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Nairobi, Kenya – Bus driver Peter Mwathi pulls some dirty bank notes from his shirt pocket and slides them into the hand of a policeman who has pulled him over.

An untrained eye would have missed the transaction, which looks like a friendly handshake, but Kenyans are used to kickbacks and bribes. A few passengers murmur and grumble.

“We call it something small,” Peter said minutes after the payment, one of many he makes each week to Kenya’s notoriously corrupt traffic police as he inches his way across Nairobi’s congested, potholed, city streets.

‘Corruption will cease to be a way of life in Kenya’
For Kenyans, corruption is proving a hard habit to kick.

Three years ago Kenya’s fight against graft caught the public’s imagination, when passengers on a city bus turned on police officers trying to solicit a bribe.

Days earlier, amid the euphoria of his historic election victory, newly elected President Mwai Kibaki declared, “corruption will cease to be a way of life in Kenya.”

But instead of being a model for change that many had hoped for, his beleaguered administration is now dogged by the same kinds of scandals that characterised the 24 year presidency of his predecessor, Daniel arap Moi.

Kibaki, formerly Kenya’s longest serving finance minister and Moi’s vice president for a decade, stands accused of paying lip service to the war on graft he promised.

‘We call it something small’
“The government has not delivered on its corruption promises,” said Mwalimu Mati, executive director of the Kenyan chapter of the anti-corruption group Transparency International.”

“The problem is that the example of corruption has been set by those at the top and they are protecting a system that serves them at the expense of the man on the street.”

Business leaders estimate kickbacks are costing the east African nation $3,5-billion (about R21-billion) a year, money that could easily be directed to roads, education, water and health care and that dwarfs the $500-million (about R3,1- billion) in foreign aid Kenya receives each year.

Kibaki’s administration began well enough.

One of his first acts was to re-establish the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission.

Yet longtime anti-corruption campaigner John Githongo, appointed as ombudsman to investigate, quit last February in protest at government inaction to prosecute those accused of graft. He now lives in exile in the UK.

“The war on corruption will only be won once a powerful and unequivocal message is consistently sent to Kenyans that corruption does not pay,” said Aram Mbui, the chairperson of the Federation of Kenya Employers which represents more than 2 500 companies.

“To put it bluntly, what we really need to see is some blood on the floor.”

The government insists it is taking action with 150 anti-corruption cases before the courts.

The Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission insist blood is being spilled but they need more investigators to probe the complex web of grand corruption.

“We are winning the war on corruption but sometimes the process is slow because we have to be extremely thorough,” said the country’s anti-graft director, Aaron Ringera.

“The public have a perception that nothing has changed but this is just a perception.”

Three of Kibaki’s ministers have resigned, one over Kenya’s biggest financial scandal known as Goldenberg, when at least $400-million (about R2,5-billion) was lost from state coffers during Moi’s rule in the 1990s.

And although five former top officials have been charged with fraud and theft as part of the Goldenberg probe – including the country’s ex-spy chief and former Central Bank Governor – no one has ever been convicted for graft.

Two other ministers quit over another scandal involving an estimated $200-million in security contracts with a fictional company called Anglo Leasing.

All insist they are innocent.

The Institute of Economic Affairs says parliament needs more powers to properly scrutinise public funds and how they are spent, citing government borrowing on some security contracts at nearly 28 percent in annual interest rates – four times the prevailing interest at the time.

Peter Mwathi’s bus route takes him through the heart of Nairobi, a sprawling city home to some of Africa’s largest slums with sewage-flooded alleys and rusting iron roofs. Mounds of rubbish litter the road, making rich pickings for rats and the circling Marabou storks that pepper the sky.

He estimates that during the last three years he has paid $600 in kickbacks, a sizable chunk of his annual $1,200 salary.

Among potential charges he has faced are playing his music too loud, overcrowding and putting too many stickers on the windshield.

A bribe, he says, saves him from a protracted court case and the potentially greater loss of time earning his salary.

“For a while when Kibaki got in, the police stopped taking money from us, but gradually it has come back,” he says from behind the wheel of his garishly painted bus.

“Now the police are more discreet because of the fear of being caught, but all that means is we have to pay a bit more. The price for us has gone up.”

Nairobi, Kenya – Bus driver Peter Mwathi pulls some dirty bank notes from his shirt pocket and slides them into the hand of a policeman who has pulled him over.

An untrained eye would have missed the transaction, which looks like a friendly handshake, but Kenyans are used to kickbacks and bribes. A few passengers murmur and grumble.

“We call it something small,” Peter said minutes after the payment, one of many he makes each week to Kenya’s notoriously corrupt traffic police as he inches his way across Nairobi’s congested, potholed, city streets.

‘Corruption will cease to be a way of life in Kenya’
For Kenyans, corruption is proving a hard habit to kick.

Three years ago Kenya’s fight against graft caught the public’s imagination, when passengers on a city bus turned on police officers trying to solicit a bribe.

Days earlier, amid the euphoria of his historic election victory, newly elected President Mwai Kibaki declared, “corruption will cease to be a way of life in Kenya.”

But instead of being a model for change that many had hoped for, his beleaguered administration is now dogged by the same kinds of scandals that characterised the 24 year presidency of his predecessor, Daniel arap Moi.

Kibaki, formerly Kenya’s longest serving finance minister and Moi’s vice president for a decade, stands accused of paying lip service to the war on graft he promised.

