Africa – wanderwarbler

April 20, 2023May 17, 2023

Johannesburg: Dance Against The Machine

The sky is heavy. Dark clouds threaten to break any second. Unfazed, the dancers are out on the street, ressed in identical lose-fitting pants and smart button shirts. Their impeccably white high-top Converse will soon be caked with the blush red mud of the African soil. Parapara! – one pair of feet stomps the ground, a brisk command for the other dancers to break into a fast, intricate footwork. Their arms move in synchronous precision, as they twist and turn and kick and high jump, their rubber legs flying, their hands shooting through the air like bullets, signalling a secret code. The dancers whistle and shout, as they pound the ground like angry tap dancers, or drag their feet, as if trying to etch a message into the soil, as if trying to leave a trace.

It’s a late summer afternoon in Tembisa, Johannesburg’s 2nd largest township, and one of the largest in the world. The name, in isiZulu, means hope, or promise, but for her inhabitants, Tembisa holds little promise: Unemployment rate is as high as the druggies at the street corners. Where the streets are paved, they’re potholed, pitfalls for the little schoolchildren in short olive skirts and striped ties. There are stinking heaps of garbage sitting next to the makeshift stalls of the street vendors, women in brightly coloured headscarves waiting stoically by their high piles of mangoes, and onions in red net bags, as their chickens cackle noisily from their cages. All around, the squatters’ corrugated iron- and cardboard shacks keep sprouting, growing into the football fields and along the busy high-way to Johannesburg. One of the battered white omnibuses, the perilous but only means of public transport, stops with a jolt, spitting out black billows of fumes. It brings home Johannesburg’s workforce, tired men and women, who live in the tiny, single-story row houses with barred windows and barbed wire hanging like tinsel from the roofs and walls. They walk home slowly, their faces worn and worried.

The dancers, though, look focused and determined. They are in their thirties, about as old as the rainbow nation, the democratic republic of South Africa. They weren’t around when their parents and grandparents fought the apartheid regime for freedom and equality. They weren’t around when their forefathers were robbed of their lands and cultures. The township is all they know, all they have. They call their dance Pantsula – a slang word meaning to waggle like a duck, a metaphor for the demeanour of a gangster. And they call themselves Amapantsula, gangsters, even though dancing is the only thing that saves them from a career in crime.

Dancing is their cultural heritage. Dancing is what their parents and grandparents and grand grandparents did. Silenced, they danced to express themselves, neglected, they danced to re-affirm themselves, oppressed, they danced to keep their faith as their world kept crumbling. They danced to survive against all odds.

Pantsula is a living socio-political document, the expression of black identity in the township. It is a dance of resistance. Counterculture, rooted in African tribal songs and dances, but catalysed by the experience of systematic oppression.

In the 19th century, overburdening taxation and segregation laws of the British colonial administration robbed the native African population of any means of self-sustenance and forced them into labour in their gold and diamond mines. Dispossessed of their land, and resettled in overcrowded workers’ compounds, music and dance were the only creative or emotional outlets. The experience and hardship of migratory work changed the traditional songs and dances. The sung epics of the Sotho, or the expressive Zulu dances soon recounted the misery of the migratory worker. In the compounds, the African working-class hero was born, sung about even on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1925 Langston Hughes wrote his poem about the Witerwatersrand goldmine In the Johannesburg Mines:

In the Johannesburg Mines

There are 240,000

Native Africans working. What kind of poem

Would you

Make out of that?

240,000 natives

Working in the

Johannesburg mines.

The natives made more than a poem out of that. They made music. In the slums andtownships that grew around the mines as more and more men and women arrived, one- stringed guitars were fashioned from empty cases of cooking oil; rusty battered barrels served as drums, and empty bottles as flutes. The townships were flooded with music, the late Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera wrote, because “…with music they soar higher than the clouds, sink deeper than stones in water.”

Despite the squalor, the townships were creative melting pots, giving birth to the first vernacular music styles, marabi, (“junk”) and later kwela (“get up!”), from the wedding of traditional African and Western music – not their oppressor’s music though, but the song and dance of Afro-America.

Black American music arrived in Southern Africa from the first half of 19th century on, in the form of touring minstrel shows and gospel choirs, later with radio and printed sheet music, and finally records. From their first encounters with ragtime, tap dancing, and harmonic singing, Africans were infatuated with black American culture. They admired black Americans for their confidence and their styling, their relative autonomy. But there was also a strong sense of solidarity and identification, as an uprooted and oppressed people, but most importantly, as Africans. Although Afro-American music hails from Western-African traditions, which rely more heavily on drums and poly/rhythms than the more voice and dance-centred Southern African traditions, the arrival of Black American culture was a seed falling on fertile ground; it was its homeland.

That the up-rooting and replanting of Africans came with their loss of cultural heritage, and most importantly their music and dance tradition, was never unintended. Music and dance, which governed every aspect of African life, from daily work chores to ceremonies, was not only an expression of humanity, but it bestowed humanity. The term Bantu – human in the African languages – comprises also the moral aspects of being human, like solidarity, empathy, respect. It was hence what colonizers needed to erase, if they wanted to exploit “natives” as workforce.

Africans were characterized as uncivilized pagans in need of education and saving. Missionary schools (British as well as American) and various Christian churches provided African children with Western clothes, Western education, Western values and beliefs. Not surprisingly, this drove a wedge between the rural Africans, who proudly stuck to their tribal values and mores, and the Westernized, missionary- educated Africans, who strove towards self-improvement, self-realization and personal advancement. The two groups, the new working class, and the trained lawyers and doctors, the new a middle class, eyed each other with growing suspicion. The workers who entertained themselves in the beer halls, with their “marabi” music, were frowned upon by the self-declared “elite,” who had acquired a taste for classical music and spiritual hymns. It was only in their growing discrimination, that they were equal. Restrictive segregation laws and measures like curfews, prohibition, and strict monitoring, subjected all black people alike. Then a miracle happened: Sophiatown.

Dancer Bhanzela Masango in Sophiatown styling — Dancer Bhanzela Masango in Sophiatown outfit

In the freehold Johannesburg suburb, the two classes united. Shunned by whites due its poor drainage and its vicinity to a municipal sewage facility, Shophiatown was home to a fast-growing racially mixed but predominantly black population. Although notorious for its violence, and poverty, it was a place of relative freedom, autonomy, and neighbourly solidarity. Given its racial and social diversity, Sophiatown was as a cultural and political hothouse leading to the renaissance of black African identity. And to Pantsula.

In so-called shebeens, illegal liquor lounges, to the sound of Marabi-Jazz, as it was now called, politics were discussed across social lines, giving rise to new political consciousness. With the help of Langston Hughes, via letters from Harlem, an African intellectual and literary scene flourished. Magazines catered to a black audience, most notably Drum magazine. With its sassy signature style, it featured investigative journalism that denounced the exploitation of black workers in apartheid South Africa, but, maybe even more importantly, it glorified Sophiatown. In the photos of German photographer Jürgen Schadefeld, Sophiatown was a bubbling, sprawling city. Men were cool cats in Borsalino-hats, the dancers at the many dance halls were caught airborne, taps sparkling on shiny patent leather shoes. The singers, songbirds, were sultry and glamorous like Lena Horne.

