Category: Africa

Africa

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Alexandria

Alexandria

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population.

Alexandria (5.2 million) was founded over two millennia ago by Alexander the Great when he had a causeway built to Pharos Island, creating two harbours where the Nile Delta meets the Mediterranean. Famous for its lighthouse and library it became a centre for learning and the exchange of ideas – where classical Greece met animist Africa.

Alexandrian geographers mapped the then known world, observed that it was round and  correctly estimated its diameter. Alexandria was where the bible was translated from Hebrew into Greek and where Euclid wrote his treatise on geometry. Indian sadhus mixed with Jews and Greeks in the bazaar and trade goods from Africa, Asia and Europe changed hands.

The destruction of the greatest library of antiquity coincided with the arrival of Christianity from Palestine and fanatical monks lynched the neoplatonic woman philosopher Hypathia. Woman fared little better with the arrival of Islam. Ninety-seven percent of Egyptian women have been subjected to genital mutilation, which has been banned since 1996 (New Internationalist 2007).

.The medieval traveler, Ibn Battuta, passed through in the fourteen century, en route from Morocco to Sumatra, and back, well before the Portuguese got to India. The strategic Suez crossing from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea drew the French and English in the nineteenth century and by the twentieth century Alexandria, “the Paris of the Mediterranean”, lingered on as Egypt’s intellectual capital long after the political capital had moved to Cairo.

I revisited Laurence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet, which I’d read in the 1970s. In volume four the narrator arrives in Alexandria in the middle of the night, appropriately by boat from Greece, and he observes German bombers, spotlights, bomb flashes and gunfire before coming ashore. As well as refugees fleeing the Nazi advance across the Mediterranean, Alexandria’s exotic mix included the New Zealand army heading up the coast to El Alamain.

During WWII Alexandria had a Jewish population of around 50,000 and Egypt’s population was under twenty million. Now Egypt’s population is over one hundred million and there are only about 60 Jews still living in Alexandria. Greeks had dominated Alexandria until the 1950s, and then, overnight, Abdul Nassar expropriated the Greek banks and business and expelled the Jews, British and French at the same time – leaving Alexandria to be impoverished by nationalism and decades of corrupt state socialism. Families who had lived in Alexandria for centuries, some for millennia, were forced to emigrate.

In Clea, Durrell devotes a chapter to the art of writing, including the writer’s self-doubt. After losing my Tuesday slot in the Whanganui Chronicle to Kevin Page I did pause to ask myself if I had anything to say. “The vanity and laziness of the artist is matched by the self indulgent blindness of the people,” counselled Durell, but, he continued, “there is always the chance that the writer stumbles on The Great Inkling – the blinding second of illumination”.

The “millisphere” explores the fact that there have never been so many humans inhabiting the world – coming up for eight billion in total. Forget everything else – this is the biggest issue facing the earth in the twenty-first century.

Each millisphere has a unique environment. As the Nile approaches the Mediterranean it fans out into multiple branches, lakes and wetlands. Near Alexandria is Lake Mariout. During antiquity the lake covered 700 square kilometres. In the beginning of the 20th century it was 200 square kilometres and in the beginning of the 21st century it had shrunk to 50 square kilometers. Originally it had no mouth to the Mediterranean and oscillated between freshwater and dry before the Nile floods. In 1801, during the siege of Alexandria, the British cut the freshwater canal to Alexandria and Lake Mariout turned from freshwater to brackish. Today the lake is also polluted by sewage and factory waste.

In Egypt’s 2011-12 parliamentary elections the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won nearly half the seats. Attacks on Coptic Christians and tourists, corruption and general ineptitude led to the overthrow of Morsi’s “brotherhood” government in 2013.

Alexandria’s future lies in its past when, unlike today, it was a multicultural intellectual beacon in the Mediterranean.

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Equateur

In the remote north of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), near the border with the Central African Republic (CAR), is the the old Belgian Congo province of Equateur (population of 7.5 million) and in May 2018 an outbreak of the ebola virus was reported there, near the city of Mbandaka (population 1.2 million). This is the DRC’s ninth outbreak since 1976 when ebola had first been identified near the Ebola River, a tributary further up the Congo River from Mbandaka.