‘We call it something small’
“The government has not delivered on its corruption promises,” said Mwalimu Mati, executive director of the Kenyan chapter of the anti-corruption group Transparency International.”

“The problem is that the example of corruption has been set by those at the top and they are protecting a system that serves them at the expense of the man on the street.”

Business leaders estimate kickbacks are costing the east African nation $3,5-billion (about R21-billion) a year, money that could easily be directed to roads, education, water and health care and that dwarfs the $500-million (about R3,1- billion) in foreign aid Kenya receives each year.

Kibaki’s administration began well enough.

One of his first acts was to re-establish the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission.

Yet longtime anti-corruption campaigner John Githongo, appointed as ombudsman to investigate, quit last February in protest at government inaction to prosecute those accused of graft. He now lives in exile in the UK.

“The war on corruption will only be won once a powerful and unequivocal message is consistently sent to Kenyans that corruption does not pay,” said Aram Mbui, the chairperson of the Federation of Kenya Employers which represents more than 2 500 companies.

“To put it bluntly, what we really need to see is some blood on the floor.”

The government insists it is taking action with 150 anti-corruption cases before the courts.

The Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission insist blood is being spilled but they need more investigators to probe the complex web of grand corruption.

“We are winning the war on corruption but sometimes the process is slow because we have to be extremely thorough,” said the country’s anti-graft director, Aaron Ringera.

“The public have a perception that nothing has changed but this is just a perception.”

Three of Kibaki’s ministers have resigned, one over Kenya’s biggest financial scandal known as Goldenberg, when at least $400-million (about R2,5-billion) was lost from state coffers during Moi’s rule in the 1990s.

And although five former top officials have been charged with fraud and theft as part of the Goldenberg probe – including the country’s ex-spy chief and former Central Bank Governor – no one has ever been convicted for graft.

Two other ministers quit over another scandal involving an estimated $200-million in security contracts with a fictional company called Anglo Leasing.

All insist they are innocent.

The Institute of Economic Affairs says parliament needs more powers to properly scrutinise public funds and how they are spent, citing government borrowing on some security contracts at nearly 28 percent in annual interest rates – four times the prevailing interest at the time.

Peter Mwathi’s bus route takes him through the heart of Nairobi, a sprawling city home to some of Africa’s largest slums with sewage-flooded alleys and rusting iron roofs. Mounds of rubbish litter the road, making rich pickings for rats and the circling Marabou storks that pepper the sky.

He estimates that during the last three years he has paid $600 in kickbacks, a sizable chunk of his annual $1,200 salary.

Among potential charges he has faced are playing his music too loud, overcrowding and putting too many stickers on the windshield.

A bribe, he says, saves him from a protracted court case and the potentially greater loss of time earning his salary.

“For a while when Kibaki got in, the police stopped taking money from us, but gradually it has come back,” he says from behind the wheel of his garishly painted bus.

“Now the police are more discreet because of the fear of being caught, but all that means is we have to pay a bit more. The price for us has gone up.”

Today is the last day for the Government to account for the Sh9.6 billion grant from the Global Fund for combating malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids. At stake is Sh7 billion, which is part of the money that was released two years ago for seven projects; two for malaria, two for tuberculosis and three for HIV/Aids.

However, the Government has been too slow in disbursing money to the civil society and submitting returns to the fund’s head office in Geneva, Switzerland. In the last two years, only Sh2.5 billion has been disbursed.

The Global Fund is now demanding a technical and financial audit from the Treasury on how the money was used. The Treasury is the principal recipient of the grant, while the Health ministry is responsible for distribution of life-prolonging drugs. However, what was principally a routine accounting procedure has opened a can of worms, leaving the Government shamelessly exposed.

The nagging question that the mandarins at Treasury cannot escape is why they are playing poker with the lives of thousands of Kenyans. It would also be interesting to know why the Ministry of Health has taken a back seat when money meant for strengthening community health structures and capacity for the civil society to combat the three diseases is unaccounted for.

That is why only two projects (both on Aids), out of seven, have been implemented despite the availability of the funds. The point here is that if the funding is suspended the whole anti-Aids campaign, which relies heavily on donor funding, could collapse. This would jeopardise the lives of up to 53,000 people living with Aids and who are depending on antiretroviral (ARV) therapy and many others waiting to join the programme.

Then there is the question of incomplete dosages and drug resistance. The anti-Aids therapy and treatment of TB is wholly tailored on completion of dosages, any interruptions render it useless. That is why the global focus is on linking the management of Aids and co-infections like TB, which is found in a third of the 40 million people living with Aids.

Community based organisations, faith-groups and other non-governmental institutions have been in the forefront of creating awareness on the two diseases and providing support services to the infected. A big portion of the money used has been from donors, including the Global Fund. Yesterday, the Ministry of Health launched the Second National Health Sector Strategic Plan, which is a five-year plan premised on health for all.

The plan has very ambitious targets that cannot be realised if this situation continues. Aids being a national disaster, wholly dependent on donor largesse, it is imperative that the Government lives up to its word. This is especially so because apart from disbursing funds, it is supposed to monitor how the money is used by secondary recipients. If the Government itself can flout the rules, especially on accountability, it is setting a bad and dangerous precedent.

A lot has been said about political interference in disbursement of funds, but what is needed is a strategy and manpower to co-ordinate and oversee such funding. A liaison unit should be established at the Treasury to oversee the implementation of grant programmes. There is also need for a focal point for the civil society, Treasury and Global Fund to assess progress.

