Africa Archive

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For the reading

By
Ben Nolan
– April 20, 2012

Meant to post this about a week ago, but what’r ya gonna do? The piece we were all waiting for narrating the creative and charismatic tension between Jay and Kanye through the Watch the Throne tour as a redemption story for the Jackass. Read it (you too, Tom!).

The Up series should be in the core 9th-grade humanities curriculum. Even if it meant bumping, like, Lord of the Flies (which I loved), I’d still think so. It’s fucking LIFE, man! Wish I’d seen it at 14. (For the uninitiated, it’s a documentary series that has been revisiting the same cross-class group of individuals from age 7, every 7 years, and ongoing– the next one’s 56-Up — testing the “give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man” iea). Here’s an interview with one of the subjects (the one who kindof jumped class to became a scientists at UW@Madison) (ty, Kottke!). Teaser:

While committed to the project, he says confessing all in front of the camera has never been easy. “It’s always very disturbing. It’s the fact that they don’t show you the way you want to be shown – but that’s not the main thing. They ask you some really disturbing questions. They stick a camera under your nose and ask – ‘Why did you choose your wife?’ – and then it’s shown to gazillions of people. I’ve learnt that the stupider the thing I say, the more likely it is to get in. You’re asked to discuss every intimate part of your life. You feel like you’re just a specimen pinned on the board. It’s totally dehumanising.”

This excerpt from a speech to J-Street by former Palestinian politician and non-violent activist Mustafa Barghouti about nails the problem of the West Bank for Israel:

What is apartheid? Apartheid is a system where you have two laws, two different laws, for two people living in the same area. If you don’t like the word apartheid, give me an alternative to a situation where a Palestinian citizen is allowed to use no more than 50 cubic meters of water per capital year, while an Israeli illegal settler from the West Bank is allowed to use 2400. How would you classify a situation where the Israeli gdp per capita is about $30,000 while a Palestinian’s gdp per capita is less than $1400?

Yet we are obliged to pay the same prices for products as Israelis do. More than that: We are obliged to pay double the price for electricity and water that Israelis do though they make 30 times more than we do.

Segregation of roads is another issue. This is the last place on earth, actually the first place on earth where people have been segregated with roads. I’m talking about roads in the West Bank, major roads are exclusive to Israeli settlers or army or Israeli citizens.

I cannot describe to you to the level of violation of human rights.. we’ve left to see Israeli army using dogs against our nonviolent settlers in the most vicious way. Which reminds us of what happened during the Segregation system here in the United States.

So the problem is very clear. Of course it is either two states or one state. But the reality is, What we are witnessing today with the passage of time is that people will be [left] with one or two alternatives. Either it’s a segregation apartheid system, or one democratic state system,. This is the choice we will all face unless some kind of a miracle happens and I don’t know what that miracle is.

Psychology may be about to debase its credibility as a scientific discipline. Some dude at the University of Virginia’s about to try to replicate every study published in three major psychology journals back in 2008. The popcorn’s in the microwave. Opening salvo:

“Ultimately it’s a waste of everyone’s time if I can’t replicate the effects,” he says. “Otherwise, what are we working on?

I feel like everyone’s been <3ing this TNC post on the opposition to racism as a rhetorical pose versus as an actual value (DeLong, Sullivan, LG&M among others), and it’s for good reason. Read it. And at least watch James Baldwin’s section of the video that kicks it off (starts at about 13 minutes in, and runs about 20, if I remember). Right now it seems to me to be the most powerful speech I’ve ever heard.

This NYT piece about the real-time socio-cultural dynamics resulting from the commodification of African tribal practices is provocative in what’s probably a good way. Even if not, it’s interesting and the writing is vivid. Teaser:

In the West we have a particular definition of authenticity and a mania for it as a standard for art, especially art that we envision as elemental, unmodern, unspoiled. We gauge genuineness in terms of age, rarity, uniqueness, history of use, motives for creation. But in Africa, as often as not, authentic is simply what works, socially and spiritually: for example, the way each Dogon tourist dance keeps a larger dance, and Dogon identity, alive.

What accounts for the more ambiguous outcomes of decriminalizing prostitution versus the unambiguously positive outcomes of decriminalizing drugs? In the case of prostitution, the legitimated commodity can suddenly demand expensive rights, supported by the power of the state, driving up the price of doing business compared to the still illegitimate competing commodities trafficked in illegally from abroad. At the same time, if you can decouple the sale from the identifiable-as-legit-or-not body of the prostitute (using the Internet), you’re a lot safer as a trafficker in the decriminalized jurisdiction — police investigators are disempowered as they need to procure some substantive reason that a given operation isn’t legit in an information void. This makes the decriminalized market an attractive hub for illegal traffickers with whose wears the legit, empowered, and fairly-paid prostitutes have to compete and often can’t. Here’s an NYT discussion of the topic.

