The world’s most mutated Covid-19 variant has been found in travelers from Tanzania. The discovery was announced three days ago by the Krisp Institute, which first discovered the South African variant.
Krisp is growing the virus to determine any effects of the mutations. There may be none but there is concern that several mutations involve the critical “spikes” that bind the virus to its prey. Several other of its specific mutations have been confirmed in many different virus samples from around the world, reflecting the natural selections that give the virus advantage.
So he’s dead. The Tanzanian government lied to its citizens for ten days. Many were arrested for “spreading rumors” that Magufuli was sick. Last night, the Vice President who the constitution designates as the next president said Magufuli “had been hospitalized at the Jakaya Kikwete Cardiac Institute since March 6.”
Reports I still believe that he was medivaced first to Nairobi, then to India, are irrelevant, now. What is relevant is that the critical authorities of the government of Tanzania believed they could claim a sick man was well, and all we want to know now is what will happen, next.
Let’s be clear: the dozens of early man species all contributed to the branching tree of life that ultimately grew into Sen. Marco Rubio. Just because Ancestry shows you have 2% Homo neanderthalensis does not mean that all the other early species in the millions of years that preceded the first neanderthal had no skin (oh, sorry, I mean amino acid) in the game. For example, in my opinion regardless of their DNA typing I think it’s evident that most of the Senators on the right get their instincts more from Australopithecus afarensis than Homo neanderthalensis. Credit where credit’s due.
“Pneumonia is our code word.” Reports from Tanzania this weekend suggest the country is spiraling into a terrible covid situation, a “second spike” not yet seen in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Because speaking about covid is against the law, doctors, activists and the patients themselves are referring to the situation as a “pneumonia epidemic.”
Truth is growing! Even in the covid-denial island known as Tanzania a courageous voice has sounded: “The chief medical officer and the rest of officialdom [in Tanzania] have been hiding Covid-19 related deaths, [but] now the funerals are exposing us.”
Jenerali Ulimwengu has been a thorn in the side of established Tanzanian governments for years. He survives the brutality and imprisonment of most other local critics because he hunkers down when he needs to, constantly extols as his guiding star the father and founder of the Tanzanian country Julius Nyerere, and … because he’s very popular on YouTube.
Is anybody but Trump, the Proud Boys and me following South African politics?
Reporting today from Pretoria, three years and one day since the former South African head-of-state left office: “Former president Jacob Zuma dodged his appearance on Monday before the State Capture inquiry, headed by Deputy Chief Justice Judge Raymond Zondo, and took refuge at his Nkandla homestead protected by the MK Military Veterans Association dressed in fake camo.”
Let me translate across the ocean into the future, January 21, 2024:
“Former president Donald Trump dodged his appearance on Monday before the January 6th Commission, headed by Former FBI Director Christopher Wray, and took refuge at his Mar A Lago homestead protected by the Proud Boys dressed in fake camo.”
“Katie bar the door,” Sen. John Tester told NPR this morning. It set the host back a half-minute. She didn’t understand what he meant. It terrified me. A flood of horrible memories just before Kenya’s civil war waved through me.
“Ruto n’mbungu!” my most senior driver, quiet James, retorted after I’d scolded all of them to just cool it, “nothing bad will happen” that December, 2007. The two expressions, one in English one in Swahili sound awfully similar to me. And I was wrong in 2007. Really wrong. Thank god James made me heed him.
Only one country in all of Africa can join Elizabeth Warren’s debate about a wealth tax: South Africa.
And in earnest. In just the last few years America’s fiscal situation has grown surprisingly aligned with South Africa’s. Probably because of the pandemic, but certainly because of globalization. Since South Africa’s politics have presaged ours for the last decade, it’s worth looking at what’s going on there.
I wanna stand up and shout through a megaphone! Listen, idiot Americans! South Africa shows us exactly what’s going to happen here now that Donald is gone!
But I’m torn, too, between just shutting up and letting the little birdie in my ear prove me remarkably prescient.
If you want to know what America might some day look like pay attention to tomorrow’s election in Uganda.
A ruthless thug will win a sixth 5-year term as president. And I mean win. He won’t stuff ballot boxes or manipulate judges. He got away with that in the past. This time Ugandan citizens – two-thirds of whom weren’t born before he first came to power – will actually choose to vote for him. With free will they will abdicate their own.
The phone woke me around four or a little before. “Jimmy! Jimmy! Why Trump still president?!”
It was English but I was half asleep and the intonation was distinctly Swahili.
‘Winston, ni wewe?’ I muttered into an old remote phone that was 20 years old and very closed to being crushed in my hand.
“Ye-ah-ss! It IS me! Why Trump still your president Jimmy?!”
