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Javier E

Study Offers New Twist in How the First Humans Evolved - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...human-origins-africa.html

human diversity african human origins early Africa neanderthal history

shared by Javier E on 17 May 23 - No Cached
  • Scientists have revealed a surprisingly complex origin of our species, rejecting the long-held argument that modern humans arose from one place in Africa during one period in time.
  • By analyzing the genomes of 290 living people, researchers concluded that modern humans descended from at least two populations that coexisted in Africa for a million years before merging in several independent events across the continent.
  • “There is no single birthplace,”
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  • Previous research had found that modern humans and Neanderthals shared a common ancestor that lived 600,000 years ago. Neanderthals expanded across Europe and Asia, interbred with modern humans coming out of Africa, and then became extinct about 40,000 years ago.
  • Human DNA also points to Africa. Living Africans have a vast amount of genetic diversity compared with other people. That’s because humans lived and evolved in Africa for thousands of generations before small groups — with comparatively small gene pools — began expanding to other continents.
  • Brenna Henn, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues developed software to run large-scale simulations of human history. The researchers created many scenarios of different populations existing in Africa over different periods of time and then observed which ones could produce the diversity of DNA found in people alive today.
  • The researchers analyzed DNA from a range of African groups, including the Mende, farmers who live in Sierra Leone in West Africa; the Gumuz, a group descended from hunter-gatherers in Ethiopia; the Amhara, a group of Ethiopian farmers; and the Nama, a group of hunter-gatherers in South Africa.
  • The researchers compared these Africans’ DNA with the genome of a person from Britain. They also looked at the genome of a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal found in Croatia
  • The researchers concluded that as far back as a million years ago, the ancestors of our species existed in two distinct populations. Dr. Henn and her colleagues call them Stem1 and Stem2.
  • Even after these mergers 120,000 years ago, people with solely Stem1 or solely Stem2 ancestry appear to have survived
  • About 600,000 years ago, a small group of humans budded off from Stem1 and went on to become the Neanderthals. But Stem1 endured in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years after that, as did Stem2.
  • If Stem1 and Stem2 had been entirely separate from each other, they would have accumulated a large number of distinct mutations in their DNA. Instead, Dr. Henn and her colleagues found that they had remained only moderately different — about as distinct as living Europeans and West Africans are today. The scientists concluded that people had moved between Stem1 and Stem2, pairing off to have children and mixing their DNA.
  • it’s possible that bands of these two groups moved around a lot over the vast stretches of time during which they existed on the continent.
  • About 120,000 years ago, the model indicates, African history changed dramatically.
  • In southern Africa, people from Stem1 and Stem2 merged, giving rise to a new lineage that would lead to the Nama and other living humans in that region
  • Elsewhere in Africa, a separate fusion of Stem1 and Stem2 groups took place. That merger produced a lineage that would give rise to living people in West Africa and East Africa, as well as the people who expanded out of Africa.
  • It’s possible that climate upheavals forced Stem1 and Stem2 people into the same regions, leading them to merge into single groups.
  • Paleoanthropologists and geneticists have found evidence pointing to Africa as the origin of our species. The oldest fossils that may belong to modern humans, dating back as far as 300,000 years, have been unearthed there. So were the oldest stone tools used by our ancestors.
  • The DNA of the Mende people showed that their ancestors had interbred with Stem2 people just 25,000 years ago. “It does suggest to me that Stem2 was somewhere around West Africa,”
  • She and her colleagues are now adding more genomes from people in other parts of Africa to see if they affect the models.
  • It’s possible they will discover other populations that endured in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years, ultimately helping produce our species as we know it today.
  • Dr. Scerri speculated that living in a network of mingling populations across Africa might have allowed modern humans to survive while Neanderthals became extinct. In that arrangement, our ancestors could hold onto more genetic diversity, which in turn might have helped them endure shifts in the climate, or even evolve new adaptations.
  • “This diversity at the root of our species may have been ultimately the key to our success,”
criscimagnael

