Tag Archives: Africa

Attack of the Hound of Malembi. Or, “Whose are these people, anyway?”

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As I’ve mentioned previously, the study site I worked in was beyond the Peace Corps Line. It was beyond the Blender Line. And it was beyond the Beer Line. Out here in this arguably very remote area, we were never short of remoteness. Every year the study site become more and more remote, as roads deteriorated, air strips grew over, bridges became more and more questionable. Over the previous decades there had been more of a missionary presence in this area, but the missionaries had withdrawn and now only passed occasionally down the ribbon of mud we laughingly referred to as the “road.”

One day a rabid dog appeared out of nowhere, bit three or four goats, killed my cat, and bit six people.
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The Great White Missionary

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It was a rare day that I was at the Ngodingodi research station at all … usually I was off in the forest with the Efe Pygmies, up the road excavating an archaeological site. It was also rare that Grinker, my cultural anthropologist colleague, was at the research station. He was spending most of his time in the villages learning language and waiting around for the other shoe to drop (he studied conflict, so on the average day … not much conflict).

But then an even rarer thing happened.
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Our Research Camp as a Mission Station

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A couple of “missionary” posts back, I intimated that we got to stay at the missionary stations while visiting various cities or en route between points in return for our work giving out medicine and such at our research camp. In truth, the arrangement was a bit more complex and subtle than this, and in fact, I think the arrangement and its nature changed over time. The various missionary entities that existed in the Ituri Forest and nearby cites that would be used as jumping off points were actually hospitable to us for three reasons. 1) Almost everybody is almost always hospitable to everybody else in this region. This is how things must be for anything to work. The only non-hospitable units are official governmental agencies of Zaire, or where they exist, embassies or consulates of the United States. 2) We did fill in a blank space on the map where essential medical services were not available to local people because the missions did not operate that far into the bush. Our research station was beyond the Blender Line and even beyond the Beer Line. 3) We paid. For the most part, mission stations had guest rooms and other facilities for use by passers by, but there was a charge (though very inexpensive) to cover costs. Flying on their planes cost as well.
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Shell Folds in Nigerian Killings Case

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Royal Dutch Shell has agreed a $15.5m (£9.7m) out-of-court settlement in a case accusing it of complicity in human rights abuses in Nigeria.

It was brought by relatives of nine anti-oil campaigners, including author Ken Saro-Wiwa, who were hanged in 1995 by Nigeria’s then military rulers.

The oil giant strongly denies any wrongdoing and says the payment is part of a “process of reconciliation”.

bbc

Human rights experts around the world generally agree that Shell was in fact involved in the killing of these people.

The trial was about to start next week. As a trial judge once said to me: “Usually, the plaintiff or the defendant folds when they get a look at the jury and the reality that they are looking for the facts and that a judgement will happen sinks in.” (Or words to that effect.)

Rape Crisis in East Congo Tied to Mining Activity

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-Activists concerned by this year’s escalation of sexual violence in eastern Congo are trying to turn up the heat on those benefitting–directly or indirectly–from illicit mineral extractions.

“Conflict minerals power our entire electronic industry,” John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, told U.S. senators at a May 13 hearing on sexual violence in eastern Congo and Sudan.

The Enough Project is a Washington-based organization campaigning against genocide and crimes against humanity, including rape in eastern Congo.

Women’s eNews

A rape in progress

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Please read the following vignette of an actual incident.

I am a scientist observing the culture of the Namoyoma people. I am sitting in a shady spot just outside the village, writing up some notes, and I observe a disturbing event. Four men are trying to drag a young woman from the road into the nearby forest, and from what I hear them saying, they intend to rape her. There are also four older women trying to drag the young woman back to the village, and they are yelling that she must go back to her father’s house where she will be protected. The battle over this young woman continues for quite some time, and the whole time I consider if I should be involved. I am here to study these people, not to interfere. Yet a rape is, at least according to my cultural norms, a bad thing. Do I get involved or not?

Eventually, the four younger men, stronger than the older women, succeed in dragging the young woman into the bush. I assume they raped her. I felt bad about not helping, but I really had little choice in the matter. I did not come here to change things, I came here to observe and to learn. Intervention could have unforeseen consequences. This culture of rape and male dominance is the way things are in this society. It would be foolish and unethical to try to change it no matter how much I disagree with it.

That is a real story, and I’ve changed the details enough so that it might be difficult for you to track down where it comes from. This is because I have no intention at this time of getting into a battle over this particular incident. Rather, I tell you this story to ask the question: Is it appropriate for you, as a private citizen living in some country like the US or Australia or wherever you are reading this from, to get involved in changing the way that people’s cultures operate in areas where you happen to think they are wrong? In a culture like the one described above, where rape of women by men is “normal” and “typical” and “happens all the time” one can certainly feel badly for the women, but can you, should you, actually intervene?

My own answer to the question is substantially different from that of the person who first told the story I relate above. The answer is: “You are asking a stupid question in a stupid way, and need to step back and think about what you are saying.”

Rape may well be a “normal” and “day to day” occurrence in this culture, simply by virtue of the fact (= tautology) that it happens all the time. But there are two reasons why one should not fail to intervene.

One of these two reasons (and I hesitate to prioritize them) is that while rape is “normal” and “frequent” resistance to rape is as well. In the story cited above, there are two opposing forces, but the researcher observing them seems to focus only on one of the two. What about the perspective of the older women pulling on the other arm of this young girl? Are they not part of this culture as well? And certainly the young girl herself is at least as much an example of resistance as she is an example of object. If you must be logical and reflective in the manner of the hapless observer cited above, rather than activist, please consider that not wanting to be raped is a cultural norm as well. Duh.

The other reason is that rape is wrong. Call me a cultural chauvinist if you like.

This post is part of an effort that I was made aware of in a letter from Sheril Kirshenbaum, but with which a lot of people are involved. It is called Silence Is the Enemy, and you can read about it at The Intersection Blog at Discovermagazine.com.

The above example is from Latin America. Recently, mass rape as a tool of warfare has become increasingly exposed (this is not a new phenomenon) in Europe and Africa as part of very recent conflicts. When generation-long warfare is combined with child-solder strategies, as has happened in Liberia, the Congo, and parts of Uganda in recent decades, young men grow up understanding that sex = violent rape, and a sort of post-Apocalypic rape culture often emerges. I’ve provided a handful of links below that you should follow to learn more about this phenomenon. I also recommend the classic but not out of date Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Browmiller, and the more recently published examination of former Yugoslavia, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia

Men, by and large, have a rape switch. All men are capable of rape. Most men are enculturated in a way that reduces rape, and in some societies it is probably true that most violent rape is carried out by individuals who are reasonably labeled as pathological. In other societies, this is not so true. In post war societies such as those described in some of these links, or any society in a state of war, rape becomes routine. The rape switch is flipped to the on position as a matter of course. Most men who were in combat in Viet Nam raped. Similar circumstances have been documented for other wars. I mention this not only to emphasize the depth and breadth of this problem, but to avoid what I fear will be an assumption as Silence Is the Enemy progresses that this is a problem exclusive to the dark skinned of the third world. This is a pan-human problem. None of us, none of our societies, are immune.

Follow the links on Sheril’s blog. Read about this global and serious problem. Donate money to the causes mentioned here and on other blogs. Many of us bloggers who gain income from our blogs are donating some portion of this month’s take to these causes. Take some of your cash and put it on the line as well, please.

Blogging:

The Intersection: Silence Is The Enemy, Sheril’s initial post.

The Intersection: Blogger Coalition, a link farm.

Quiche Moraine: Stephanie wrote this.

Information and commentary:

New York Times OpEd: After Wars, Mass Rapes Persist

CNN.com commentary: War on women in Congo

Do something:

If you are an American, you can write to Congress

Give something. Consider doctors without borders. Me? I’m got my own favorite, the Ituri Forest People’s Fund.


… Continues …

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Pirate Perspective. Arrrrrr.

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… but seriously … even though we all hate it when a bunch of armed and desperate people board a ship of humanitarian relief supplies that they don’t own and demand large sums of money, we also know that few people grow up to become pirates without a reason.

So let’s get some perspective, and start with an overview by Rachel Maddow:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

To this I’d like to add the important fact that over the last several years, more “acts of piracy” that have occurred in this region have come from bases NOT in Somalia than those in Somalia. This is perhaps changing, and Somalia is probably the biggest factor right now, but Yemen has always been a source of low level, near coastal piracy. And cultural and political boundary between Yemen and Saudi Arabia is vague. Really vague. In other words, the bleed-over effect once the West starts attacking land bases where pirates operate will be significant and probably quick to start.

Then there is the deeper and larger context for western Indian Ocean piracy. This very morning, a student of mine (J.O.) sent me an interesting writeup from an alternative news web site that is worth reading.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. … If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off [the] captain would whip you with the Cat O’ Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world.

The article goes on to describe the plight of Somalia and the Somali people, and to identify the cause of much of the bad stuff going on there as the same Western countries that are running their ships through these seas.

The Somali littoral has become a favored illegal dumping grounds for Western nuclear waste. The world’s fishing fleets have been scouring this part of the Indian ocean for fish, out cometing and putting out of work the local fisher people who cannot protect their own waters. and so on.

This is the context in which the men we are calling “pirates” have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a ‘tax’ on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and it’s not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters… We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.” William Scott would understand those words.

Of course, within this context, it does seem that some or all of the “Volunteer Coastguard” has specialized a bit more in high ticket ransom, and in the context of the corrupt non-government of the region, the pelagic version of Somali War Lords have risen and regular piracy rather than radical political action has become an important, if not the main activity of these folks. We really have no idea.

The article is here.

And, the latest news from the region? Pirates have taken another vessel, this time a Greek-owned Tanker flagged under the Philippines, named the MV Irene, in the Gulf of Aden. (bbc)

Nigeria oil unrest ‘kills 1,000’

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Violence in Nigeria’s oil region left 1,000 people dead and cost $24bn (£16bn) last year, a report says, according to an official and activist.

Ledum Mitee, chairman of the Niger Delta Presidential Technical Committee, says the figures only cover the first nine months of 2008.

Militants and criminal gangs often attack oil installations, leading to reprisals from the military.

The unrest has cut Nigeria’s oil output by about 25% in recent years.

Last week, President Umaru Yar’Adua said his government was considering granting amnesty to violent groups if they disarm.

Hat Tip, Elle. Read the rest here.

And in a related story, regarding the Shell Oil connection:

A landmark human rights lawsuit, accusing Royal Dutch Shell of complicity in the execution of author and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa some 14 years ago, will proceed to trial in a New York courtroom.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and Earth Rights International, along with Mr. Wiwa’s son, allege the International oil company “financed, armed, and otherwise colluded with the Nigerian military forces that used deadly force and conducted massive, brutal raids against the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta.”

They claim Shell was complicit in the 1995 military executions of nine activist leaders, including Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Details here.

Shell Oil. I think I’ve heard of them.

Music, the kinda universal langauge

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One afternoon I was sitting by the hearth writing notes on the morning’s data collection, and a cassette player was running nearby. The Beatles White Album was on. Happiness is a Warm Gun was playing.

Lengotu, an Efe man I had been working with, who had made the claim to be a rain shaman (which in the case of the Rain Forest, meant someone who could stop the rain from being so severe) came over to me and said “You have to turn off that song.”

“Why?” I said. Then, right after I said that I took in the look on his face. He was clearly disturbed. Without saying another word, I walked over to the cassette player and hit the Stop button.

I never got an explanation that I could understand as to what was so disturbing about this music. The consensus was uniform among the Efe Pygmy men in the camp that day. This music was going to cause something bad to happen. In a society where most music arrives on the cultural scene in an act of ritual and magic, although it is enjoyed on a daily basis for is entertainment value as much as anything else, I was not surprised that some music would come along and have an unexpected impact. The music I had with me … not because I had brought it (I had brought none) but because other researchers more nervous about leaving behind their western ways had carted out there, consisted of Joan Armatrade, The Police, Dire Straits, and the Beatle’s White Album. It was the White Album that, apparently, had the extra mojo. And we didn’t hava to play it backwards to get that effect, which is the usual way in the United States.

Anyway, I was reminded of this event when I read this post by Dave Munger: Even isolated cultures understand emotions conveyed by Western music.

The Mafa people, who live in the far north of Cameroon in the Mandara mountains, are one of the most culturally isolated groups in the world. Since many of their settlements lack electricity, there are some individuals who have never been exposed to western movies, art, or music.

But the Mafa do have their own musical tradition….

The Mafa are not nearly as isolated as the Efe were at the time I was in the Ituri, and the musical tradition of the Efe is to the western ear even more non-western than the Mafa example Dave gives. But the instruments are similar, and my own guess is that most of the time similar emotions would be conveyed across these diverse cultures.

And then there is the occasional magic song.

Number nine … number nine … number nine…

How diverse were early hominoids?

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And hominids.

We know the fossil record underestimates diversity at least a little, and we know that forested environments in Africa tend to be underrepresented. Given this, the diversity of Miocene apes may have been rather impressive, because there is a fairly high diversity in what we can assume is a biased record.

But I’d like to make the argument from another angle, that of modern ecological analogues. Let us assume that the greater apparent diversity of apes in the middle and late Miocene compared today can be accurately translated as a modern reduction in ape diversity. Not counting the relatively diverse lesser apes, there are five species (2 chimps, gorilla, human, orang) which can be further divided into 10 subspecies, across the entire old world.

Now look at the size range of all of the living apes. Gibbons are the smallest and gorillas the largest. When a family or subfamily of land mammal is diverse in a particular region (a biome or something larger than a biome) we tend to see that diversity played out along a spectrum of size, and against size we can find additional diversity derived from dietary or subhabitat differences and geography. It seems to me that there is room in the size spectrum between gibbons and chimps, and orangs and gorillas, and there is certainly room above the gorilla size as indicated by the existence in the fossil record of very large Asian forms.

We know that some of the later Miocene apes were bipedal, and it is starting to look like bipedalism or something like bipedalism is showing up among other apes in the Miocene as well. So perhaps there is a spectrum of locomotory pattern along which diversity may be spread.

This gives us a the following size classes: gibbon, siamang, [something in between], chimp, orang, [something in between], goriilla, [something bigger], or at total (a minimum?) of eight size classes across which apes might exist in a world in which apes are divers. Like the Miocene. If we add to this a more arboral form and a more bipedal form, perhaps we double the number, or perhaps we add about five new classes (I’m guessing that a Mighty Joe Young size ape would not have been bipedal!). This gives us about a dozen, conservatively estimated, niches when we divvy up size and so-called positional behavior.

To this we can add geography. It is probably reasonable to assume that a wetter, more forested middle and late Miocene Africa could be divided into at least four or regions, between the West/Central divide that modern biogeogrpahy tells us was effective at least in the Late Miocene, the Congo River divide, North/Central Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa. Let’s conservatively assume four, and let’s assume that only half (six) of the hypothesized ape species are divided among these areas. That means that 24 species are endemic to varoius regions, and six additional species are more widely spread for a conservative estimate of 30 species.

Among these species there may have been several bipedal forms, but only one of them (plus or minus a little hybridization hanky panky here and there) would have been the human ancestor. Of course, no one at the time suspected that …. (Or they probably would have done something about it.)

This is not an outrageous suggestion. The idea that if you went back in time to a more ape-rich time (and we know it was more ape-rich) and got a current copy of the Guide to the Mammals of Africa, the ape section would have a few dozen species, just like the monkey section or the antelope section today has a few dozen species.

Go apes!

The Story of Stories: The Siege of Mugombane

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ResearchBlogging.orgI think of her now as the Tea Lady, because she was drinking tea when I met her and had an English accent to go along with her English colonial outfit. She was one of the first native white South Africans I had met on my very first trip to that country. And now the Tea Lady, who was in fact a volunteer for the local historical society of a small town a couple hours drive north of Pretoria, was chugging her way up this steep, gravelly mountain path with the rest of us trailing behind gasping for breath.

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This is the view looking up the Mwaridzi Valley from the eastern
entrance of Historic Cave. Photograph kindly provided by Dr. Amanda Esterhuysen.

Behind us, back beyond the tea, was The Limeworks, an old fertilizer mine that has yielded a respectable number of australopithecine (early human ancestor) remains. Off to our left, as I followed the tea lady and was, in turn, followed by my flock of tourists (I was leading an ecotourist-educational trip to South Africa), was the Cave of Hearths. Cave of Hearths is said by some to be one of the longest occupied archaeological sites in the world (second longest, to be exact) with artifacts dating from the Oldowan to much more recent times representing a ‘continuous’ (in paleolithic terms) use by humans for perhaps 1.5 million years or so.
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