Although extremely violent, gangs often played the role of Robin Hoods in the tightly- knit communities. They had distinguished tastes in fashion, dressing in Cab Calloway style zoot suits that were all the rage, and music. Particular gangs protected particular orchestras or bands. Most performers were either affiliated to gangs, like Miriam Makeba, or gun-toting gangsters themselves.

Music flourished. Jazz bands and orchestras imitated the sound of Duke Ellington and Count Basie to the T, while tappers and Lindy Hoppers perfected the routines of the Nicholas Brothers or Fred Astaire, in their marabi way.

A dress with Miriam Makeba’s iconic DRUM cover

If Sophiatown didn’t live up to the glitter, its image gave the black urban Africans something to be proud of: an identity and political consciousness. In the Shebeens and dancehalls, where Nelson Mandela clinked glasses with Miriam Makeba, the Anti- apartheid movement was born. To drink and dance was an act of civil resistance.

By the end of the 1950s, the apartheid government put an end to the socio-political utopia that was Sophiatown. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, Sophiatown bulldozed, and its more than 70,000 inhabitants resettled in townships. Diversity had proved to be threat to totalitarianism, so people were resettled according to their ethnicity, even though in African culture, where people organized their lives along kinship, not race, this had never played a role.

Now there were streets of identical four room houses reserved for Zulu, others for Xhosa and so on. Estranged, the Africans were not only robbed of their past and their newly gained identity, but of their future, as the Bantu Education Act system came into effect: Afrikaans, which black Africans rarely spoke, was legally instated. It was a policy of active de-skilling of the black population. As pupils didn’t understand their teachers anymore, they were rendered fit for menial work as nothing else. Any organizations were monitored and regulated, and as gatherings were forbidden, dancing, the very expression of humanity, pushed into the underground.

“Now when we grouped, the police would beat us. Now when we make Pantsula, they think we are just there for happiness.” Daniel Mokubung says in a documentary about Pantsula. “It’s where we started talking about our lives. It’s not only dancing, it’s where we start to know politics.”

Dancer Msindo Lingo in his home, which serves also as his atelier.

In the 1960s, at the height of the oppression, when tap shoes fell silent, Pantsula took over. The movement didn’t stop, only the shoes changed.

In the 1980s, an international boycott isolated South Africa, but American Hip Hop reached the country on contraband tapes. To the lo-fi sound from rattling boomboxes, the dancers in the townships recreated their style. “You had to respond to the political oppression in creative ways, so that you can have dignity.” Pantsula Sicelo Malume, who danced in the 1980s, says. Politically active musicians like Miriam Makeba were barred, and censorship rendered South African music so anodyne, they called it Bubblegum Music. Pantsula, though, got edgier.

As the death toll rose and the Anti-apartheid struggle turned increasingly violent, the steps quickened. The moves gained a new percussive quality, or fierce abruptness, as if the body was barely able to contain its forces. So was the country. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released. The days of the apartheid regime were counted.

Redefinition: Dancer Msindo Lingo creates art from discarded soda cans, and recreates Tembisa, the township built by the oppressor, as art.

Now, thirty years after the formal end of apartheid, Pantsula is about carving out a niche in a world that doesn’t hold much in store for those who still suffer from economic discrimination. Since dancing and drinking is no longer an offense, Pantsula has lost its political charge. Many young dancers regard it as a way out of misery. But if they admire American gangsta rap, they have none of the cool nonchalance of Snoop Doggy Dog or Jay Z. The amapantsula rehearse with extreme discipline, matching the military drill of a Russian Ballet school. They dream of an international career – a dream that hardly ever comes true, even though in the past ten years, Pantsula has reached a broader public. TV shows like South Africa Got Talent, frequently feature Pantsula, as did Beyonce in her video to “Girls run the world.”

Pantsula as heritage. The next generation waiting in the wings.

“If we were 20 or 30 in the 1970s and 1980s we would have been using everything we had to fight Apartheid… but now we have the freedom and space to do what we want with our talent and we have the ability to really manifest our dreams…” Poetess Lebogang Masile says, referring to South Africa’s post apartheid youth, dubbed the “Freedom children”. “If our parents fought for freedom, we fight for identity,” Pantsula dancer Malume says.

With the commercialisation of rap, the word township has recently got a sexy ring to it. Media like MagY and youth radio stations, catering to the freedom children, showcase “Ghetto superstars” in glossy pictures and high-end video productions. Local fashion brands like Loxion Kulcha (a malapropism of Location Culture, with location being another term for township) sell high-priced township fashion and converse sneakers to the hipsters in the gentrified neighbourhoods of Johannesburg. But their paying costumers rarely live in the townships.

In Tembisa, far from the craft gin bars and vegan coffee shops of Johannesburg, Pantsula is more than shoes and fashion. It is pride, it is identity. It is hope in a hopeless place. To dance is to be alive, to dance is to be human. Parapara! – the clouds break, and the potholes turn into puddle. The red mud splashes from the shoes of school children as they dash home, and from the flat tyre of an omnibus that got stuck, and from the dancers’ feet, as they keep stomping and whirling, skipping and sliding. The rain falls on fertile ground.

November 24, 2022January 22, 2023

Zimbabwe: Exclosure

It’s been seven years since Cecil’s death. The handsome, black-maned lion was shot right outside his home, Hwange National Park in Western Zimbabwe, by a trophy hunting American tourist. The dentist from Minnesota had paid USD 50,000 for the shooting rights. His action was hence legal under Zimbabwean law, however he had paid his helpers to use an elephant carcass to lure the lion from a protected area into a hunting concession.

Cecil’s agony lasted for well over twelve hours. The circumstances of this death could later be minutely reconstructed as he was collared and named as part of a research programme. Aside from the inhumane aspect of Cecil’s unnecessarily painful death due to the inexpert use of bow and arrow, his killing caused an uproar. The act of a rich American so nonchalantly shooting an African animal strongly echoed the not so long-gone days of colonialism.

It was, however, under colonial administration that Hwange National Park was established, namely in 1928, when present day Zimbabwe was the British colony Southern Rhodesia. Over the years Hwange has grown in the country’s largest national park, comprising of a variety of landscapes from dense teak and mopane forests to white Kalahari sands and golden savannas. It’s raw and diverse African landscape, as the safari marketing slogan goes. Hwange is also one of the best managed parks in the world, running various research, educational and conservancy projects. It is a place for endangered species to thrive.

The idea behind the park, though, was far from idealistic. First and foremost, a national park promised huge revenues from tourism to the colonial government. Wildlife conservancy was the means, a fringe benefit. But it was much more than a collateral damage that the establishment of the national park led to the near extinction of a people that like the lions had roamed the land for millennia; a people that mastered the use of bow and arrow, and who were able to turn themselves into lions: the Tjwao, the bushmen of Zimbabwe.

If not physically, then legally, a National Park is a fenced-off area. The aim is not to lock in the wilderness, but to keep the rest of the world out, so the land appears pristine and raw, untouched by human hand: a glimpse of the world as God had created it. However, the land between the Zambezi river in the North, the train tracks to Victoria Falls in the East, and the Kalahari desert in the South-West, is by no means untouched by human hand.