When the explorer Henry Stanley passed through in the nineteenth century he had a rock placed where the equator crossed the Congo, just south of Mbandaka. Known as the Stanley Stone it still stands there today. Seven kilometres east of Mbandaka are the Botanical Gardens of Eala, established by the Belgians in 1900. It once covered 370 hectares and contained 5000 Central African species, but now, neglected and unfenced, it provides charcoal for Mbandaka.

The streets of Mbandaka are dirt, most of the city has no electricity or running water and roving groups of Kulana (bandits) commit armed robbery, rape and murder. Pygmies and other tribes of “eco-refugees” have settled on the outskirts as their forest habitats disappear.

During the Zaire-Congo war (1998-2003), when over five million Congolese died, Equateur strongman Jean-Pierre Bemba assembled an army of deserters and ethnic militias and took control of the region. Using jungle airstrips Bemba traded blood diamonds for arms with dealers from Russia, Israel and New York.

Bemba’s Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC) became a political party and in 2008 he challenged the DRC dictator Joseph Kabila for the presidency, coming second in an election that was probably rigged. In 2008 Bemba was arrested in Brussels and sentenced at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague to 18 years for crimes against humanity – the longest sentence so far passed by the ICC and the first for sexual violence. Many Congolese in Equateur still consider Bemba their leader.

Mbandaka is the centre of the Tumba-Ngiri-Maindombe wetland (Lake Tumba is where the latest ebola outbreak started). An area of forest and permanent and seasonal lakes twice the size Belgium the wetland has great environmental and economic value but a rapidly growing population combined with a corrupt government may be contributing to its irreversible destruction. In 2009-2010 a dispute over fish ponds lead to 200,000 refugees fleeing across the Oubangi River into the Republic of Congo.

After a drought in 2016 cholera broke out in Equateur but the state has never been able to meet the region’s health needs, which includes TB, malaria and HIV. There are desperately inadequate transport links, no medicines, no salaries for qualified caregivers and medical ethics mediated by animist priests. Cholera, like the weather, is considered a cyclical event.

Since 1976 the ebola virus has emerged periodically, primarily in African countries, but cases have been reported in the US, UK, Russia, Italy and Spain. Depending on the strain the fatality rate ranges between 50 and 90 percent. In the largest outbreak, in West Africa in 2014-16, around 5000 people died in Liberia, 4000 in Sierra Leone and 3000 in Guinea.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) it is thought that fruit bats are natural ebola hosts and that people can pick up the virus from infected “bushmeat”. Shaking hands and bushmeat have suddenly become unpopular in Mbandaka.

Just before the latest outbreak Donald Trump scrapped Barack Obama’s $US 250 million ebola containment fund on the grounds that Africa was not part of the US geopolitical interests – this was followed by the resignation of his global health security advisor. He has since contributed $US seven million towards fighting the latest outbreak.

A vaccine, developed by the American pharmaceutical company Merck, and trialled in West Africa in 2016, is being deployed by the WHO which is now fighting its first urban ebola outbreak.

So far about 60 ebola cases have been reported, half of whom have died. Last week 49 people drowned when a ferry heading for Mbandaka overturned.

 

Past millisphere columns can be accessed at millisphere.blogtown.co.nz

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Malawi

Malawi

millisphere (noun): A discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population.

“New Zealand must seek the light after its darkest day,” wrote Stuff when the Malawi Queens beat the New Zealand Silver Ferns in netball at the Commonwealth Games recently.

“This was an unacceptable, unfathomable and deeply disconcerting descent into the abyss,” they continued, somehow forgetting the Tangiwai, Wahine and Pike River tragedies.

“Right now NZ netball has a lot to think about. No stone must be left unturned as it searches at the end of a dark tunnel,” said Silver Ferns captain Katrina Grant continuing the theme of darkness — and mixing her metaphors.