Still, I think it’s a progressive step in a system in flux. Thoughts?

That’s all I got for now.

Happy friday, everyone!

Here’s another comic from the archives you may not find funny:

PS – Maybe the Red Sox just aren’t very good? (H-t Matt Eckel)

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“Aboriginal genome rewrites history of human migration”

By
Trevor Macomber
– September 23, 2011

…is the breathless headline from the Science section of The Telegraph today. In the article, we learn that

Genetic information extracted from the lock of hair, which was donated by a young Aboriginal man to a British anthropologist in the 1920s, suggests that instead of leaving Africa in one single migratory movement, humans departed in two separate waves.

[...]

Their remarkable findings, published in the journal Science, suggest that modern Aborigines moved out of Africa 24,000 years earlier than the humans who went on to form the populations of Asia and Europe, challenging current theories of a single phase of dispersal from Africa.

As it happens, I’ve finally gotten around to starting Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for years, and the chapter I just finished yesterday deals with none other than “theories of a single phase of dispersal from Africa” — specifically, its previously documented unlikelihood as illustrated by Alan Templeton’s 2002 study in Nature.

The article and accompanying graphic are heady stuff (see below), but the bottom line is that well-regarded theories promoting multiple African dispersals have existed for at least a decade. In Templeton’s specific conclusions, “The genetic impacts of Africa upon the entire human species is large because of at least three major expansions out of Africa.”

So, I guess, suck it Telegraph? (At least until Ben points out where I went wrong this time.)

"The model of recent human evolution shown in Fig. 1 is dominated by genetic interchange and a special role for Africa. I consider first genetic interchange. African and Eurasian populations were linked by recurrent gene flow, certainly over the last half a million years, and probably longer. Overlaid upon this gene-flow trellis are occasional major movements out of Africa and out of Asia that enhanced gene interchange through interbreeding. More recently, population expansions acted to extend the geographical range of the human species and to establish additional areas linked by gene flow. This model emphasizes that genetic interchange among human populations, facilitated both by gene flow and range expansions coupled with interbreeding, has been a major force in shaping the human species and its spatial pattern of genetic diversity."

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Can Somalia be saved?

By
Trevor Macomber
– September 22, 2011

For basically the most depressing shit you’ll read all year (and if it ain’t, you are reading some truly depressing shit on a regular basis — maybe mix in some Dave Barry once in awhile, okay, just to keep the noose at bay?), please don’t enjoy this NYT article about the imminent and probably unavoidable starvation of 750,000 Somalis by the end of the year.

The United Nations’ warnings could not be clearer. A drought-induced famine is steadily creeping across Somalia and tens of thousands of people have already died. The Islamist militant group the Shabab is blocking most aid agencies from accessing the areas it controls, and in the next few months three-quarters of a million people could run out of food, United Nations officials say.

Soon, the rains will start pounding down, but before any crops will grow, disease will bloom. Malaria, cholera, typhoid and measles will sweep through immune-suppressed populations, aid agencies say, killing countless malnourished people.

To say this is awful and tragic and inhuman is accurate, but also empty, because how can you really qualify the mass failure of a government, of a country, of a world that allows this to happen?

And yet, there is a frighteningly compelling — frightening because it is compelling — line of reasoning that says that, even if we could deliver instantaneous and comprehensive food aid to this population with no more than the push of a button, it would be remiss of us to do so, because facilitating an unsustainable paradigm of overpopulation will merely ensure a continuation in the cycle of starvation with no termination until the affected population eventually declines to match the resources available to support it. (Sorry. Didn’t mean to get on a rhyming “-ation” kick there in the middle.)

That said, even if I were 100 percent convinced by the argument summarized above (and elucidated in much more detail below), there is no way that I — nor, I imagine, most people — could refrain from pressing said magic button were it in my power to do so, because how can one human possibly allow 750,000 others — 7,500 others, 75 others — to starve to death if it is in his or her power to prevent it? But since the button is only hypothetical, while the tragedy it would temporarily prevent is very real, the question isn’t whether or not my heart would overrule my head (as noted, it would), but whether it should.