In 1889, Queen Victoria of England authorized the adventurer Cecil Rhodes to economically explore and subsequently administer the lands North of the British Cape Colony. By this time, 35 year-old Cecil was already a diamond magnate, having made his fortune in South Africa. Now he showed great interest in the teak forests, as teak was a sturdy wood needed for the building of fast growing railroad tracks through Africa, as well as in the ivory urgently needed to quench the high demand of upright pianos in the US; Also, the land was rich in coal, another resource the west needed to fire the steam engines of the ongoing industrial revolution promised . He set out immediately.

First, he tricked the local Madebele – a belligerent Bantu tribe that had settled in this region for generations – into granting them the rights to the natural resources. The naturally illiterate Madebele signed the British contracts, foolishly trusting the oral promises of the Rhodes’ agents. Then, under the pretext of hence broken promises, his rifle-savvy British South Africa Company battled them in the First Madebele War, which resulted in the Africans’ defeat. Subsequently, he consigned the Madebele as workers to build a railroad to connect the teak forests in the South with the coal mines in the North. Rhodes meant business indeed.

By the time of his early death, in 1902, the teak forests were cleared to the extent that they wouldn’t regenerate on their own, and the sandy soil wasn’t fit for agriculture, or husbandry, due to the Tsetse fly. On top, not only were the elephants starkly decimated, but all wildlife had been hunted to near extinction. The British considered hunting a noble sport, and killed predators as vermin, and kudus and giraffes and impalas as trophies. To reserve the remaining game for themselves, and for lack of better use of the sandy and dry soil, they turned the area into a private Game Reserve.

The Tjwao bushmen had foraged and hunted in these dry and sandy lands since the beginning of humankind, as archaeological evidence from the Old Stone Age suggests. Their life style, as that of other San (Bushmen) groups all over Southern Africa, was in complete harmony with nature. Their diet consisted primarily of foraged berries and roots, their game hunts were ritualized hunts that lasted for days on end – or longer. Their settlements were temporary, which enabled them to follow migrating game, as well as the rains. This flexibility was a valuable asset in a region so close to the Kalahari desert, a land prone to droughts and climate uncertainty. In their nomadism, they left no traces, no evidence of their presence. aside from carvings and cave paintings. They were invisible, blending into their surrounding.

Most fascinating about the Tjwao and other bushmen cultures though, was their understanding of the relationship between the natural world and themselves. They lived in the truest sense of the word inseparable from nature. All the landscape around them was considered alive, every boulder, every animal once was a human creature, or was inhabited by the spirits of the dead, or those yet to be born. Should the need arise, the Tjwao were also able to turn themselves into animals, into a kudu if they hunted one, or into an ostrich, or a lion.

“My aunt turned herself into a lioness. She sought for us, as she wanted to see whether we were still comfortable where we lived. She, when she had smelt our houses’ scent, she passed in front of us, she roared like a lioness because she wished that we should hear her, that it was she who had come seeking for us.” (from “Stories that float from afar” Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa)

The Tjwao lived outside the confinements of time and their own physical bodies, but immersed into their land, their identities inseparable from the natural world around them.

*^{young lioness – Cecil’s granddaughter}*

By the turn of the 20th century, when the white settlers and Cecil Rhodes arrived, Tjwao families lived in scattered groups in what is now Hwange National Park. As Rhodes’ administration claimed the land, they relocated the locals to so-called Native Reserves. This was done on the legal basis of the Game and Fish Preservation Act of 1929. The British blamed the Tjwao for “poaching,” and the sudden loss of wildlife, which of course was irrational, given that the Tjwao had lived in these lands for thousands of years without decimating the wild animals, nor the trees. Rather, Cecil Rhodes had a hidden agenda; he considered the natives barbarians and thought that the sooner the Anglo Saxons subjugated the governed the continent, the better for the human race. It was, he said, their obligation. In a letter from 1888 he wrote:

“I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence.”

Although not the world’s first National Park, Hangwe was hence the first to evict indigenous inhabitants.

In the years to follow the expulsion, during the liberation struggle and after declaration of independence of the state of Zimbabwe, in 1980, the situation for the Tjwao didn’t improve. As a people who didn’t fit in with neither the Bantu societies, let alone the imperialistic Europeans, they were caught in the middle, victims of violence by the hands of the colonial forces as well as, post 1980, by the red berets, the notoriously brutal Zimbabwe Military Police. They were also victims of cultural ghosting. Unrecognized as an indigenous people, in the native reserves, their history and their culture were forgotten. Their homesteads in the Tholotso district south of Hwange National Park is the poorest district of Zimbabwe, their political representation not worth mentioning, their income the lowest in Zimbabwe due to their low literacy rate and lack of higher education.

The Tjwao language, which has no writing, is destined to die out, spoken by only a handful of people of advanced age. The young, who have never been to Hwange National Park, don’t understand it. They mostly speak Ndebele, the prevailing language in the region, and dream of a different future, where their children at least get better education and can find a better life, in Zimbabwe or abroad.

Only the old still dream of returning to their ancestors’ land, where their forefathers lay buried, the land that defined them as a people, and as persons. They still feel the phantom pain from missing the land from which they were once inseparable. To venture into the National Park, even only for foraging for their traditional foods (hunting is out of question within the confines of the park), they need to apply for a license, a bureaucratic obstacle they mostly fail, or are too scared too attempt, or are denied anyway.

Today, the number of Tjwao living in the homesteads surrounding Hwange is estimated to be around 1500 people. There are fewer Tjwao in Africa, than there are lions.

*^{Mopane worm – traditional Tjwao food}*

Lions are an endangered species, as are wild dogs and cheetahs and giraffes, who all live in large numbers in Hwange National Park. In its wildlife conservation efforts of Hwange National Park is laudable. Situated in a dry region that has no rivers and waterbodies, the park management has since the 1930s installed 103 boreholes, first run by wind wheels, then by diesel generators and presently by solar power, to provide the large mammals with water. Without these artificial waterholes, the many large animals, and with them the lions and other predators, would have long died. This concerns especially the elephants, whose population has exploded since the establishment of the park, from ca. 1,500 elephants in 1920 to ca. 45,000 in 2020.

The sight of many playfully entangled trumps, of happy baby elephants as they splash in the waters against the tangerine African sunset is enlightening to the eyes of the paying visitor – affluent Americans and Europeans. The sparkling reflection of the sunbeams on the solar panels does not diminish their joy. Nor does the presence of rangers managing the waterholes or patrolling for poachers. For these licensed rangers, who are highly skilled in tracking and nature conservation, the National Park is not simply a job, or an income, but their love for wild life is evident – and contagious. Hangwe is not the raw African landscape as the marketing slogan goes; it is land carefully managed and lovingly cared for. As it was before it became a National Park, and before Cecil Rhodes ever set foot on the land that is holy to the Tjwao.

That Tjwao aren’t back to the land that complements them in their identity, that their lives have not been cared for, but falsely sacrificed for the lives of lions and elephants, is incomprehensible; it’s another wrong doing of Cecil Rhodes that should be righted before it’s too late, before their culture has vanished into oblivion.

Unlike his namesake, Cecil the lion was an old man at the time of his death. In the run of his long life he had fathered many new generations. His wives, his daughters and sons, and even his grandchildren are the lions that today hunt in Hangwe National Park and who carry with them the spirits of Africa, of those passed, of those yet to be born.

