The revolutionary fervor seeping from Hong Kong to Argentina to Mexico has infected Kenya’s most important tourist area, the Maasai Mara.
Younger educated and articulate Maasai ranchers are protesting the contracts that their elder clansmen signed with safari companies that ridiculously are supposed to continue through 2025. Unlike Hong Kong where of thousands of people are flooding into the streets, the Maasai are flooding the tourists areas of the Mara with thousands of cows.
Making a surprise appearance last week in London, Harry Potter author J.K. Rawlings appealed to young delegates at the One World Conference to “stop voluntourism.”
Rawlings invoked her not-for-profit, Lumos, to discourage volunteering in orphanages in Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Moldova, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Colombia, Haiti and elsewhere.
A few days ago in New York I sat down with someone deeply involved in The Sudan’s American diaspora, and I was stopped in my tracks when he affirmed with facile certainty that the diaspora thinks the current revolution will succeed.
But what do you think he said when I asked him to predict if Trump would be defeated next year?
Years ago when I first guided safaris one of the concerns potential travelers had – before and after their trip! – were the … bathrooms.
Even today we joke that the veld has a bathroom anywhere you might need it! But in the old days the concern wasn’t so much with the veld as with the hotel or lodge.
Who are your heroes? It’s an important question, particularly now when the world seems totally forsaken.
Today starts the Mashujaa weekend in Kenya. The stem, shujaa, is a straightforward, heavy Swahili word for “hero.” Kenya has many ‘shujaa’s to celebrate this year, in sports, literature, politics and academics. And in Kenya — seemingly unable to mend its tribal rifts – the country really does come together this weekend. The heroes come from all the tribes. It’s a time a citizen really thinks first of herself as Kenyan, and then something else.
What wildlife authority in Africa recently issued this edict:
“Many wild animals in (?) have become displaced as the result of urban growth and habitat loss. [They] are becoming more common in urban areas and are frequently seen by people. These animals can cause problems. A resident landowner or tenant can legally capture some species of wild animals without a permit if the animal is discovered damaging property.”
Kenya, South Africa?
What actually did the scientists at Oxford University tell us last week about the catastrophic decline in lion populations?
We’ve known for some time that lion populations are in trouble. The world’s preeminent scholar on wild lions, Craig Packer, issued a number of striking studies before his retirement several years ago. Packer was sounding the alarm a decade ago and just before retiring was so moved by his own data that he shook loose from his life-long support of sports hunting.
But nothing happens in vacuum. If you’re the vacuum cleaner man then it may seem so, and it seems to me the researchers from Oxford University are acting like vacuum cleaner men.
Women – not other genders, races or ideologues – will determine the world’s upcoming contentious elections. Women is the only voting demographic universally conceded as being oppressed. Oppressors in power argue that’s the way it should be. So there’s no rationalization in between; arguments won’t sequester into “Fake News.”
63 years ago today, in the cold war days of 1956, 20,000 women marched on government buildings shouting, “Enough is enough!” Not in Washington. It happened in Pretoria, South Africa.
The whole world is watching. It wasn’t 35 years ago when Kenya’s President decided he would visit a part of the country that told him not to come. Suddenly, I was a part of that.
I was in Nairobi walking the streets with three hundred dollars of cold cash squished deeply into my cargo pants pocket. It was 1994. I knew Nairobi well but the street I was now walking, not so well.
Riverside Drive was then the esophagus into the underbelly of this city. Yes there were huge slums surrounding the city, but Riverside Drive preyed on that poverty and it wasn’t on the outskirts. It was smack dab in the middle. Riverside Drive wasn’t so much a slum as a mafia promenade. Badly lit, never cleaned up and always putrid, this was where you bought an AK47 for $8.50.
Twelve black American Congresspeople and two white ones led by Nancy Pelosi addressed the Ghanaian parliament yesterday. “We know our forebears did the abominable to you but we must also bear in mind that there is nothing we can do about what happened in the past.”
She didn’t say that. That was said by an important Ghanaian politician to the delegation.
Politics clash. Politics aside.
Four hundred years ago sometime early last month the modest Portuguese caravel, the San Juan Bautista, limped into Veracruz, Mexico, having horribly navigated the Gulf of Mexico managing to miss all the islands much less Jamaica which was the captain’s destination.
One of its three lanteen sails hung limply, ripped apart by a terrible storm at sea. The top third of its pole mast was split nearly in two. How the captain must have rejoiced when the lookout in the Crow’s Nest shouted, “Land Aho!”
He ordered the remaining two sails lowered so haphazardly that the weary ship tilted violently, almost sinking. Somehow, though, it managed to coast slowly towards the beach to finally end the 3-month horrendous voyage from Angola. Many of his crew were dead. Most of the remaining, including himself were seriously sick. All were starving.