‘Saa Kumi bwana,’ I pleaded but he rebuked me that on safari I often wake at 4 a.m. to get ready for the early morning game drive. Which isn’t true. I get up at five. I hung up and had about four hours to figure out why Trump was still our president.
Whether good friends or African newspapers I’m being asked, “How could this be America?” I can’t answer all individually. Below is one reply.
Dear Brian,
Yesterday was not surprising and I am concerned with your personal perception (and that of so many of my other friends) that this “is not the America I know.” It is precisely the America I know.
I was beaten in the streets of Madison WI as a college demonstrator, chased by police in Chicago, had my phones tapped and my identification ripped from me by U.S. government agents… and all that happened before I was jailed in Conakry, kidnapped in Kano and stared at the wheels of a Sherman tank that were taller than me in Goma. My affinity for Africa I’m sure comes in part from a maturing personality that grasped soul matches in the turbulence of Africa.
But why all this? is the question. I’ve spent my life wondering and there’s no simple answer, but there are broad understandings.
Your split from Brexit is a good start. I know that you supported it. It’s the opposite of “all for one, and one for all.” It’s when sports bifurcate between teams and super stars, when pay for the CEO grows exponentially beyond his floor worker, when walls to keep out different looking people turn into barricades dividing mothers and their babes into separate cages, when “tax refunds” double the wealth of a billionaire but leave a quarter of our children in poverty. It’s all about division rather than unity.
Divide and conquer. Divide off and prosper (Brexit). Divide so far that compromise is antithetical to the positions that remain.
It’s hyper-individualism, which might have been useful when the vacant prairie was dusted by drought a hundred years ago, but today it’s absurd. The world is in too much of a crisis for any part of it to pretend they can go it alone. It’s delusional – truly clinically psychopathic for any person today to think they can live without the help of strangers half way round the world.
Critical to this analysis is that any governing document that is two and half centuries old can’t possibly work except to inhibit solutions.
Most of us use phones and computers and dozens of other gizmos about which we don’t have a clue as to how they work. All we know is that every few years they grow obsolete and we’ve got to get a new one. Recently we’ve even begun to give up our visible gizmos to trust “the cloud.” If we do this automatically in our daily lives, what is stopping us from doing it with the governance of our society?
America’s constitution is like my first laptop, a 1980’s Zenith box. It’s neither equipped nor was it intended to last more than a few years. The American constitution is an incredibly beautiful document, a foundational document that liberated the subject from its sovereign. But it’s too old, now, and it’s remaining functional capability is to stop change. Good minds have tried to work with it by piling on tomes of interpretation but therein is lost any governing core. We need a governing core, and not one no more valuable than Homo erectus.
This is the morning after a single battle. Perhaps, now, we’ll begin to remember the others: Baltimore, Orlando, Portland, etc., etc. The skies are momentarily clear of smoke and screams. The few people killed and busloads of injured last night are thousands less than those killed and tens of thousands less than those hospitalized yesterday by Covid. This is no anomaly. It was called for, predicted, wholly anticipated. This is nothing unique. Terrifying insurgencies happen all over America, all the time.
The crazy instigators including our President’s advisors and the weak, shameful politicians who enabled his wanton destruction have begun to divide themselves into enervated losers and delusional religious fanatics. But left standing is the megalomaniac himself and half the society he has brainwashed. Every instant until he leaves has a potential for some yet unimagined historical explosion. The story continues.
Particularly for my African friends, suddenly bombarded with their media exhalations of joy with the Georgia race, puncturing with nuclear force the silences that I had attributed to a sagacious long-view of history. Regain the patience you are so notable for. This tiny moment in history does not an epoch make. Trump is alive and well.
Recognize a stark and striking difference between America and all the rest of the “free world.” Our democracy is not. Our aged system is designed to inhibit change, because the change that gave us our revolution from Britain was so fragile that once secured it had to be stopped for fear of reversing itself.
Jared Kushner’s crusade for Arab recognition of Israel is as curious as cursory. It’s pretty clear now that the UAE will not honor most of its agreement but will nonetheless gain advantage in the Yemen war. Now Kushner has pulled off another weekend coup throwing out decades of African diplomacy in the Western Sahara for the King of Morocco’s pledge to recognize Israel.
That won’t hold, either, but the damage this does to the people of the area is as great as it will do to the people of The Horn. The man has no idea what he’s doing to the world.
Everyone wants to know: what will happen to the Republicans? Look to South Africa.
You know the “ANC,” the party of Mandela, but in American terms it’s the Republican Party of South Africa: The ANC dominated South Africa just like the Republican Party dominated America. It had a crazy president who left in disgrace then spent the next years dodging jail, while dozens of his cronies and former ministers and family did go to jail! Then, just when you thought he was gone for good! He’s back to crack the party in two!
