With last month’s reclassification of giraffe as “vulnerable,” and continent-wide surveys last year of both elephant and lion, it’s now beyond doubt that Africa’s big animal population is declining rapidly. This is the #2 story of 2016.
It’s fair to say that lion and giraffe are declining at about 20% every decade, and elephant about half that.
These numbers are at last real science. But they aren’t complete and there’s a lot more to the story.
The top story in Africa in 2016 is “The Election:” Mali, The Gambia, South Africa, The Congo and elsewhere like the U.S. The “story” isn’t simply who won or lost. The “story” is that elections aren’t working: they are not manifesting the will of the people.
Trump is the quintessential example, but I want to examine the African experience because I think it provides very important insights into exactly what’s going on.
Trump dominated the news in Africa in 2016 in so many different ways, including expectations and predictions that were much more correct than those made in America. Had Trump not been around, the top news would have been the finally substantiated science of massive declines in Africa’s big animals. Many important events like this were eclipsed by America’s election.
Return in the next several days for more in-depth discussions of these stories. Below is the summarized list:
Financial realities are overwhelming African safari vendors whose Life-of-Riley is slowly coming to an end.
Right now safari vendors are falling all over themselves to offer better and better “specials.” It’s the wrong way to do the right thing, and they’re just going to end up in a deeper hole.
My last most important story in Africa for 2015 is how expensive a safari has become. By the way it isn’t just safaris. Packaged and guided programs worldwide are artificially priced too high.
The reasons for this I explain below, but what I want to get to right away is how seriously wrong African vendors are responding.
Five-for-four, four-for-three, six-for-four, two-for-three, and now even two-for-one “specials” is the way African vendors are responding right now. It won’t work.
I’ve been vested in African properties and transport, and I’ve been the “middleman” who packages multiple vendors then resells them. I know the nitty gritty of almost every cost on both sides of the coin, and I know that African investors have really got it wrong today.
The answer isn’t to offer specials, but to recalculate business models and lower profits. This is the only way to survive.
First of all recognize why this is happening. The market for safaris is softer than ever. It’s not entirely the African businessman’s fault. A lot has to do with the weak economies worldwide. Europe has always been the principle consumer of African safaris, and Europe is struggling to perform.
Asia was the new hope only a few years ago for the African safari market. Entire safari chains switched over to serve only rice with menus in Mandarin. That market has all but dried up.
But the common sense thing to do when your market goes soft is to lower prices. African vendors have rarely if ever lowered prices, and that’s their problem. They don’t know how to do it…
Packaged travel – an inclusive vacation that you buy from a single seller and that includes everything you need from transport and accommodations and meals to the guide – until very recently was the only way you could visit the African wilderness.
“Packaging” is expensive, not inherently so but historically so. It reflects a consumer as interested in service as cost. So in the early days, anyway, middlemen like EWT worked hard to provide better service, because that was the selling point.
Service can be premium priced, especially in small markets. It’s why first-class air travel is 8 times as expensive as economy, even though the seats aren’t eight times as big.
The African vendors we packaged got jealous of our high profits: “If “WorldWide Tours” can earn a third of the price, then we should be able to, too!”
By 25 years ago, the business model for African safaris had been set:
Every investor wanted a 50% minimum return on his investment within three years of writing his first check.
After those three years – after the mortgage had been paid off and the returns realized – the absolute minimum was put into maintenance and renewal. If the market declined the strategy was to lay off staff, and … get this, raise prices.
Africa is about the only place on earth where tourism net prices increased from 2007 to 2009.
While the original motivation for African investors’ high profits was copy-catting their resellers, by ten years ago the dynamic had flipped. During the robust global economies of the late 1990s, middlemen — the packagers — lowered their margins because there was so much business sound capitalist principles were in sway: volume.
African safari businessmen should have too, but they didn’t. So as soon as there was some emergence from the Great Recession, middlemen – the packagers – started increasing their profits with the same mantra: “If the vendors can make so much on a single sale, why shouldn’t we?”
The point, of course, is that neither the vendors or the resellers should have been so stupid.
This is upside down capitalism, and as crazy as it sounds it might once have been appropriate for a market that was reactive to politics and other unstable factors like weather that couldn’t be managed.
But that era is over. Travelers today will spring for an African safari in spite of a bevy of travel warnings or classical notions of unstable situations, which as the years go by proved Peter-the-Wolf fantasies. Radical weather has almost become the norm everywhere.
The reason specials won’t work is because in our business we don’t sell cars. We don’t have inventories to get rid of because whole new inventories are on their way.
Travel is a service not a thing. Specials work for things, not services. A consumer ponders and researchers purchasing a service a lot more than when purchasing a thing.
Especially with travel very few consumers buy last-minute, as they do all the time with things. I’d venture to say that 95% of travel to Africa is bought at least six months in advance, and that likely more than 50% is bought a year in advance.
So a special that will expire soon is pointless.
