The Sudanese-Arab militia worked its way systematically through the tents, shacks and mud houses of the Ardamata camp, shooting male residents. The settlement in western Darfur was home to about 30,000 non-Arab Sudanese people who had fled earlier bouts of fighting in the country’s civil war, which started nearly seven months ago.
The United Nations Refugee Agency said Friday that around 800 people were killed in the camp and the surrounding community between Nov. 4 and 6. Local activists said the number of victims could be above 1,000.
The killings, these activists and international officials say, raise the specter of a repeat of the bloodshed inflicted on Darfur two decades ago, when Sudanese-Arab militias killed an estimated 300,000 people, most of them members of the region’s non-Arab minority.
follow the money: The area is full of gold reserves.
And the govt is supported by the Russian mercs, aka Wagner group who want the gold.
CNN Article 2022: They were plundering gold to pay for the war in the Ukraine.
“The Rapid Support Forces’ latest episode of ethnically targeted killings in West Darfur, has the hallmarks of an organized campaign of atrocities against Massalit civilians,” said Mohamed Osman, Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The UN Security Council needs to stop ignoring the desperate need to protect Darfur civilians.”
This CNN report notes how the Wagner group is backing the RSF
“What is not in doubt is Wagner’s role in this, it has been supplying the RSF with arms and supplies through Darfur,” one Western intelligence official told CNN.
“It follows Wagner’s modus operandi. Create chaos and seize power,” another intelligence source active in the region
just a reminder to the left in the USA who blame the CIA and Israel for all the problems in the world: Lots of bad guys out there oding their thing. And the UN, alas, is pretty helpless to stop it.
Not my area of expertise, but these reports are about several recent coups in the southern Sahel which used to be French colonies, and where the French usually kept the peace, but now we see the Wagner group manipulating the local military and of course the Muslim charity money that is diverted into jihadi groups.
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Strategypage has an article on what is going on in Mali:
apparantly the Wagner group, is now considered as formally Russian troops, and the government will have to deal with the Russian Government
Backstory is the head of the Wagner group attempted a coup against Putin and died in an accident (/s).
so what is important about Mali?
Gold
Mali is a major producer of gold and the Russians have always been willing accept payments in gold. Russia maintains a huge gold stockpile (about 2,300 tons), the fifth largest in the world. The Russian gold is an emergency fund that is now being tapped to pay for military operations in Ukraine.
backstory:
The military government in Mali had hoped that hiring Russian Wagner Group mercenaries would enable Mali to maintain control of northern and central Mali. ...
The problems began when the military government ordered the independent French Barkhane counter-terrorism force out of Mali and it was gone by the end of 2021. Since then, Mali forced the 15,000 UN peacekeepers to start withdrawing.
The government forced the French and G5 peacekeepers out by the end of 2021.
lots of details at the link. cated article on what is going on in Central Africa.
again not my area of expertise.
But this part is about refugees in Malawi:
August 10, 2023: Malawi is seeking emergency funds and donations to feed more than 50,000 refugees who are crammed into the Dzaleka Camp. This is the only refugee camp in the country. Most of the refugees in Dzaleka are from Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Ethiopia and Somalia. The government says the camp will run out of food by December 2023. Foreign aid groups have already cut food supplies because of funding shortages. The government says it needs an additional $6.3 million in order to feed the refugees through June 2024. There are also about 8,000 refugees living outside the camp and are regarded as illegal migrants by the government that they are trying to relocate.
sigh
Refugees are a world wide problem.
I wonder how many of those the fleeing to Europe is due to such disorder.
a new elected government, opposition yells fraud, counter story is that the USA/West is trying to manipulate the opposition, and the elephant in the room: What did China do behind the scenes?
I congratulate President Emmerson Mnangagwa on his re-election. I wish him and the people of Zimbabwe well for the upcoming term.
— Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦 (@CyrilRamaphosa) August 28, 2023
You have consistently denied summoning polling officers to the command center for the signing of new V.11 forms. However, to expose your dishonesty, our team was deployed this afternoon to Nyika, where they witnessed the opening of ballot boxes in the absence of… pic.twitter.com/yGpCOhSX6s
— Citizens' Coalition for Change (@CCCZimbabwe) August 28, 2023
most of the article is behind a paywall, but here is how it starts:
Registering to vote in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, isn’t easy. The only registration centre is two bus journeys from the most populous suburbs. Nationwide there are just 71 voter-registration centres, or one for every 216,000 people (though some mobile ones are operating ahead of a general election next year).
