Most of the group was asleep. It was a full moon and a still, warm night and everything we did was watched by our minders who were watched by the militia.
I was leading a group of journalists and experts, the first Americans allowed back into Ethiopia since the Dirge broke with the West and allied with the Soviet Union. It was hard, tense work reminding the dilettantes that we could all be killed if they didn’t behave.
Read more
This morning alone I glanced at dozens of emails from lodges and hotels offering the normally high end-of-the-year season for less than a third of its cost only a year ago!
In one remarkable case the super luxury company Sanctuary Retreats – one of my favorite vendors – offers December specials for a quarter of their former price!
Read more
Hey, You Northern Hemispheric Dude! Remember when spring turned to summer and for brief periods you forgot about the virus? Unmasked walks and picnics with friends?
Despite that not being such a good idea, your friends on the other side of the world are going through that right now, and just like you they’re pretending.
Read more
A primer for my African friends:
The 2020 election, its comparison with 2016, and what it tells you about Americans.
Trumpists are seriously trying to disrupt the results, but my life in Africa is too raw for me to be able to fairly assess this, so for the purpose of this blog I’m presuming they won’t prevail… It could be months before the results are widely accepted by the American politic, but I’m basing this blog on the assumption that the Democrats achieve full governance on January 20.
Read more
I stood in front of the Congolese Army tank, its giant shooting nozzle arched far above my head into a meaningless wilderness. It probably couldn’t shoot, anyway: It was there simply to stop us from crossing the border.
The Rwanda genocide was forming, but I had eight clients leaving Kigali, Rwanda, that night. The thousand-year divide between the Hutus and Tutsis had finally touched me. It’s nothing compared to the divide in America today.
Read more
Apartheid was coming apart. Reagan had just been overridden by Congress and lethal sanctions were about to fall on South Africa.
My partner and I packed our bags and raced to Joburg certain that young fellows from America would now be needed to market the “New South Africa” to the angry and suspicious Americans who had toppled them.
Read more
My daughter watched a plane fly into a twin tower on 9/11 from her apartment roof in New York. I heard the bombing of the Kenyan embassy and ten minutes later from the garden of my nearby hotel pieces of eyeglasses, jangling key chains and fabric fell out of the sky at my feet. Both of us later saw horrible pain and destruction.
“August seventh” was as big to Kenya as nine-eleven was to America. The relative number of people killed and maimed, the heroism of rescuers, the damage to politics, economy and society – it was all comparable. Even the perpetrators’ beliefs, religion and motivations for suicide were the same. What was different?
Read more
What can cut through the parallel universes that currently divide us? The spirit. This very African notion can save us.
Read more
Absolutely wonderful and absolutely fascinating. Four well-established conservative thinkers at a virtual round table:
Political commentator George Will, first and foremost. Historian Anne Applebaum whose just published book proves she takes no second place to any contemporaries. Journalist Canadian-American David Frum who more than any other living reporter documents the preeminent importance of compromise.
With… Joe Scarborough, the Trump anti-thesis, yet a TV personality to rival Trump. The four of them were on “Morning Joe” today. Their unusually long panel together reminded me (hopefully) of the African clergy who were so essential in bringing real democracy to the continent.
Read more
Real surprise, yesterday. Here’s what happened.
Like so many Americans who spend a lot of their lives outside of the country, I’ve been forced to live otherwise because of the pandemic. For the first time in more than half a century since I was 20 years old, I’ve now been at home for an entire uninterrupted year.
I don’t like it. Read more
The tension between opening up and mitigating the virus is worldwide. From large German street protests against wearing masks (and other restrictions) to South African restaurateurs arguing that shutting restaurants kills more people than the virus, it is an organic, confusing debate.
The debate reached the streets immediately outside where I live this morning. We had trouble walking the dog because so many cars were parked end-to-end with at least 30 people converging in a small garage for what in America we call a “garage sale.”
For my African friends. Well… all my friends, and especially for those who live near Galena, Illinois.
Currently I don’t have potable water. Why I don’t have potable water reflects America today, dysfunctional and imploding. It’s sad and infuriating but for those of us who have lived much of our lives in places like Africa, it’s also very telling.
An entire industry has now arisen to recover funds for travelers who have lost deposits because of the pandemic. Like timeshares, ambulance chasers, J.G. Wentworth and scores of others, the more well-off who are pissed as hell that some of their vacation money might be forfeited, are now themselves preyed on by dubious advocates.
To some of us it’s a delight to see capitalism eating itself to death.
The virus has unmasked many of our lies and failed promises in terrible ways. It’s also revealed how inhumane much of tourism is.
The lack of upmarket safari business is seriously damaging conservation throughout sub-Saharan Africa, stripping away the feel-goodness of charity for what it really always was: a sales tool.