The way the current crisis is handled will influence how other donors will treat us. Given the many national disasters facing us it would be a disservice to the nation if the Treasury remains indifferent and the country loses the Sh7 billion funding. The trust of donors and the lives of Kenyans must never be taken for granted.

KENYA’S government has spent millions on contracts for security projects that lawmakers and the public were barred from scrutinising, leaving a loophole for corruption, according to a report published yesterday.

The government borrowed money at nearly 28 percent in annual interest rates to pay for some of the contracts – four times the prevailing interest at the time, according to a report by the independent Institute of Economic Affairs. This year, the government has set aside millions of dollars to repay loans for security contracts, the report said.

“It should be noted that such contracts are not subject to public scrutiny, neither are they subjected to parliamentary scrutiny. Often they are not subjected to established government procurement procedures,” according to the report.

“These omissions make them very prone to corruption.”

President Mwai Kibaki has come under increasing pressure to crack down on corruption by key allies accused of crafting some of the security contracts in an effort to raise funds for next year’s election.

Two of the schemes, involving a fictitious company known as Anglo Leasing, have led to the resignation or firing of three Cabinet ministers.

Another minister resigned from Kibaki’s government after accusations that he was involved in Kenya’s biggest financial scandal, one orchestrated under the notoriously corrupt regime of former President Daniel arap Moi.

Kibaki’s government had set aside nearly nine billion shillings (US$124 million) to service loans taken to pay Anglo Leasing and other companies that had won security contracts, according to yesterday’s report.

KENYA’S government has spent millions on contracts for security projects that lawmakers and the public were barred from scrutinising, leaving a loophole for corruption, according to a report published yesterday.

The government borrowed money at nearly 28 percent in annual interest rates to pay for some of the contracts – four times the prevailing interest at the time, according to a report by the independent Institute of Economic Affairs. This year, the government has set aside millions of dollars to repay loans for security contracts, the report said.

“It should be noted that such contracts are not subject to public scrutiny, neither are they subjected to parliamentary scrutiny. Often they are not subjected to established government procurement procedures,” according to the report.

“These omissions make them very prone to corruption.”

President Mwai Kibaki has come under increasing pressure to crack down on corruption by key allies accused of crafting some of the security contracts in an effort to raise funds for next year’s election.

Two of the schemes, involving a fictitious company known as Anglo Leasing, have led to the resignation or firing of three Cabinet ministers.

Another minister resigned from Kibaki’s government after accusations that he was involved in Kenya’s biggest financial scandal, one orchestrated under the notoriously corrupt regime of former President Daniel arap Moi.

Kibaki’s government had set aside nearly nine billion shillings (US$124 million) to service loans taken to pay Anglo Leasing and other companies that had won security contracts, according to yesterday’s report.

THE sandy track through Kenya’s empty north is silent. Nothing stirs in the midday heat. Then a Nissan truck appears, carrying a human cargo across the bumps and ruts of the B8 towards the Somali border, and the road comes to life.

Tiny figures emerge from the bush, barely able to carry the old vegetable oil bottles that their mothers have entrusted to them. Women wrapped in bright cloths and wearing headscarves leave the shade of the acacia trees along the verge.

The truck shudders to a halt and a 100-litre barrel of water is retrieved from beneath the passengers crammed aboard.

With a minimum of greeting, the vegetable oil containers and jerry cans are filled and the truck is on its way again.

Fetching water is women’s work in this part of the world. But in parched northern Kenya — where a two-year drought is threatening to plunge the country into famine and change for ever an age-old pastoral way of life — fetching water means begging at the side of the road.

Bishara Muhammad, 40, hefts a half-filled bottle on to her hip. “There’s nothing to eat,” she says.

“The cows are finished, the goats are finished. We have no work, nothing. Even the camels are finished which means there can be little chance for us. Our only hope is the road.”

Her family’s 50 camels have been reduced to two. All the cattle are dead. Only a handful of goats survive.

Her husband and male relatives have led the hardiest animals over the border into Somalia in search of pasture. The women and children are left to fend for themselves.

“Our biggest worry is the children, getting enough maize for them,” Bishara says.

Around her, the other women and the stick-thin children slip silently away to wait in the shadows for the next truck.

The story is the same all along the track from Wajir to El Wak, a stone’s throw from Somalia. It cuts through a dusty land, where only termite mounds and leafless acacias grow. This is the epicentre of the drought in Kenya. About 3.5 million people need food aid to survive the year.

The aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières has determined that 20 per cent of children around El Wak are malnourished — well above the 15 per cent emergency threshold.

Across the Horn of Africa about 11.5 million people are at risk of starvation, according to the World Food Programme (WFP) of the UN. Five successive rains have failed, making this Kenya’s worst drought since independence, and the start of the March-to-May rainy season has made no impression. Aid agencies say that death rates will soar if the rains fail again.

So far the WFP has raised only $50 million (£29 million) of the $225 million that it says it needs to feed Kenya this year, and it says that it will run out of some essential foodstuffs, such as vegetable oil and pulses, by the end of the month. People living near the road to El Wak are getting used to the aid convoys travelling from the tropical south into the dry northeast. The trucks travel with armed escorts for protection against Somali bandits.

For centuries the people here have eked out a life as pastoralists, nomadic herders who follow their animals for hundreds of miles from waterhole to pasture. Aid agencies struggle to keep track of a mobile population that roams through Kenya and into Somalia.