And this is not the only worry. Since 2018 Zimbabwe has collected fingerprints, photos, addresses and phone numbers to clean up the voters’ roll, which was reportedly full of “ghost voters”. This frightens many Zimbabweans, especially those belonging to the minority Ndebele ethnic group, much of which is concentrated near Bulawayo. In 1983 some 20,000 mostly Ndebele people were massacred by the army. Emmerson Mnangagwa, now the president, was head of the security services at the time. Now, people fear data collection “is a way to re-identify and target us,” says Rodwin Sibanda of the Habakkuk Trust, an ngo in Bulawayo.
China is Zimbabwe’s biggest foreign investor and kept the nation afloat amid Western sanctions, but is now estimated to control 90% of Zimbabwe’s mining industry (with the largest lithium reserves in Africa) and helps keep the economically disastrous Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) in government.
Over the years, Chinese interests have been a power behind the throne — once again, ZANU-PF triumphed in national elections last week; once again, amid accusations of rigging the system — with a hand in making and breaking its leaders.
Strategypage has a long essay on the implications of the coup in Niger and points out that often military coups are to fight corruption in civilian governments, but that it leads to a loss of western aid until they restore democracy.
But the bad news is that the problem is corruption and that corruption is so widespread that the military reforming government doesn't work.
part of the essay is about the Amreican and French military in the area trying to fight Islamic terrorism.
This is mainly a technical article outside my area of expertise, so if you are interested read the whole thing.
African governments had also been caught in a delicate balancing act between the shadowy mercenary group and the Russian government.
The Malian coup-makers continue to refer to the armed group as “Russian instructors”, though CAR authorities are more forthcoming.
“CAR authorities have always been uncomfortable,” Charles Bouessel, senior analyst on CAR for International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera.
“They did not know who to praise for Wagner’s assistance. Sometimes, they are thanking the Russian authorities and sometimes, they are thanking Prigozhin. But what they want is that the Russian assistance continues, and they would be cautious in expressing their opinion [on Prigozhin’s death] intimately.”
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,and this is similar to what I have posted on several blogs about the pushing of the sexual agenda on small countries:
About a decade ago, the US had laws like "Don't ask, don't tell" in their military. In the US, LGBTQ is not accepted by everyone. Why do the US and the west think they can force Africa to accept LGBTQ? Let the west keep pushing us like slaves. We will embrace Russia and China.
Globally, there is a growing need to address the sexual abuse of children. Taylor said that there has been an explosion of sexual violence in the digital space. This includes an increase in the number of sexual images of children.
Main factors behind this were changes imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased use of the internet by children. In some cases, sexual violence against children takes place via live streaming.
Currently, one in eight adults worldwide experienced sexual abuse as a child, according to one statistic. That rate is increasing in the digital age. Already one in five children has experienced sexual abuse in the digital space in a country, a survey funded by GPeVAC found. The survey was conducted in 13 countries in Africa and Southeast Asia.
then you have the attacks on Christian villagers in Nigeria, which the western MSM pretends is poor cattle herders burning down farmers villages so they can feed their cattle, but in reality it is a persecution of the Christians.
and here is a more up to date report from EWTN News:
No, I don't know much about Mali, but StrategyPage notes they produce gold, and are using gold to pay for things that foreign aid used to pay for. But of course the common folk aren't getting much benefit. And they note that ordinary folk are doing what we call mom and pop gold mining (They do this in the Philippines, and it is more dangerous and more polluting than professional companies, but, again, I don't know much about this).
But they note the Wagner group, a mercenary group of Russians who are notorious for their work in the Ukraine, are there and trained local soldier to keep the government in place.
and they are paying them in gold.
The article explains that Mali threw out the French and UN peacekeepers partly because they reported on atrocities by the Govt troops and the Wagner group
But the peacekeepers are there to stop Islamic groups who are terrorists and also who threaten the government.
it's the corruption of course
The Mali peacekeeping operation costs about half a billion dollars a month and that is about the only foreign aid Mali gets now that the military government is in control. Most foreign aid was halted because the government was stealing so much of the aid. It is difficult to steal any of the money spent on peacekeepers but the government seems to be trying to do just that.
and of course the problem is that the Islamic terrorists are growing and threatening nearby states
this report from DW last week discusses the good and bad points of the Wagner group
it notes the charismatic movement in Christian churches is now influencing Islam.
well, nothing new here: Sufi Islam stressed a personal relationship with God, and this was partly due to Hindu (Gita) influence I believe. So a pentecostal revival in Islam might pressure the more rule oriented/terrorist inspiring version of Islam pushed by the Saudis to be less influential.