Why Is Ethiopia at War in the Tigray Region? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tigray-conflict-explained.html

shared by criscimagnael on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • A year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.
  • The tide of the civil war has fluctuated wildly. The government teetered in early November when fighters from Tigray surged south toward the capital, Addis Ababa, forcing Mr. Abiy to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.
  • But weeks later Mr. Abiy pulled off a stunning military reversal, halting the rebel march less than 100 miles from the capital, then forcing them to retreat hundreds of miles to their mountainous stronghold in Tigray.
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  • Mr. Abiy succeeded partly by mobilizing ordinary citizens to take up arms to block the Tigrayan advance. “Nothing will stop us. The enemy will be destroyed,”
  • Drones have also hit refugee camps in Tigray and killed dozens of civilians. Despite recent releases of political prisoners by Mr. Abiy, which prompted a phone call with President Joe Biden, the prospect of a cease-fire seems distant.
  • The conflict threatens to tear apart Ethiopia, a once-firm American ally, and further destabilize the volatile Horn of Africa region.
  • But after he took office in 2018, he set about draining the group of its power and influence in Ethiopia, infuriating the Tigrayan leadership, which retreated to its stronghold of Tigray. Tensions grew.
  • In September 2020, the Tigrayans defied Mr. Abiy by going ahead with regional parliamentary elections that had he had postponed across Ethiopia.
  • Two months later, T.P.L.F. forces attacked a federal military base in Tigray in what they called a pre-emptive strike against federal forces preparing to attack them from a neighboring region.
  • The Ethiopian military suffered a major defeat in June when it was forced to withdraw from Tigray, and several thousand of its soldiers were taken captive.
  • Through it all, civilians have suffered most. Since the war started, witnesses have reported numerous human rights violations, many confirmed by a U.N.-led investigation, of massacres, ethnic cleansing and widespread sexual violence.
  • The T.P.L.F. was born in the mid-1970s as a small militia of ethnic Tigrayans, a group that was long marginalized by the central government, to fight Ethiopia’s Marxist military dictatorship.
  • Tigrayans make up just 6 or 7 percent of Ethiopia’s population, compared with the two largest ethnic groups, the Oromo and the Amhara, which make up over 60 percent.
  • But at home, the Tigrayan-dominated government systematically repressed political opponents and curtailed free speech. Torture was commonplace in government detention centers.
  • Mr. Abiy, a onetime T.P.L.F. ally, moved quickly to purge the old guard. He removed Tigrayan officials from the security services, charged some with corruption or human rights abuses and in 2019 created a new political party. The Tigrayans refused to join.
  • At the same time, he strengthened his ties to President Isaias Afwerki, the authoritarian leader of Eritrea, who nursed a bitter, longstanding grudge against the Tigrayans.
  • But by mid-2020 that peace pact had become an alliance for war on Tigray.
  • Children are dying of malnutrition, soldiers are looting food aid, and relief workers have been prevented from reaching the hardest-hit areas, according to the United Nations and other aid groups. Since July, a government-imposed blockade of Tigray has kept desperately needed aid from reaching the area. In late November, the World Food Program announced that 9.4 million people across northern Ethiopia required food aid.
  • In western Tigray, ethnic Amhara militias have driven tens of thousands of people from their homes as part of what the United States has called an ethnic cleansing campaign.
  • Ethiopia’s ties to the United States, once a close ally, have come under great strain. Mr. Biden has cut off trade privileges for Ethiopia and threatened its leaders with sanctions.
  • He freed political prisoners, abolished controls on the news media and helped mediate conflicts abroad. His peace deal with Eritrea and its authoritarian leader, Mr. Isaias, caused the Ethiopian leader’s international profile to soar and led to his Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.
  • But even before the war erupted in Tigray, Mr. Abiy had resorted to old tactics of repression — shutting down the internet in some areas, arresting journalists and detaining protesters and critics.
  • In a stark speech in November, Mr. Abiy called on soldiers to sacrifice their “blood and bone” to bury his enemies in “a deep pit” and “uphold Ethiopia’s dignity and flag.”
g-dragon