January 15, 2022January 18, 2022

Namibia/Botswana: The Age of Loneliness

Humanity arose from the African savannas. As frequent lightning struck and set the grasslands in flames, homo erectus, a split-off from the ape lineage, learned how to control fire. The easily digestible calories from cooked meat were a tremendous advantage over competing species, like the chimpanzees and bonobos. Homo erectus started walking on their hind legs, which freed their front legs to carry weapons, and bounty, and their off-spring on the run. With their brain size enlarged, around 200,000 years ago, homo erectus evolved into homo sapiens. Into humans. Us. a lucky accident of primate evolution.

Like other large mammals of the savanna, the apes, wild dogs, elephants, and lions, early humans lived in highly organized societies marked by collaboration and division of labour. But at night, only the humans sat around the fire, and talked, and told each other stories. We know all this, because there are still some around who live very much like the first humans in Southern Africa: the /Xam, the Ju/’hoansi, the !Ko, the Nharo, the Heixom, the G/wi and other nomadic tribes more commonly known as San, or Bushmen. Hunters and gatherers who once travelled long distances, they are now confined to a small territory in the Kalahari desert of Namibia and Botswana, struggling to hold on to their ancient lifestyle, in tightly knit communities without chiefs or religious leaders, with a view of the world where everything is possessed by divine spirit. The San are what we once were, in the Garden Of Eden, before the Fall.

But of course, the savanna with its fierce competition among predators, with bushfires and torrential rains, never was a biblical garden Eden. And of course the San didn’t live in constant enchantment by the sprites of nature. Rather, they have been living in a state of respectfulness – granting animals the same rights as themselves, valuing nature as much as their culture; outsmarting predators and prey, knowledgeable of roots and grasses, savants of the changing skies. Quite unsentimentally, theirs was, or is, a lifestyle perfectly adapted to their environment, to the circumstance and age that age that brought about us humans: the Holocene, the Age of Mammals, which followed the Mesozoic Era, the Age of Dinosaurs. If ever there was a Garden of Eden, it was not a place, but a manner of living.

Obviously, we don’t live in this Garden of Eden anymore, but on a planet transformed by human activity, in a new age called Anthropocene. Why were we expelled from our garden Eden? Was it the original sin, as the bible says, or was it rather the combination of swift technological progress with the worst of human nature, as biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson said?

Edward O. Wilson, regarded the greatest biologist and one of the most influential scientists of the 20^th century, has in his lifetime witnessed the so called sixth extinction, the alarming rate of extinction of species in the past fifty years. Half of the Earth’s living creatures, from animals and insects, are estimated to have been lost since 1971.

Biodiversity as a whole forms a shield protecting each of the species that together compose it, ourselves included. What will happen if, in addition to the species already extinguished by human activity, say, 10 percent of those remaining are taken away? Or 50 percent? Or 90 percent? As more and more species vanish or drop to near extinction, the rate of extinction of the survivors accelerates…. As extinction mounts, biodiversity reaches a dipping point at which the ecosystem collapses, Wilson wrote in 2016

Humanity as a species is perfectly adapted to excel in the Holocene, the biosphere and biodiversity of the past 200,000 years. In the Anthropocene, though, we find ourselves as vulnerable and helpless as we would have been in the Mesozoic period: an evolutionary cul-de-sac, easy to prey to a T.Rex called rising sea levels, or draughts and deluges, shortness of food, and water, and oxygen.

*Endangered species: There are less than 6000 wild dogs living in the wild.*

Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground, so the bible said. Consequently, there are very few places on this world left intact, free from human impact. Farmland and pastures displace natural forests and habitats. Oceans are void of fish, as air pollution blankets the planet, plastic swamps the waters, and debris lies scattered in the remotest places. It’s become an impossibility even to find a place free from human noise, or free from light pollution. Climate collapse, a direct consequence of extraction and burning of petroleum and carbon, has irreversibly altered temperature and weather patterns.“We thrash about, appallingly led, with no particular goal other than economic growth and unfettered consumption,” Wilson writes.

Of all the mammals on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans, only 4% are wild mammals. Farmed poultry makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The recently-updated Red List issued by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature classified 19,625 of the currently recognized 59,508 species as threatened.

“It’s only in the past fifty years or so that children have been brought up to think chickens come from the supermarket and Nature is a TV show. As with so many things, what we don’t know may kill us, and what we seem not to know right now is that without a functioning biosphere (clean air, clean water, clean earth, a variety of plant and animal life) we will starve, shrivel, and choke to death.” Wilson said in a talk with poet Robert Haas.

Edward O. Wilson fears we have already entered the next age, for which he has already coined a name: the Eremocine, the Age of Loneliness; a single species left in the world, having lost touch with nature.

There are still a few intact places – not untouched, but habitats free from obvious signs of human activity. These places, such as remote forests in South America, the Congo Basin, or New Guinea make up less than five percent of the Earth’s land mass. In his book “Half Earth”, Wilson demands that half of the planet is restituted to nature as wildlands, for our own sake: to regenerate the biodiversity and biosphere we humans need to survive.

Only a major shift in reasoning, with greater commitment given to the rest of life, can meet this greatest challenge of the century. Wildlands are our birthplace. Our civilizations were built from them. Our food and most of our dwellings and vehicles were derived from them. Our gods lived in their midst. Nature in the wildlands is the birthright of everyone on Earth. The millions of species we have allowed to survive there, but continue to threaten, are our phylogenetic kin. Their long-term history is our long-term history. Despite all our pretensions and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world.

About 50,000 years ago, an earthquake caused the Okavango River in Southern Africa to crack up and spill into the Kalahari Desert. Thus, in the middle of one of the planet’s driest and loneliest regions, a lush fresh water oasis was created: The Okavango Delta, situated in nowadays Northern Botswana, is one of the world’s largest and last pristine ecosystems. The Delta is home to the Ba’Yei, descendants of the San, who have inhabited the Delta for centuries without impacting its ecological integrity, and to many endangered species according to IUCN, such as giraffes, Ground Hornbills, Wild Dogs, Rhinceros, Lions, to name but a few, and the world’s largest population of elephants. In 2013, the Okavango Delta was declared one of the Seven National Wonders of Africa, in the following years, 2014, UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognizing its “outstanding value to humanity.” It is in fact so naturally beautiful, it’s been dubbed the Garden Of Eden.

In January 2021, the Canadian oil and gas exploration company Reconnaissance Energy Africa started drilling inside a protected wildlife area in northeastern Namibia. ReconAfrica, has acquired exploration licenses valid until January 2023, which cover more than 21,000 square kilometers near the Okavango River. Although the Okavango Delta does not lie within the leased area, it will likely be affected. Pollution from oil and gas drilling – despite ReconAfrica’s contradicting claims – is inevitable, as experience has proven. Once the Okavango River is contaminated, pollution will accumulate in the Okavango Delta, as it has no outlet to the sea.

The drillings come on top of other threats. After years of scant rainfalls, and with commercial water use by farms in Namibia and Angola increasing, water has become scarce, and the Okavango’s water levels have fallen to an all-time low.

*kingfisher caught a fish in the Okavango*

As any pollution to the Okavango River would directly impact the ecosystem of the Okavango Delta, it would affect not only the Ba’Yei. The delta is the main source of water for the region. The livelihood of the San people of the entire Kalahari is under threat. Another paradise lost.