“There is a constant problem with trying to move the food to the right places,” Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the WFP in Nairobi, says.

It is also difficult to get food through northern Kenya to Somalia because of poor roads. “We have had trucks go missing for more than a week,” Mr Smerdon says.

The last stretch of road before El Wak is the worst. The hard dirt road becomes sand, sending 4x4s slipping one way then the other. Here you can smell the villages before you see them. A thick, sweet stench, like a rubbish dump, hangs in the air ahead of Gode. The carcasses of hundreds of cows, donkeys and goats lie in unnatural poses, rotting in the sun.

Some are fresh, their hides still brown or white. A donkey lies with his head twisted, chest heaving. Others are little more than a pile of bleached bones crumbling into the sand.

Gode is home to hundreds of “dropouts”, as they have become known, herders whose animals have died, forcing them to stay in one place.

Ibrahim Abdi Amoy, 50, arrived here with the youngest of his ten children last month. He still carries the gnarled wooden stick that marks him out as a man of influence. But the 45 camels and 50 cows that marked him out as a man of means are dead.

He says: “One time I was wealthy, but now . . .” He picks thoughtfully at his thin beard and looks around at the handful of surviving goats. He walked for three days to reach the relative safety of Gode, close to a borehole.

“Maybe there will be rain from Allah but, for now, maybe the NGOs will help us here with food and water,” he says.

One day he hopes to return to the lifestyle of his ancestors. “I don’t like to stay here in one place. I didn’t choose this.”

THE sandy track through Kenya’s empty north is silent. Nothing stirs in the midday heat. Then a Nissan truck appears, carrying a human cargo across the bumps and ruts of the B8 towards the Somali border, and the road comes to life.

Tiny figures emerge from the bush, barely able to carry the old vegetable oil bottles that their mothers have entrusted to them. Women wrapped in bright cloths and wearing headscarves leave the shade of the acacia trees along the verge.

The truck shudders to a halt and a 100-litre barrel of water is retrieved from beneath the passengers crammed aboard.

With a minimum of greeting, the vegetable oil containers and jerry cans are filled and the truck is on its way again.

Fetching water is women’s work in this part of the world. But in parched northern Kenya — where a two-year drought is threatening to plunge the country into famine and change for ever an age-old pastoral way of life — fetching water means begging at the side of the road.

Bishara Muhammad, 40, hefts a half-filled bottle on to her hip. “There’s nothing to eat,” she says.

“The cows are finished, the goats are finished. We have no work, nothing. Even the camels are finished which means there can be little chance for us. Our only hope is the road.”

Her family’s 50 camels have been reduced to two. All the cattle are dead. Only a handful of goats survive.

Her husband and male relatives have led the hardiest animals over the border into Somalia in search of pasture. The women and children are left to fend for themselves.

“Our biggest worry is the children, getting enough maize for them,” Bishara says.

Around her, the other women and the stick-thin children slip silently away to wait in the shadows for the next truck.

The story is the same all along the track from Wajir to El Wak, a stone’s throw from Somalia. It cuts through a dusty land, where only termite mounds and leafless acacias grow. This is the epicentre of the drought in Kenya. About 3.5 million people need food aid to survive the year.

The aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières has determined that 20 per cent of children around El Wak are malnourished — well above the 15 per cent emergency threshold.

Across the Horn of Africa about 11.5 million people are at risk of starvation, according to the World Food Programme (WFP) of the UN. Five successive rains have failed, making this Kenya’s worst drought since independence, and the start of the March-to-May rainy season has made no impression. Aid agencies say that death rates will soar if the rains fail again.

So far the WFP has raised only $50 million (£29 million) of the $225 million that it says it needs to feed Kenya this year, and it says that it will run out of some essential foodstuffs, such as vegetable oil and pulses, by the end of the month. People living near the road to El Wak are getting used to the aid convoys travelling from the tropical south into the dry northeast. The trucks travel with armed escorts for protection against Somali bandits.

For centuries the people here have eked out a life as pastoralists, nomadic herders who follow their animals for hundreds of miles from waterhole to pasture. Aid agencies struggle to keep track of a mobile population that roams through Kenya and into Somalia.

“There is a constant problem with trying to move the food to the right places,” Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the WFP in Nairobi, says.

It is also difficult to get food through northern Kenya to Somalia because of poor roads. “We have had trucks go missing for more than a week,” Mr Smerdon says.

The last stretch of road before El Wak is the worst. The hard dirt road becomes sand, sending 4x4s slipping one way then the other. Here you can smell the villages before you see them. A thick, sweet stench, like a rubbish dump, hangs in the air ahead of Gode. The carcasses of hundreds of cows, donkeys and goats lie in unnatural poses, rotting in the sun.

Some are fresh, their hides still brown or white. A donkey lies with his head twisted, chest heaving. Others are little more than a pile of bleached bones crumbling into the sand.

Gode is home to hundreds of “dropouts”, as they have become known, herders whose animals have died, forcing them to stay in one place.

Ibrahim Abdi Amoy, 50, arrived here with the youngest of his ten children last month. He still carries the gnarled wooden stick that marks him out as a man of influence. But the 45 camels and 50 cows that marked him out as a man of means are dead.

He says: “One time I was wealthy, but now . . .” He picks thoughtfully at his thin beard and looks around at the handful of surviving goats. He walked for three days to reach the relative safety of Gode, close to a borehole.