What it does do is seriously endanger the integrity of pricing. No one will believe any more any published price. Everyone will start bargaining and we’ll have one big casino on the veld:
I’ve watched more than one curio vendor put themselves out of business by accepting too low a price.
So to my African colleagues: accept lower profits. And to my potential clients: don’t hold your breath.
(For my summary of all the top 10 stories in Africa in 2015, click here.)
Poaching and other animal/human conflicts is my #9 most important story in Africa for 2015, because that’s exactly how I’ve always viewed poaching: a human/animal conflict.
Fanatics who give elephants souls and would save a meerkat before a Maasai are finally falling out of favor: Their hyperbolic, inflammatory arguments are fortunately being replaced by science.
But first the news.
Overall, 2015 was not good for African big game, although the Paul Allen elephant census injected some sanity into the elephant hysteria and showed us it isn’t as bad for elephants as many suggested.
For other headliners like rhino and lion, the numbers were grim. Even for the great herds and other ungulates several years of serious climate change seems to be taking its toll.
Until now I’ve taken great pleasure in telling a prospective client that despite all the news about Africa’s declining wilderness and game, that there are three times as many wild animals in Africa compared to when I started in the 1970s.
With such a span of time that may still be true, but telescoping down to just a few year increments, 2015 was definitely worse than 2014 which barely held onto 2013. In fact until around 2010, animal populations (with the exception of elephant and lion) were increasing. Now, it seems the increases have stopped or started to reverse.
What’s happening?
Charlatans would have you believe it’s poaching, and that poaching is evil incarnate.
Much of it is due to poaching. But as I’ve often written, the only evil incarnate may be with the end consumer. If you had any sympathy with Senn Penn’s interview with El Chapo, or understand the social progressive notion that crime is survival, it’s the facilitator – the user, the end consumer – who should be held culpable.
This is especially true at the periphery of wilderness in Africa. These are usually the most rural areas of the continent, yet still heavily populated with people who need food and water and other basic tools for survival.
When development slows or stops, when unexpected and radical climate change repeatedly devastates a rural area, peasants devolve into what those more fortunate than them call criminal behavior.
It’s only criminal if you can survive without doing it.
Lions are being hit very, very hard, because like all carnivores on the periphery of wilderness in developing areas, they eat meat. No bylaws govern their consumption. A cow doesn’t run as fast as a wildebeest.
Lion also suffer from increasing eminent domain. The wilderness is shrinking because Africa is developing. The first animals to suffer from shrinking territory are those that are territorial like lion.
Rhino poaching has morphed from individual kills by desperate folk to organized farms. But while there are a couple areas [only] where rhino are holding their own in the wild, on the whole they’ve been absent from the real wilderness for several decades. (They are doing well in fenced and other protected areas.)
Elephant have been decimated in central Tanzania … by poaching. (Elsewhere, they’re doing OK, thank you.) There’s probably no better example on the whole continent of human/animal conflict, because where the poaching is now (The Selous) is only 50-80 miles from a city of ten million people (Dar-es-Salaam).
Farmers in the west want to shoot wolves because they eat sheep. I wouldn’t dare suggest that a rancher in Morogoro lives a life similar to an American farmer’s, but a comparison still holds true in a relative way: both farmers argue the animal threatens their livelihood, or at least their way of life.
We are much less arrogant refuting the U.S. ranchers’ claim than the Tanzanian’s: it’s unlikely the U.S. rancher and his children will die if they are prevented from shooting wolves. It’s much less certain that the rancher in Morogoro and his family won’t die if he can’t raise his sheep. His next step is poaching.
People and animals, the whole environment are intricately connected. Ignorance may be an excuse but those of us who are not ignorant must be stewards of the less fortunate folks.
But … people come first.
(For my summary of all the top 10 stories in Africa in 2015, click here.)
Paleontology — especially in Africa — is just simply growing in leaps and bounds. Not too many years ago when it was presumed we (homo sapiens sapiens) evolved in a linear way from just a few creatures that preceded us and followed the apes, enormous attention was applied to finding the gaps, or “missing links” in that line.
That’s all blown away, now. The last few decades have proved so rich with discoveries showing that there were many, perhaps many many species of “early man.” Even the Neanderthals, who were likely not on our own linear evolutionary line, probably had cousins who died out.
So as the universe of potential discovery grows, so does the depth, range and interest of scientists, and that as you can imagine leads to more and more discoveries.
Here are the high points of 2015:
Most important certainly was the announcement of the initial conclusions about Homo Naledi, a new early man species found in South Africa in 2013.
I don’t agree with all the conclusions, particularly that the cave in which the 15 individuals were found was a burial site, but there are many other equally interesting conclusions that come from this remarkable discovery.
First and foremost, the appendages (hands and feet) of the creature were very close to our own, even though the brain size suggested a very primitive and early creature that would, for example, predate both homo erectus and homo habilis.
The individuals were astoundingly complete, at least in terms of what most 2½ million year old fossils normally look like.