“The players were guttered (sic) and disappointed with themselves,” Silver Ferns coach Janine Southby told Newshub after the match. I presumed this was a typo, but my mind was left grappling with “guttered” netballers instead of the usual gutted ones.

On TV One news that night, the Malawi Queens, in their fluoro pink, green and black uniforms, looked far from guttered with their 57-53 win over the Silver Ferns, unless it means piling on top of one another and then dancing around the court as their supporters in the stands broke into wild victory drumming.

Malawi is a narrow landlocked nation west of Lake Malawi (the third largest lake in Africa) and, with a population of 18 million (2016), it can be divided into two millipsheres — one in the north beside the lake and a densely populated one in the south beside the Shire River.

Ninety-eight per cent of Malawi’s electricity supply is hydro-generated by the Shire River, which flows into the Zambezi, so when there are droughts there are power cuts.
Malawi is one of the poorest countries in Africa and 75 per cent of its population is dependent on tobacco production.

Burley leaf from Malawi (which is high in nicotine) is blended into most global brands. Malawi grows about 7 per cent of the world’s tobacco and tobacco accounts for 70 per cent of the country’s foreign earnings.

Despite United Nations pressure, Malawi — unlike New Zealand — has not signed up to the World Health Organisation framework convention on tobacco control.

Malawi has very little tobacco regulation — there are no rules about smoking in government buildings, schools, hospitals, buses, restaurants or bars and, counter-intuitively, it has one of lowest incidences of smoking in the world.

There are health warnings on cigarette packets but most smokers buy cigarettes singly and never see a packet.

The impact of the tobacco industry has seen the failure of crop diversification as farmers can earn twice as much growing tobacco than other export crops like tea, coffee and sugar.

Cannabis is one crop, although riskier to grow, that can earn a farmer more than tobacco.

Cannabis in Malawi is prohibited but remains a popular drug and is produced for domestic use and export. It is known locally as chamba and a strain known as Malawi Gold is internationally renowned as one of the finest sativa strains in Africa.

The popularity of this variety has led to an increase in marijuana tourism and there is an apocryphal story in Malawi about visitors who came, tried chamba, and lost their will to return to their country of origin.

Malawi is a tiny country — about one third the area of New Zealand — but has a rapidly growing population. The average woman has 5.7 children.

At independence in 1966, Malawi had a population of four million. By 1990 it had more than doubled to 8.7 million, and by 2016 had doubled again to 18 million.

Cecilia Khofi, the current Miss Malawi beauty queen, is using her position to campaign against child brides being forced into marriage.

For this small country, overpopulation and unemployment are big problems.
Overpopulation, coupled with land being devoted to export crops, is leading to the real prospect of famine in the near future.

The Silver Ferns losing a netball game is minor league compared with the challenges the Malawi Queens face at home.

 

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Bandundu

Bandundu

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the total world population.

When Sam Manzanza played the Musicians Club I quizzed him about the millisphere of Bandundu. Soukous music, a speeded up Congolese version of Caribbean rumba and samba rhythms, has become popular in the Congo since Sam left Kinshasa. In 2000 the government tried to ban soukous because of its sexually explicit dancing.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) consists of ten millispheres and including the one Congo (Brazzaville) millisphere on the north side of the river there are roughly eleven millispheres covering the watershed of the Congo.

The Congo is the second longest river in Africa and the world’s second largest river by water discharge. The coastal millisphere of Atlantic Congo contains the non navigable section of the river and the port of Matadi is connect to the DRC capital, Kinshasa, by road and rail.

Kinshasa (11 million), the third largest African city, after Cairo and Lagos, is a millisphere in itself. According to Mike Davis in Planet of Slums, Kinshasa’s infrastructure has been in decline since the Belgians left in 1963. “The Belgians took twenty percent for themselves and put eighty percent into the government and infrastructure; after independence the new leaders took seventy percent for themselves,” said Sam who moved to Kinshasa in the late sixties.

Sam had been born by Lake Mai-Ndombe (Black water) in the time of the Belgian Congo. Mai-Ndombe is part of the old Bandundu province (eight million), above the Stanley Pools, where the Congo becomes navigable and the Kasai and Kwango rivers branch off. Bandundu is Kinshasa’s hinterland – but still in the lower Congo and there are another seven millispheres further upriver.

