Woe Nelly

Woe Nelly

A tale of woe.

Is that Cyril Ramaphosa selling South Africa out to the Russians then tripping over his own feet when he couldn’t let Putin meet him because he’d have to arrest him? Or is it Brice Nguemo body-guarding Ali Bongo Ondimba by arresting him so Albert Ondo Ossa couldn’t come to power and installing himself, instead? Or… might it be Emmerson Mnangagwa’s continuing sapping of Zimbabwe? Or, hey, maybe you didn’t yet know that there were only 1280 of us left on earth 900,000 years ago and that our species hung by the thread for 117,000 years because there wasn’t a Trump to kill us off?

But I couldn’t write about anything of that. Because of my own tale of woe. Which I’m now going to relate to all the many of you who love to read tales of woe, because well, we’ve all just seen Oppenheimer and want to believe there’s something worse.
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ZOOMa

ZOOMa

His face says it all. His eyes glance at me through the picture of spite and revenge that laid waste so many. But his head can’t turn: he’s too old. Flabs of neck skin reveal the greasy gutter food on which he ravenously fed whenever he lost a battle, which were many. But he always avoided his Waterloo. He always won the big ones, and the rivulets of the sweat of those battles seemed this morning to have congealed his pugnacious face as prep for Madame Tussaud’s ultimate judgment:

He’s lost. There will be no granite or even concrete statues. His legacy is wax.
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Survival Suicide

Survival Suicide

Feel the epiphanous relationship of the disaster in The Sudan with Kaylin Gillis and Ralph Yarl.

It’s called destruction. It emerges from hate, love or some other intense emotion. Amplified by modern technology it grows exponentially, quickly fuses into cultural movements and governments like a Covid virus strangling our pulmonary cells. And then – always – it explodes into war.
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Linking Language

Linking Language

Now few believe in the power of language that I do, and Manvar Singh’s excellent time line of the word “indigenous” developing from the 16th Century into various versions including Maasai anagrams is almost fascinating. But what does it really have to do with the Maasai being kicked out of Loliondo?

Singh’s New Yorker epistemology of “indigenous peoples” and the resulting evisceration of same peoples’ aspirations is terribly incomplete and as useless as he tries to portray those aspirations.
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Guilt Trips

Guilt Trips

To everyone planning travel : Listen to NPR’s latest podcast of “To The Best of our Knowledge” after, of course, first reading this blog. And then, buy and read “Beyond Guilt Travel,” remembering, of course, this blog.

“To The Best of Our Knowledge” is an often dead-pan basement interviewing machine adroitly edited to keep you awake. When successful you actually learn quite a lot. Ditto for this week’s podcast about travel.
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KLM Backwards

KLM Backwards

Twenty years old I thought I was an up-and-coming journalist albeit of a different kind. Because the Movement into which my age conscripted me was winning. We young, naive often reckless kids were actually stopping the war in Vietnam, and we “journalists” played a proactive part in bringing that about.

Why am I writing about this on Martin Luther King Day?
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Seal Attack

Seal Attack

Yesterday a baby seal, about the size of a small black lab, attacked multiple swimmers at Cape Town’s popular Clifton Beach. I’d come down exhausted from watching the House disaster, in need of several items of ordinary African news. And the first I found was this.

The seal first attacked a kid, then an older man rescued the kid and got attacked, then the lifeguards blew out warnings but one woman didn’t notice and the seal really bit a chunk out of her until a guy grabbed it, swung it around and then threw it back out to sea… where it immediately turned around and swam back to attack him.
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Failed Demo

Failed Demo

Tomorrow the modern African country that started the Arab Spring in 2010 will officially end democracy in Tunisia. This is neither a coup or proletarian revolution. It’s what the people want.

Tunisia is and always was one of the most progressive and developed societies in Africa. It was no surprise that the “Arab Spring” started here. And I don’t think it’s really their fault that the democratic experiment of 2014 will fail. It’s the fault of democracy itself.

This massive political and social retrograde is happening because democracy is seen as having suffocated economic development. Too much talk and not enough action.
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OnSafari: Aswan

OnSafari: Aswan

The incredible multi-thousand year old history and monuments of pharaonic Egypt draw nearly 12 million visitors a year. But I’m getting really fascinated by the much later periods, when first the Greeks, then the Romans, then ultimately Muslims took control of the empire.

The basic pantheon of Egyptian gods existed from about 5000 years ago, about a dozen deities that explained creation, the difference between good and evil and the afterlife associated with each. But with time the collection of gods increased substantially, and with it the elaborate tombs and monuments and ceremonies that created a civilization that became encapsulated in myth and held stable by fierce ideology.
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OnSafari: Israel

OnSafari: Israel

Three soldiers — all very young – like stick men in a video game strutting awkwardly across an intersection at the very far end of a very long, dark street. Too far to hear their boots on the lose rocks. But the shrill shouts of very young children displace their cadence, and they lift their TAR-21s to hip level and face the sounds of the screaming children.

It just so happens that the kids are between me and the soldiers. I’m in the line of fire.
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OnSafari: First a Fall

OnSafari: First a Fall

The “Great Wall,” the rapturing at the Church of the Nativity, an intimate private lunch with a Palestinian family — so much, today, but one of the most telling was our visit to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron.

Considered a sacred site in both Judaism and Islam for the same reason, the ability of believers to worship here is now “absurdly” controlled by Israel.

Israel has valid security concerns since at least 67 Jewish worshipers were gunned down here in 1929 on rumors that Jewish militias were going to take over the Temple Mount.
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OnSafari: War Births

OnSafari: War Births

The easiest question of the day: ‘Where’s the center of the earth?’ Certain Christian sects believe it’s the Temple Mount; Jews believe it’s Golgotha; and the always necessarily compromising Palestinians simply draw a line between the two assumed centers and declared the half-point the real middle which conveniently falls in the middle of the Church of the Sepulcher.

So that’s the easy part. So glad we finally figured that out since it’s been bugging me for such a long time.
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OnSafari: First Impressions

OnSafari: First Impressions

Unusual message from the Lufthansa purser: “Please prepare for an immediate landing.” But we’re a long way… “Make sure that you leave behind all personal belongings if asked to evacuate.” Evacuate? I look out the window. “Tray tables now immediately to upright positions.”

But we’re three-quarters of an hour before the scheduled landing! The whole jammed-pack aircraft is now filled with erect, silent passengers – some like me in window seats, squashing their noses against the glass for a better view.
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AWAKE

AWAKE

Beware The Woke. For half a century I’ve lived, worked and critiqued Africa. Now I’m supposed to relent, regret what I did? This mostly leftist campaign currently focused on the entertainment industry is ready to pounce on me and thousands like me.

So I’m pouncing first.
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