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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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:
Yesterday a good friend reminded me how much of my skills I’ve lost. As I approach my 50th year as a professional safari guide the horrors of sentimentality led to outright embarrassment: it’s not really my age, it’s Alexa.
Feel the epiphanous relationship of the disaster in The Sudan with Kaylin Gillis and Ralph Yarl.
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?
To everyone planning travel : Listen to NPR’s 
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.
Yesterday a baby seal, about the size of a small black lab, 
Tomorrow the modern African country that started the Arab Spring in 2010 will officially 
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.