But before the old man touched land the notorious British pirate John Jope commanding the modern war ship named the ‘White Lion,’ together with his partner the wealthy privateer Daniel Elrith who commanded the even more impressive ‘Treasurer’ built with a writ from the Earl of Warwick, intercepted the Bautista, killed what was left of its miserable crew, and confiscated about half of the 100 slaves in its belly.
They took only half, because the other half was dead.
Elrith’s ship was greater but Jope’s ship was faster. They split the booty including the human cargo and raced for the American colonies.
Jope showed up first, about 400 years ago exactly.
Without waiting for the normal invitation by local British authorities, Jope moved quickly into Point Comfort which later was named Hampton, Virginia, just across the James River from Norfolk.
The British colonel in charge of the port immediately contained his anger when he saw enough of the pirate flags to know it was Jope, and that Jope was Elrith’s partner, and that Elrith had connections to King James.
The townspeople, however, were not so mollified. They hastened down to the dock surrounding the British colonel protesting he had not engaged the militia. More than several unwanted British privateers were docking monthly, avoiding taxes and bringing all sorts of miscreants into town.
The colonel did then herald a few soldiers, but not to delay the ship’s docking, to keep the settlers at bay.
Among the townspeople was John Rolfe, the colony’s secretary and spouse of Pocahontas. He sympathized with his fellow settlers but he performed his paid duties for The King honorably: Rolfe duely registered the ship along with its commercial cargo, “20. plus and odd Negroes.” Rolfe was discreet. There were probably at least 50.
What thought John Rolfe? It was known that these black people were being sold as slaves in the Caribbean, and there had been animated conversations in the pubs and carriage houses about how useful they could be to the farmers who were constantly desperate for help.
I can only imagine that exact moment when Rolfe or others of the townsfolk looked upon the sick and starving blackness being raised from the belly of the caravel. There had to be some compassion after initial revulsion at the inhumane state of the human.
Was this the moment that we rationalized slavery? We would tend their wounds, fill their bellies and wash their putrid skins… in return for their souls? How easy it must have been at that moment to feel like a savior of the slave.
And so it continued. Child labor and prostitution in the slums of the dirty cities, for if not wouldn’t the kid die? Sons of Liberty dressed up as Injuns for that moment of violence.
“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, the owner of 600 slaves who were not “others.”
The Jackson massacres, the Trail of Tears.
April 22, 1889: 50,000 white people lined up waiting for the noon gunshot “bringing civilization” helter skelter over the sacred lands of the Cherokee. The Battle of Bad Axe and the treaty-flaunting wars preceding it in which a young lieutenant, Abraham Lincoln, fired his first military shot. He missed.
A catastrophic Civil War that never really ended. Tammany Hall and mafias protecting the poor.
Benches for whites and benches for blacks. Teachers for the privileged and debt-laden overworked single mothers for the denied. Food stamps for the poor and frequent flyer miles for the rich. Votes for sale. Lies for Liberty.
Americans are champions of rationalization. Did it all start that one day at Point Comfort 400 years ago?
“But we must bear in mind that there is nothing we can do about what happened in the past.”
At our peril.
Four years after the moon launch, 46 years ago, Kathleen and I were teaching at a very remote boys boarding school in Kenya. I had the brilliant idea of showing the 400 students a movie about the space launch.
Not so brilliant, after all. I unleashed the cock in the sky.
Recently a good friend who is returning again to East Africa after a period of about ten years asked me if she would be able to visit a Maasai village near one of their camps, as we had regularly done years ago.
The short answer is yes. There are these scam “villages” scattered all over East Africa near expensive foreign tourists camps and lodges. The long answer is much more troublesome.
It was natural that my friend would ask the question. I often took all my guests to a village in the earlier days. It became an essential part of the trip and introduced foreigners to some of the traditional lifestyles of early East Africans.
Somewhere down that long and winding path of my 47 years guiding safaris it hit me how unauthentic villages had become. Simultaneously, I realized how racist it was of visitors – and me – to so eagerly want to visit something so unauthentic.
Once it was authentic, years ago. The majesty of traditional peoples, especially the Maasai, was shown in all sorts of ways: Women could put up and dissemble a home (boma) faster than you assemble a prefabbed bookcase. Men could spear a marauding animal at 50 yards. And despite their primary need to protect their lifestock, they spoke almost poetically about the wildlife among which they lived.
In those days the Maasai were not unlike the wildebeest. They went wherever the rains took them. Rarely did a homestead (boma) last more than 3-4 months, because that was the cycle of rains and new grasses.
The bomas were clean, sanitary and the children were usually well fed and happy and did not have flies in their faces and snot dripping down their cheeks.
The pressure on traditional peoples was intense in the 1990s, as Africa began to rocket its development. The Maasai in particular had been pushed around unconscionably ever since Bernard Gzimek convinced Tanzanian parks to evict them from what is now the western corridor of the Serengeti.
