Mugabe is throwing out the last of his "white" farmers.
Well, they stole the land fair and square so expect them to yelp.
But the rest of the Africa headlines are furthur north, where the war on terror is brewing a religious war (actually a war between the farmers and those who herd cattle).
And now, Ebola.
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Nigerian troubles
a good story on locals vs the terrorists from the WAPOST
In fact, residents said a riot did break out briefly between young Muslims and Christians near the market after the blasts, but community leaders quickly helped police contain it and the tension subsided. “There will always be youths who drink or take drugs and act out, but I think we have reached a level of understanding among the leaders,” Begu said. “They know that Boko Haram is not made up of local Muslims.”
On Wednesday, as rescue workers and survivors picked through the rubble of more than 200 destroyed shops, a pall of horror and grief lingered in the smoke-
tainted air. Muslim-owned carpet stalls lay in ruins next to Christian-owned appliance shops. Hajjia Aisha’s snack stand was a charred shell; so was the Father X-Mass shoe shop next door.
Gabriel Ucheodum, 32, pointed to blackened yams and oranges in front of his electronics shop where a pair of elderly women had been selling produce when the bombs exploded. The first woman’s head and legs were blown off in front of him, he said shakily. The second woman was torn in half.
“I can barely believe God let me live,” Ucheodum said. “I saw such horrible things and I lost so many neighbors. Some were Christians like me, some were Muslims, but none of them deserved to die like this.”
Nearby, Muslim trader Alhajj Harun, 55, fingered his prayer beads and peered into the blackened shops. He said he had lived through some of the area’s ugliest sectarian clashes and then helped work to overcome them. He proudly mentioned that he had been to Jerusalem as well as Mecca and that he had three daughters in college or in professional jobs.
“There were problems between us, but everyone has worked hard to manage them, and things have been calming down,” Harun said. “None of us want to have our religion and our country blamed for these terrible things. If these barbarians want to divide us, let them die trying.”
© The Washington Post Company
Monday, May 12, 2014
Boko harum
The elites in the US just noticed them, and the Islamophobes are upset that the press there doesn't dare say they are radical Islamicists.
Uh, yes, and like other radicals wanting to impose Islam from the 8thcentury, they kill "moderate" Muslims, not just Christians... and the prophet would disown them too.
and they are so bad that even AlQaeda has disowned them.
Full background at StrategyPage includes this snippet:
Nigeria uses Britain as a model for its military, as Britain was the former colonial power in the region and helped establish the Nigerian military half a century ago. But the corruption that is endemic to the region eventually had its way with the armed forces. Leadership and training have suffered. But U.S. training teams (to improve peacekeeping and counter-terror skills) have been in Nigeria during the last decade, and report that the armed forces are not completely demoralized and debilitated by the corruption, and with some intense training, and elimination of the most corrupt officers, combat capabilities would be much improved.
Uh, yes, and like other radicals wanting to impose Islam from the 8thcentury, they kill "moderate" Muslims, not just Christians... and the prophet would disown them too.
and they are so bad that even AlQaeda has disowned them.
Full background at StrategyPage includes this snippet:
Nigeria uses Britain as a model for its military, as Britain was the former colonial power in the region and helped establish the Nigerian military half a century ago. But the corruption that is endemic to the region eventually had its way with the armed forces. Leadership and training have suffered. But U.S. training teams (to improve peacekeeping and counter-terror skills) have been in Nigeria during the last decade, and report that the armed forces are not completely demoralized and debilitated by the corruption, and with some intense training, and elimination of the most corrupt officers, combat capabilities would be much improved.
Friday, April 25, 2014
A new tool to fight the tsetse fly
After 10 years of effort, a team led by scientists at Yale has finally decoded the genes of the tsetse fly, a bloodsucking scourge of Africa. With that knowledge, they hope to find new ways to repel or kill the insects, whose bite transmits sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease that, like rabies, drives its victims mad before they lapse into a coma and die. The flies also carry nagana, which weakens or kills cattle and renders whole regions of Africa inhospitable to most livestock.
it is a major cause of disease, but the real benefit would be to open large amounts of land so that it can be farmed.