Why Was Africa Called the Dark Continent? - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/alled-the-dark-continent-43310

africa dark continent truth Renaissance

shared by g-dragon on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • is that Europe did not know much about Africa until the 19th century, but that answer is misleading. Europeans had known quite a lot, but they began ignoring earlier sources of information.
  • They called Africa the Dark Continent, because of the mysteries and the savagery they expected to find in the “Interior."
  • It is true that up until the 19th century, Europeans had little direct knowledge of Africa beyond the coast, but their maps were already filled with details about the continent.
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  • During the Enlightenment, however, Europeans developed new standards and tools for mapping, and since they weren’t sure precisely where the lakes, mountains, and cities of Africa were, they began erasing them from popular maps. Many scholarly maps still had more details, but due to the new standards, the European explorers who went to Africa were credited with discovering the mountains, rivers, and kingdoms to which African people guided them.
  • Once the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, however, abolitionists turned their efforts against slavery within Africa. In the colonies, the British were also frustrated that former slaves didn’t want to keep working on plantations for very low wages. Soon the British were portraying African men not as brothers, but as lazy idlers or evil slave traders.
  • At the same time, missionaries began traveling to Africa to bring the word of God. They expected to have their work cut out for them, but when decades later they still had few converts in many areas, they began saying that African people’s hearts were locked in darkness. They were closed off from the saving light of Christianity.
  • guns gave these men significant power in Africa.
  • When they abused that power – especially in the Congo -  Europeans blamed the Dark Continent, rather than themselves. Africa, they said, was the that supposedly brought out the savagery in man. 
  • Race does lie at the heart of this myth, but it not about skin color. The myth of the Dark Continent referred to the savagery Europeans said was endemic to Africa, and even the idea that its lands were unknown came from erasing centuries of pre-colonial history, contact, and travel acro
  • g-dragon on 24 Oct 17
     
    The truth behind why Africa was called the Dark Continent.
maddieireland334

Boko Haram Falls Victim to a Food Crisis It Created - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...boko-haram-food-crisis.html

Boko Haram crisis Nigeria UN

shared by maddieireland334 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • At first, the attack had all the hallmarks of a typical Boko Haram assault. Armed fighters stormed a town on the border with Nigeria, shooting every man they saw.
  • Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group terrorizing this part of the world, is on the hunt — for food.
  • After rampaging across the region for years, forcing more than two million people to flee their homes and farms, Boko Haram appears to be falling victim to a major food crisis of its own creation.
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  • Across parts of northeastern Nigeria and border regions like the Far North, trade has come to a halt and tens of thousands of people are on the brink of famine, United Nations officials say
  • The hunt for food appears to be part of what is pushing Boko Haram deeper into Cameroon, according to an American State Department review of attacks in the first few weeks of this year.
  • A military campaign by Nigeria and its neighbors has chased fighters from villages they once controlled. Now, officials contend, the militants are left to scrounge for food in the sparse Sambisa Forest during the dry season, or go out raiding for whatever they can find.
  • But while some elements of Boko Haram may be battered, fighters still manage to carry out devastating attacks, the results of which are on full display at the hospital in Maroua, the capital of the Far North. Shrapnel and burn victims from recent attacks across various towns recuperate together.
  • Recent joint operations by the Cameroonian and Nigerian militaries have captured and killed numerous fighters and seized suicide belts, weapons and equipment for making mines. Officials hope to squeeze the fighters from both sides of the border so they have nowhere left to run.
  • The mass displacement caused by Boko Haram — and by the sometimes indiscriminate military campaign to defeat it — has left 1.4 million people in the region without adequate food supplies, the United Nations says.
  • In the Far North of Cameroon, this time of year is a moonscape of bone-dry river beds and clouds of dust so thick they look like misty fog. The region is moving into the so-called lean season, the in-between months when the fruits of the previous harvest are being depleted and next year’s crop is not yet ready.
  • Despite the influx of new people, officials closed the town’s market out of fear that it would be attacked. Boko Haram had struck a satellite village just days before. Residents now worry that the market will remain shut for weeks.
  • The food crisis is part of broader economic devastation in the area, adding to the burdens on Cameroon at a time when it is hosting thousands of refugees fleeing a religious war in nearby Central African Republic.
  • Even a religious leader who attends births and marriages in the Minawao Refugee Camp said the refugees needed to go home.
  • The United Nations accused Cameroon of sending tens of thousands of refugees back to Nigeria at the end of last year. The government has since said it would involve the United Nations in any plans involving the refugees’ return.
  • Tourism has plummeted in Cameroon, which has such diverse ecosystems and a range of wildlife that it refers to itself as Little Africa. Guides who once led visitors to see lions and elephants in Waza National Park in the north now scrape by with occasional work building new homes in the Minawao Refugee Camp
mattrenz16

