Trying to survive under Robert Mugabe: When an elephant dies of old age in a Zimbabwe national park, hundreds of starving villagers fight and stab each other for its meat:
Photographer David Chancellor said: ‘Just after dawn a villager spotted the carcass as he passed on a bicycle.
‘It was in the middle of nowhere, but within 15 minutes hundreds of people had arrived from all directions.
‘The women formed a ring around the elephant and the men stood inside, fighting and stabbing each other to get to the meat.’
He added: ‘The meat was taken back to homes. Some was eaten immediately but most was dried on washing lines and stored to eat later.
‘There were celebrations in the surrounding villages for the next two nights.’
Look at the photo. This is what Zimbabweans should do with Mugabe.
You mean Barack Obama isn’t getting this one? Did he miss the nomination deadline?
The backers of a $5 million prize celebrating good governance in Africa said Monday they cannot find anyone to award this year.
The Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership brings the winner $5 million over 10 years and $200,000 annually for life thereafter.
The prize-giving committee could not select a winner after considering “some credible candidates,” said former Botswana President Ketumile Masire, a board member of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.
Seriously speaking, though, if they mean their prize as an incentive for African rulers to try something better than the traditional African leadership model of plundering their own countries, they’ll have to come up with much more than 5$ million over ten years. The traditional African leadership style is vastly more profitable than that.
The study found that one in 10 men said they had been raped by other men. Some 3% of the men interviewed said they had coerced a man or a boy into sex.
It would be interesting to see how many South African women have been raped at least once in their lives. It is likely to be a horrifying number, judging by this bit of statistics:
One in three of the 4,000 women questioned by CIET Africa, non-governmental organisation, said they had been raped in the past year.
More: Child rape is ”the national sport” in South Africa, with one in four girls and one in five boys at risk of being raped before the age of 16.
I am sure decades of apartheid are to blame for this.
African author and economist Dambisa Moyo on ending western aid to Africa now, what Bono and Geldoff don’t get, and the deadening of African independence and entrepreneurship.
Dambisa Moyo’s prescription for economic sustainability in Africa—which includes cutting off all aid within five years—might seem insane if the statistics weren’t so grim: despite one trillion dollars in western aid over the past sixty years, the economic lot of the average African has only gotten worse. Most Africans now live on one dollar per day, and sub-Saharan Africa remains the poorest region in the world. Despite a deluge of aid between the years of 1970 and 1998, poverty on the continent skyrocketed from 11 percent of the population to 66 percent, which means over six hundred million Africans are now impoverished. The average African can only expect to live to be about fifty, and half the continent’s citizens are under the age of fifteen. In addition to poverty, AIDS, corruption (half the continent is still under un-democratic rule), civil war, and genocide ravage the continent. Indeed, Africa seems constantly embroiled in a steady stream of horrors, the likes of which are not seen anywhere else on the planet. Why? Are Africans innately different from the rest of us? Nonsense, says Moyo. She blames aid.
Giving people money for decades without any conditions is no way to help them find their own feet. It’s a great way to prop up tyrants, though. Many interesting things in this interview.
Authorities in Gambia have rounded up about 1,000 people and forced them to drink hallucinogens in a witch-hunting campaign that is terrorizing the tiny West African country, an international rights group said Wednesday.
Amnesty International called on the government of President Yahya Jammeh, who seized power in a 1994 coup and has claimed he can cure AIDS, to halt the campaign and bring those responsible to justice.
Authorities began inviting “witch doctors,” who combat witches, to come from nearby Guinea soon after the death earlier this year of the president’s aunt. Jammeh “reportedly believes that witchcraft was used in her death,” the London-based rights group said.
Since then, “witch doctors” — accompanied by police, soldiers, intelligence agents and Jammeh’s personal guards — have forcibly taken about 1,000 alleged witches from their villages and spirited them to secret locations, Amnesty said. About 300 of them were taken to Jammeh’s personal farm in his native Kanilai, east of the capital, the group said.
Victims are being “forced to drink unknown substances that cause them to hallucinate and behave erratically,” the group said in a statement. “Many are then forced to confess to being a witch. In some cases, they are also severely beaten, almost to the point of death.”
The mysterious liquid prompted serious kidney problems among many, and two people are known to have died after being subjected to the ordeal, Amnesty said.