Get rid of the tsetse fly and bring in irrigation, and Africa could feed the world. which is why China is buying up farmland and investing in Africa.
Tsetsefly collars for cattle? this Xinhua news story of a European funded initiative to stop cattle deaths:
and that story notes why this is important
Since time immemorial livestock farmers in most parts of Kenya have been forced to lighting fires to smoke away tsetse flies every day.
The well to do farmers have been using drugs (trypanocides) to help repel the flies away from the grazing fields and within the homesteads.
Because of this circumstance, the farmers have been forced to graze their livestock late in the morning hence completely avoiding early and late evening grazing everyday when tsetse flies, a routine that is hard to keep given that livestock especially cattle feed a lot.
But in a bid to help farmers solved this menace, the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) has developed a repellent collar that is tied around the animal's neck and in the process repels tsetse flies.
"The repellents have been identified from odors of animals avoided by tsetse, like the waterbuck, a big antelope species that is common in tsetse-infested areas of eastern Africa but which is rarely fed on by the flies," the Principal Investigator of the project Dr. Rajinder Saini said.
He noted that these repellent collars slowly dispense the chemicals in them, thereby protecting the animals and their herders from the flies.
Saini observed that the disease levels in protected cattle had been reduced by more than 90 percent and that repellent collars performed better than traditional traps that had been used by the institution in areas such as Lambwe Valley in Homa bay County.
These flies carry the trypanosome parasites that cause human African trypanosomosis, commonly called sleeping sickness, and the livestock disease nagana.
The problem of tsetse and trypanosomosis thus lies at the heart of Africa's struggle against poverty.
About 60 million people are at risk of getting sleeping sickness in Africa and more than 300,000 are infected yearly, of whom 95 percent do not receive any treatment because of the remoteness of the affected areas.
Trypanosomosis currently causes annual losses of some 1.5 billion US dollars and over the long run has had the effect of limiting Africa's agricultural income to some 4.5 billion dollars a year below its potential level.
About 3 million cattle die annually due to the disease. The flies are one of the main reasons why 80 percent of the continent's land is still tilled by hand due to the absence of draught-power.
Few livestock also implies less availability of manure that could be used as organic fertilizer, consequently leading to lower yields of crop and fodder plants.
Almost more than any other disease affecting people and livestock, trypanosomosis thus straddles the ground between human health, livestock health and agricultural production, and thus rural development.
radiation has also been used to control the fly. from the VOA
After the sterilization, a plane spreads thousands of non-productive tsetse flies every Wednesday in various parts of Ethiopia, especially along riverbed breeding grounds. So far, more than a million laboratory flies have been released. Now sterilized flies outnumber fertile flies, eight to one.
Sacrificing children to get ahead.
BBC article on child sacrifice
sigh. When I worked in Liberia, newspapers reported about two mangled bodies were found and one teenager managed to run away and talk to the press.
When HIV started hitting the elites, many went to these shamans (not witch doctors: witch doctors DIAGNOSE witchcraft...those who do things like this are witches).
headsup TurtleBay and beyond blogspot, who note that Americans and Europeans have no problem sacrificing children so they can succeed...the difference being, of course, that Americans and Europeans sacrifice their own children before birth.
sigh. When I worked in Liberia, newspapers reported about two mangled bodies were found and one teenager managed to run away and talk to the press.
When HIV started hitting the elites, many went to these shamans (not witch doctors: witch doctors DIAGNOSE witchcraft...those who do things like this are witches).
headsup TurtleBay and beyond blogspot, who note that Americans and Europeans have no problem sacrificing children so they can succeed...the difference being, of course, that Americans and Europeans sacrifice their own children before birth.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Saturday, April 05, 2014
Central African Republic
It's not a "religious" war unless it is pay back for previous atrocities.