The Congo has many languages, and, before learning French and English, Sam spoke Lingala which is spoken by about 8 million people living upriver from Kinshasa and it is also the language used by the DRC army. Sam said in the country everything grew and there was no problem with food, but having no money to buy essentials, like medicine, sent people down the river to the city to look for work.

In the late nineteenth century, during the first thirty years of Belgian rule by King Leopold II, the population had dropped by a third. In 1961, when the DRC achieved independence, there were 13.5 million Africans and 100,000 whites; today the DRC has a population approaching 80 million and has one of the ten fastest growing populations in the world.

The Congolese independence movement came from the intellectuals in Kinshasa and Belgian mining interests were quick to help the breakaway province of Katanga, at the top of Congo watershed, in its bid for its own independence. During the Katanga conflict Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first president, was shot by Belgian mercenaries (backed by the CIA) protecting western mining interests.

In the late 1990s the ethnic conflict in Rwanda spilled over into the DRC claiming as many as five million casualties (mostly civilians) as the army, warlords and ethnic militia fought for control of DRC’s mineral-rich eastern regions. As well as being rich in diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, manganese, tin and uranium the DRC has eighty percent of the world’s clotan, a semiconductor used in computer electronics. “Paul Kagame (president of Rwanda and now head of the African Union) is a criminal, stealing the Congo’s minerals,” said Sam.

In the First World War copper from the Congo was used to made the brass shell casings for both sides. The uranium in the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the Second World War came from a mine in southeast Congo. Nothing much has changed since the days of the Belgian Congo; with global mining interests, working with a small corrupt local elite, backed by the military and ethnic militia controlling production.

“The first will last and the last will be first,” said Sam as we discussed why a country blessed with so much abundance should be so poor and had the bloodiest conflict since the second world war. “Africa’s World War,” was a conflict for the control of minerals sought after by global corporates and arms manufacturers.

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Sahara

Sahara

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by approximately 1000th of the total world population.

“We live in a globalised world, it can’t be just goods, it’s also human beings,” said one African migrant in Libya heading for Europe. March/April/May/June is the peak time for crossing the Mediterranean and it is estimated that this year 200,000 Africans will cross the Sahara and 150,000 will cross the Mediterranean.

Boundaries imposed by 19th century colonial powers divide the millisphere of the Sahara between, Algeria,Tunisia, Libya, Mali, Niger and Chad. If there is one group that can call the Sahara their home it is the Tuareg (population two million) who traditionally carried high value goods (salt, gold, ivory and slaves) from one oasis to another. The Sahara crossing by camel took about 40 days and today it still takes several days – 25 passengers to a Toyota pickup.

It is thought more migrants travelling to Europe die crossing the Sahara than crossing the Mediterranean but back in 1982 when Bruce and Mary hitch-hiked across the Sahara it was still safe for tourists. “We didn’t know where we going really,” said Bruce, who now lives in Aramoho.

They arrived in Tunis by ferry from Sicily. An Algerian took them to the first oasis and on a truck carrying vegetables they took two days to get to Tamanrasset, in the middle of the Sahara, “where vegetables in the market were really expensive”. The road to Agadez in Niger was littered with wrecked vehicles Bruce remembered.

Agadez is where African travellers from all over the Economic Community of West African States come to buy a ride to Tripoli in Libya. The migrants are not dirt poor farmers – you have to have money to travel. Typically a family will scape together a large sum to send a family member to Europe to send back remittances – as poor countries develop their emigration rates rise.

The Tuaregs have historically shared the Sahara with other travellers including Muslim traders, adventurers and black slaves. The millisphere of Sahara can be visualised as a road network – sometimes extending into surrounding millispheres. Tuareg businessman, Mohamed Ali, owns Rimbo a Nigerian bus company specialising in moving migrants to Agadez. A burned out 727 from Venezuela was recently discovered on a desert landing strip in Mali – 25% of all Europe’s cocaine crosses the Sahara.