And from my layman point of view, the incredible transparency of the discovery, from almost the moment it was found to the invitation to scientists worldwide to analysis the data, marked a real turning point in the until to now bitter infighting common among paleontologists.
Some other important bones discovered included fingers! Million-year old fingers aren’t easy to come by, and the discovery in Olduvai parallels Naledi’s suggestion that our physical traits existed much earlier in the hominin record than previously thought.
In the category of “keeps getting older” scientists also in South Africa found a homo habilis dated to almost 3 million years old. This predates by nearly a half million years the next oldest habilis find and resurrects suggestions this is our own most immediate ancestor.
This was hotly contested, by the way, with another 2015 discovery in Georgia of another homo erectus. The scientists on this site insist this creature is in line for our most immediate ancestor.
Moving away from old bones, there were scores of new tool finds, deeper analysis of existing data and actual field science regarding the dynamics of evolution itself.
Stone tools were very many years presumed to mean the user was an early man. That’s changed as we documented less than mankind, like chimpkind, also uses them.
In 2015 scientists announced finding what they claimed were the oldest fossil stone tools on record, more than 3 million years old. I disagree with their conclusion that this find by itself pushes back “humanness,” but it remains an argument that still carries weight.
One of the hottest topics this decade is trying to figure out why we prevailed and Neanderthals didn’t. Some really clever research suggests at least one of the reasons is that we had … and enjoyed music! (And that the big guy didn’t.)
Some may fear I’m sinking into the arcane, but there was also some really fascinating research on Africa’s cichlid fishes that qualifies the value of natural selection! Cool stuff.
Some people lay on their back and peer into the heavens, wondering what’s out there. I do sometimes as well, but I much prefer peering into the distant past and wondering what marvels of the universe transformed us into what we are, today!
(For my summary of all the top 10 stories in Africa in 2015, click here.)
My #6 and #7 most important stories of 2015 in Africa sort of go together, “Zuma the Clown” and “Trump,” two of the most unimagineable politicians in history, one in South Africa, one in the U.S.
They are inextricably linked by their unique ability to sustain their popularity by maligning their supporters, a sort of SM political love.
Trump really didn’t start hogging the stage until midyear, but ever since then Africa has been almost obsessed with him.
It started with the fascination that in America a crazy, like Marie Le Penne of France, might actually be taken seriously. More analytic observers probed “inner meanings” to suggest this showed both how open democracy was and how strong it would be finally restraining these “crazies.”
While Trump was on his ascendancy, State President Zuma on the other hand was going in the other direction. Problem is that Zuma has been falling for some time, and his hole seems bottomless.
There are few modern leaders in essentially democratic societies who have been mired in such scandal as Jacob Zuma. Normally leaders who reach the point he has – like the Toronto mayor or South Carolina governor, fall pretty quickly.
But Zuma carries with him more than his own folly. He’s a symbol of the anti-apartheid movement, one of the last of the original revolutionaries. To many patriotic South Africans, certifying his collapse would be tantamount to questioning the anti-apartheid movement.
It seems a stretch to me, but I’m not a 50-year old South Africa who felt enormous liberation in the mid 90s.
What these two buffoons have in common is that they are supported by people they dislike if not disdain. Trump has no intention of helping the poor. Zuma seems simply incapable of organizing anything constructive.
Yet it is precisely the poor from which Trump gets his main support, and from the well educated managerial class of South Africa that Zuma get his.
So what else do they have in common?
Public disdain for critics. Almost overnight the two of them have given critics a bad name even while themselves criticizing their detractors with regular sorties of foul language into normally hallowed territories like spouses and other family members.
I think what the two demonstrate is that the whole damn world is fed up with the systems in place and they are about as radical a divergence from existing systems as you can come up with.
Perhaps it’s a social, subconscious frustration that the Arab Spring fizzled out. That’s an awfully hard thesis to construct but on a macro level, I think it’s a reasonable assessment of social perceptions, today.
They lash out at the ruling elite and convince their supporters they aren’t ruling elite, because above all, they lie.
Damned world isn’t it, when that’s the only sure way to success?
(For my summary of all the top 10 stories in Africa in 2015, click here.)
Last week the new Tanzanian president, already nicknamed “Bulldozer,” announced he was deporting all illegal workers. It was a direct hit on neighbor Kenya, because much of Tanzania’s professional class comes from Kenya.
The #5 story in Africa for 2015 was the Tanzanian election, and it tells a horrible tale of democracy and may be foretelling the future for the U.S. and worldwide.
Magufuli’s deportation order followed all sorts of other blustering initiatives, including ranting in front of a group of high-profile African businessmen that they would be jailed if they don’t pay their taxes and executive actions slashing the national budget.
Magufuli is an object lesson in democracy. Everything he is doing at the moment is wildly popular in Tanzania: damned if it isn’t legal, or ethical or even moral. It’s … popular.
Consequences? Who knows, it’s popular! The polls say so!