The world ends twice, Wilson wrote in “Half Earth”, Humanity started with fire, with social gatherings around the campfire 200,000 years ago, with stories told and re-told. And it will end in deadly loneliness – with a second, a final expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Welcome to the Misanthropocene.

“We should forever bear in mind that the beautiful world our species inherited took the biosphere 3.8 billion years to build. The intricacy of its species we know only in part, and the way they work together to create a sustainable balance we have only recently begun to grasp. Like it or not, and prepared or not, we are the mind and stewards of the living world. Our own ultimate future depends upon that understanding. We have come a very long way through the barbaric period in which we still live, and now I believe we’ve learned enough to adopt a transcendental moral precept concerning the rest of life. It is simple and easy to say: Do no further harm to the biosphere.”

Edward O. Wilson passed away on December 26^th 2021 at the age of 92. You can join the call for a moratorium of ReconAfrica’s drillings here

November 19, 2021December 26, 2021

5-YEAR RECAP

I started this website, wanderwarbler, in early 2017 not only to document my travels, but to contemplate and venture into terra incognita philosophically, by means of the books, the poems, the lores and legends of the places I visited. My research deepened my understanding of geography, biology, and of humanity as a whole, as art and abstraction always reveal the truth hidden underneath the banalities of travel schedules, or of daily life.

In the beginning I questioned the moral rightfulness of travelling in a world where travelling was a privilege reserved to a wealthy minority, yet equally a chance for the under-privileged to make a living in tourism-related jobs. I believed in respectful, openhearted and openminded travel, traveling beyond the pitfalls of mass tourism and neo-colonialism. The challenges and experience of travel no doubt made me a wiser, enlightened person. But would my tales and travels change this planet for the better?

My hope was to build an argument for cultural diversity in a world ever more McDonaldized, H&M-ized, Hollywood-ized. Wanderwarbler could make a case against Club Med, but support the family-run Beds and Breakfast’s. In short: emphasize the difference between tourism and travel, which means to respect and to treat every place as somebody’s home, and not a entertainment park.

For five years I kept travelling, learning, researching, writing, but not exclusively for my readers. I kept writing to come to terms with what was hard to bear, or witness: social injustice, scars of wars, the irreversibility of death.

*_{Great Zimbabwe, 2019: 1000-year old stonewall}* –

Obviously, I am not a war reporter. I shy away from war torn places, or countries in turmoil and civic unrest, and my destinations are those everyone could visit without fearing for their lives. Still, wherever I went, on or off the beaten path, I came across poverty and illiteracy, pollution and destruction, and screaming injustice. I held on to the thought that sharing my experiences could change the world for the better, at least on some homeopathic level. Five years later, the world has changed dramatically.

Five years – in terms of planet Earth are nothing, but in terms of social dynamics, a lot had changed. Demagogues – the Trumps, Orbans, and Bolsonaros of this world – scarred communities. Social media didn’t knit us into a tight fabric of humankind, but entangled us in alternative facts and half-truths, in the fake, misogynistic, beauty-filtered world of Instagram. The pandemic and climate collapse, and with it the rapid destruction of habitat and disappearance of wild life, and the commercial conquest of outer space, have widened the gap between rich and poor, between left and right, between those who will have the means to save themselves, and those who won’t.

*^{_{Franz and Innozent show off their Vogueing Poses in Maltahöhe, Namibia, 2018}}*

For the last two years, Corona travel restrictions have prevented me from travelling far. My trips nowadays are mostly restricted to neighbouring European countries, and to journeys into the past, again and again revisiting those moments that in their intensity, and sometimes in their perilousness changed my life. It’s the African episodes of my travels that keep springing to mind most prominently, like lessons for life.

I often remember Lovemore, whom I met in the streets of suburbian Johannesburg. A tall, lanky man in his early thirties, Lovemore worked as a 24/7 security guard in one on the richest neighbourhoods where the streets are lined with blue blooming jacarandas and the sweet air filled with bird song. He spent his days in his little hut outside an electrified wall, which blocks the view of the villa behind, the pool, the lush garden and the luxury limousines that park in the drive way. Lovemore himself lived in the notorious Vodaphone tower in the city center, a sky-rise that after the fall of apartheid had been taken over by squatters, lacking of electricity, running water, and garbage disposal: a stinking hell in the hands of armed gangs. But Lovemore smiled. On his phone with the cracked screen, he showed me photos of his children, his wife, his family. He talked about the brother- and sisterhood of all people. And how people are misguided, abused, by politics. I wouldn’t be like Lovemore, I thought then. In his shoes, I’d be Loveless. But Lovemore appeared happy. He seemed to live a fulfilled life. We are still friends on facebook and maybe, today, I believe, I love more.

And I remember a journey through remote Tanzania, the Landrover staggering along the dusty red dirt road when we passed by a funeral procession. My driver, Salim, a Muslim, and my birding guide, Emanuel, a Christian, stopped the car, jumped out and ran to hug the grieving family, then shouldered the coffin and helped to carry it along. When they later got back to the car, I asked them whether they knew the deceased. “No,” they said. “That’s what you do. You pay respect.”

Of course it was those moments that exposed the transience of life that challenged me most in my morals and responsibilities as a human being.

I remember the night I got lost in the Kruger Nationalpark in South Africa. Shaking with fear from lions and buffaloes, I had to walk back to the camp after our car broke down in the middle of the savannah. The Milky Way sparkled above me, a tiara of zillions of brillilant stars in the black of the night, as my feet kept sinking deep into the lose sand, slipping with each step on fresh elephant dung. And I remember, years later, fearing for another creature’s life, when I got to observe three regal lionesses stalking an antelope in the bush of Botswana.

I was transformed when I reached the camp in the Kruger unscathed, and I was transformed when I watched the antelope look the lionesses in the eye with defiance. The lionesses abandoned the stalk and lazily lay down in the sun. Life, I learned in the wilderness, is a brittle little thing, and yet it’s only this brittleness that bestows value on it. Only when it seems to slip away, we want to hold on to our lives. Some with fear, some with defiance.

If we all realized that the world as we have known it – a planet filled with animals and birds, with trees and snow-capped mountains – is slipping away between our fingers like desert sand, and if we realize this means our lives, our memories, our values and even our possessions, all we’ve ever owned, will fade as well, will we love our planet, hang on to it like to our lives, fight for it, with fear or defiance?

No matter where I travelled, I was never alone. There were always other beings around me, humans and non-humans, and I realized that we’re all sitting in the same boat, struggling through troubled water. We all belong to the same ecosystem: a system that’s changing for sure, as we do in a lifetime, and one that’s as brittle as our lives are, and as unique. It is after all the only eco-system in billions of years that brought about human life. Maybe, if I keep telling about the lionesses, whose families are as organized complicated as ours, about the elephants and wild dogs, who take care of each other with love and tenderness just as we do, or the birds, whose songbook exceeds the Bach-Werkeverzeichnis, will it be evident that we are all the same, but speaking in a different language.

*_{Family of Egyptian Geese, Tanzania, 2019}*

I had to travel to the other side of the world to realize that the life of dung beetle like Sysiphos forever rolling its ball is just as meaningful as mine. Travelling has taught me that I am just a tiny speck in this world, but that I am an important, essential part of it: That I am part of nature, part of humanity, part of every tribe in this world, part of every species. Everywhere is home.