Conflicts arise at the desert margins, where nomadic pastoralists meet sedentary agriculturalists. The desert is advancing south into the Sahel at about one kilometer every two years. Planting a “green wall” of trees to halt the desert has been an expensive failure although in Burkina Faso simple “water farming” techniques (trenches following the contours) and protecting trees that grew naturally has managed to re-establish some firewood areas. The common myrtle Myrtus communis is distributed around the Mediterranean but the Saharan myrtle Myrtus nivelli is distributed around the the Sahara desert.

Bruce and Mary crossed from Niger into Burkina Faso and then to the Atlantic coast of Cote d’Ivoire at Abidjan. In Mali they got within one ride of Timbuktu, but that meant waiting for days for enough passengers to fill up the bus. Back in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) they pulled the pin and flew to Lyon in France.

In the early 19th century the French Geographic Society posted a reward of 10,000 francs for the first person to travel to Timbuktu – and back. In 1825 British soldier, Alexander Laing got there but was murdered two days later. In 1827 French butcher Rene Caillie got there and back and claimed the prize. The British thought Caillie was a “bad sport” for dressing in Arab robes and not full dress military uniform as Laing had.

In Timbuktu (Mali) there has been a collapse of foreign tourism due to armed Islamists, who also targeted Tinariwen for playing “Satan’s music.” Tinariwen, a band of Tuaregs from Mali played WOMAD in New Plymouth this year.

Jihadists attacks in Mali have sent refugees spilling into Burkina Faso where job seekers are now looking at the EU and tomato picking in Italy, where there are seasonal labour shortages, and Tinariwen are now living in the American south-west – in the Mojave desert.

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CAR (Heart of Darkness)

Heart of darkness

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the total world population.

If I were to travel to the Central African Republic (CAR) I’d be tempted to take the Congo-Ocean Railway from the Atlantic coast to Brazzaville in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is not without its risks; in 2010 four carriages derailed into a ravine and 60 passengers died.

Above the Stanley Falls one can ride on a barge up the Congo and into the setting of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. By taking another boat up the Oubangui it is possible to reach Bangui, the capital of the CAR (population 4.7 million).

Wikitravel at present advises: WARNING, the CAR is in the midst of a violent poverty-fueled state of civil war and most governments advise against travel to the region. Travelers should leave immediately if they can find a safe exit route. The CAR is possibly the most dangerous country for locals and tourists alike!

Due to the kidnapping of government officials, humanitarian and United Nations workers the British Foreign Office ranks the CAR at 4th of the 17 most dangerous countries in the world. Add extra-judicial killing, torture, beatings, rape, mob-violence, human trafficking, forced labour, inter-tribal genocide and child labour and you wonder why anyone would want to go there.

Anyway, should my travel companion and I get to Bangui we’d check out the historic Notre-Dame of Bangui cathedral. According to Tripadvisor it is one of the best examples of French colonial architecture, in its original state, in Africa.

700,000 “Central Africans” live in Bangui. CAR has 80 different ethnic groups and is 50 percent Christian, 35 percent indigenous believers and 15 percent Muslim (mostly in the north). Half the population is illiterate and 11 percent is HIV positive. On the UN HDI (human development index) CAR ranks 188 out of 188. And the World Bank ranks it at 183 out 183 for the ease of doing business.

Despite being rich in diamonds, gold, oil, uranium, cobalt, lumber, hydroelectric potential and arable soil growing cotton, coffee and tobacco, it is one of the world’s poorest countries. Two-thirds of CAR is in the Oubangui river basin, where most of the people live. The CAR is mostly savannah grassland with equatorial jungle in the south and deserts in the north.

Between independence in 1960 and 2016 the population quadrupled to its present 4.7 million – doubling every 28 years – but life expectancy is only around 50. Seventy percent of CAR girls are married before they turn eighteen and women live in fear of been accused of being a witch or sorceress and causing death or misfortune.