We’re getting a good dose of that lesson right now during our own presidential campaign. Democracy is showing its true colors.
Tanzania’s election last fall was peaceful and certified by all sorts of outside observers as free and fair. But the choice available to the people at the time, Magufuli vs. Lowassa, was not a choice that a lot of the electorate wanted. So goes democracy.
And guess what?! It wasn’t a choice that the power elites wanted or expected!
Sound familiar? Edward Lowassa (Jeb Bush) was the establishment favorite. Instead, Magufuli (Cruz? Trump? Milton Don’tknowyet) became the nominee. Foreshadowing what might happen this summer in the U.S., Lowassa (Jeb Bush) then mounted his own rebel campaign.
Magufuli’s decisive victory stunned everyone, I think even his supporters. But then, there was no jubilation, just depression and tension.
Did the people get what they wanted? If they did, did they know what they wanted? Did they want what they knew they wanted?
End of First Book.
The Beginning of the Second Book opens with Magufuli firing up the team.
Hiding behind trucks in shady parts of Dar to unmask criminals, telling tax evaders he’s going to put them all in jail, far exceeding his executive authority with actions slashing the budget.
Now, deporting “illegals.”
Think he might suggest building a wall?
I don’t think the Second Book is going to end well, but we’ll see. But the first book is done. It shows that the democratic process is not a democratic process. What influences elections in Tanzania might be different than what influences elections in the U.S., but the result is the same.
Influence trumps rational choice.
Stay tuned. Or maybe if you’re an American, take heed. Either way. Keep the message to a sound-bite length.
(For my summary of all the top 10 stories in Africa in 2015, click here.)
Recently we were besieged by conservation organizations begging for money to stop the otherwise inevitable extinction of elephants.
Fortunately, you didn’t give them anything near what they requested, and fortunately, elephants are not going extinct.
The #4 story of 2015 in Africa is “the elephant story” finally in a balanced, scientific way and much to the chagrin of numerous conservation organizations.
It was very hard for me, a staunch proponent of elephant conservation, to have to argue that other proponents of elephant conservation were screaming fire when there wasn’t any. Yet that is how I spent much of the last 18 months, getting booed.
The release last month of the Paul Allen elephant census has silenced my critics. We now have good numbers, for the first time ever, and elephants are not going extinct.
Poaching is extremely serious, perhaps definitively irreversible in central Tanzania. But practically everywhere else the population is holding its own, or increasing.
The hysteria that many organizations tried to create unsuccessfully was because of all the action that was happening in central Tanzania, which was bad. Beginning with an undercover film by the BBC of ivory dealers in Dar in 2012, to the arrest of a high profile dealer last November (that was actually an election gimmick), I argued continuously that exaggeration is just as bad as neglect.
The Allen census took a long time, but the hysteria abated when the overall numbers for Tanzania were published earlier last year. They ended once and for all the outrageous claims by several organizations that the populations had declined by 60%.
I find little solace in being proved correct, though. Exaggeration unmasked guts credibility. Fox News buying NatGeo isn’t trying to retain NatGeo’s old supporters, but organizations like the WWF and Save the Elephants now have a lot of difficult explaining ahead of them.
Elephant – like lion – are declining in certain places because of a terribly serious conflict between man and beast. Africa is developing. Africa’s wilderness has been preserved mostly for rich foreign tourists.
It’s important that we get back to the crux of the problem: how to demonstrate to local Africans an ultimate benefit from the protection of elephants while simultaneously not inhibiting the development of a modern African society.
That’s a tall order, but one that could never have been tackled in the hysterical atmosphere of the last several years. Now that’s over, let’s get on with it.
(For my summary of all the top 10 stories in Africa in 2015, click here.)
The #3 story in Africa is maybe the #3 story in the world: The Power of the People!
In Africa it’s happening in even the most dictatorial regimes. It was unthinkable that public demonstrations would occur in Ethiopia, but throughout December they did, led by youth and student groups.
The Ethiopian protests if removed from the excitement and fear of confrontation are somewhat arcane, almost a dispute over zoning propositions. It would have seemed more likely that such flagrant protests of an extremely dictatorial government would have been of something more substantive, but that isn’t the point.
The point is that the public – the ordinary joes and janes – throughout Africa in 2015 were successful bringing attention to issues of justice that authorities had refused to consider.
In Tanzania rangers enforcing national park regulations reacted “too harshly” to citizen intruders and in the end, four park rangers were arrested! This is so similar to police in America being arrested for excessive force. (Like in nearly every case in America, the police were finally exonerated in court.)
The fact that rangers were arrested, like police in Chicago, is simply because the people – the ordinary joes and janes – protested publicly.
Although the bulk of those I surveyed were peaceful protests, there were violent ones, too. Violence did not seem to matter in terms of the issue being acknowledged by authorities, or of the outcome.
