Thursday I leave for seven weeks of guiding safaris in Kenya and Tanzania. Stay tuned! I try to post as often as I can!
White man once again plucks discovery from black people’s commonplace. Didn’t colonialism end last century? What about slavery? There are many to blame, but once again, NatGeo’s at the forefront.
Two days ago the magazine reported in headline, “Black leopard confirmed in Africa for first time in 100 years.” (I expect they will be taking this down but I’ve got a screen capture.) They’re racistly wrong. A Kenyan photographer published photos of the same leopard five years ago and Kenyans today are livid.
Why does a miniature scorpion in Samburu remind me of one of the world’s greatest paleontologists?
When Richard Leakey published The Sixth Extinction nearly a quarter century ago, many disparaged what they contended was just another publicity stunt in the then ongoing personal wars between paleontologists who were finally getting their air time with Oprah.
Last week’s Nairobi bombing may not have been against Kenya, but America.
Today global media reran a report by Somali Radio Dalsan shortly after the attack last week. The report claimed that bombing was in direct response to two American actions: (1) the decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem and (2) revenge for the American drone killing of a top al-Shabaab leader.
So… what?
Read more
Africans are outraged at the New York Times publication of photos of the dusitD2 hotel massacre in Nairobi Wednesday.
The backlash was severe enough globally that the Times announced a working group that might alter their policy on publishing blood and gore, even as their Director of Photography continues to justify this one.
In the last year 21 were killed and at least 28 injured by shooters in Kenya in a single incident that happened yesterday. In the last year 106 people were killed and 121 injured in 18 separate incidents in the United States. In Parkland, 17 were killed.
It you were a foreigner heading to Orlando last February, or Nashville last April, or Sante Fe last May or Pittsburgh in October or any of the other 14 major U.S. shootings last year, you’d probably feel right now just like an American heading to Nairobi.
More than two decades into China’s super-investments in Africa, a less than practical policy is becoming clear. As with Sri Lanka, China apparently expects a number of African governments to default on their loan agreements, followed by Chinese assumption of major parastatals like the electricity grid, ports and airports.
2018 was a sobering year in Africa: Human rights and democratic freedoms declined. It was hard to find much hope.
There were a few places, though, and South Africa especially may be showing us and the rest of the world the way out of this darkness. It’s very African: patience pays.
Many Africans view 2018 positively, a time when autocratic leaders solidified power and stability increased. For many African conservatives it was a good year.
It was not a good year for African liberals, human rights activists, members of the LGBT community, women or those who champion democracy. Rightists celebrated; leftists wept.
Today I join thousands of other Americans in the “Christmas Bird Count.” (It’s time to change the name to something more secular).
Volunteers across the country survey their regions for what birds remain after the annual fall migration. Since Christmas Day 1900, the bird count has proceeded uninterrupted by wars or depressions.
Last week Rwanda, one of the smallest countries in the world, announced completion of Universal Health Care (UHC), and Kenya announced the start of UHC pilot projects across its country.
Since 2000 the U.S. has dropped from second to 19th of the world’s richest countries, in great part because it has refused to adopt UHC. When health care is private, the costs dominate economies and constantly escalate reflecting the richests’ capacity to purchase the best. Private health care is making us poorer and poorer and in the long run will destroy the country.
A gigantic difference between places like the U.S. and Africa — between developed and developing counties — is the speed at which things are changing. Progress doesn’t always come with change, but the truth is that progress can’t occur without change.
America, in particular, is falling way behind the rest of the world in “change.” The developing world – Africa in particular – leads the world in change. And perhaps the single most contentious aspect to modern life changing in the developing world is… traffic.
The election to Congress of the first refugee, a Somali woman from Minneapolis has caused furor in Kenya as prominent politicians congratulated her in spite of aggressively having demanded the closure of the refugee camp she grew up in.
Ilhan Omar was the successful Democrat candidate to replace Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) who stepped down earlier this year after sexual abuse allegations which he vigorously denied, and he just won Tuesday’s Minnesota Attorney General’s race.
There’s more: Trump vehemently warned voters against supporting her, claiming that Minnesota “had suffered enough from Somali immigrants.”
Rebecca Davis writes in South Africa’s Daily Maverick that “fervent supporters of the Republican and Democratic parties are no longer inhabiting the same moral universe.”
The South African woman is in the United States for our election. Trump’s gruesome retrenchment from the globe into his own ego impoverished much of it, especially Africa. Why? Because the America that I knew and loved before Trump helped the world. Trump doesn’t even help America, Davis concludes. All he tries to help is himself and his tiny family.
I’ve never thought of Richard Quest as a crusader for anything but saving pennies. But this weekend in Nairobi he rattled that country’s ultra-conservative stance against gender equity and may, actually, have moved the country in a good direction.
Yes, Richard Quest did successfully return to New York on the Kenya Airways’ inaugural nonstop flight from Nairobi, Sunday. But his action earlier Sunday is still flying high.