Forced into reflection by our virus winter, travelers are having second thoughts about what travel means to their lives.
A surprising transformation is occurring. Owning up to the fantasies of their trips and faced with a future economy that doesn’t look all that good cost is becoming more important than ever.
Kenya began reopening today, and Kenya had one of the strictest lockdowns in Africa if not the world. Kenya’s lockdown made New York’s lockdown look frivolous.
“You MUST become your brother’s keeper,” the Kenyan president declared in his order, today before listing all the mandates still required and warning that he would “claw back” everything should the virus reemerge.
“Civic responsibility is not a demand that can be enforced. It is a duty you pay to your fellow country-men for coexisting with them.”
“White population(s) used political power and security forces to maintain slavery, segregation, racism, and marginalisation,” all over the world writes Abdi I Samatar in today’s South Africa Daily Maverick.
When the Black Lives Matter demonstrations took off the beginning of this month it wasn’t long before disruptive but peaceful protests occurred in Kenya and South Africa. While they have mostly died away, the buzz continues.
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.
Planning totally unconventional. Nevertheless an MOP was established over the years that I used religiously.
Whenever the date for an African national election was announced, I pulled out a pile of yellow pads and started figuring out how to keep my clients from being there when it happened.
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.
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.
A refreshing optimism is leading to an unspeakable heartbreak.
The “opening up” of almost every part of the world irrespective of its virus case situation brings much hope to those out of work. This is most clear in my trade in Africa. “Out of work” is bad even for the car company executive, but on an individual level what may happen in Africa is exponentially more terrifying than here at home.
In a wildfire if you have the capability you dump the water on the largest blazes. When we get a vaccine will we direct the first doses to the worst outbreaks?
It’s daunting trying to predict where the worst outbreaks are now much less where they will be. Using Statista today the U.S., all of Europe and the U.K. are at the top of the list for deaths per capita, yet there is not a single African country, or Southeast Asian country in the top 50.
How can that be?
The carnage of African safari companies grows like a dry season wildfire. Distant Serengeti grasslands are lit with flames of desperation. The dead grasses fueling this destruction are the charities proffered to safari customers as a benefit of their bookings.
The charity these schemes achieved for years has stopped flat out: Anti-poaching units, schools, health dispensaries, food assistance and educational training are disappearing with a level of human suffering that the executives of the companies who concocted them ensured they would never experience themselves.
China and America are toeing up at the post-virus starting line at the continent of Africa, and it’s pitiful how out of shape Americans are. Mike Pompeo and the State Department rely on a tried and true Trump technique of dominance: lie until it’s believed. But Africans aren’t as dumb as Americans.
Imagine about a year from now when much of the world, even a few parts of Africa, start to really manage the virus. Imagine an airplane actually flying from London to Johannesburg. Imagine, too, that Americans are banned from these flights.
I just finished an hour reading the sarcasm, fear and disbelief – mostly from Africa – about Trump suggesting “injecting” disinfectant into the body to kill the virus.
These emotions rope off America from the rest of the world. Today’s African commentary was particularly worrisome that the medical advisors sitting beside him didn’t jump up and scream, “NO!!!”
America isn’t just the laughing stock, but the King Kong monster of the world.
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.
Ready for a new threat? It’s just as ethereal and deadly as Covid-19. It strips away our naive precautions just as efficiently and wrecks havoc far beyond its relatively short existence when it’s finally put under control. In a word, “worse” than the virus. I rely specifically on my African experience to tell you about this.
I experienced it mostly in troubled times and situations, a singular threat to my protecting my group. But it also walloped me when I least expected it, when everything around me seemed just so perfect and peaceful.
Rage.
Sometimes it’s better to let your brain suppress your gut. Better than Rolaids. It’s what I have to do when contemplating the virus in Africa.
There’s an enormous disconnect between what my gut tells me about the dangers of Covid-19 and what my brain does. The numbers on the continent are – and I suppose this is the point – ridiculously low. But numbers in Africa are like snow flakes in a cotton field. They rarely appear and when they do, they’re very hard to find.