“Maybe there will be rain from Allah but, for now, maybe the NGOs will help us here with food and water,” he says.

One day he hopes to return to the lifestyle of his ancestors. “I don’t like to stay here in one place. I didn’t choose this.”

DOZENS of masked police officers forced a television station off the air in an early morning raid in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, before moving to a newspaper plant, where they disabled the printing press and burned thousands of papers, witnesses said.

The crackdown on the country’s second-largest media company came after the Government jailed three of its journalists over a recent article about political intrigue involving President Mwai Kibaki.

Mr Kibaki, elected in 2002, has experienced a flurry of critical press coverage in recent months as his administration has grappled with accusations of corruption and political infighting.

Thousands of Kenyans rallied outside the downtown headquarters of the newspaper, The Standard, to express outrage that a government that came to office criticising the abuses of the past would take such action. “Go!” they yelled in Swahili, calling on Mr Kibaki to step down.

“We believe this is a direct and blatant attempt to undermine the freedom of the press in this country as guaranteed by the constitution,” said Tom Mshindi, chief executive officer of the Standard Group, which owns the television station and newspaper.

Police spokesman Jaspher Ombati said the police raided the two properties just after midnight as part of a national security investigation that involved “inciting ethnic hate and animosity” as well as “a breach of the peace”.

He accused Standard journalists of receiving a $5000 bribe to print “a series of fabricated articles aimed at achieving instability”, an allegation the newspaper denied.

The three detained journalists were charged with “publishing false rumour with intent to cause alarm to the public”. They pleaded not guilty and were released on bail.

During the raids, the heavily armed police officers, who presented no warrant, smashed doors, broke padlocks and roughed up employees, workers at the scenes said.

The police spokesman denied that officers set newspapers on fire during the raid, although copies of The Standard were still smouldering outside the printing press on Thursday afternoon.

The story that set off the Government’s ire, which ran last Saturday in The Standard, said that Mr Kibaki had met secretly with a major political foe, Kalonzo Musyoka, in an attempt to mend fences.

Both Mr Kibaki and Mr Musyoka, a former minister in the President’s cabinet who has since broken with him, denied that the meeting had taken place.

But Mr Musyoka, a member of Parliament, was one of those condemning the Government for overreacting.

He said that there were legal ways of dealing with falsehoods in the press.

“I am absolutely dismayed to have woken up this morning to one of the saddest mornings we have had as a country,” Mr Musyoka said.

The Kenya Television Network, the country’s oldest independent station, returned to the air about 12 hours after the raid. The Standard made repairs to its press and managed to produce a special edition devoted to the police action.

Created 01/31/2006 6:43 am

The adaptations which facilitated the evolution and survival of humans
in Africa also pre-adapted the species for speech and language.
The evolution of speech had important social implications for all
of humanity. The most ancient characteristics of language worldwide
are rooted in surviving African languages. — Khoisan: from the
phonetic point of view these are the world’s most complex
languages. To speak one of them fluently is to exploit human
phonetic ability to the full.

148 is the group size at which human societies appear to function
most effectively.

Hunting and gathering was the founding economy on which human
society is based, but hunters and gatherers were not “the original
affluent society” as is popularly supposed; their numbers and
distribution were determined by the “law of the minimum.” —
Nutritional Limitations kept the human population of Africa at
minimal levels for extended periods, but the population expanded
rapidly when conditions permitted. Cycles of “boom and bust” were a
commonplace factor of human experience. — Pronounced climatic
change prompted cultural responses. Evidence of hunting first
occurs in Africa from 18,000 years ago, when the last ice age
brought dry conditions to the continent, and the world’s
earliest-known evidence of organized human-on-human violence dates
from 14,000 years ago in Africa, when deteriorating conditions
provoked competition for resources among populations whose numbers
had expanded during the intervening period of benign conditions.
— Deliberate control of plant productivity dates back to 70,000
years ago in southern Africa, and the world’s’s earliest-known
centrally organized food-Production system was established along
the Nile 15,000 years ago–long before the Pharaohs–then swept away
by calamitous changes in the river’s flow-pattern. — Domestic
livestock were present in the Sahara during a wet phase 9,000-7,000
years ago, when African cereals were also domesticated in the
region. The first villages are evident from this period, indicating
the beginnings of a sedentary farming lifestyle, for which the
invention of pottery was a crucial development. In particular,
pots enable people to make substitutes for mother’s milk, thus
shortening the weaning period and birth intervals and fuelling a
growth in population. — The domestication of livestock enhanced
early food production economies, but lactose intolerance and the
tsetse fly reduced the spread of pastoralism among the people and
habitats of Africa. — In less than 3,000 years the Bantu-speaking
peoples expanded from their cradle-land that straddles the borders
of present-day Nigeria and Cameroon and colonized virtually all of
sub-Saharan Africa. The development of iron-smelting technology
played an important role in their dispersal. — While
civilizations rose and fell along the Nile, their influence on
sub-Saharan Africa was one of exploitation only– African
commodities were traded north, but nothing of the Nile’s culture
and technology moved south.