From StrategyPage
From StrategyPage
Most of the mayhem is in the largely Christian south and especially in and around the capital, where most of the Moslems are in the south. This all began when the capital was captured by Moslem rebels in early 2013. That was followed by rebels engaging in extensive looting and other crimes. Most of their victims were Christians. This included some deliberate attacks on churches. That resulted in Christians forming militias to fight the rebels. In the last year over 2,000 people have died, most of them in the last six months. Now the Moslems remaining in the south are arming themselves and fighting back at Christian civilians. This caused the number of refugees in and around the capital to go from 20,000 to over 200,000 in March.
The Christian militia are also angry because the peacekeepers failed to curb rebel violence against Christians last year. The general chaos of the last few months has caused over a million people (a quarter of the CAR population) to flee their homes
Friday, February 28, 2014
Punishing the poor to force Africa to be PC
From the (gov't run) Zim Herald:
An article about Uganda passing an "anti gay bill"
expect those "rights" organizations to push to change the law.
expect China to fill in the gap.
This 2010 article from Xinhua new agency says China is the second largest invester there.
This 2009 article from the ChinaInAfrica website notes how China is active in the Ugandan economy.
so all the "greens" who work with aid agencies are pushing organic and natural ways of growing traditional methods, while China is actually changing their agricultural infrastructure.
And Chinese shops are all over, replacing the previously owned shops run by immigrants from India and their children that were widepspread in colonial days.
This is bad and good: cheap goods can make local manufacturing wither (as we see here in the Philippines), and the ability of Chinese immigrants to money (in the past, via family links these shops essentially took over the small business shops in SEAsia) mean they crowd out locals trying to run such businesses. (cultural problem too: A kid brought up by business oriented parents will be more likely to succeed, and as I noted in colonial times, the opportunities for locals were limited due to the Indian shops...no, this is not "racist", since in places like the Philippines, where only locals could own land or businesses, the merchants quickly intermarried, which is wny many of our families who run the place are part Chinese).
This article discusses the resentment against this neocolonial push:
from the WATimes (Right wing US paper):
also on that paper: There is an anti obscenity law and the police have had to save women from roaming mobs undressing women to punish them for wearing miniskirts.
This is happening in Iganga which is a city in the SE area of Uganda.
According to Wikipedia, that is an area with a large Muslim population.
and although the US activists point to "fundamentalists" for being behind the "anti Gay" law, the population doesn't have a large percentage of them. Again, from Wikipedia:
and, as the local paper the Monitor points out: While you were being distracted, lots of other scandals are going on.
mainly economic problems but this one caught my eye:
Two items in this snippet:
One: Notice the money gone missing? One of the biggest problems in Africa and Asia (including the Philippines and China) is graft and corruption.
Two: the "initiative" is "modern day alchemy" because the local scientists are using gentic modification to try to save a threatened banana plague.
ALL bananas have a narrow genetic spectrum, and could easily be wiped out, resulting in a famine resembling the Irish Potato famine.
The UKGuardian, which is a left wing paper that usually pushes the green agenda, has a nice article on that here.
Like other rural areas, often kids go to boarding schools, which have a bad reputation for letting kids be abused, be they the "fagging" in the UK public school system, the abuse of Canadian Aborigenes that got a lot of publicity there (not as much in the US, since most of the schools were Anglican etc). This article discusses the abuse of missionary's kids at African boarding schools (presumably for the elites.) And yes, I know a missionary whose son was abused this way in South America at a Christian boarding school
Christianity today has an article here.
this is of white kids in Christian boarding schools for the elites.
Are we supposed to think that black kids weren't abused?
The reason I think there is a big story here is:
One: Homosexual rape was probably common in pre colonial times, but we have no documentation except for the case of the Uganda martyrs, whose major "sin" was refusing to be abused by the king and his court.