I don't know how accurate this report is, since it is by western reporters who believe polls (uh, people will tell pollsters what they want to hear, out of politeness guys, but never mind).... and these reporters seem to think that the Islamic vs Christian wars can be blamed on local Christians (or even local Muslims) whereas it was actually inspired by Saudi/ISIS etc. snf is something new: Islamic slave traders of the Sahel decimated these tribes for centuries (heck, the slave trade goes back to the days of ancient Egypt and is more about cuture than religion per se).
But I am not an expert here.
Also missing: How African churches are pushing back against the gay agenda in the large Anglican church, and it is local Evangelicals (not the western bigots as the western press always seems to accuse) that is pushing against the US push toward so called gay rights/ birthcontrol/ sex education that approves of premarital sex.
Right now there are confusing stories about the Wagner group turning against the Russian military.
BBC stories LINKLINK2 and a lot of people are following it on Twitter.
A lot of the civilian atrocities in the Ukraine are blamed on the Wagner group. I have no idea how much is true because the propaganda from that war is so confusing.
However, the Wagner group has worked as mercenaries in Africa, and were suspected to be responsible for atrocities there.
When abuses were reported in recent weeks in Mali – fake graves designed to discredit French forces; a massacre of some 300 people, mostly civilians – all evidence pointed to the shadowy mercenaries of Russia’s Wagner Group.
Even before these feared professional soldiers joined the assault on Ukraine, Russia had deployed them to under-the-radar military operations across at least half a dozen African countries. Their aim: to further President Vladimir Putin’s global ambitions, and to undermine democracy.
Analysts estimate Wagner operates with only a few hundred to 2,000 mercenaries in a country.
Many are ex-Russian military intelligence, Siegle said, but because it is a private force the Kremlin can deny responsibility for Wagner’s actions.
The real price is paid by ordinary people.
the Wagner Group has been active in the Sudan and is suspected to be meddling in the military coup there, but without neutral observers on the ground it is hard to verify this.LINKLINK2
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lots of folk in the west are aghast at claims of CIA interference in foreign countries, but they ignore that there are other folks doing this too.
I just got notified that an essay I posted in 2012 has not met community standards.
Sorry about that.
as usual, there is no way I can easily find a post that old, and since no one complained about it or commented on it in the last 11 years, my opinion is forgtaboutit.
So who went back 11 years to find something and complain about it?
Heh. Wait til they start scanning my medical blog where I posted graphic illustrations of FGM....
GetREligionblog reports that the Anglican bishops in Africa have rejected the leadership of the bishop of Canterbury, essentially saying the see of St Augustine is empty. (St Augustine of Canterbury evangelized the Anglo Saxons and reestablished Christianity in England. The See refers to the seat/location i.e. area governed by the bishop).
The Anglican site VirtueOnLine has several reports about this:
a similar schism is perculating in the Catholic church, and Africa might have a major part of that rejection of PC sexual morals. From Cardinal Sarah to CNA in 2015 essentially rejects how western government are pushing gender ideology on Africa. He has written several books, including one with some other bishops in Africa stressing that Africa will save Catholicism from these anti family trends.
the so called synod on synodality is being pushed with the idea to let people talk about what concerns them: but of course these meetings are not with practicing Catholics as much as with those eager to change the church, and like most institutions that practice wokeness, there is a danger that it will push out true believers who feel their voices are being ignored.
thanks to Mother Angelica, despite Catholics leaving the church en masse in the USA (some to no religion, but about half to other Christian churches), about half the bishops remain faithful to Christianity. This is similar to the few Anglican bishops in the UK who oppose these trends, but who are slowly being replaced by those obeying the non Christian reformers.
Alas, due to liberation theology and Pope Francis' shennanigans in adding pachimama pagan rituals, there is also an exodus to evangelical churches in Latin America and in Hispanic immigrants in the USA.... there, similar to that in the Philippines, where out bishops push a green agenda that will make poor people poorer, help China, but hey it will get them praise from the elites here.
The various civil wars, insurgencies, careless mining practices that exploit people, and outbreaks of disease in Central Africa have been going on for years. So who cares about what is going on there?