Ultimately a society decides to act on the protests’ issues or to rebuff them, the tip toe dance between stability and freedom. In Baltimore or Johannesburg, authorities cracked down hard, rebuffing them. The outcome was not manifestly effected: protests scored a victory and authorities changed their policies.
In the U.S. we can’t argue that without harsh government crackdowns our society will self-destruct. That is what some African authorities claimed however:
In Zambia a rap artist was jailed for criticizing the president, and in Nigeria out-of-control journalists harangued a visiting Head of State. No slack was extended either side, by either side. The intransigence defined the extremes and both led to popular protests. The singularity here was that both sides claimed that altering their position would lead to an implosion of society.
Separately, African courts began intricate investigations of the limits of things like freedom of speech. When should hate speech be prohibited? African courts also experimented with youthful constitutions that gave professional judges the right to overturn jury verdicts.
These are some of the extremely novel, imaginative perhaps even self-contradicting public conflicts about justice that happened in Africa in 2015, and they reflected how important the issue is to African societies.
Justice is a complex component of a modern society, and a dynamic one. When it isn’t being aired and argued in the public arenas but confined to those in power, we tend to be in times of war and global conflict. I disagree somewhat with the Africans who believe some of these protests herald a fraying apart of their society.
Rather, I think it heralds a period of social reflection (despite some violent components, none of which were lasting). That’s a very, very good thing. Everybody should spend more time debating in aggressive free discourse.
(For my summary of the top 10 stories in Africa in 2015, click here.)
The most undeniable effect of global warming is the extremity of today’s weather, and nothing hit me harder than the Super Storm in the Serengeti last spring.
We can all recount weather events which we thought were particularly harsh or unusual. But when I took my vehicle to the top of a little hill on the plains in the Maasai Kopjes, it was truly terrifying. Click here to read the account of that awful afternoon.
While that was the most extreme of the extreme, there were similar events on all my safaris last spring, and it was happening throughout the sub-continent.
Global warming has been pummeling sub-Saharan Africa for a number of years, so climate change per se is not the story. The tragedies it’s causing and the attempts to prepare for even worse times are the stories:
You’d think that after years of being depressed, the escalation of coffee prices would be a boon to the highlands of East Africa, and it is … if they can grow it! Coffee is extremely sensitive to temperatures, especially night-time temperatures. The rise of a single degree centigrade is decimating East Africa’s highland coffee plantations.
Inevitably the disruption of the normal climate for people who already live in climate-stressed areas pushes them to a breaking point. One effect is increased conflict, as demonstrated this year in Kenya’s Northern Frontier among tribes who have always had limited resources, but who are now fighting among themselves for what’s left.
Many believe these kinds of incidents will soon combine into a massive, unorganized but global uprising.
Yet Africans are trying to do something about it, and their efforts are definitely part of the reason this is the number 2 story of 2015.
South Africa, which has lots of coal and even nuclear power plants, is investing heavily in mega solar power projects.
I’ve actually written about a number of these massive mega-projects throughout Africa. But there are also thousands of smaller, individual and truly heart-rendering initiatives as with the young entrepreneur Tom Osborn of Kenya.
As the years pass and the rain tumbles doesn’t it seem strange that some still deny climate change? How inconceivable that we would elect people like James Inhofe, and worse, give him a platform for his denial!
Most people right around the world know this is the world’s most pressing single issue. ISIS might topple Mosul, but climate change will topple the Himalayas.
(For my summary of the top 10 stories in Africa in 2015, click here.)
Africans have an important skill to teach Americans: how to deal with terrorism.
Thousands were killed this year by terrorists in Nigeria and Mali, and hundreds in Kenya and Somalia. But Nigerians and Malians and Kenyans and Somalis know that things are actually getting better. They are winning the battle against terrorism.
Just as Britain overcame the IRA and Spain overcame the Basque Separatists and Japan overcame the Red Army and Germany overcame Nazism: the solution takes time. It does not include creating impenetrable defenses. Africans successful fight against terrorism includes taking on head-to-head the two most significant causes of terrorism:
Hunger, physical and psychological.
Exclusion, ethnic and economic.
Most Americans when asked who Timothy James McVeigh is don’t even pretend to know. Yet many Americans when asked who presents the greatest threat of terrorism insist with divine certainty that it is Muslims and refugees.
On April 19, 1995, a 27-year old Gulf War veteran, Starpoint (NY) Central High School’s Most Promising Computer Programmer, devout Roman Catholic, registered member of the Republican Party and National Rifle Association, killed 168 Americans and injured another 600 by blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City. Why?
Because, in his own words, he wanted to inspire a revolution against America’s tyrannical government.
“I’m sorry these people had to lose their lives. But that’s the nature of the beast….Innocents [have to die] to win the war.”
Hundreds followed McVeigh in America as terrorists since 1995. Almost all of them were fully fledged, driver-license endowed, passport eligible home-grown boys – Americans through and through.
McVeigh was Irish American. Hear any calls from Trump to ban Irishmen from entering the U.S.?