How South Africa is viewing Trump vs. Biden (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • South Africans are painfully aware that their country generally does not loom large, if at all, in the awareness of most Americans, nor in the policies of their government.
  • But that doesn't mean they're not waiting with keen interest to see the outcome of Tuesday's race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
  • US involvement in South Africa peaked during the Cold War.
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  • During the apartheid years, the White minority governments aligned themselves with the Western nations and leveraged SA's militarily strategic position to maximize British and US support.
  • The government's views tend to be at odds with those of President Donald Trump's administration over Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Iran, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the seemingly intractable issue of Palestinian statehood, of which Ramaphosa's government is a vocal supporter.
  • There was anger when he tagged all of Africa, along with Haiti, as "shithole" countries, causing an affronted South African administration to summon the US chargé d'affaires for a dressing down.
  • This support, articulated by President Ronald Reagan as "constructive engagement," alienated the oppressed Black majority and left a lingering bad taste with many in Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, which has been the ruling party since South Africa's first democratic election in 1994.
  • President Cyril Ramaphosa's government seized on the #BlackLivesMatter protests to lament George Floyd's "regrettable death" and condescendingly observed that the incident "[presented] the USA with an opportunity to address fundamental issues of human rights."
  • Privately, it has a preference for Biden, with a government analyst telling me that South Africa believes the Democratic candidate would return to the multilateralism that Trump has scorned and is expected to be less protectionist and isolationist when it comes to China.
  • South Africa is dependent on a strong economic relationship with the US. There are around 600 US firms here, with many making SA their springboard to the rest of Africa.
  • The US is South Africa's third-biggest export destination and the country benefits from the Generalized System of Preferences trade program and the country hopes to continue to benefit from the US African Growth and Opportunity Act, currently under review.
  • Trump's stance on Israel has also drawn strong but quiet support from some sectors of South Africa's shrinking Jewish community, which numbers barely more than 50,000, equivalent to only 0.1% of the country's population of 58 million.
Javier E

Neanderthal Genes Hint at Much Earlier Human Migration From Africa - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...neanderthal-dna-africa.html