Interview: Behind the scenes of Netflix/UNESCO's African Folktales Reimagined
Netflix and UNESCO are supporting a new generation of African storytellers
On March 29, the films “Enmity Djinn” by Mohamed Echkouna from Mauritania; “Katope” by Walt Mzengi Corey from Tanzania; “Zabin Halima” (Halima’s Choice) by Korede Azeez from Nigeria; “Anyango and the Ogre” by Voline Ogutu from Kenya; “Katera of the Punishment Island” by Loukman Ali from Uganda; and “MaMlambo” by Gcobisa Yako from South Africa will premiere globally on Netflix.
A report from GlobalVoices, from a local independent blogger:
Zimbabwe's cyberpunk cities fueled by China
Interrogating the narratives behind Zimbabwe’s smart cities
The government is making a suburb. aka New Harare, with full internet integration. The companies behind this are Chinese government linked companies such as Huawei.
New Harare’s plans for omnipresent facial recognition tech combined with AI will usher Zimbabwe into a dystopian era. The technology will be able to match a person’s live images with centralized databases and alert law enforcement when a suspected criminal is detected.
In Zimbabwe, where freedoms are harshly curtailed by the regime of President Emerson Mnangagwa, there are also politically-motivated ulterior motives for this technology. In fact, CCTV (Closed-circuit television) cameras are already being placed in Zimbabwe’s cities where opposition movements are strong.
I lived in central Zimbabwe. We had paintings on rocks where they were split and so the area was flat and sheltered, and the local hill where the baboons lived was where they buried chiefs.
But I was too busy treating people and learning the culture and language to go into these ancient sites: Until I got sick and the sisters arranged for me to spend a week vacation in a mission near Umtali.
Nearby, the local mountain was terraced, with stone walls every couple of feet.
No one knew exactly who did this, but it inspired stories such as King Solomon's mines and the idea that the ancient Phonecians settled there and built these terraces: completely fiction of course and racist because it suggested only white people could do this, not the primitive natives. And indeed, there have been comparisons of the terraces in Zimbabwe to those in Yemen.
The beliefs of the Lemba tribe and DNA suggest there might be a splinter of truth in this, and of course, there was active trading via the Red Sea in ancient times, and later with Arab traders: elephant ivory, gold and slaves: something that is only now being recognized.
But anyway, the site of a mountainside terraced was impressive, but hard to find the history of who did this or why this was done. And yes, this was racist because no one wanted to recognize that Bantu farmers would do that.
What inspired this post however was that archeologists discovered "clay pits"near the Zimbabwe ruins complex, and after ignoring them, someone has said: Hey these are in an area that could be used to collect rainwater and the pits used to save it so it was there during the dry season.
AARHUS, DENMARK—According to a statement released by Aarhus University, a new study at Great Zimbabwe, the eleventh-century capital of the Shona kingdom located in what is now southeastern Zimbabwe, indicates that the large depressions in the landscape surrounding the city’s surviving stone structures may have been used to store and manage the city’s water supply.
It had been previously thought that the depressions, which are known as dhaka pits, were made when clay was dug to build the city. However, remote sensing surveys and excavations conducted by an international team of researchers led by Innocent Pikirayi of the University of Pretoria suggest that the pits were positioned to collect surface water in areas where water runs when it rains, and collect and store seeping groundwater. The stored water would have allowed the people of Great Zimbabwe to manage their livestock and crops during the two dry seasons of the year, the researchers concluded.
The article mentions local stone masons. Yes, when I was there, they could make bricklike pieces of stone by finding a flat rock, and placing a fire on top. After a day or two, they would throw cold water on it, and the top layers would come off in slabs of rocks, which they then chisled into bricks very similar to the walls and towers in the Great Zimbabwe.
a photo of the walls to see how the flat stones were used:
But the terraces of eastern Zimbabwe? Were they related? Done by the same tribe?
and why?
I looked for information for years, until I read Brian Fagan's book Elixir, where the author has a long section on East African water systems and noted these were similar to those found in Zimbabwe and on Drackenburg moutain in South Africa.
To understand a lot of this, you have to realize that rain is seasonal in Zimbabwe: so for months you might not have rain at all. So like other cultures, in the Middle East, Egypt, India, and China, these cultures managed the water supply.
Until the Sahara got so dry to make crossing it difficult, sub Saharan Africa was in touch with these civilizations, and of course, ideas spread via trade routes.