Terrorism – which we once incorporated into the phrase, “guerilla warfare” – is nothing new, but seems so, and that may be because it’s finally becoming successful.
Terrorists can’t amass enough fire power to prevail. So their strategy is simple: get inside the shirt of their adversary, inject the heart with fear and make the adversary turn on himself.
Fear uncovers our soul. We run or we fight. We save others at the risk of ourselves or we hide. We can’t masquerade our inner identity when we get afraid – it all shows.
Donald Trump and his frighteningly large number of followers are cowards of the simplest sort. They won’t fight the real battles, so they make up battles that don’t exist, like the religious “clash of civilizations.”
They want to believe they can still gun down their opponents, so they amass huge stockpiles of arms, but in their heart of hearts they’ve been frightened into believing in the near invincibility of terrorists.
So they want to build walls to barricade themselves from the rest of the world, an ultimate defense against the foreign phantom. What irony that future Timothy McVeighs, Americans through-and-through, Christians of the most flowery sort, Republicans and NRA contributors will all be behind the wall together. Easier to blow things up from the inside, isn’t it?
If the wall’s big and strong enough, the blast won’t hurt anybody at all on the outside.
Africans are fighting for ways to fairly redistribute diminishing resources, to find better ways of feeding everybody who’s hungry, to end corruption to make life inclusive for everyone. I don’t doubt that long before America achieves economic inclusiveness, most African nations will.
I’ve written about all these last year. These are tireless, thankless but meaningful battles. How pitiful are the extremists on the right who refuse to take these battles on.
Listen to Africa. Listen to Europe. Listen to Trump and his followers, too, but beware of them: This isn’t just entertainment. They’re standing in front of a white flag.
(For my summary of the top 10 stories in Africa in 2015, click here.)
Events in Africa in 2015 reflected a real maturation from reaction to reflection. There were some horrible things that happened but they had definite silver linings, and there were also many positive, dynamic social movements.
Return in the next several days for a more in-depth discussion of these top events. Below is the summarized list:
#1 TERRORISM
As the year transpired it became clear to westerners that terrorism was no longer centered in Africa. There were horrible terrorism attacks in Nigeria and Mali, particularly. But even though the actual number of human casualties remained higher in Africa than elsewhere in the world, it was Charlie Hebdo and November 13 in Paris that sent cold water down the spines of the western world.
Westerners should have taken their lead from Africans who have never become polarized by terrorism. But westerners didn’t, and Africans noticed it.
One part of The West developed a good, rational understanding that terrorism is no more external than internal. But another good hunk succumbed to terrorism. Fear breeds fear, so when used as a weapon the first strike may be external but the final one will be from within.
#2 CLIMATE CHANGE
All of us can recount that day or week of weather that was “unlike anything before.” But my seeing the super storm in the Serengeti on one of my spring safaris was terrifying. It was as if I were in an alien world.
Yet in the midst of such natural fury it’s easier to empathize with the African farmer who struggles even when things are good, and to understand that few global issues can be as politically transformative as this.
Few things can drive a man to desperation. No water one day followed by flooding the next is one. One type of desperation is suicide bombing.
#3 POPULAR MOVEMENTS
Black Lives Matter and income inequality are no more dynamic movements than journalistic freedom/free speech and income redistribution are in Africa.
This year was notable for popular movements gaining political momentum throughout Africa. This leads to a truly fascinating social dialogue, about justice and equality and the limits of the state.
In South Africa the country experienced the first major implementation of its constitution’s allowance for an appointed high court to overturn a jury’s acquittal. In Kenya popular outrage over press reforms stopped serious restrictions on the freedom of speech.
As in America these movements’ fuel came not from elections but popular uprising.
#4 ELEPHANTS
I felt vindicated this year as public opinion moved way from the commercially (that is, not-for-profit commercialism) crafted notion that elephants were going extinct, and embraced the more nuanced reality of their manageable decline.
Though the false anthropomorphization of an animal still dominated the entertainment industry, critics grew. It’s important especially in Africa that the world realize elephant are no more important than people.
There were some real banger issues, too, as when Tanzania’s ruling party arrested an ivory black-marketeer who had been known for decades, simply to achieve an advantage in its election.
#5 ELECTIONS
Democratic elections are now routine in much of Africa. The major presidential elections in Nigeria and Tanzania were both extremely surprising. In Nigeria the regime was ousted. In Tanzania the regime was sustained.
Yet in both cases the results seem to have been transformative. Nigeria has begun to recapture itself from Boko Haram and in Tanzania actual events suggest that the country’s greatest cancer, corruption, may be under attack.
Does this mean that democracy is more important than its outcome?
#6 ZUMA The CLOWN
While at the bottom of the continent, democracy bottoms out completely: The current president of South Africa is so enmeshed in scandal, so childishly reactive to important national and international affairs, that many are no longer just making fun of him but insisting that he go.