September 28, 2020September 28, 2020

Le Mal D’Afrique |Zimbabwe

Due to the Corona pandemic I cannot migrate to the South this year. Missing Africa, I dwell in memories.

In the township

There is laughter. The joyful treble of children at play: The girls, skipping with an old elastic rope tied to their waists, are showing off their intricate foot work. The little boys are chasing each other, trying to ride an old cast-off tire, its rubber grey and worn off. White teeth, red lips, little bare feet against the dry orange soil. The children throw you hidden glances and when they see you smile at them, they scream in delight. Their laughter comes as a relief. They don’t hate you. You, who in your Goretex shoes and polarized sunshades, your high-tech camera gripped tightly in your hand, didn’t come from another country, or another continent, but a different world altogether.

Makokoba is a township at the outskirts of the South Zimbabwean town of Bulawayo. A township like so many other townships in Africa, installed by European colonists in need of work force but in fear of Africans. A place to keep the workers close by, to cultivate their fields, clean their clothes and wash their dishes, build their roads and houses and churches, but safely fenced off, separated from their roads and houses and churches. A township to keep the Africans out of sight. To send them back to Africa when night falls.

The main streets of Makokoba are paved, but they are potholed, and blanketed with thick layers of orange dust. A bitter stale taste that with every breath coats the inner of your mouth. A pale orange that clings to the children’s skin and the stray dogs’ shaggy fur, the scattered plastic trash that piles up at every corner, the bare bricks of the one-storied buildings, and the rubber sandals at the callused feet of the people of Makokoba. When you catch their eye, you wave at them: “Salibonani!, you call, which, as your guide told you, means “Hello!” in their language, Ndebele. An old woman – or maybe your age only, yet prematurely hunch-backed and brittle, clad in an apricot-colored head dress waves back at you. Her smile reveals bare toothless gums in a wrinkled face. A young man with bloodshot eyes keeps his gaze at his feet. His gait is unsteady as he passes you by. Still you smile at him. You grip your camera tighter. Not because you fear he might rip it from your hand, but because you feel just as unsteady. You feel out of place. You feel guilty.

The land, fertile and sunbathed, was given to the English immigrants, in exchange for coming to Africa. The land, fertile and sunbathed, was taken from the African tribes that had settled here before. The Ndebele people were relegated to the barren land, far off the water lines, not living from their land anymore, but working for the landlords.

“Salibonani!” A woman in a yellow T-shirt and a skirt of a green leafy pattern wants to show you her garden. She has used discarded tires as beds to plant vegetables. Water is expensive here, you learn, she has to buy it a high price by the barrel, back there, at the manually operated iron cast pump. The rubber tires keep the water from dissipating in the sandy soil. Her plants are thriving: full leaved cabbages reaching for the cloud covered sky. She poses for a photo with a sunny smile.

Makokoba is an enchanting word. Within the century of its existence, the township has gathered fame as a place where African culture has thrived amidst all the poverty and oppression, a place that has brought about music, dance, and literature. A symbol of how a bitter root can bear the sweetest fruit. But still, Makokoba is a poor, disadvantaged African township, where unemployment and poverty lead to gangsterism and alcoholism. A place forever at the margins.

At the market, in the midst of terracotta pottery, bowls and pans neatly aligned, and hand-carved drums, lined up by size and tuning, among iron headed spears and glass pearl-chains and silver bangles, among dried herbs in cardboard boxes with Chinese labels, sits the sage woman. Her face weathered and serious, her eyes piercing. She knows of all the illnesses and their cure, your guide tells you. And you want to buy from her, but you don’t speak the language. You can’t spell the illness. “Salibonani,” you say instead. You smile. But she looks back at you, empty handed. She doesn’t have the cure.

December 13, 2019December 14, 2019

Zimbabwe: Matriarchs

A matriarch is a leader. A general. A decision maker. A caring mother. A matriarch guides her family from the moment of its formation to the moment of her death. A matriarch will die for her children.

*The pattern on the fur are unique, like a fingerprint.*

Painted Wolves live in a strict hierarchical system that can safely be called altruistic. In the den, they huddle together to sleep, and when they wake, before leaving for their risky daily business, hunting big game in the wilderness of Africa, they perform long and joyful rituals. Dances that show their mutual love and devotion. Who knows who will return in the end of the day?

Fights within the pack are rare. Instead, the pack members take good care of each other, feeding incapacitated members, and licking each other’s wounds.

Their leader is the alpha female, the matriarch. When she dies, the pack will dissolve. She and her alpha male are the only ones to breed. Their pups will be looked after by the whole pack. At first the little ones will be fed regurgitated meat when the adult animals return from the hunt, but as soon as the pups are old enough, they will join the hunting party. The youngsters don’t contribute to the hunt yet, they are here to learn, but they will be the first to eat, guarded by the adult animals.

Painted Wolves are formidable hunters. Their success rate lies at 90%, a number that by far exceeds that of other apex predators, like lions, leopards or hyenas, and is undoubtedly owed to their perfect organization.

A typical hunt starts with the pack spreading out to cover more ground and give each member enough space to manoeuvre. Once prey is detected, the pack is called and together they spread panic in the heard to separate them. The ensuing chase will be both long distance – with pack members performing flanking movement to cut off any escape routes, or driving herds towards rivers and waters, deadly traps. And it will be high speed. The prey will tire, but not the painted wolves: Comparable to a cycling team, pack members at the head of the chase will pull back once they’re exhausted and other members will take their place, taking the weakened prey down.

Until the present day, there is no incidence recorded of painted wolves ever attacking humans. In fact, for thousands of years Africans and painted wolves lived side by side. Oldest testimony thereof is a palette from ancient Egypt, than 5000 years old, that depicts the big-eared creatures while dancing. It was only when the Europeans arrived on the continent that things went dire for the Painted wolves.

When the Dutch first encountered painted wolves, they thought that they were hyenas – which was wrong. They were soon corrected by the British naturalist Joshua Brookes, who recognized them as canids, and named them: Lycaon Pictus, which is a creative mixture of Latin and Greek, meaning something like: a painted wolf-like thing. What the Romans themselves made of painted dogs, is not known. But they surely held wolves in high esteem, especially when it came to motherhood… With this hybrid name however, Joshua Brookes was closer to the truth. Painted Dogs are neither dogs nor wolves, but their own species.

By 1900, painted wolves lived all across the African continent, an estimated 500.000 of them, roaming the savannas, the semi-deserts, bushlands and forests. They lived at the sea shores and even on top of the Kilimanjaro. Then the European settlers started to establish their European ideas of agriculture in their colonies. Painted Wolves, or Wild Dogs, or Painted Dogs, or whatever name they gave them, to the settlers were a vermin. A pest. Their threat to live stock radically overstated.

Rhodesia (nowadays Zimbabwe), which considered painted wolfs “problem animals” until 1975, paid a reward of five shillings for each wild dog destroyed. Their excellent organization was of no help to the painted wolves when it came to shotguns. Government records state that in the 1950ies alone, 3,679 Wild Dogs were killed for reward. That’s more than half the number of Painted Wolves living today: 5000-6000.