Two: Many British families sent their problem sons to Africa in colonial times. The sexual shennanigans of the colonists was notorious in the more chaste Bantu neighbors, who have taboos on who you can and cannot sleep with. (I have no information on the Nilotic or Masai tribes, except to note that the high rate of infertility in Masai women was from STD related PID, which is why in the good old days they kidnapped and/or married the women from other tribes).
Three: It is a hierarchical society, where you obey your superior. This includes your teacher, your relatives, and of course your employer. So if your employer "hits" on you, you say "Yes"...and although this is more common with women (which is why tribes only allowed "houseboys", I know of cases where the boys were used sexually by their employers).
Four: by taking men from their villages and making zoning laws that didn't encourage women to accompany them (and tribal laws that meant you lost your land if your wife didn't work it for you), you encouraged not only family breakup but homosexuality in the huge worker's dormatories.
Five: There have been wars and revolutions in Central Africa including Uganda.Female rape has resulted in a lot of reporting, but male on male rape is also being done, mainly as a way of punishment.
Time magazine report here.
NYTimes article here.
UKGuardian report here.
and few of these rapes are reported, because of the stigma.
Six: Sex tourism. All sorts of sex tourism, because of all those lovely beaches. If you google, you will find articles on western women seeking love from local men while on vacation (reminds me of the film "Shirley Valentine"). But it also includes the nasty problem of enticing poor children into a risky life of prostitution. Western liberatarian see this as a free choice, but hunger sort of obscures the free choice part.
from ask.com:
and the BBC in 2010 asked for comments on pedophilia in Africa: read the comments and weep.
most of this is about girls, but the boys are at risk too.
A lot of this depends on when you decide it's pedophilia or if you count sex with teenagers over whom you have power. That too can result in great rage by the boy but often he keeps quiet from shame.
An article about Uganda passing an "anti gay bill"
In a speech after signing the law, President Museveni warned Western nations not to meddle in the east African nation’s affairs — and that he was not afraid of aid being cut.
Some donors were quick to punish Kampala by freezing or redirecting aid money, while Sweden’s Finance Minister Anders Borg, who visited the country on Tuesday, said the law “presents an economic risk for Uganda”.
The Netherlands froze a seven-million-euro subsidy to Uganda’s legal system, while Denmark and Norway said they would redirect around six million euros each towards private sector initiatives, aid agencies and rights organisations.
expect those "rights" organizations to push to change the law.
But Opondo said Uganda’s government was not worried.
“Western ‘aid’ to Africa is lucrative and (a) profitable trade, they cannot cut off completely,” Opondo said.
“Slave trade, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation, Africa must stand up to Western domination.”
expect China to fill in the gap.
This 2010 article from Xinhua new agency says China is the second largest invester there.
This 2009 article from the ChinaInAfrica website notes how China is active in the Ugandan economy.
Another field to benefit from Chinese interest is agriculture. China has evolved the best technique of growing rice to yield bumper crops, and has passed on this technique to Uganda as well. The first rice-farming project has been in Kibimba in eastern Uganda spread over 1721 acres of land.
China is interested in the oil deposits recently discovered in Uganda. As of now Uganda exports leather goods to China, along with timber, agricultural products, cotton, copper and fish. The total trade between the two countries amounted to $247 million in the year 2008. However, this includes Chinese exports amounting to $230 million, and Uganda has the remaining share of $17 million. The present division is extremely lopsided, and this is not perceived as advantageous to Uganda. Chinese goods have also replaced the domestic products since they are so much cheaper.
so all the "greens" who work with aid agencies are pushing organic and natural ways of growing traditional methods, while China is actually changing their agricultural infrastructure.
And Chinese shops are all over, replacing the previously owned shops run by immigrants from India and their children that were widepspread in colonial days.