I’ve often written that in a newly democratic nation the chief executive is often something quite unusual. But Jacob Zuma has overstepped the boundaries of a cartoon and may be putting his country in real peril. One indication of this is the plummet of the rand.
#7 TRUMP
My detractors will claim this ridiculous, but it isn’t. Africans have always been intrigued with American politics, even at its tamest, so there’s hardly anything unusual with interest in the opposition’s front runner.
But we need to heed what Africans are saying: There is an acute understanding that Donald Trump is not just a trouble-maker but a very evil force in America.
#8 EVOLUTION
Because we evolved in Africa, Africa will always figure prominently in the discussion of evolution. As technology improves discoveries increase and are more frequent.
Homo naledi may be the greatest discovery of early man in the last fifty years. The American turned South Afrikaner who found it is a wonderfully refreshing personality to percolate up the ranks of paleontological celebrities! His discovery has been presented so transparently, I hope not just the science but his methodology can transform the jealous and conceited way American paleontologists have dominated the science for years.
#9 MAN vs. BEAST
This goes well beyond the specifics of elephant poaching to the new if “modern” battle between the emerging African middle class and the wild animals that live all around them.
Lion poisoning, especially in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, profoundly demonstrates that the only solution – or at least the only path to a solution — is through government not private initiative.
#10 AFRICA TOO EXPENSIVE
Interestingly linked to #9 above the cost of an African vacation for a foreigner has been increasing faster than any vacation in the world, and Africans are about to price themselves out of future markets.
Tense peace in The Congo, despair with ivory smuggling, ownership of The Nile, more pieces to the early man puzzle and break-through yellow fever research round out 2014’s Top Ten Stories.
[For the summary of all Top Ten Stories in 2014 click here.]
Actual war in The Congo is over: my # 5 Story for 2014. The central government of the DRC in Kinshasa, far far away from the conflict area, won and with massive international assistance peace will ultimately emerge.
For the time being the area is as ravaged as West Africa was and we know what that means. So even as enough peace has settled on the region conservationists are now reappearing to try to save some precious pieces of wilderness, gun battles are common.
But they are not organized, rather individuals who know nothing but war and whose leaders have disappeared. Oil companies are back prospecting, exiled leaders are returning and I believe a vicious conflict of nearly 30 years is truly ending.
Some will argue that increased elephant poaching and ivory smuggling should get greater attention than “just” my #6 Story for 2014, but as readers know, I feel this story has been massively exaggerated.
Elephant poaching is rising, and it’s distressing enough that some aid groups rightly so are withholding assistance until countries – particularly Tanzania – establish firm policy to stop the increase.
On the other hand, I believe there are too many elephants. When more attention is placed on protecting elephants than sustaining the development of the growing populations of increasingly unemployed people around the elephant habitats, the formula is set to increase poaching.
I take strong issue with those who compare today’s crisis with the one in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then it was corporate, global criminal action and the methods of stopping it were much easier than today. Today’s solution requires massive local economic reforms with a new emphasis on sustaining the development of the local communities at which today’s poaching originates.
Hiding in plane sight is one of Africa’s most important issues, potable water. Sub-Saharan Africa has always been a net arid land. Water has always been an issue.
Despite recent finds suggesting massive acquirers may exist below the Sahara itself, east and southern Africa remain dependent on the water sheds of the Great Rift Valley, and a huge percentage of these ultimately flow down The Nile towards Egypt.
When Britain was formulating independence for its many colonies in the area it structured a treaty in the 1950s that has governed the use of The Nile until today. But Ethiopia’s massive new dam, Tanzania’s recent announcements of its own new hydroelectric policy and Uganda’s incompetence at the headwaters at Lake Victoria are all on a terrible collision path.
Egypt has even threatened war, although that seems almost comic. What is not humorous is the fact that contemporary society is draining the Nile fast, and my #7 Story for 2014 is the increasingly dangerous tension in the area as those countries involved seem unable to find a common policy.
Global warming is a global issue and might rightly be considered the world’s most important issue right now. I’ve written often about its effects in Africa, even those immediate ones that have effected me while on safari.
This year, however, scientists have finally concluded that it is global warming more than any other single dynamic that is reducing Africa’s great animal populations and at a rate not seen before.
It isn’t just the big and visible animals, of course, but I felt this the #8 Story of 2014 because it lends much explanation to why we are seeing fewer lions, why birth rates in endangered species are declining in the wild, why nocturnal animals in particular are on the decline, and perhaps even why elephant poaching is so high.
So many foreigners who travel on safari are rich, and most of the rich people of the world are conservative, and most of the conservative people of the world deny global warming. I hope that this connection might serve to change a few minds.
My #9 Story of 2014 is a wonderful discovery by a group of paleontologists working in East Africa on pre-hominin fossils.
For a long time the modest creature proconsul who lived as long as 25 million years ago was thought to be the precursor if not the actual “lca” [least common ancestor] to humans and apes.