He tried to do same at Ngorongoro, but they resisted there. Gun battles resulted in one of my friends, a one time greeter at Ngorongoro Sopa Lodge, losing his life.
Even today the unwarranted oppression continues on the Maasai. A huge movement including mass demonstrations and legal filings is attempting to enjoin the Tanzanian government from moving successful Maasai ranchers out of a huge swath of the northeast of the country. Why does the government want to do so? To give the land to Mideast princes as private hunting grounds.
Early visitors were fascinated with Maasai circumcision ceremonies. I have 32 slides of one I was invited to in 1973. Visitors were titillated when told that Maasai drink blood. In fact, all Nilotic peoples years ago mixed cow blood with milk to produce probably man’s most nutritious food as a yoghurt. It was an ingenious method for growing food in a desert: let the cows and goats nibble on the few weeds available.
For the most part Maasai don’t have these elaborate ceremonies any more or live traditional lives. I know of a few very distant places in East Africa where handfuls of such people might still exist, but they are very few and live in very remote areas.
Maasai boys spend Tsh. 2500/- at a hospital if they want to be circumcised. Cows aren’t farmed for their blood. A cow in Ngorongoro goes for upwards of $1200 today, roughly 2/3 the Tanzanian GDP per capita. Many Maasai are quite rich.
The Vice President of Kenya was Maasai. One of the CEOs of Kenya Airways is Maasai. One of Google’s continental vice presidents is Maasai. In 2017 I was inducted by Kenyan Maasai as the first white American to be made an honorary Maasai elder. I don’t drink blood. Neither do the real elders who inducted me.
Why racist? And how did I contribute to this for a while?
It came slowly and then hit me like a truck.
I was taking a group of my clients to a village in Samburu. As soon as we entered I noticed that several of the “reenactors” were waiters at the camp where we were staying. They winked at me. I winked at them.
The guests were taken through the tour which ended at the “blacksmith’s” station. There a wonderful kid I knew at the lodge had donned traditional garb and was having a dickens of a time trying to start a fire rubbing sticks together.
He looked up at me and said in Swahili, “A long, long time ago, we used matches.”
I didn’t laugh. I suddenly realized what a mess I was making not only of Maasai but of all the many issues associated with Maasai repression and their attempts to break out of it.
I realized that visitors, at the time egged on by me, were titillated at the repulsive ideas of being dirty and sick and drinking blood. The particular village visit where my epiphany occurred was actually pretty sanitized. As a “living village” it wasn’t bad, and I convinced all of them later to promote it as such: no longer actually being used, rather as a historical remembrance.
Meanwhile many other so-called villages stagnated and even increased, growing more putrid and letting more kids get sick, because this drew visitors! The price went up in the 2000s from $10 per visitor to $20.
Those fake villages don’t move, so obviously sanitation is horrible. The price brought in by tourists amounts to much more over a few years than the potential a kid might get from going to school, so the kids are kept out of school!
Admittedly, many Maasai and other formerly traditional peoples are today caught in a bind: either in the horrendous slums of the great cities or because they’re land-poor. They can’t move easily either geographically or vocationally into the modern world.
That’s a very serious problem and one that modern East Africans grapple with daily, very much like Americans grapple with Appalachians or RV retirees without pensions clogging KOA parks. These are serious problems, but their possible remedies aren’t helped an iota by visitors thinking that this is how they want to be.
Times change, I had to tell myself. Yes in the early 1970s when Kathleen and I first came to East Africa there were many traditional peoples, proud and happy and successful. Not today. They are as mired in the political and social difficulties of globalization as any visitor. And they want to master coding and global economics and how to sell short just like you do.
Refusing to see this is racist. Refusing to understand that the poverty that widely exists in East Africa has anything to do with anything but the world’s unfair economic system is racist.
So my friend returning to East Africa, first my apologies for having probably encouraged your village visits long after I shouldn’t have. And second, visit a school, visit a town on legitimate interactions organized by reputable places like Gibb’s Farm. Visit a slum in a city by reputable tour companies showing how remarkably clean they can be despite the horrendous poverty and how smart and hopeful the people living in them are.
But don’t as I did try to make the future the past, just because it’s more complicated and unpleasant than we might want to admit.
It’s not easy being an American in Africa, today.
There’s been a slow swell in criticism of America ever since Trump came to power, but now, with the story of child immigrants being abused the criticism is severe. The frowns, the delayed services and lack of previously wonderful engaging conversation with locals makes me feel more and more alone. America, you are absolutely becoming cruel and fascist in the eyes of the world.
A breakthrough in eradicating the world’s worst and most onerous disease has set the scientific and conservation worlds into a maddened dither. Why on earth is everyone so concerned that the disease we’ve been fighting for centuries might at last found its master?