This is bad and good: cheap goods can make local manufacturing wither (as we see here in the Philippines), and the ability of Chinese immigrants to money (in the past, via family links these shops essentially took over the small business shops in SEAsia) mean they crowd out locals trying to run such businesses. (cultural problem too: A kid brought up by business oriented parents will be more likely to succeed, and as I noted in colonial times, the opportunities for locals were limited due to the Indian shops...no, this is not "racist", since in places like the Philippines, where only locals could own land or businesses, the merchants quickly intermarried, which is wny many of our families who run the place are part Chinese).
This article discusses the resentment against this neocolonial push:
from the WATimes (Right wing US paper):
KAMPALA, October 3, 2012 - Chinese, the renowned ‘investors’ in Africa have shifted positions, turning to small retail trade in massive numbers. This is especially true in Uganda’s capital Kampala, where they are suffocating the local traders who are calling for government intervention through regulation of trade to foreigners.the Monitor (Uganda) discusses this from a local viewpoint, published Feb7 2014:
Taking advantage of favorable terms of trade and reduced costs of imports, Chinese traders who are widely present in Kampala’s arcades sharply cut prices for their products, undercutting the prices charged by local traders.
The loathed Chinese cheaply import from their home country to the detriment of Ugandan traders who import the same products at much higher prices from China. The local sellers lament that the practice is completely unfair, and that they need government support to even the playing field.
Ugandan traders bitterly complain that they are on the verge of losing their businesses, thanks to price slashing by their Chinese competitors. In July, the traders staged a demonstration against the increasing Chinese suffocation, calling for the government to intervene before local traders are forced from business.
“China gives aid without political ties. African leaders don’t want to be dictated upon. That is why they like China not the Western countries which insist on democracy and social freedom,” Prof Makara said at a workshop organised by Makerere University department of Journalism and Communication, Bergen, Norway and Chr Michelsen Institute with support from the Norwegian Embassy in Kampala.“Over dependence on China exploitation of natural resources is unsustainable in the long term. Taking minerals and oil to China doesn’t create jobs in Africa and Uganda in particular. They are Chinese who benefit. They are exporting our minerals to China. If they are exported and they are over, will they still need us? Sustainable development may not be realised in the long term.”
also on that paper: There is an anti obscenity law and the police have had to save women from roaming mobs undressing women to punish them for wearing miniskirts.
This is happening in Iganga which is a city in the SE area of Uganda.
According to Wikipedia, that is an area with a large Muslim population.
the Iganga District in eastern Uganda has the highest percentage of Muslims. The rest of the country has a mix of religious affiliations.[107
and although the US activists point to "fundamentalists" for being behind the "anti Gay" law, the population doesn't have a large percentage of them. Again, from Wikipedia:
According to the census of 2002, Christians made up about 84% of Uganda's population.[106] The Roman Catholic Church has the largest number of adherents (41.9%), followed by the Anglican Church of Uganda (35.9%). Evangelical and Pentecostal churches claim the rest of the Christian population. There's a growing number of Presbyterian denominations like the Presbyterian Church in Uganda, the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Uganda and the Evangelical Free Church in Uganda with hundreds of affiliating congregations. The next most reported religion of Uganda is Islam, with Muslims representing 12% of the population.[106]
and, as the local paper the Monitor points out: While you were being distracted, lots of other scandals are going on.
mainly economic problems but this one caught my eye:
* We heard that about Shs40 billion of your taxes and mine given to the Presidential Initiative on Bananas is missing. This was always going to be an exercise in modern-day alchemy; what large global market is out there for banana flour? Why not spend it on coffee or tourism?
Two items in this snippet:
One: Notice the money gone missing? One of the biggest problems in Africa and Asia (including the Philippines and China) is graft and corruption.
Two: the "initiative" is "modern day alchemy" because the local scientists are using gentic modification to try to save a threatened banana plague.
ALL bananas have a narrow genetic spectrum, and could easily be wiped out, resulting in a famine resembling the Irish Potato famine.