The rub was that of the many proconsul fossils found none were from a forest environment where it is known both apes and man originated. This year it changed with new evidence that proconsul did exist in the forest. This may seem an arcane fact to many – it isn’t like a whole new species has been found – but it ties together so many presumptions about early man that it absolutely ranks in the top ten!
Finally, my #10 Story of 2014 is how new genetically overseen medicine has provided striking new opportunities to control one of Africa’s deadliest diseases, yellow fever.
Yellow fever is transmitted like malaria through a mosquito, but intricate new understandings of how it works is leading scientists to completely new methods of treating the disease. These are true break-through determinations and the opportunity at last of curing rather than just controlling yellow fever outbreaks have appeared on the horizon.
There are, of course, many other important stories in 2014, including the continuing rise of dictators, the tedious story of corruption, the buffoonery of South African politics and the increasing disengagement of China from Africa after several decades of intense involvement.
In some ways all important stories are linked to all other important stories and for the casual reader the excitement and intensity of my first top ten, albeit chosen by my own deeper interests, might hopefully lead you to a better understanding of Africa as a whole in 2014.
The President of Kenya is not quite a wholly free man, but a war criminal is no longer charged, and iniquity has trumped justice.
The dropping of charges against the President of Kenyatta is my # 4 Story for Africa in 2014. [For the summary of all Top Ten Stories in 2014 click here.]
Early last month the International Criminal Court at The Hague dropped all charges against Uhuru Kenyatta, the current President of Kenya, after a 5-year prosecution of crimes against humanity.
Kenyatta is guilty. Whether he should ever have been prosecuted is now another question, but the ICC’s flipflop is as much a statement on the feasibility of global justice as it is on Kenyatta’s culpability.
The President of Kenya, the Vice-President of Kenya and originally four other high officials plus a local journalist were all charged by the ICC for being the key masterminds in the horrible violence that wrecked Kenya following its flawed 2007/2008 national elections.
About 1200 people were slaughtered and equally awful were the near quarter million who were displaced of which more than a 100,000 remain displaced, today.
The agreement brokered by the U.S. and Britain between the warring parties established a coalition government that actually worked well and which mastered a new constitution that at least on paper is nothing short of fabulous.
Part of the agreement required Kenya to bring to justice all those responsible for the violence. A sub-agreement to that required the ICC to step in if Kenya was unable to accomplish this.
So despite all the creativity and work that Kenyans managed in creating a new society, in the end they were unable to bring themselves to charge the son of the first president, Jomo Kenyatta, who was quickly achieving national popularity especially among his ethnic group, the Kikuyu.
So the ICC stepped in as agreed and two years ago had a near irrefutable case against Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, who in the meantime became freely elected as Kenya’s president and vice president.
Drip. Drip. Drip. One by one protected eye witnesses recounted or disappeared. Those who resisted were found murdered. Drip. Drip. Drip. Hard factual evidence began evaporating at The Hague.
No one believes that Kenya has either the power or wizardry to change the past, but it sure seems so. Earlier last month the prosecutor had to drop the case, because … well, there wasn’t one, anymore.
The rules of the ICC allow it to bring charges again, at any time, so technically Kenyatta has not been vindicated. Quite to the contrary, the animus of the ICC towards Kenyatta is palpable. The prosecutor has made no bones about why she dropped the case: it, literally, was stolen from her.
History has already crystalized. Kenyatta and his henchmen funded and orchestrated much of the horrible ethnic violence that followed the 2007/2008 election. In a Shakespearean twist classic to Kenyan mischievousness, most of the violence Kenyatta concocted was against the ethnic group of … Kenya’s vice president.
In a brilliant move several years ago, Kenyatta didn’t simply offer an olive leaf to his arch rival, the man who the ICC charged with being equally murderous against Kenyatta and his clans. Kenyatta offered him the second spot on the national stage.
By the way, charges have yet to be dropped against the Vice President, William Ruto, but everyone knows they will be.
Many in Kenya see this public and power alliance as retribution enough. Many in Kenya believe justice has been served and that it’s no business of a World Court thousands of miles away and culturally so dissident to judge Kenya’s recent past.
In fact, there is a growing movement in Africa to abandon the ICC altogether. The ICC is a complicated but I believe wonderful concept that has yet to win over the greatest world powers like the United States and China.
But for the great majority of the rest of the world it’s working pretty well. It’s had few convictions, but its masterful prosecutions and principle investigations have held many to account and I believe imprinted much of Africa with the need for justice.
So while even I can be convinced by the many Kenyans who believe that this horrible chapter of their history is closing, they leave one page unturned: It was they, the Kenyans, who invited the ICC in.
Kenyans themselves could have closed the book, but they couldn’t. So Kenyans themselves invited the ICC to take over. Then? Kenyans apparently connived and manipulated the witnesses and somehow stole the evidence.
That’s so behind-the-scenes, so Machiavellian, so deceptive that it in my opinion it’s immoral. No justice can come from this.