— electrum: a natural alloy of gold
containing about 20 percent silver

A mariner’s handbook from the first century AD indicates that
although trading vessels from Roman Egypt sailed to sub-Saharan
Africa, the region offed meagre profits an attracted little
interest. — The unique environmental circumstances of northern
Ethiopia combined with the trading opportunities of the Red Sea to
fuel the rise of sub-Saharn Africa’s first indigenous state. —

boustrophedon– script: as the ox turns in ploughing

While Aksum was distinguished by the conspicuous consumption of a
ruling elite and its subjects toiled under the rule of despotic
kings, the large, complex societies of the inland Niger delta
developed a more egalitarian and less coercive political system.
— If cities are founded by people from different social
and occupational backgrounds congregating to live in close
proximity of one another, is a hierarchical social system and
coercive centralized control the only way of managing the group’s
increasingly complex economic and social interactions? In the
classic definition of the urbanization process, centralized-often
despotic-control is deemed to have been the norm, with the many
ruled by the few and the ideology of the city state reinforced by
monumental architecture. Does the prevalence of one interpretation
obscure even the possibility of an alternative? Is there perhaps
an alternative management strategy, more practical than
ideological, that would direct the growth the complex societies
along routes than rendered monumental “signposts of permanence”
(totems of failure) unnecessary? The history of people exploiting
the resources of tee inland delta of the Niger River in West Africa
suggest that there is an alternative route. West Africa history was
“unshackled from the Arab stimulus paradigm” in the 1970s when
evidence of “cities without citadels” was uncovered, wherein the
transformation to a complex urban society began 1,000 years before
the arrival of Arab traders from across the Sahara, and a large
urban center, Jenne-jeno, remained active for centuries… there is
no evidence of hierarchical social system and centralized
control, no monumental architecture, no citadel.

Foolish-African-Never-Takes-Alcohol FANTA

The demand for diversification is incompatible with requirements
of specialization; yet each is fundamental to survival. Special
relationships between specialists: People know how to behave
because they know they are different and this mutual respect
allows specialization to flourish and material symbols of group
identity to develop. Together, myths and material symbols remind
all involved of the expectations that bind the regional community,
Herein lies the origin of in situ ethnic elaboration, and the
device that maintains ethnic boundaries. The counteracting forces
of ethnic identity where the demands of specialization pushed
groups apart while the requirements of a generalized economy pulled
them together– created a dynamism that ensured growth and the
establishment of urban settlements. And they were non-coercive
settlements. Groups congregated by choice. This is an instance of
transformation from a rural to an urban society that did not
establish a hierarchical society and coercive centralized control,
with the many ruled by the despotic few. The process in the delta
and at Jenne-jeno in particular, was once one of “complexification”
rather than centralization. They settled within shouting distance of
each other, but avoided assimilation into a single urban entity.
Clustering allowed a diverse population to congregate for
economies of scale and to draw upon the services of other
specialists without surrendering their independent identities,
the whose thereby functioning as a city and provide a variety of
services and products to a vast hinterland. In effect, the ‘push’
of specialization produced occupational castes and ethnic
distinction, while the ‘pull’ of economic integration produced a
web of share myth and belief that emphasized both individual ethnic
identity AND mutual interdependence. Not a whiff of disaster is
evident at Jenne-Jeno throughout its 1,600 years of occupation.

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Created 02/03/2006 2:54 am

Because humans evolved in Africa, their parasites and diseases
are uniquely prevalent there too. Disease spreads rapidly among
people congregating in large numbers and has been a major
constraint on the establishment of urban centers in Africa. —
throughout the grater part of its evolutionary history, the human
population of Africa has lived in relatively small groups.
demonstrating that people are perfectly capable o living
peacefully in small communities for millennia without establishing
cities and states.