Enter Ishamel (specifically, Chapter 8, Part 5), where Daniel Quinn offers the previously described “frighteningly compelling line of reasoning” that it should not. I can’t do any better than to quote the passages in question, so I’ve embedded the appropriate Google Books section (starting with, “Given an expanding food supply”) below. Unfortunately, GB has redacted one of the relevant pages, so I’ve also provided the complete transcript. It’s 1,281 additional words that I’m asking you to read, but the moral struggle they provoke should provide you with plenty of…well, food for thought.

 

***

“Given an expanding food supply, any population will expand. This is true of any species, including the human. The Takers have been proving this here for ten thousand years. For ten thousand years they’ve been steadily increasing food production to feed an increased population, and every time they’ve done this, the population has increased still more.”

I sat there for a minute thinking. Then I said, “Mother Culture doesn’t agree.”

“Certainly not. I’m sure she disagrees most strenuously. What does she say?”

“She says it’s within our power to increase food production withoutincreasing our population.”

“To what end? Why increase food production?”

“To feed the millions who’re starving.”

“And as you feed them will you extract a promise that they will not reproduce?”

“Well . . . no, that’s not part of the plan.”

“So what will happen if you feed the starving millions?”

“They’ll reproduce and our population will increase.”

“Without fail. This is an experiment that has been performed in your culture annually for ten thousand years, with completely predictable results. Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population. Obviously it has to have this result, and to predict any other is simply to indulge in biological and mathematical fantasies.”

“Even so . . .” I thought some more. “Mother Culture says that, if it comes to that, birth control will solve the problem.”

“Yes. If you’re ever so foolish as to get into a conversation on this subject with some of your friends, you’ll find they heave a great sigh of relief when they remember to make this point. `Whew! Off the hook!’ It’s like the alcoholic who swears he’ll give up drink before it ruins his life. Global population control is always something that’s going to happen in the future. It was something that was going to happen in the future when you were three billion in 1960. Now, when you’re five billion, it’s still something that’s going to happen in the future.”

“True. Nevertheless, it could happen.”

“It could indeed—but not as long as you’re enacting this story. As long as you’re enacting this story, you will go on answering famine with increased food production. You’ve seen the ads for sending food to starving peoples around the world?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever seen ads for sending contraceptives?”

“No.”

“Never. Mother Culture talks out of both sides of her mouth on this issue. When you say to her population explosion she replies global population control, but when you say to her famine she repliesincreased food production. But as it happens, increased food production is an annual event and global population control is an event that never happens at all.”

“True.”

“Within your culture as a whole, there is in fact no significant thrust toward global population control. The point to see is that there neverwill be such a thrust so long as you’re enacting a story that says the gods made the world for man. For as long as you enact that story, Mother Culture will demand increased food production today—and promise population control tomorrow.”

“Yes, I can see that. But I have a question.”

“Proceed.”

“I know what Mother Culture says about famine. What do you say?”

“I? I say nothing, except that your species is not exempt from the biological realities that govern all other species.”

“But how does that apply to famine?”

“Famine isn’t unique to humans. All species are subject to it everywhere in the world. When the population of any species outstrips its food resources, that population declines until it’s once again in balance with its resources. Mother Culture says that humans should be exempt from that process, so when she finds a population that has outstripped its resources, she rushes in food from the outside, thus making it a certainty that there will be even more of them to starve in the next generation. Because the population is never allowed to decline to the point at which it can be supported by its own resources, famine becomes a chronic feature of their lives.”

“Yes. A few years ago I read a story in the paper about an ecologist who made the same point at some conference on hunger. Boy, did he get jumped on. He was practically accused of being a murderer.”

“Yes, I can imagine. His colleagues all over the world understand perfectly well what he was saying, but they have the good sense not to confront Mother Culture with it in the midst of her benevolence. If there are forty thousand people in an area that can only support thirty thousand, it’s no kindness to bring in food from the outside to maintain them at forty thousand. That just guarantees that the famine will continue.”

“True. But all the same, it’s hard just to sit by and let them starve.”

“This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler: `I will not let them starve. I will notlet the drought come. I will not let the river flood.’ It is the gods wholet these things, not you.”

“A valid point,” I said. “Even so I have one more question on this.” Ishmael nodded me on. “We increase food production in the U.S. tremendously every year, but our population growth is relatively slight. On the other hand, population growth is steepest in countries with poor agricultural production. This seems to contradict your correlation of food production with population growth.”

He shook his head in mild disgust. “The phenomenon as it’s observed is this: `Every increase in food production to feed an increased population is answered by another increase in population.’ This says nothing about where these increases occur.”