The UKGuardian, which is a left wing paper that usually pushes the green agenda, has a nice article on that here.
There are plenty of human rights problems in Uganda, but essentially the law is popular because of the perception that gays are predators.
In recent years a devastating bacterial disease has swept across Uganda and, to a lesser extent, neighbouring countries, causing annual banana crop losses to the region of more than $500m (£310m). The rapid spread of banana Xanthomonas wilt, or BXW, which destroys the entire plant and contaminates the soil, "has endangered the livelihoods of millions of farmers who rely on banana for staple food and income", according to an article in the journal Molecular Plant Pathology last year.
With no resistant varieties or chemical cures available, growers such as Kamenya have been forced to destroy large sections of their plantations. For smaller farmers the damage has been so severe many have given up on the fruit.
But local scientists have not. On a sprawling campus outside Kampala, Wilberforce Tushemereirwe and his colleagues at the National Banana Research Programme have been on a quest to defeat the disease by building a better banana. This has involved adding to the fruit a sweet pepper gene that has already improved disease resistance in several vegetables.
Like other rural areas, often kids go to boarding schools, which have a bad reputation for letting kids be abused, be they the "fagging" in the UK public school system, the abuse of Canadian Aborigenes that got a lot of publicity there (not as much in the US, since most of the schools were Anglican etc). This article discusses the abuse of missionary's kids at African boarding schools (presumably for the elites.) And yes, I know a missionary whose son was abused this way in South America at a Christian boarding school
Christianity today has an article here.
this is of white kids in Christian boarding schools for the elites.
Are we supposed to think that black kids weren't abused?
The reason I think there is a big story here is:
One: Homosexual rape was probably common in pre colonial times, but we have no documentation except for the case of the Uganda martyrs, whose major "sin" was refusing to be abused by the king and his court.
Two: Many British families sent their problem sons to Africa in colonial times. The sexual shennanigans of the colonists was notorious in the more chaste Bantu neighbors, who have taboos on who you can and cannot sleep with. (I have no information on the Nilotic or Masai tribes, except to note that the high rate of infertility in Masai women was from STD related PID, which is why in the good old days they kidnapped and/or married the women from other tribes).
Three: It is a hierarchical society, where you obey your superior. This includes your teacher, your relatives, and of course your employer. So if your employer "hits" on you, you say "Yes"...and although this is more common with women (which is why tribes only allowed "houseboys", I know of cases where the boys were used sexually by their employers).
Four: by taking men from their villages and making zoning laws that didn't encourage women to accompany them (and tribal laws that meant you lost your land if your wife didn't work it for you), you encouraged not only family breakup but homosexuality in the huge worker's dormatories.
Five: There have been wars and revolutions in Central Africa including Uganda.Female rape has resulted in a lot of reporting, but male on male rape is also being done, mainly as a way of punishment.
Time magazine report here.
NYTimes article here.
UKGuardian report here.
and few of these rapes are reported, because of the stigma.
Six: Sex tourism. All sorts of sex tourism, because of all those lovely beaches. If you google, you will find articles on western women seeking love from local men while on vacation (reminds me of the film "Shirley Valentine"). But it also includes the nasty problem of enticing poor children into a risky life of prostitution. Western liberatarian see this as a free choice, but hunger sort of obscures the free choice part.
from ask.com:
If you are gay or lesbian and wish to travel to Africa it is wise to do a little research before you plan your trip. Homosexuality is illegal in almost every African country (bar South Africa) and is considered a criminal offense in several top tourist destinations like Egypt, Morocco and Kenya.
and the BBC in 2010 asked for comments on pedophilia in Africa: read the comments and weep.
most of this is about girls, but the boys are at risk too.
A lot of this depends on when you decide it's pedophilia or if you count sex with teenagers over whom you have power. That too can result in great rage by the boy but often he keeps quiet from shame.
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