
Sick South Africa
With South Africa’s first confirmed case of Covid19, some experts say that the virus is unlikely to spread much in Africa.
Here’s why.
Biden His Time
It goes without saying that a lot of the world and especially Africa monitor America for political and social trends.
South Africa especially is curious about Biden, because that was where Biden claimed untruthfully to have been arrested years ago. But all of Africa wonders what’s happening as a result of last night. Here’s my take.
Peas in Apod
In a little pinpoint of country high atop rugged mountains, isolated from most of the world socially and politically, a prime minister charged with murdering his wife invokes a Trumpism to ensure his freedom.
And the Trumpism isn’t even that; it’s a dead-out Americanism raised from hibernation by America’s radical right: i.e., the head of state can’t be prosecuted.
Versus Mankind
Everyone is focused on the Covid19 pandemic, but what about the unprecedented continuing outbreak of Ebola in central Africa and Lassa in Nigeria, and why all this now?
The ebola outbreak began in August, 2018, and of 3,340 confirmed cases 2,249 have died, a two-thirds mortality rate. And it continues. In Nigeria the chronic Lassa virus has mushroomed with over 600 cases and 170 deaths annually since 2018.
What’s going on?