Men have decimated the number of Painted Wolves by 99% within a century, making them an endangered species, their number lower than that of elephants (500.000), giraffes (70.000), rhinos (25.000) and lions (20.000).

Habitat loss continues to be the greatest threat for the painted wolves, predators that need large spaces. Their future is looking bleak. The tragic fate of these loving, joyful creatures has been largely ignored by the world.

Until David Attenborough’s BBC series Dynasties hit the screens. In the fourth episode he tells the story of Tait, matriarch of a pack living in Zimbabwe’s Mana Pools Nationalpark. Her bravery has not only touched the hearts of a world-wide audience, but turned Mana Pools into a prime eco-tourist attraction. Tourists that bring desperately needed money into the country, and therefore might ensure the survival of the painted wolves.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06mvrr0

Recommendation: Painted Wolves by Nick Dyer is not only a beautiful and informative book, shot in the Mana Pools National Park, but its revenue will go into the conservation of Wild Dogs.

https://www.hphpublishing.co.za/products/painted-wolves

November 30, 2019December 12, 2019

Zimbabwe: Sundown

Finally, the rains have started to fall. Too little, and too late. Already the stench of death lingers. The sad remains of impalas and baboons lie scattered on the parched earth. Weakened by the heat, they were easy prey to the lions, wild dogs and hyenas. The arid soil is cracked open by the biting sun. For weeks on end, a cruel heatwave kept temperatures soaring to 45 degrees without respite.

Vultures perch on dead trees. The carcasses of elephants and buffaloes, so seemingly unconquerable creatures, line the muddy pools. Pools that once were a reliable source of fresh water and gave their name to Mana Pools Nationalpark in the North of Zimbabwe, Mana meaning four in the local Shona language. But now, with an unprecedented heatwave and draught, these once life-giving pools have turned into sticky death traps for the heavy giants. Life is but a fierce struggle for survival in Zimbabwe.

Last year’s rainy season was short and ineffective. The dams didn’t fill, and even the once majestic Victoria Falls have dried out, leaving the country in desperate need for electricity: The mighty Zambezi- river is at a record low and Kariba Dam, essential for the national electricity supply, fails to produce, leaving those who can’t afford private generators of solar power literally in the dark.

*Children suffer from the drought and food shortage the most.*

Hunger is a frequent visitor in the history of Zimbabwe – a country used to deal with famines and droughts in the rural areas. But the worst drought in the four decades of Zimbabwe’s existence, cyclone-induced floods and an economic collapse have left Zimbabwe on the verge of its worst-ever famine. Zimbabwe will run out of maize, its staple food, by January.

*A marabou stork looks at the almost dried out Long Pool, of Mana Pools National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.*

The current climate crisis has acerbated the problem, as have “poverty and high unemployment, widespread corruption, severe price instabilities and the lack of purchasing power,” said Hilal Elver, the UN special rapporteur on the right of food, in an interview with the Guardian. According to the UN report, about 5.5 million rural Zimbabweans and a further 2.2 million in urban centres face food insecurity. The country is now on the brink of starvation.

*A white-backed vulture claims a buffalo’s carcass.*

As Zimbabwe, once dubbed Africa’s bread basket, has now agreed to buy maize from neighbouring South Africa, so have the national parks ditched their policy of non-intervention and started feeding animals. Over 7000 bales of hay have been delivered to Mana Pools, and water is bumped up from bore holes.

*A dying elephant in Mana Pools National Park. Zimbabwe hosts 80,000 elephants, a major part of the world’s elephant population.*

Together with South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, Zimbabwe unsuccessfully lobbied the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species for controlled sales of their ivory stocks at a meeting in August. Trade in ivory is banned to deter poaching. Zimparks, who run Mana Pools among others, and who receive no government funding, says its ivory stockpile is worth $300 million. Money it can use for wildlife conservation.

Elephant calves are now being exported to China: to save them from the drought and ease the situation in the Zimbabwean parks, as well as garner an income for Zimparks. These baby elephants end up in circuses in China, the land of the rising sun. They are just another victim of the global climate crisis.

July 11, 2019July 22, 2019

The Lion King

25 years after “The Lion King” hit theatres as one of the world’s most successful films, Disney will release its remake on July 19^th. While the 1994 original won multiple awards for its creative animation work, the 2019 remake relied on photorealistic CGI technique – computer generated Images – a technique so realisitically precise, it could fool the movie goers into believing they’re watching an Attenborough documentary, if it weren’t for the unrealistic plot.

That and its anthropomorphism will surely turn the remake into an even bigger success at the box offices. For lions have fascinated humans as long as they remember.

A lion king in the Okavango Delta. It is said that Botswana owns the strongest anti-poaching units. They shoot first, then ask questions.

Spotting a lion, or a lioness, in the wild is a both intimidating as awe inspiring experience: the demeanor of a queen, a king, the innate grace that stems both from superior in strength as well as the unconditional solidarity to the pride. No wonder humans have idolized them.

The oldest known object of figurative art is in fact a figurine of a human’s body with a lioness’s head. The so called Löwenmensch, German for Lion Human, was carved out of mammoth tusk about 40,000 years ago. Discovered in Germany in 1939, only a couple of days before the outbreak of WWII, the Löwenmensch is proof of the presence of lions all over Europe.

In ancient Rome, gladiators had to fight Barbery Lions, lions from the land of the Berbers in Northern Africa. They were in fact damnatii at bestias – condemned to Death, their prosecution entertainment for the lower class.

Neither cave lions, which roamed central Europe in prehistoric times, nor the smaller South European Lion, Panthera Leo which the Romans still enountered when they ruled the continent, had humans on their menu – unless of course they were made sparring partners to unlucky gladiators at the colosseum. Rather, lions and humans have always been competitors on the hunt.

A competition, humans won. The Panthera Leo Europea has long gone extinct. And for the African Lion, the Panthera Leo Leo, the outlook is just as bad.

The Selous Game Reserve offers sufficient space and prey to apex predators

25 years since Disney’s “The Lion King” ran as one of the highest grossing films of all times, lions have halved in number to less than 25.000 – there are fewer lions than rhinos worldwide. Only six countries are home to more than 1000 lions respectively. All of them are in Southern or Eastern Africa, most notably Tanzania, which with its Selous Game Reserve and Ruaha National Park – still offers sufficient space and prey for large predators to thrive.

A young male in the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania

Lions have suffered a dramatic loss of habitat through fragmentation due to agriculture and livestock replacing their natural prey, fueling the conflict between carnivores – humans and lions in this case. Many lions are simply killed in retaliation, or because they are perceived a threat to human livelihood. Poaching, badly managed trophy hunting and bush meat hunting – due to poverty in rural Africa – have done the rest to put lions on the list of endangered species.

A lion cub in the Selous Game Reserve in Southern Tanzania. It’s future is unsure.

25 years after Disney’s “The Lion King” hit the theatres as one of the best selling shows ever, the IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, put lions on the list of endangered species.

But real, wild lions however are important in this world and to individual countries. As apex predators they keep ecosystems in balance, they increase the touristic attractiveness as a country for ecotourism. But most importantly, they have as any other living being on this planet has an unconditional right to live.