— Subsistence farming in Africa often demands more labor than can
fed with the food that farmers produce, but where conditions have
been amenable, innovative agricultural practices have overcome
this problem and established a highly successful community. Until
comparatively recently recent times, elephants have been a major
constraint on agricultural developments in Africa. — ukara is
an island lying off the south-eastern shore of lake victoria
Bambara-Nuts — Crops, cattle and iron formed the matrix around
which African society and economy developed. A gerontocratic
social order prevailed. Salt probably stimulated the first
instances of long-distance trade between groups, camels
facilitated the exploitation of Sahara deposits. — The ancient
settlement of Igbo-Ukwu in Nigeria was an outpost of West Africa’s
long-distance trade routes. The inroads of the trans-Saharan gold
trade stimulated the inception of centralized states in the Sahel;
environmental constraints predicated their demise. — Chinua
Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart 1958 — The idea that generations
of Africans enjoyed congenial lives in well-integrated, smoothly
functioning societies prior to the era of European exploitation is
widespread but wrong. Few communities had sufficient labour to
satisfy their needs. Life was arduous and unpredictable. Slavery
was commonplace. — A history of slavery in Africa claims that
between 30 and 60 per cent of the entire population were slaves
during historical times. If this is correct, the number of people
enslaved in Africa far exceed the number taken from the continent
by the slave trade. In fact, given the volume of the demand of
slaves within the continent, the shipping of slaves across the
Atlantic should be seen as an extension fo the internal market. —
Bananas and plantains, introduced to Africa from southeast Asia
more than 2,000 years ago, produce high yields with minimal
labour. They revolutionized food production throughout the
equatorial regions and rapidly became a staple food–most
especially in Uganda, where cattle simultaneously became valued as
symbols of prestige and wealth. — Cattle converted grass into
times of wealth that could be owned, exchanged and inherited. In
the extensive grasslands of southern Africa a new order of values
emerged, characterized by a degree of social stratification that
is epitomized at Great Zimbabwe. The gold trade initiated by Arabs
calling on the East African coast introduced a disruptive dynamic
to the region. — Chinese fleets visited East Africa in the early
fifteenth century and took a giraffe back to Beijing in 1415;
Portuguese caravels began exploring the coast of West Africa
during the same period. The Portuguese sought gold, but found
Africans willing to supply slaves as well. Nearly 1,000 African
men, women an children were shipped to Portugal between 1441 an
1446. — The Portuguese outflanked the trans-Sahara gold trade
when they reached the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) in 1472. The first
European buildings in Africa were erected in El Mina (the mine)
with materials imported from Europe; gold and slave-trading
contacts were firmly established in east Africa while the Portuguese
carried European influence around the southern tip of the
continent: the Cape of Good Hope. — Though Europeans first
Visited Ethiopia in 1407, Ethiopians had been visiting Europe since
1306 at the latest. These early visitors told of a great Christian
king, Prester John, who ruled Ethiopia. Portuguese voyages around
the continent were intended to make contact with Prester John and
gain his support for the Christian crusade against Islam. — The
Portuguese harnessed Africa to Europe. The continent and its
people were assessed in terms o their significance to Europe, but
the stress of ecological imperatives on human society in Africa
remains strikingly evident fro documentary evidence, which joins
archaeology as the principal sources on African history. —
European descriptions of rich and densely populated kingdoms
notwithstanding, the exigencies of human ecology kept Africa
thinly populated. Rural settlements were dispersed, urban centres
small, population growth rates low–but the foreign demand for
slaves became relentless. — Over nine million slaves were shipped
across the Atlantic between 1431 and 1870. Another million or more
did not survive the voyage, wile untold numbers died on the
journey from their point of capture to the coast. Europe’s taste
for sugar was the principal incentive of the trade. — island
Goree off-present-dat Dakar stories of white men from the ships
eating their black captives were legion in the slave homelands.
huge copper kettles stood boiling on the foredecks, they had been
told; African meat was salted, and fed to the crew; red wine was
African blood; cheese was made from African brans; the victims’
bones were burned and became the ashlike, lethal grey powder that,
when placed in iron tubes, transformed itself back into the flames
from which it had come and spewed pain an destruction against any
who tried, unprepared, to resist their demands… — African
entrepreneurs grew prosperous on the slave trade; slaves were
exchanged for European goods by barter–a fickle method of trade
to which the cowrie shell brought a standard measure of value when
it was introduced from the Maldives n the 1510s. — African
chiefs and wealthy elites took people whom customary practice ha
enslaved within the indigenous economy, where the practice
bestowed at least a measure of benefit on all parties, and sold
them abroad for goods that brought little benefit ao anyone other
than the traders themselves–the inflow of foreign goods
seriously disrupted the development of indigenous economies. Like
asset-strippers on Wall Street, African slave-traders plundered
the accumulating human resources over which they had gained
control wit no thought for the wider implications and long-term
consequences of their actions. They sold their brothers, their
cousins, their neighbors, the only conceivable justification
being that slaves were a commonplace feature of African
society–chattels, valued less highly than the goods offered by
European traders. — The significance o the slave trade for Africa
lay less in the number of people lost than in the changed social
patterns an reproductive capabilities of those who remained behind.
The importation of firearms had a profound effect on these
developments/ — The slave trade commercialized African
economies; after abolition indigenous slavery kept the economies
turning–throughout the continent the incidence of slavery
increased. — french island of Saint-Domingue

Climate exercised a major influence on the slave trade, with both
good and bad conditions serving to maintain the trade. The effect
continued in the aftermath, when African economies relied upon a
work force of about 6 million slave in total, and annual
recruitment was ten times the number shipped form the continent
each year while the Atlantic trade was at its height. — When the
Dutch established a permanent settlement at the Cape in the 1650s
the introduction of European land-use strategies clashed with
those of the indigenous population. Conflict was inevitable. —
The British took control of the Cape form the Dutch in 1806, and
in 1820 shipped 4,000 settlers to the eastern frontier as a buffer
against advancing Xhosa populations. The Xhosa wanted land, the
settlers desperately needed labour–a conflict of interest that
was exacerbated by treachery. — Massive population movements
which convulsed southern Africa in the early 1800s have been
attributed to the formation and expansion of the Zulu state in
Natal. The predations of slave-traders shipping captives from
Delagoa Bay to Portuguese plantations in Brazil are a more likely
cause. — Edit | Delete | Back to Notepad

Created 01/27/2006 2:15 am

almost always seven vertebrae in the neck
Pangaea

The processes which created the configuration of the continents
and the prevailing terrestrial landscape are exceptionally well
demonstrated in Africa, where the particularities of ancient
geology have endowed the continent wit immense deposits of mineral
wealth — Some of the earliest-known forms of life have been found
in Africa, and its ancient rocks are the repository of evidence
from all stages in the evolution of life forms. Africa was the
‘keystone’ from which tectonic forces drove the other continents
on their global wanderings. Dinosaurs and the earliest known
mammals were present on the continent 200 million years ago. — A
landscape of tropical rainforest and meandering rivers that
existed 40 million years ago in what is today the Sahara region of
western Egypt was the cradle of the primates from whom the human
line evolved. Tropical rainforests preserve the greatest plant
diversity on Earth, but they never have been permanent
fixtures–their extent and location varies with climatic change.
— Climatic change undoubtedly has a major effect on the
distribution and population size of all living species, but
evidence from Africa indicates that competition for resources has
had more influence than climate on the origin and evolution of
species. — The upright bipedal gait of humans is a unique and
highly inefficient mode of locomotion, but the anatomy of modern
apes, with 60 per cent of their body weight carried on the
hind legs, indicates that the common ancestor of apes and humans
was pre-adapted to bipedalism. Environmental circumstances in
Africa provide an explanation of why and how the fully upright
stance and bipedal gait evolved in humans. — The ancestors of
modern humans were bipedal nomads and scavengers who discovered
that sharp stone flakes were more efficient than teeth at
detaching meat from a carcass. Tools were teeth in the hand.