In 2007, Jammeh declared he had discovered a cure for AIDS and began treating patients inside the presidential palace, using herbs and incantations. His dictatorial regime has cracked down harshly on critics, especially the press.
On March 8, authorities arrested Halifa Sallah, who has written about the “witch doctors” for the main opposition newspaper, Foroyya. Sallah, who was a presidential candidate in 2006, has since been charged with sedition and spying, Amnesty said.
I wonder if one hundred, or even one thousand, years from now, this will still be the kind of news one expects to hear from Africa.
Preferably children, before their global-warming footprint goes out of hand. Children like Bakouma Kpatekatola from Togo, who was 14 when he died of malaria last year:
Bakouma was one of approximately one million people who died of malaria last year. Almost all of them were like him: poor, young, and African. And almost all of those deaths could have been prevented through vaccines, insecticide-treated netting, and (gasp) DDT spraying. Empirical research supports the indoor residual spraying (IRS) of DDT as not only safe, but the most economical and effective method for malaria prevention. For example, a 1996 DDT ban in South Africa, pushed by environmental groups, led to a malaria epidemic with over 60,000 cases reported in 2000. After DDT spraying resumed in 2001, infections dropped 80% in one year. Facing a mounting death toll across Africa the World Heath Organization and USAID have recently lent support to IRS using DDT, but its adoption continues to be opposed by environmental extremists relying on shoddy science and fearmongering.
Read the rest. Bakouma was a child Iowahawk’s family sponsored for several years.
That’s the word that invariably springs to mind when one reads about 21st-century atrocities such as these:
BABIES’ skulls dashed against rocks; attempts to twist off the heads of toddlers. Girls, their mothers and grandmothers (and sometimes male relatives too) raped at knife- or gunpoint, the weapons then used to inflict mutilation. Women hauled off to camps or just tied to trees and gang-raped. Thousands of children, some as young as nine, snatched or recruited by armed gangs (or regular forces) and made into drug-crazed killers, the girls among them often serially abused or taken by commanders as “wives”.
Such are the horrors reported from some recent conflict zones.
Salma Hayek breastfeeds a stranger's hungry baby in Sierra Leone
Salma Hayek was on a UNICEF mission to Sierra Leone, and one of the women she met had a malnourished one-week-old son who was not getting any milk – so she took the baby and began breastfeeding him in front of rolling ABC cameras. Here is the video:
This, of course, is a good opportunity to post the “Salma Hayek on Letterman telling about asking God to give her some breasts” video:
THE HAGUE, Netherlands – A former child soldier calmly recalled in court Tuesday that he killed and mutilated people during a battle at a church school in eastern Congo.
The young man testified at the International Criminal Court that he was abducted while on his way home from school and sent to brutal military training camps run by militia leader Thomas Lubanga. He was about 11 at the time, he told a three-judge panel.
Lubanga, founder and former leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots political movement and its armed wing, has pleaded innocent to charges of recruiting and using child soldiers in tribal conflicts in 2002-2003.
The witness gave a chillingly matter-of-fact account of a battle with fighters from the rival Lendu tribe near a missionary school.
“We went as far as the mission. At the mission we killed those who were there, also the priests,” he said through an interpreter.
“We captured some of them, took them hostage,” he added. “We cut their mouths off. We would destroy their faces. That’s what the Lendu did too.”
Even people like Bob Geldof and that Irish guy in pink shades acknowledge that the Bush Administration has saved millions of lives in Africa. And now, a week before W. leaves, the Associated Press finally feels free to report it.
“The administration and Bush himself deserve a lot more credit than they received for getting this job done,” says Josh Ruxin, assistant professor of public health at Columbia University.
In 2005, Mugabe nationalized Zimbabwe’s urban water and sewerage services. The predictable result: water crisis.
In the townships, the water turns in a deadly cycle. Months without it mean that toilets are blocked, leading to people defecating in the open, everywhere, at night. At the same time, the pressure of the trapped sewage is enough to flip open cast-iron manhole covers and spew the contents through the streets, into people’s yards. The stench of faeces is all-pervasive.
When Mugabe is finally ousted, I hope he’ll be swinging from the highest tree in Harare. More probably though, some other African dictator will give him refuge. There, he’ll be able to call himself president in exile, with enough countries recognizing him as such.
