File “science as scandal:” For a long time South Africans have culled heavily in their national parks even as many scientists vociferously argued against doing so. Now it seems that in some kind of warped tolerance if not outright trickery South African officials managed a big cull of jackals… to prove that culling jackals doesn’t work!
Why would they cull to prove culling doesn’t work? Well, that we don’t know. What we do know is this:
Women marched Saturday across Africa, across Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.
Take heed oh women of America of your African sisters’ history. This was not the first such women’s march in South Africa. That was in 1956 and what followed it was … 37 years of unimaginable repression.
They failed.
Today in a few hours America installs Trump. It’s very hard for any of us to do much of anything but watch and listen to the proceedings.
Gambia, too, is installing a new president today, with the help of thousands of soldiers from neighboring countries and in the absence of nearly a fifth of the country’s population which has fled.
Which would you rather be? A Gambian or an American?
Can a piece of art be hate speech? A year-long furor in South Africa blew up yesterday when a gang of white men calmly entered Cape Town’s prestigious National Art Museum and plastered a large sticker reading “Love Thy Neighbour” over a “F**k White People” pop-art canvas.
What’s illegal here? The vigilantes believed South Africa’s strict hate speech laws weren’t being enforced, but were they breaking laws protecting the artist’s freedom of speech?
Each year at this time one news story is repeated, analyzed, attracts more comments and fuels more anger in Africa than any other single story of at any other time of the year, year after year:
The rich gather at Davos and Oxfam releases its report on the inequality of wealth. Nothing comes close to getting the attention this does African-wide. And year after year it gets worse and worse:
Today is one of the most important holidays for political America, the Martin Luther King federal holiday. It’s impossible to understate its importance this year.
The current xenophobic administration is poised to make illegal 800,000 young people Friday at midnight. Starting in the wee hours Saturday morning, the embodiment of “I Have a Dream,” King’s famous speech, today America’s “Dreamers” face being deported to places they have never seen.
2016 was one of the most peaceful years in Africa in decades. Both the UK and American governments reduced their travel warnings for most of the continent.
There’s more to this than a good score card on the war on terror, and of course peace is rarely reported so there are fewer news stories about this than just an analysis of what didn’t happen.
Here’s why this is my sixth most important story for Africa in 2016:
For a much longer time than Americans Africans have viewed fake news as a cancer threatening their societies. Across the continent Africans have experimented with censorship as the remedy.
Fake news and cell phone journalism is my #5 pick for the top stories in Africa in 2016, and I have to admit this is because I’m not African, since I doubt they would put it in the Top Ten. But as an American I’m hopeful we might learn something from them.
There are currently more refugees in the world than there are people in all but the largest 21 countries, more than 65 million. About half of these are in Africa, and about half are under 18 years old.
This the fourth most important story of Africa for 2016, and the world is fast coming to understand it isn’t just an African story.
2016 was notable for the darkness which follows the dawn: as a comeback for dictators in Africa. For nearly the previous two decades dictatorship in Africa was on the decline and long-serving overlords looked increasingly in trouble. That changed in 2016.
With last month’s reclassification of giraffe as “vulnerable,” and continent-wide surveys last year of both elephant and lion, it’s now beyond doubt that Africa’s big animal population is declining rapidly. This is the #2 story of 2016.
It’s fair to say that lion and giraffe are declining at about 20% every decade, and elephant about half that.
These numbers are at last real science. But they aren’t complete and there’s a lot more to the story.
The top story in Africa in 2016 is “The Election:” Mali, The Gambia, South Africa, The Congo and elsewhere like the U.S. The “story” isn’t simply who won or lost. The “story” is that elections aren’t working: they are not manifesting the will of the people.
Trump is the quintessential example, but I want to examine the African experience because I think it provides very important insights into exactly what’s going on.
Trump dominated the news in Africa in 2016 in so many different ways, including expectations and predictions that were much more correct than those made in America. Had Trump not been around, the top news would have been the finally substantiated science of massive declines in Africa’s big animals. Many important events like this were eclipsed by America’s election.
Return in the next several days for more in-depth discussions of these stories. Below is the summarized list:
Africa’s a bit unsettled. Europe’s more unsettled than ever.
The world is connected by a million strings. They’re best seen from afar, because up close they’re indistinguishable from the humdrum of everyday life. The ones I watch are in Africa:
Growing protests turn really violent in the DR-Congo. The Gambian president who conceded defeat in an election now says only God can tell him to step down. The Ugandan military is flexing its arms like it did under Amin.
What’s happening and is it coming to America?