dna africa neanderthal migration genome

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • From DNA recovered from the bones, researchers deduced that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals some 60,000 years ago, after leaving Africa.
  • People of African ancestry, it was thought, have little to no Neanderthal DNA.
  • Using a new method to analyze DNA, however, a team of scientists has found evidence that significantly reshapes that narrative.
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  • Their study, published on Thursday in the journal Cell, concludes that a wave of modern humans departed Africa far earlier than had been known: some 200,000 years ago.
  • The ancestors of humans and Neanderthals lived about 600,000 years ago in Africa
  • The scientists also found evidence that people living somewhere in western Eurasia moved back to Africa and interbred with people whose ancestors never left. The new study suggests that all Africans have a substantially greater amount of Neanderthal DNA than earlier estimates.
  • The research offers a view of human history “almost as a spider web of interactions, rather than a tree with distinct branches.”
  • These people interbred with Neanderthals, the new study suggests. As a result, Neanderthals were already carrying genes from modern humans when the next big migration from Africa occurred, about 140,000 years later.
  • The Neanderthal lineage left the continent; the fossils of what we describe as Neanderthals range from 200,000 years to 40,000 years in age, and are found in Europe, the Near East and Siberia.
  • The human genome is detailed in units called base pairs, about 3 billion such pairs in total. The scientis
  • ts found that Europeans on average had 51 million base pairs that matched Neanderthal DNA, and East Asians had 55 million.Dr. Akey’s previous research had indicated that East Asians carried far more Neanderthal ancestry than did Europeans.Africans on average had 17 million base pairs that matched Neanderthal DNA — far higher than predicted by the original models describing how humans and Neanderthals interbred.
  • They concluded that a group of modern humans expanded out of Africa perhaps 200,000 years ago and interbred with Neanderthals. Those modern humans then disappeared. But Neanderthals who lived after that disappearance inherited some modern human DNA.
  • sitation over the analysis of African DNA, Dr. Reich said the new findings do make a strong case that modern humans departed Africa much earlier than thought
  • It’s possible that humans and Neanderthals interbred at other times, and not just 200,000 years ago and again 60,000 years ago. But Dr. Akey said that these two migrations accounted for the vast majority of mixed DNA in the genomes of living humans and Neanderthal fossils.
  • In recent years, Dr. Reich and other researchers have found evidence that ancient people from the Near East moved back into Africa in the past few thousand years and spread their DNA to many African populations.
criscimagnael

Desmond Tutu, Whose Voice Helped Slay Apartheid, Dies at 90 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...desmond-tutu-dead.html

shared by criscimagnael on 27 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Desmond M. Tutu, the cleric who used his pulpit and spirited oratory to help bring down apartheid in South Africa and then became the leading advocate of peaceful reconciliation under Black majority rule, died on Sunday in Cape Town. He was 90.
  • “a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead.”
  • the archbishop remained unhappy about the state of affairs in his country under its next president, Jacob G. Zuma, who had denied Mr. Mbeki another term despite being embroiled in scandal.
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  • His voice was a powerful force for nonviolence in the anti-apartheid movement, earning him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
  • “You are overwhelmed by the extent of evil,” he said. But, he added, it was necessary to open the wound to cleanse it. In return for an honest accounting of past crimes, the committee offered amnesty, establishing what Archbishop Tutu called the principle of restorative — rather than retributive — justice.
  • Archbishop Tutu preached that the policy of apartheid was as dehumanizing to the oppressors as it was to the oppressed. At home, he stood against looming violence and sought to bridge the chasm between Black and white; abroad, he urged economic sanctions against the South African government to force a change of policy.
  • But as much as he had inveighed against the apartheid-era leadership, he displayed equal disapproval of leading figures in the dominant African National Congress, which came to power under Nelson Mandela in the first fully democratic elections in 1994.
  • “many, too many, of our people live in grueling, demeaning, dehumanizing poverty.”
  • “We are sitting on a powder keg,” he said.
  • The cause of death was cancer, the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation said, adding that Archbishop Tutu had died in a care facility.
  • “I think we are at a bad place in South Africa,” Archbishop Tutu told The New York Times Magazine in 2010, “and especially when you contrast it with the Mandela era. Many of the things that we dreamed were possible seem to be getting more and more out of reach. We have the most unequal society in the world.”
  • This government, our government, is worse than the apartheid government,” he said, “because at least you were expecting it with the apartheid government.”
  • In elections in 2016, while still under the leadership of Mr. Zuma, the party’s share of the vote slipped to its lowest level since the end of apartheid. Mr. Ramaphosa struggled to reverse that trend, but earned some praise later for his robust handling of the coronavirus crisis.
  • Politics were inherent in his religious teachings. “We had the land, and they had the Bible,” he said in one of his parables. “Then they said, ‘Let us pray,’ and we closed our eyes. When we opened them again, they had the land and we had the Bible. Maybe we got the better end of the deal.”
  • Although Archbishop Tutu, like other Black South Africans of his era, had suffered through the horrors and indignities of apartheid, he did not allow himself to hate his enemies.
  • He coined the phrase “rainbow nation” to describe the new South Africa emerging into democracy, and called for vigorous debate among all races.
  • Archbishop Tutu had always said that he was a priest, not a politician, and that when the real leaders of the movement against apartheid returned from jail or exile he would serve as its chaplain.
  • While he never forgot his father’s shame when a white policeman called him “boy” in front of his son, he was even more deeply affected when a white man in a priest’s robe tipped his hat to his mother, he said.
  • But Archbishop Tutu did not stay entirely out of the nation’s business.
  • When Desmond was hospitalized with tuberculosis, Father Huddleston visited him almost every day. “This little boy very well could have died,” Father Huddleston told an interviewer many years later, “but he didn’t give up, and he never lost his glorious sense of humor.”
  • After his recovery, Desmond wanted to become a doctor, but his family could not afford the school fees. Instead he became a teacher, studying at the Pretoria Bantu Normal College and earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Africa. He taught high school for three years but resigned to protest the Bantu Education Act, which lowered education standards for Black students.
  • By then he was married to Nomalizo Leah Shenxane, a major influence in his life
  • He was named Anglican dean of Johannesburg in 1975 and consecrated bishop of Lesotho the next year. In 1978 he became the first Black general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, and began to establish the organization as a major force in the movement against apartheid.
  • Under Bishop Tutu’s leadership, the council established scholarships for Black youths and organized self-help programs in Black townships. There were also more controversial programs: Lawyers were hired to represent Black defendants on trial under the security laws, and support was provided for the families of those detained without trial.
  • A month after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, Desmond Tutu became the first Anglican bishop of Johannesburg when the national church hierarchy intervened to break a deadlock between Black and white electors. He was named archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, becoming spiritual head of the country’s 1.5 million Anglicans, 80 percent of whom were Black.
  • “I am a man of peace, but not a pacifist.”
  • In 2021, as he approached his 90th birthday, he pitched into a fraught debate as disinformation about coronavirus vaccines swirled.
  • He remained equally outspoken even in later years. In 2003 he criticized his own government for backing Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, who had a long record of human rights abuses.
  • On his frequent trips abroad during the apartheid era, Archbishop Tutu never stopped pressing the case for sanctions against South Africa. The government struck back and twice revoked his passport, forcing him to travel with a document that described his citizenship as “undetermined.”
  • Still, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its final findings in 2003, Archbishop Tutu’s imprint was plain. It warned the government against issuing a blanket amnesty to perpetrators of the crimes of apartheid and urged businesses to join with the government in delivering reparations to the millions of Black people victimized by the former white minority government.
  • Archbishop Tutu officially retired from public duties in 2010. One of his last major appearances came that year, when South Africa hosted the World Cup
  • But he did not retreat from the public eye entirely. In June 2011, he joined Michelle Obama at the new Cape Town Stadium, built for the tournament, where she was promoting physical fitness during a tour of southern Africa.
  • In an interview in the early 1980s, he said: “Blacks don’t believe that they are introducing violence into the situation. They believe that the situation is already violent.”
  • “There is nothing to fear,” he said. “Don’t let Covid-19 continue to ravage our country, or our world. Vaccinate.”
julia rhodes

BBC News - Nigeria: US 'to name Boko Haram as a terrorist group' - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-africa-24922833

US politics crisis policy nigeria news bbc terrorist

shared by julia rhodes on 13 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • 13 November 2013 Last updated at 06:45 ET Share this page Email Print Share this pageShareFacebookTwitter Nigeria: US 'to name Boko Haram as a terrorist group' Boko Haram frequently clashes with the Nigerian armed forces Continue reading the main story Nigeria under attack Afraid to go to school Dead or alive Vigilante war Gunning for Boko Haram The US state department is expected to designate the Nigerian Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, as a foreign terrorist organisation.
  • The US state department is expected to designate the Nigerian Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, as a foreign terrorist organisation
  • t will become a crime under US law to provide material support to the group
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  • BBC's Nigeria analyst, Naziru Mikailu, says the US's decision will be welcomed by the Nigerian government and the Christian Association of Nigeria, which has long been campaigning for the US to declare Boko Haram a terrorist group
  • hile Boko Haram's main focus is Nigeria, the US has cited links to the al-Qaeda affiliate in West Africa, and extremist groups in Mali.
  • igeria's government declared Boko Haram and another militant group Ansaru as terrorist organisations in June, warning that anyone who helps them will face a minimum prison sentence of 20 years
  • Last year, top US diplomat for Africa Johnnie Carson said Boko Haram exploited popular discontent in northern Nigeria, and the government needed to tackle the political and economic grievances of the mainly Muslim population in the region.
  • "reports of contact and growing relationships between elements of Boko Haram and other extremists in Africa, including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb".
Javier E

How Africans Are Changing French - One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...africa-french-language.html

french frANCE africa culture language

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • A growing number of words and expressions from Africa are now infusing the French language, spurred by booming populations of young people in West and Central Africa.
  • More than 60 percent of those who speak French daily now live in Africa, and 80 percent of children studying in French are in Africa. There are as many French speakers in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as in Paris.
  • Through social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube, they are literally spreading the word, reshaping the French language from African countries, like Ivory Coast, that were once colonized by France.
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  • “We’ve tried to rap in pure French, but nobody was listening to us,” said Jean Patrick Niambé, known as Dofy, a 24-year-old Ivorian hip-hop artist listening to Marla on the rooftop. “So we create words from our own realities, and then they spread.”
  • The youth population in Africa is surging while the rest of the world grays. Demographers predict that by 2060, up to 85 percent of French speakers will live on the African continent. That’s nearly the inverse of the 1960s, when 90 percent of French speakers lived in European and other Western countries.
  • Nearly half of the countries in Africa were at one time French colonies or protectorates, and most of them use French as their official language.
  • President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a 2019 speech: “France must take pride in being essentially one country among others that learns, speaks, writes in French.”
johnsonel7

SAP BrandVoice: Empowering Youth Is Key To Long Term Survival In Africa And Beyond - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...-survival-in-africa-and-beyond

africa economics imperialism effects

shared by johnsonel7 on 06 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Africa is nobody’s prize to win or lose, says Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, who believes it is the responsibility of Africans to take charge of their own interests and develop their continent to its full potential. To do that, Africa needs strong trade relations around the globe. That’s why coming together as a region has never been more important than it is now.
  • And since Africa is the continent with the youngest, fastest growing population, it is equally important to harness the power of youth to build relations and develop potential.
  • Africave was awarded a sizable grant by the SAP CSR team which it will use to build and train a team of three fulltime staff to run the organization. Besides covering a new, lean tech stack, the grant will also be used to develop the skills of young employees who will be mentored by high achieving, well established professionals at top global organizations ranging from Goldman Sachs to Google to UNESCO. Africave’s advisors include Oprah Winfrey’s longest-serving Chief of staff, Libby Moore and it has operations in the USA and Europe working to recruit young digital talents.
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  • Creating a sustainable future is one of those problems. If you are starving, you don’t care about other social issues, like the environment, so for Ekezie and his co-founders, economic empowerment is key to long-term survival. He is keenly aware of the fact that by 2050 one third of the world’s population will reside in Africa, yet 43 percent of young Africans today are unemployed.
mariedhorne

The New Covid-19 Strain in South Africa: What We Know - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...frica-what-we-know-11609971229

South Africa covid-19

shared by mariedhorne on 19 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A new variant of the coronavirus is driving a powerful second wave of infections in South Africa. The variant has already spread to other countries and raised concerns over how it will respond to Covid-19 vaccines.
  • he discovery and spread of the South African variant has coincided with a powerful surge in infections in the country. New daily cases and deaths have already surpassed those seen in the first wave, which peaked in July, and infections are still going up. South African researchers say they also believe that the new variant is more transmissible, since it has quickly crowded out other versions of the virus circulating in the country.
  • So far, laboratories in at least 14 countries—including Canada, France, Germany and China--have found the variant in coronavirus tests, although mostly in people who had recently traveled to South Africa. Researchers in the U.K., Botswana and Zambia say they have found cases of local transmission of the variant in their countries.
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  • Researchers who have studied the E484K mutation say it may make the existing Covid-19 vaccines less effective against the new variant, but is unlikely to be totally resistant to the shots.
  • Laboratory experiments have shown that the E484K mutation can make the virus resistant to some important antibodies the body uses to fight off Covid-19.
  • “The challenge like here in [South Africa] is in knowing whether reinfection is more likely with these variants,” said Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, “or whether they are just seeing reinfection with these variants because they are the viruses circulating at the moment and immune responses from first episodes have waned.”
  • South Africa expects to get its first one million doses of a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC this month, with the second shipment of 500,000 doses due in February.
rerobinson03