“I don’t get it.”

“An increase in food production in Nebraska doesn’t necessarily produce a population increase in Nebraska. It may produce a population increase somewhere in India or Africa.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Every increase in food production is answered by an increase in population somewhere. In other words, someone is consuming Nebraska’s surpluses—and if they weren’t, Nebraska’s farmers would stop producing those surpluses, pronto.”

“True,” I said, and spent a few moments in thought. “Are you suggesting that First World farmers are fueling the Third World population explosion?”

“Ultimately,” he said, “who else is there to fuel it?”

I sat there staring at him.

“You need to take a step back from the problem in order to see it in global perspective. At present there are five and a half billion of you here, and, though millions of you are starving, you’re producing enough food to feed six billion. And because you’re producing enough food for six billion, it’s a biological certainty that in three or four years there will be six billion of you. By that time, however (even though millions of you will still be starving), you’ll be producing enough food for six and a half billion—which means that in another three or four years there will be six and a half billion. But by that time you’ll be producing enough food for seven billion (even though millions of you will still be starving), which again means that in another three or four years there will be seven billion of you. In order to halt this process, you must face the fact that increasing food production doesn’t feed your hungry, it only fuels your population explosion.”

“I see that. But how do we stop increasing food production?”

“You do it the same way you stop destroying the ozone layer, the same way you stop cutting down the rain forests. If the will is there, the method will be found.”

Like I said: provocative.

(Incidentally, I officially recommend the entire book — this just happens to be the passage that caused me the most psychic pain in terms of how it conflicted with my natural inclinations and yet how drawn to it I was all the same.)

(Transcript via)

[Editor's note: When you navigate to the above link in the Chrome browser, it helpfully informs you that "This Page is an antiquarian - possibly outdated - usergenerated website brought to you by an archive. It was mirrored from Geocities in the end of october 2009. For any questions about this page contact the respective author. To report any mal content send URL to oocities[at]gmail[dot]com. For any questions concerning the archive visit our main page:OoCities.org.” That’s not really relevant to the post, but I thought I’d mention it.]

Update by Ben: I noted this in the comments, but thought I’d put it somewhere of higher prominence: I don’t think there’s any excuse for anyone who wants to seriously take up this line of argumentation to not get a vascectomy or tubectomy — relatively painless and humane medical procedures, especially compared to starving to death, although they should maybe consider that option for themselves too.

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Vice goes to the DRC (a.k.a. the rapiest place on earth)

By
Ben Nolan
– September 15, 2011

Only episode 1‘s up so far.

People were getting off on hating on the Vice travel docs after David Carr got all in the face of Shane Smith re: Smith’s comments about the MSM’s coverage of Liberia in that NYT movie that no one saw (“Page One“).

Transcription of the exchange stolen from here:

CARR: If you’re a CNN viewer, and you go, “Hmmm. I’m looking at human shit on the beach …”

SMITH: Well, I’ve got to tell you one thing: I’m a regular guy and I go to
these places and I go, “Okay, everyone talked to me about cannibalism, right?
Everyone talked about cannibalism.” Now I’m getting a lot of shit for talking
about cannibalism. Whatever. Everyone talked to me about cannibalism! …
That’s fucking crazy! So the actual — our audience goes, “That’s fucking
insane, like, that’s nuts!” And the New York Times, meanwhile, is writing about
surfing, and I’m sitting there going like, “You know what? I’m not going to
talk about surfing, I’m going to talk about cannibalism, because that fucks
me up.”

CARR: Just a sec, time out. Before you ever went there, we’ve had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide. Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do. So continue.

People seized on the pile-on opportunity to point out that there was at least one pretty major error in Smith’s TV’s Liberia doc‘s introduction (Smith offhandedly paints Samuel Doe as this tragic Allende-like figure, which is pretty phooey — dude was corrupt and repressive). Anyway, yeah, the fact-checkers shoulda nabbed that one, but who can afford fact-checkers these days? And really, it’s a point that’s pretty peripheral to what the Vice Guide to Liberia, I think, really contributes to the discourse, which is that it succeeds in making the present situation in Liberia real to bougie hipster-in-denial assholes like me.