— The demands of stone-tool manufacture were significant among
the aspects of early hominid life which stimulated the development
of cognitive abilities and the evolution of anatomically modern
humans–homo sapiens sapiens–in Africa. — Thermoregulation and
access to water were crucial determinants of human survival in the
African cradle-land–and important preconditions for the evolution
of the species’ highly developed brain and social behavior. —
Genetic, palaeontological and linguistic evidence indicates that
anatomically modern humans existed only in Africa until about
100,000 years ago, when some migrated from the continent and
progressively populated the entire globe. — …a greater
time-depth of mutation was preserved among people in Africa, while
everyone else shared a predominance of mutations which had
accumulated in the relatively recent past. Setting these measures
of difference against the calculations of the rate at which
mutations occur, the geneticists concluded that the entire
population of the modern world was descended from a relatively
small group of people that left Africa about 100,000 years ago.
Extrapolating still further they from the present into the past,
they claimed that the distinctive form of modern humans had
evolved between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago in Africa… —
African environments demonstrate the universal relationship that
exists between soils, rainfall and vegetation in a natural
environment, and the extent to which biological adaptations enable
animals to take advantage of what is available. —

Though the fossil record of human evolution in Africa is unique
and extensive, it is also tantalizingly incomplete. Crucial stages
are still a matter of speculation. — Edit | Delete | Back to
Notepad

Created 02/03/2006 4:25 am

Africa’s colonial boundaries were decided upon in Europe by
negotiators with little consideration for local conditions. The
boundaries cut through at least 177 ethnic “culture areas”
dividing pre-existing economic an social units and distorting the
development of entire regions. — The “thin white line” of
colonial authority in Africa was tested at several points but
never broken. The newly invented machine-gun was formidable
instrument of colonial power, but the devastating onslaughts of
drought, disease, and rinderpest (cattle plague) in the 1890s were
no less harmful. — Oppressive policies inspired rebellions
against German colonial rule in SW Africa and German East Africa
(present day Tanzania). Both were crushed, giving Africans a
sobering foretaste of the ruthless methods they would see employed
in the Boer War (1899-1902) and the FirstWorld War (1914-1918).
— acephalous group -headless

Between the First and the Second World Wars , colonial governments
accepted more responsibility for the welfare of the African
colonies than ever before. Establishing effective administrations
tacitly amounted to redefining the continent, however. The
constantly changing institutions of ono-literate societies were set
in the written word of law; origin myths were transformed into
tribal histories; socio-economic distinctions made one tribe
better than another. — the colonizers claimed that they were
merely confirming the significance of existing traditions,but
traditions in Africa and elsewhere are merely accepted modes of
behavior that currently function to the benefit of society as
a whole. they persist so long as their benefit is evident and fade
away when it is not. no tradition lasts for ever. change and
adaptability is the very essence of human existence– nowhere
more so than in Africa. The paradox is painfully evident: by
creating an image of Africa steeped in unchanging tradition, the
colonizers condemned the continent to live in a reconstructed
moment of its past, complete with natives in traditional dress,
wild animals and pristine landscapes. The paradox could not stand
unresolved for ever, but it hindered development for decades.

ethnic thinking: the perception of unity as the inevitable
outcome of common origin

Education stimulates people “to want what they do not have” In
Africa, those whose aptitude qualified them for education to
university level studied abroad, where contact with political
activists taught them to want independence for their countries.
Their numbers were small, but the gulf that education opened up
between the elite and the majority of Africans was very large
indeed. —

an urban population amounting to 20 per cent o the total is an
average for the entire continent (the precise UN figure is 18.4
per cent)

The second world war foreshadowed the end of colonialism in Africa,
though experts believed that decades of preparation would be
required before self-government was merited. In the event,
nationalist pressure and unrest (such as the Mau Mau rebellion in
Kenya), brought independence much sooner–long before the
proposed[posed standards of preparedness had been attained.

— The Belgian Congo was among the least prepared of th nations
that became independent in the 1960s. Chaos and rebellion erupted
within days of the independence ceremonies. But the Congo was
strategically important, and America’s meddling in the Congo’s
affairs typifies the manner in which African countries thus became
pawns in the Cold War. CIA agents planned to assassinate the
Congo’s first prime minister, the Soviet-leaning Patrice Lumumba,
and US support for Joseph Mobutu was designed to frustrate Soviet
ambitions in the region. — The dreams and Africa becoming a
continent of peaceful democratic states quickly evaporated. More
tan seventy coups occurred in the first thirty years of
independence. By the 1990s few states preserved even the vestiges
of democracy. One-party states, presidents-for-life and military
rule became the norm; resources were squandered as th elite
accumulated wealth and the majority of Africans suffered.
Nigeria an Rwanda exemplify the nightmare; South Africa preserves
a flickering hope of transforming dreams into reality. — People
live behind a mask, which the winds of history
occasionally blow aside,