Back in the 16th and 17th centuries black slaves were sold by other ethnic groups down the Congo to end up in the Americas. In the 19th century Muslim traders arrived from the north and by 1850 slave traders were coming with armed soldiers to take slaves to the Mediterranean. In “the scramble for Africa,” in the late 19th century, Belgian, German and French colonists came and set up plantations using forced labour.

In 2012 the Muslim Seleka Group overran the north and centre of the CAR and in 2013 the Muslim rebels seized power in this Christian majority country. In 2014 3000 United Nations, 6000 African Union and 2000 French forces helped the Christian Anti-Balaka retake Bangui.

From Bangui roads head north to Cameroon, Chad and Sudan. The Christians have forced the Muslims out of the capital and hold the Oubangui basin and the south-west of the country. The Muslims hold the north-east and the watersheds to Lake Chad and the Nile. In between is an ongoing “bush war”.

The November 2008 edition of the National Geographic reported that the CAR was the country that was the least affected by light pollution – I suspect it still is. National Geographic said that in northern CAR “the clear desert night skies are spectacular.” It would be something to see.

Generally my travel companion is up for going out where the buses don’t run but we’re attempting to have a house built at the moment – and that could take quite some time.

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TOCOSA – Corsica, Sardinia and Pisa (Tuscany)

Map Tocosa-2
Millisphere of TOCOSA – Tuscany, Corsican & Sardinia

Millisphere (noun) at discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the total world population. About seven million but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do.

In February 2018 French president Emmanuel Macron visited the fractious French Mediterranean island of Corsica where nationalist, anti-French sentiments go back centuries. If Spain has Catalonia, France has independence movements in Brittany, Alsace, Provence and Corsica.

“France is playing with fire by rejecting Corsican demands for autonomy,” said newly elected Corsican Nationalist leader Gilles Simeoni, voicing local sentiment.

With a population of 330,000 Corsica doesn’t qualify as a millisphere. Combined with it’s Italian near neighbour, Sardinia (population 1.7 million), they make two million but don’t meet the 3.5 to 4 million cut-off.

Divided by the narrow Straits of Bonifacio they share an ancient history including being conquered by Rome. The fierce and rebellious inhabitants were not considered good slaves and the mountainous centre of the islands were avoided by the Romans.

Complex shifting alliances orbited around northern Italy and Pisa until Genoa sold Corsica to France to pay off debts in the eighteenth century. To this day the Corsican and Sardinian bourgeoisie send their children to be educated in Pisa and if more people are needed to form a millisphere it should be with Tuscany in Italy, not Provence in France.

Steamboats, Napoleon, jobs in the army, language, empire and prestige drew Corsica into France’s orbit in the nineteenth century. Taking advantage of the chaos of the French revolution Corsican soldier Napoleon Bonaparte (of Italian descent) quickly rose through the ranks of the French army, becoming first emperor of France and then king of Italy before being exiled to island of Elba (between Bastia in Corsica and the Italian mainland).

Bastia Hill, in Whanganui, is named after the town in northern Corsica where the Georgetti family came from and a friend of mine, and a Georgetti descendant, went there to check it out. “There would be men outside drinking coffee and there would always be one watching you,” he said sensing its reputation for banditry. Corsican number plates ensured avoiding road rage while driving in the continent he told me. “No one in their right mind would nut off at a Corsican.”

From the days of Carthage (near Tunis), before Christ, Sardinia in the south has had links with North Africa. Barbary pirates from Tunisia raided Sardinia for slaves until the late eighteenth century and today there is a weekly ferry from Cagliari in Sardinia to Tunis. In good weather a fast boat carrying illegal immigrants can cross from Algeria in one night.

During the Algerian war for independence thousands of “Pied-noir” (European Algerians) were resettled in Sardinia where they found the locals less than welcoming. Around 100,000 boat people arrive from North Africa in Italy every year, 10.000 of them in Sardinia. Once again finding the locals less than welcoming these refugee then try to carry on to the Italian mainland and the larger capitalist cities of Western Europe.