So back to the actual terraces. ZimFieldGuide has an article on them, noting the earliest terraces were dirt, but later they were made of stone.
In some areas, whole hillsides are covered with thirty or more lines of terracing. For example, at Ziwa Ruins, it has been estimated there are 800 kms of terracing in an area of 30 square kilometres. Examples of terracing patterns are observable from Google Maps at GPS reference: 18°08'10.13″S 32°38'15.50″E which is the position of the Ziwa Site Museum.
Alas, I can't find a decent photo of the terraces. But then, even when I was visiting and we walked up the mountain with the terraces to our right, we couldn't get a decent photo due to the brush and trees that almost hid them from a distance.
Robert Soper in his book The Terrace Builders of Nyanga presents detailed plans and sketches showing that the terraces show how the agricultural community grew crops on the terraced hillsides, raising livestock in the pit structures in the Nyanga highlands initially from about AD 1300 and then moved down into the lowlands by AD 1800 leaving the remains of their efforts over an area of over 8,000 square kilometres. He acknowledges that terracing is used in other parts of Africa, such as South Africa, East Africa, the southern region of Ethiopia and in Sudan, but nowhere are they used as extensively as Nyanga.
There are differences in use however; Sutton observes that the terraces found in Tanzania were designed for irrigation, whilst the ones in Nyanga were mainly for soil conservation purpose,
The ruins represent the remains of family homesteads and extensive stone-built agricultural terraces. Successive stages of development have been traced, starting with settlements on some of the highest peaks around AD 1300 and expanding gradually for five centuries to cover an area of over 5000 square kilometres. These stages show how the farming community adapted to and exploited the opportunities offered by the varied environments of the Nyanga highlands and lowlands to develop a specialised agricultural system integrating cultivation and livestock.
I would like to read the book, but alas it's not available on ScribD, and I can't afford 30 plus dollars plus postage to buy it from Amazon.
that oneThe Archaeology of Nyanga, Eastern Zimbabwelocked
Plan Shenjere-Nyabezi from oxford press:The Nyanga district is however particularly famous for its stone constructions that come in a variety of forms, consisting of stone terraced hillsides, which extend for almost sixty-five miles from north to south and cover some twenty-three hundred square miles, as well as stone-lined pit structures, hilltop forts, stone-walled enclosures, and trackways. Dating from the 14th to the early 19th century, the culture is one of the Later Farming Community cultures of Zimbabwe. The stone architecture and several other cultural aspects differ from those of the more famous Zimbabwe Culture, such that, although the two entities partly overlapped chronologically, Nyanga represents a separate cultural development in Zimbabwe’s history. The purpose of the stone structures has been a subject of archaeological debate for some time. The majority of scholars generally agree that the terracing and pit structures were constructed for agricultural and animal herding practices.
with the covid strictures on travel being removed, and with Zimbabwe becomeing more peaceful, the tourist industry should reopen: not just to Europeans but to South Africans and from China who want to see the beauties of that country.
BBC:A banner marking the 300km walk was unveiled to welcome the pilgrims
A group of about 60 Catholic pilgrims are recovering after spending nine days trekking through war-torn South Sudan to see Pope Francis in the capital, Juba....
One pilgrim, who was shedding tears as she arrived, hinted at the trauma the years of fighting have brought to this country.
"When you have smelled and seen death and hopelessness, then you will search for peace with all the might that you have," said the woman, who did not want to give her name.
"I have lost enough, but along the way I saw love and we all spoke one language - that of peace. I really pray that even after the Pope leaves, we will still be like that," she continued.
"He is a prophet and whatever he prays in the next few days, while on our soil, will come to pass. Things will be different. We are going to be one people."
...Pope Francis is spending three days in the country and will hold a Mass on Sunday.
In a historic first, he travelled with two other Christian leaders - Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland Rev Iain Greenshields.
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Many years ago, in 1980, I worked with a physician from the South Sudan.
He had fled to a refugee camp to escape the fighting, and the Seventh Day Adventists rescued him and arranged for him to study abroad. He became a physician and hoped to help his people, but the war there made that too dangerous, so he was working in our clinic in Liberia for awhile until he found a job at a nearby Lutheran hospital.
Alas, I lost contact with him because I had to leave that country, and shortly after that, there was a coup that resulted in chaos and civil war for years.
The story of how charities try to rescue some of the refugees to resettle and get an education in the USA is told in this film:
