The Maasai of East Africa, the Rohingya of Myanmar and even the 4th generation Rhodesian farmers of Zimbabwe are inhumanely imprisoned in modern societies incapable of figuring out how to assimilate them.
No better example of this conundrum than America’s own native Americans. We visited the site of Little Bighorn. It’s one of the most moving national monuments in our country.
I spotted the first group of bison for a half-second before we continued sailing along the paved road and a ridge obscured the valley in which I glimpsed them. No problem. A gravel track headed out that way.
The “Wildlife Loop” road that runs around the periphery of the park is a nicely paved circuit. There are so many bison in the park you’ll certainly see many of the big, old bulls sitting near the paved road chewing their cud.
But to see the larger herds and the calves, you’ve got to leave the paved road and head to a southern plains area appropriately called “Buffalo Corrals.”
Sunday in Wall, South Dakota, is not unlike any other day at first glance. The town is jam-packed with tourists. This is because the town is the Wall Drug Store, founded in 1933, an enterprising theme park that collects tourists off I-90 like black flies off the Black Hills, motorists at their wits ends after 12 hours of driving through flat cornfields.
Main Street is Wall Drugs on one side and Wall Drug spinoffs on the other side. Wall Drugs is a half-mile of winding creaking corridors of fudge shops, gun dealers, American flags, skin sellers, tonic brewers, restaurants, western clothing dealers with every clerk dressed like Annie Oakley or Roy Rodgers. Roy Orbison booms behind the many old photos plastered everywhere and if you accidentally bump into an employee in the halls, she courtsies or he bows.
I’ve always felt there’s a lot of similarity between America’s Wild West and parts of wild Africa, and that may help to explain why proportionately fewer Americans who live in places like Montana and South Dakota visit Africa than from urban areas.
Well I hope to revisit this question in the next couple weeks. Kathleen and I are on our way to Yellowstone! On our way we’ll be traveling through the Badlands, Black Hills and native American lands of southern Montana looking for outstanding scenery, wildlife and America’s checkered internal history.
Stay tuned!
A significant breakthrough in the understanding of our own ancestors might once again flip some basic presumptions about human evolution.
Wonder if we’re in a new cold war? Take a look at how Africa responded to the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem yesterday.
Two-thirds of the 32 countries attending the ceremony were from Africa. Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria – normally close allies and the powerhouse of much of the continent – took different positions: only South Africa protested, recalling its ambassador.
Well now, social media – this same Facebook that you’re now using – may be the most powerful political tool on earth. Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta has even bettered Trump tweets by unfollowing his Deputy President.
Kenya is agog. First of all, you do know what “unfollow” means don’t you?
Trump’s recent White House meeting with Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, got little attention here. But from an African perspective it set human society back almost to the time of the Crusades.
Fear, uncertainty and a growing distrust of America spread across sub-Saharan Africa last night as it grew more and more evident how crippled a number of African countries might become as a result of Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran Nuclear Dear.
Africa? But we’re talking about Iran, right?
How can you own the most of something extremely precious to the world and yet grow sick and poor because of it? That’s the story of South African gold.
Seven of 13 miners who were trapped in yet another gold mine catastrophe in South Africa died over the weekend. Gold is the reason South Africa is what it is economically, and right now what it is isn’t too good.
Infidelity, sexual deviance and pornography are now all OK, and this is as monumental a cultural change as gender rights. American-led it is spreading across the world. Example which follows is Kenya.
The acceptance of what only a few years ago was considered immoral and unethical is aggressively rationalized by churches, especially evangelical ones as political necessity. Religion has unmasked its piety. If Jesus or Muhammad only knew.
If there was no animal library for Lion King and Disney had to make them all up, the mountain bongo would be the first created.
Larger than a deer, it’s as cuddly as a panda. Huge spherical eyes drip with love. It walks delicately through deep forests like a water thrush, its wiggly nose forever sniffing flowers. But what puts it on the ToysRUs shelf is its gorgeous thick chestnut coat with pure white stripes like icing over candy.
When I was a young safari guide, we almost always saw bongos. Today they’re all but extinct, but! The news at the moment is exceptionally good!
Man or Woman? South Africa’s Caster Semenya was the world’s best, all-time middle-distance woman runner… until last week when global sports authorities announced they would reverse her many wins and ban her from future competition because of her hyperandrogenism.
The proposed action drew immediate and strong protests from such running powerhouses as Canada much less South Africa, opening the ultimate can of sports worms: what constitutes gender?
A young African Sudanese man seen riding a truck carrying bananas in Juba, the capital of the Republic of South Sudan. South Sudan became an independent state on July 09, 2011, and soon thereafter also a United Nations member state. South Sudan is one of the poorest countries in the world.
August 20, 2011. Photo by Moshe Shai/FLASH90
**MAARIV OUT**
Food security is now threatened by something far more onerous than Mother Nature: a debate about whether to tinker with Mother Nature, because many scientists believe there is a reasonable defense: GMO. But will Africans starve before embracing GM foods?
Sorry I missed yesterday’s blog. I had malaria.
The sickness, the available rapid cure and the incredible obsession Americans have with health care put an interesting bookend on my two months in Africa.