The people of the rural villages of Sardinia, along with some Japanese in Okinawa, have the longest life expectancy in the world but because of emigration and a low birthrate some years the island’s population is actually shrinking and lacking the people to care for an aging population. Some North African immigrants would be useful for elder care.

Recently there was an incident with North African tourists on a Corsican beach. Some Corsican youths were photographing Muslim women swimming in “burkinis” when one their menfolk protested and stabbed a Corsican youth. Returning with the entire village the youths attacked the bathing tourists and torched their cars.

Corsica, which is included in the Provence, Alpes, Côte d’Azur European Union region, receives too many subsidies from Paris to want full independence but it now wants more autonomy, language recognition and the release of nationalist prisoners held on the French mainland.

Just as the steamboat changed geography in the nineteenth century cheap airfares have changed the twentieth century. Corsican grievances now include absentee holiday home owners form Europe pricing the locals out of the housing market.

DH Lawrence, when he visited Corsica, described it as “belonging to nowhere, never having belonged to anywhere.”

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Rwanda

Rwanda and surrounding millispheres

Last month Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, was sworn in as chairman of the African Union so this week I talked with two women from Whanganui about their time in Rwanda.

The 1994 genocide, when 800,000 people were murdered by their machete wielding neighbours, still keeps tourists and travelers away but by all accounts Rwanda is one of the safer places to visit in Africa. Pam and Anne went to volunteer in an orphanage.

Landlocked, high on the watershed between the Congo and the Nile, and with fertile soils Rwanda is beautiful and the people humble, they told me. It is also one of the most densely populated countries in Africa.

Apart from a handful of Muslim countries in the Middle East the world’s fastest growing populations are in sub-Saharan Africa. Rwanda’s population is growing at 2.4 percent per annum but twenty African countries are growing faster, including Rwanda’s neighbours: Burundi, The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Tanzania and Uganda.

Rwanda (2015 population 11.2 million) is mostly Christian with a small Muslim community. Rwanda is also divided into Hutu (86%) and Tutsi (14%).

The conflict started with a Hutu revolution in 1959 when the Tutsi monarchy was deposed and 300,000 Tutsis were forced out of the country. In 1994 a plane carrying both the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was hit by a rocket shortly after leaving Kigali airport, followed by the assassination of the moderate Hutu woman Prime Minister. The army and bands of Hutu “Interahamwe” (those who attack together) then attacked Rwanda’s Tutsis with whatever weapons they could lay their hands on.

Hutu extremists were thought to be responsible for the rocket attack but the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and even Paul Kagame have not been ruled out.  Kagame’s RPF then took the capital, Kigali, and two million Hutus fled into the DRC. Anne’s orphanage was near Lake Kivu on the border with the DRC. In 1996 the Hutu/Tutsi conflict spilled over the border into the Congo (then known as the Zaire) and another five million died in the DRC

Because of the huge number of genocide cases the accused are tried in “Gacaca” courts – traditionally used for disputes between families. Pam saw chain gangs, dressed in different coloured overalls depending on the crimes they has commited, maintaining Rwanda’s roads, “I think the murderers wore pink overalls and lots of people had horrible machete scars,” Pam said. Pam also visited the Diane Fossey Research Centre in Karisoke where the mountain gorillas live. “There are armed guards with the gorillas all the time to stop poachers,” she said. American comedienne Ellen DeGeneres has recently established a wildlife fund there.

Since the RDF takeover Rwanda has enjoyed economic stability and the Rwandan army punches well above its weight in the region. Kagame is “genuinely popular” although his enemies “tend to die.”

Kagame’s ambition is to make Rwanda “the Singapore of Africa”. The capital Kigali is sprouting high rise office buildings and the county has the densest road network in the region, twenty percent of which are paved. Landlines are insufficient but they are currently rolling out fibre optic cable and mobile phone ownership is growing rapidly. Along with its neighbours Rwanda has agreed to phase out the import of second-hand clothing and shoes from the first world. Rwanda’s HIV rate has halved since 2000 but there is still malaria and TB.

When tourists arrive any plastic bags are confiscated Pam and Anne told me. Rwanda is a plastic bag free country, there is no graffiti and the last Sunday of the month is a “rubbish pickup day”. In 2008 English was made the language for educational  instruction.

Rwanda today is an oasis surrounded by ongoing conflicts. As head of the African Union Kagame faces many challenges. “The temptation to link the entire conflict in Rwanda with overpopulation and competition for resources is irresistible,” said NZ economist Gareth Morgan when he passed through on a motorbike. This goes for much of Africa today.

 

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Capetown (West Cape)

Millisphere, noun: A discrete region inhabited by one-thousandth of the total world population. around 7 million people, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million people. A lens to examine human geography.

The continent of Africa (population 1.2 billion) consists of about 170 millispheres. Sitting at the south-western tip of South Africa (population 55 million) is the former Cape Province (2016 population just under 14 million).

Roughly equating to the region where the Afrikaans language is spoken, the pre-apartheit Cape Province population was 6.7 million in 1967 and the population  has doubled in the past 50 years.

The Afrikaner population goes back to when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established a warehouse/garden there in 1650 to restock its ships heading to and from the Indies.

It was the Portuguese who called it the Cape of Good Hope 150 years earlier — because it meant turning back to the tropics. Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are at Blombos near Cape Town, going back 77,000 years to the San Bushmen.

The “Cape Coloureds” of Cape Town go back to the 17th century and the mixed races of the Dutch and their slaves, both Black and Malay.

Occupied by Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, Cape Town (population 3.7 million) is a modern multicultural city, with sizeable Indian and Malay communities. In South Africa, post-apartheid, poverty among whites increased and many blacks rose to the middle and upper classes. The South African population is 80 per cent black, 9 per cent white (down from 22 per cent a century ago), 9 per cent coloured and 2.5 per cent Asian, and there has been an influx of 5 million refugees from Africa.

The old Cape Province can be further divided into its modern post-apartheit provinces: Western Cape, 5.8m (Cape Town), Eastern Cape, 6.5m (Port Elizabeth, East London) and Northern Cape, 1.1m, (draining north into the Orange River).

The watersheds of Eastern and Western Cape drain south to where the Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean and both qualify as millispheres.

Eastern and Western Cape have interesting biogeographies because of an ancient chunk of Gondwanaland fusing with the African continent back in prehistory.

The cape floral kingdom is a biodiversity hot spot and is one of the worst areas in the world for the invasion of foreign weed species, including NZ pohutukawa and flax.

In the summer of 2018 Capetown can very close to running completely out to water.

South Africa has no “capital”. The Parliament is in Cape Town; the president and the administration are in Pretoria, as are the foreign embassies; Bloemfontein is the judicial centre and Johannesburg has the constitutional court (and serious crime).

South Africa was the first country to “renounce” nuclear weapons and it has the second highest murder rate in the world and the world’s highest rape rate.

A girl in South Africa is more likely to be raped than to complete secondary school and there are seven million South Africans with Aids.

South Africa’s solution to crime has been “gated communities”.

The private security industry is the largest in the world, with 400,000 registered guards — more than the police and army combined. Private security even guard the police stations so the poorly paid and ineffective police can do their “work”.

More than half of crime is unreported and violence is generally reasoned “OK” to resolve conflict.

The country is 80 per cent Christian, although 60 per cent of blacks consult “healers” and follow African spirit and ancestor beliefs.

Known for its gold mines, Johannesburg was once known as “Jewburg”. There were 120,000 South African Jews in the 1960s; now there are 67,000, many “returning” to Israel, where they have congregated in one of the richest suburbs in Israel.

Recently a white South African was granted asylum in Canada on the argument that whites were disproportionately affected by crime.

While those most affected by “crime” are actually the poor blacks, the murder rate for white farmers is around three times the South African average.

In the 1980s one SA rand was worth one US dollar, now it is 15 rand to the dollar.

While kleptomaniac Jacob Zuma continues to cling on to the South African Presidency, recently Cyril Ramaphosa, from the mine workers’ union, who is seen as the “least corrupt of a corrupt bunch”, has replaced him as president of the ANC, the country’s ruling party.