Walifundisha sisi na macho yet yamefungwa. Tulipowafungua, walikuwa na ardhi na tulikuwa na Biblia.
Moments of human greatness often come in speeches. They lose a little each time they’re replayed or recounted from one person to another or translated through languages, because each language has a unique tonality, syntax and onomatopoeia – an unique style for their own unique talk.
Party power controls democracy. Elections make the final decisions but to get onto the ballot you have to go through the party.
Independents have a slightly greater shot in America where primary elections aren’t closed exclusively to registered party nominees but it’s rare in America that an “independent” who caucuses as a Democrat is challenged by a Democrat in the primary.
In many parts of Africa a new year – and especially a new decade – begins with somber predictions from seers and religious leaders whose adoration depends upon their past reliability.
In Kenya the famous psychic Nicolas Aujula says Trump will lose “but won’t go quietly.” In Nigeria The Presiding Bishop of The Divine Seed of God Chapel Ministry, Sasa, Ojoo, Ibadan, Prophet Wale Olagunju says, “With little prayer, Donald Trump will win the election.”
So there you have it.
A “parliamentary driven democracy as opposed to presidential… is the only system which [can] shield the country from biased or unsuitable leaders.”
So ascribes Kenya’s current president together with his principal rival who were on opposite sides of the mini civil war of 2008. While America languishes in anguished reflection regarding what to do with something like Trump, Kenya has a plan. They intend to change their constitution.
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.
I saw my first gorilla in 1977. It was an eastern lowland gorilla in Kahuzi-Biega national park in The Congo, a species of gorilla (graueri) that’s still going extinct. I watched several Italians throw tomatoes at them. There were no guides then. You just climbed into mountain jungles and threw things at fur. It was an improvement over shooting.
In November the most celebrated of the four gorilla species, the mountain gorilla (berengei), was moved OFF the critically endangered to just the endangered list. I was exhausted and exhilarated learning this. And nobody partied. No ticker tape parades. The world’s just too damned complicated at the moment.
Populism is not some lonesome social condition. Populism controls democracy, and populism brings down and sets up autocratic regimes. It’s not conservative or progressive, capitalist or communist. It’s not necessarily based on truth. It’s knee-jerk support for – or against – individuals wielding power. Why? How is it harnessed?
East Africa gives us some insight: Ten years ago Kenya hardly had an army. Ten years ago Kenya was in incredible social turmoil, very close to a civil war. Today Kenya is a military powerhouse, rivaling the two other area powerhouses, Ethiopia and Rwanda. And today Kenya’s stable society thrives on a growing populism.
This week’s 70th anniversary of the formation of the Chinese Navy was marked by the arrival of a huge new naval fleet in the Red Sea off Somalia.
With the withdrawal of U.S. and U.K. forces from Africa China has stepped in. Chinese warships have provided a safe escort in the Red Sea for more than 6,600 vessels in the last decade, without any further justification required from those vessels than a call for assistance. Only a few years ago it was U.S. and U.K. warships that provided these safe escorts.
Sometimes good acts prevail even after evil-doers reverse them:
The previous Republican controlled Congress and current Trump administration wiped out Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Bill, the “Rule on Conflict Minerals.” But that rule had such a powerful effect when first passed by Congress that the world embraced it and has continued to strengthen it despite the official reversal by the United States.
Never have I felt so ashamed despite a life filled with dangers unchallenged and compromises poorly made. Right now I’m sitting in the van Galder bus to Rockford having just returned from several months on safari, writing my mea culpa at O’Hare’s Terminal 5 before it, too, seems too ordinary.
It was incredibly crowded. According to my automated entry receipt the time was 12:57p, Saturday, April 6. I normally cruise through immigration and customs, boasting that I know the best lines and routes, but today I lamented not having Global Entry.
There are so many African dictators in part because of America. Today is America’s Presidents’ Day Holiday. It celebrates the office as much as the individuals who held it. It celebrates the closest thing a democracy can be to remaining a monarchy.
Today begins the long Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. (Canada celebrates it earlier.) Festivities continue throughout next week with many people not returning to normal work routines until a week from Monday.
For many Americans this has become a bigger holiday than Christmas and other end-of-the-year celebrations, which are considered more religious than familial.
In both Canada and the U.S. the holiday week is characterized by copious amounts of food featuring seasonal recipes and lots of sweets. The traditional meat served at the feast is turkey.
The holiday originates with the first permanent settlers to the New World, people who called themselves “pilgrims” who were fleeing England’s restrictive laws on religion. They arrived the northeast coast of America between 1620 and 1621.
They fared poorly in the beginning until two local native Americans, both Wampanoags of the Algonkian-speaking clan, befriended the settlers. Both spoke English; one of them had traveled to England in 1605.
The “Indians” taught the pilgrims how to farm and build homesteads, and the summer planting season was so successful that the pilgrims invited the Indians to a “Thanksgiving” harvest dinner in November, 1621.
Click here for a fascinating account of the first Thanksgiving, what led up to it, and what came afterwards.
The report was first published for the Tacoma School District by a panel of scholars from the northwest. Among the things that stuck out to me was that the first Thanksgiving was an extremely friendly affair that lasted three days between Miles Standish’s pilgrims and the local Alonguin Indians.
Both women and men Indians sat at the Thanksgiving tables, but only Pilgrim men were allowed to sit at the tables since the women were expected to stand behind their men to serve them as needed.
Capt. Standish did, indeed, issue the invitation to the local Indians for the first harvest thanks, acknowledging that his small settler group would not have survived without the Indians’ constant consul and encouragement.
If ever there were illegal immigrants, it was Miles Standish and his band of exiles. But Clan Chief Massasoit threatened no barrier. In fact, the chief gave the Standish clan choice pieces of his own land.
The friendship between the citizens and exiles was so profound that 150 years later Benjanmin Franklin realized that because of the equality that women were given among the native Americans that they should be given an important seat at the table creating a new America.
According to the Tacoma document Franklin invited the principle Indians of the time, the Iroquois, “to Albany, New York, to explain their system to a delegation who then developed the ‘Albany Plan of Union.’ This document later served as a model for the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution of the United States.”
There are never things lacking for being grateful for. This Thanksgiving remember all those who built our pasts with open hearts and the courage to confront new times and new places embracing, not fearing those unlike us.
There’s nothing better I can do for you this Friday than let you click the arrow above. At a time of poisonous tribal discord that’s disturbing my sleep with apocalyptic futures, I give you REFUGE!
How perfectly named! Nairobi’s new Kid Band. Not a Boy Band because the inspirational lead singer isn’t. Actually it should be called the UN Band. All call Nairobi home, but only one, Ike, was born in Kenya. The others hail from Belgium, Eritrea, the US, Ethiopia and Bolivia. Nairobi? Are you kidding me?
Might this have had something to do with the rush by all the world airlines this morning to waive all fees for changes over very generous time frames?