Absolutely there’s a smugness to VBS’ reporters (to Smith in Liberia and North Korea, and to Suroosh Alvi in the DRC), but I can’t say it’s not, to a degree, earned, and actually humanizing. The insertion of ego — hearing the adrenaline/fear in the voice of someone who’s in the thick of it and who it’s clear has a sense of humour not dissimilar to that of VBS’ viewers/readers, except clearly brave in a way that makes you want to be (or wish you were) brave too — brings the situation home to VBS TV’s viewers in a way the Times’ cold reporting (which you might or might not think is proportional to the relative newsworthiness of the situation), I think, can’t. In fact, I’d bet that after you watched the Vice Guide to Liberia, you’d be far more likely to want (if not demand) more and better coverage of the situation in Africa from traditional publications like the Times, and having seen the Vice guide myself (obvs), I think that’s good. Does that make sense?

Whatever.

My point is that I like the Vice travel guides and am looking forward to seeing the next Congo segment whenever it ends up coming out and think you should be too.

***

Disclosure: Vice paid Tom for a review of Bon Iver’s latest that he contributed a couple months back. I don’t think that’s affected my judgment, but I guess that’s up to you to decide.

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“The Most Severe Humanitarian Emergency in the World”

By
Ben Nolan
– July 14, 2011

Well this is fucking makes-your-insides-gape horrible:

Abdi Aden, a former farmer who lived in Sakow town before the drought forced him to flee, said he lost an 8-year-old son after eight days of trekking.

“He tried to cry before he died, but he could not. He was so weak. He died peacefully from hunger,” he said. “I buried him by myself in a shallow ditch so hyenas could not eat him.”

On her way to Dadaab, Abdullahi said she walked with friends for three days before she and her children lagged behind. She saw around 20 children dead or unconscious abandoned on the roadside.

“I saw two elderly people on the road,” she said. “They cried out, ‘Ma’am, give us a helping hand.’ They wanted to sweet-talk me, but I said to them ‘I can’t help’ and moved on.

“You will feel kind only when you have something,” she said. “I wanted to give the little water I had to my children.”

Context:

Trying to escape starvation and East Africa’s unforgiving drought, hundreds of Somali children have been left for dead on the long, dusty journey to the world’s largest refugee camp.

UNICEF on Thursday called the drought and refugee crisis “the most severe humanitarian emergency in the world.” The international Red Cross signaled “great alarm” this week at the nutritional state of Somali children.

[...]

The U.N. expects at least 10 million people will need food aid, and a U.S. aid official said he believes the situation in Ethiopia is even worse than the government acknowledges.

The Ethiopian government said that 4.5 million people need food aid there, 40 percent more than last year. Jason Frasier, mission director of USAID in Ethiopia, the U.S. government aid arm, suggested that Ethiopia might even be undercounting those who need help.

Aid agencies have appealed for more than $100 million in emergency funding while warning of dire consequences if help does not arrive.

You can donate to the Red Cross here.

Some perspective on the present (and likely future) global politics of food, and a picture:

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In case you missed it, the world has a new country

By
Trevor Macomber
– July 11, 2011

From MSNBC last Friday:

As one of the thousands of “lost boys of Sudan,” Mawut Mayen remembers eating mud, hiding from death squads and watching a friend die under an acacia tree after civil war invaded his life, destroyed his village and sent him on an extraordinary exodus from his war-torn homeland.

On Saturday, more than two decades later and half the world away, he will watch with equal measures of hope and trepidation as his homeland formally declares its independence from the north, becoming the Republic of South Sudan.

Don’t bother prepping your passports, however; it’s not exactly ready for tourists yet. Shit, it’s not even ready for citizens:

Lise Grande, who leads the U.N.’s humanitarian operations in South Sudan, told the Associated Press this week that the region is “one of the most underdeveloped on the planet.” Only 15 percent of the population can read. Most live on a $1 a day. Education and health facilities are sorely inadequate.

If you’re lacking in perspective on the situation — well, obviously you’ve got The Google and The Wik’pedia, but if you’re lacking in poetry on the situation, I can only urge the hell out of you to pick up a copy of What Is the What by Dave Eggers and settle in for 560 pages detailing one of the most grueling, astonishing, hilarious, and heartbreaking stories you’ll ever encounter.

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Who says dinosaurs don’t still roam the earth?

By
Trevor Macomber
– July 7, 2011

(via)

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Probably the Worst Place in the World

By
Ben Nolan
– May 12, 2011

Al Jazeera:

More than 1,100 women are raped every day in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), making sexual violence against women 26 times more common than previously thought, a study has concluded.

More than 400,000 women and girls between the ages of 15 to 49 were raped in the war-ravaged country in central Africa during a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007, according to the study published in the American Journal of Public Health on Wednesday.

That is 26 times more than the 15,000 women that the United Nations has reported were raped there during the same 12 months.