A lioness also in the Selous Game Reserve in Southern Tanzania

25 years since the first Lion King, the Walt Disney Corporation has asked fans to donate to their Lion Recovery Fund, as well as donating $1.58 million to various lion protection projects since August 2018 themselves. A number dwarfed the $814.7 million adjusted life time grossing of the first Lion King.

A bachelor in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. This young male was actually wearing a colar. Scientific research is fundamental in saving the lion population by tracking their ways and preventing conflict between the big cats and local cattle farmers.

Here are some links of lion conservation projects for you to donate:

The Ruaha Carnivore Conservation Fund:

ABOUT RCP

Remembering Lions

January 31, 2019February 1, 2019

Lesotho: Drained

High up in the Drakensberg riff sits the mountain kingdom of Lesotho. It is home to Africa’s highest mountain, the Ntlenyana at 3482m, and some of the continent’s highest waterfalls. The small republic is completely surrounded by the state of South Africa, for which it has always held a special attraction. Lesotho has something in abundance its single next door neighbor desperately wants: water.

A Sotho boy in typical outfit. Photo by Karen Smit

Upon visiting the mountainous land one is touched by its picturesque scenery and the traditional life style of the Basotho people (Lesotho means: land of those who speak Sotho). Climbing the steep slopes in rubber-boots or high up a horse – they are expert riders – clad in their traditional and super warm blankets, they appear taciturn, withdrawn like so many mountain peoples. But most striking to the visitor is the fact that tap water is unsafe in this country. It’s sad but true: 25% of the population have no access to clean drinking water.

Lesotho has known a troubled past. While independence from the British came peacefully in 1966, the small and bitterly poor republic has since been depending on South Africa – for obvious geographic reasons. The big neighbor has always dominated the region economically, but also has never shied away from armed interventions when it came to securing to economic advantages, like: access to the fresh water of Lesotho.

In 1986, South Africa and Lesotho under its South Africa-backed leader Major General Lekhaya (who came to power by a means of a coup d’etat, which many believe was sponsored by South Africa) signed the Lesotho Highlands Water Treaty. Lesotho – would supply Johannesburg and Pretoria, and the whole of Gauteng, South Africa’s arid heartland, with fresh drinking water. For water, it was was believed, Lesotho would always have plenty.

Financed by South Africa, the now functioning Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) consists of a series of dams – most importantly the Katse dam in central Lesotho – that trap water in deep mountain valleys, as well as canals and tunnels that transport water North to South Africa. This way, Lesotho makes US$45 million each year: a significant amount in one of the world’s poorest countries. So much, that the LHWP has in fact become a symbol economic integration, of national identity and pride.

But the project came at a high cost. Dams flooded the land, turning fields into water wastelands, drowning trees, leaving the local farmers struggling. Instead, profits went towards a small numbered elite in Lesotho’s modern capital, Maseru. South Africa has always protected their “Water Castle”, as they came to call Lesotho. A notorious incident occurred in 1998, when after political unrest in Maseru, a South African military intervention left 13 Lesotho soldiers dead at the Katse dam.

Things got worse for the Lesotho farmers when the effects of climate change hit the country. Increasingly unstable weather conditions and frequent droughts, most importantly the severe drought 2014 to 2016, took a terrible toll on the Basotho. The country went dry.

A Sotho woman preparing thatching for the traditional huts

There are no irrigation systems in Lesotho. Crops failed. Cattle had no grass to graze. With the drought came poverty – almost a million of Basotho were left in need of emergency food programs – and the fierce fight for survival. The number of school drop-outs soared, as did HIV rates, especially among adolescent girls, who increasingly relied on prostitution to support themselves. With lack of sufficient sanitation services the risk for diarrhea increased, threatening most of all young children. Still, the Basotho had to watch their waters flow towards South Africa.

The mighty Matsunyane falls – a tourist attraction. Lesotho also attracts skiers in winter and adventurous drivers on its steep mountain passes. Yet, tourism is not strong enough to support the country – yet!

Lesotho is not only a victim of climate change. Lesotho is an example of what happens when a country turns water into a commodity.

One doesn’t know the worth of water, until the well runs dry.

December 20, 2018January 29, 2019

The Silent Death Of Giraffes

Free roaming Angolan giraffe in Damaraland, Namibia. It hasn’t rained in five years, survival is a fierce fight.

Giraffes are the supermodels of the animal kingdom, they turn the savannas of Africa into their cat walk with each sway of their elegant long necks, with each long-legged stride and each long-lashed bat of their eyes. They fill us with this warm feeling of satisfaction one gets when witnessing beauty and perfection. Humans adore giraffes – so much that the number of Sophie La Giraffe rubber toys sold each year in France alone is bigger than the number of Giraffes living on the entire African continent.

The world’s tallest animal is at the risk of extinction. Nearly 40% of the wild giraffe population in Africa (that means worldwide) was lost in the past thirty years, according to the authoritative list compiled and issued by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Masai giraffe in the Selous GR, Tanzania. Giraffes and oxpeckers live in symbiotic harmony. The gregarious little birds feast on the tics and keep the giraffe’s fur clean.

It is, as with any other endangered species, the growth of human population that led to this dramatic decline in numbers. Tackling the underlying causes requires economic and ecological collaboration on a global basis.

While poaching is a considerable problem – their natural curiosity makes giraffes easy prey, loss of habitat through agriculture, mining, urbanization and pollution seems to be the bigger problem. These giant animals need space to roam – space which many protected areas like national parks and reserves can’t offer. Loss of wild crops like mangoes and sunflowers, which are more resilient to droughts and diseases, and which provide food supplies when times get rough, constitutes another important problem.

Giraffes have exceptionally long tongues, extendable to 30cm, and are the only animal that can manoeuvre around the long thorns of the whistling tree to eat its leaves. Ants that live in the thorns are therefore the giraffes’ natural nemesis. They bite the giraffes in the tongue.

Silent Extinction

“These gentle giants have been overlooked. It’s well known that African elephants are in trouble and there are perhaps just under half a million left. But what no one realised is there are far fewer giraffes, which have already become extinct in seven countries,” the British naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough said.

While their conservation status has been considered of least concern, giraffes are now “vulnerable”. In numbers, giraffe population has plummeted from 157,000 to 97,500 since 1990. Today they count less than 100,000.

After the rain in KwazuluNatal. South Africa has been successful in raising the number of giraffes.

Recently, researchers have discovered through DNA analysis, that there is not just one species of giraffe, but four distinct species: The Southern Giraffe with two subspecies (the Angolan Giraffe and the South African Giraffe); the Massai giraffe; the reticulated giraffe; and the northern giraffe with another two subspecies (the Kordofan and the West-African giraffe).

This might seem like an irrelevant academic detail, but it is in fact problematic since in the wild distinct species do not interbreed. This means, that while the South African giraffe is actually growing in numbers due to successful protection efforts in South Africa, the three others are facing extinction.

According to IUCN chairman Julian Fennessy giraffes are especially under threat in war torn areas like northern Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia in the border area with South Sudan. With his wife, the biologist has founded GCF, the Giraffe Conservation Found that saves giraffes in their habitat. Their breathtaking work can be supported at their website: giraffeconservation.org .

This year, French babies are still happily squeezing their rubber Sophies, but they grow up into a dim future, where the living, breathing giraffes will be a nothing but a silent memory.