South Africa Halts Coronavirus Vaccine Rollout Because of New Variant - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ica-Covid-variant-vaccine.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 10 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The new findings from South Africa were far from conclusive: They came from a small clinical trial that enrolled fewer than 2,000 people. And they did not preclude what some scientists say is the likelihood that the vaccine protects against severe disease from the variant — a key indicator of whether the virus will overwhelm hospitals and kill people.
  • “It’s becoming increasingly apparent that we’re going to be stuck in this whack-a-mole reality, where we have variants that don’t respond to vaccines,” said Andrea Taylor, the assistant director at Duke Global Health Innovation Center. “We’ll try to tweak those vaccines to target new variants, but because the virus will still be able to spread in some populations in some parts of the world, other variants will pop up.”
  • AstraZeneca is working to produce a version of its vaccine that can protect against the variant from South Africa by the fall.Still, the findings rattled scientists, undercutting the notion that vaccines alone will stop the spread of the virus anytime soon. And they led to new, and more urgent, demands that richer countries donate doses to poorer countries that could become breeding grounds for mutations if the virus spreads unchecked.
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  • he B.1.351 variant has already spread beyond South Africa to neighboring countries, the United States and Britain. Scientists believe one of its mutations may make it harder for antibodies to grab onto the virus and keep it from entering cells.Among scientists’ worries is that the variant first detected in Britain has acquired the same mutation, known as E484K, in some cases.
  • Because the trial participants in South Africa were relatively young and unlikely to become severely ill, it was impossible for the scientists to determine if the vaccine protected people from hospitalization or death. Immune responses detected in blood samples from vaccinated people suggest it could.
  • Like many developing countries, South Africa was relying on the relatively cheap and easy-to-store AstraZeneca shot — “the people’s vaccine,” as Ms. Taylor put it — to tamp down new outbreaks. When airport workers rolled vaccine crates out of the belly of an airplane last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa watched from the rain-soaked tarmac.
  • Given the proven safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine and the hope that it might yet prevent hospitalizations and deaths from the new variant, Professor Venter said that health officials should consider offering it to anyone who wanted it.
aqconces

A Brutal Genocide in Colonial Africa Finally Gets its Deserved Recognition | History | ... - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...deserved-recognition-180957073

colonial africa genocide

shared by aqconces on 19 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Activist Israel Kaunatjike journeyed from Namibia to Germany, only to discover a forgotten past that has connections to his own family tree
  • Black and white people shared a country, yet they weren't allowed to live in the same neighborhoods or patronize the same businesses. That, says Kaunatjike, was verboten.
  • A few decades after German immigrants staked their claim over South-West Africa in the late 19th century, the region came under the administration of the South African government, thanks to a provision of the League of Nations charter.
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  • This meant that Kaunatjike's homeland was controlled by descendants of Dutch and British colonists—white rulers who, in 1948, made apartheid the law of the land. Its shadow stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, covering an area larger than Britain, France, and Germany combined.
  • “Our fight was against the regime of South Africa,” says Kaunatjike, now a 68-year-old resident of Berlin. “We were labeled terrorists.”
  • During the 1960s, hundreds of anti-apartheid protesters were killed, and thousands more were thrown in jail. As the South African government tightened its fist, many activists decided to flee. “I left Namibia illegally in 1964,” says Kaunatjike. “I couldn't go back.”
  • Germans first reached the arid shores of southwestern Africa in the mid-1800s. Travelers had been stopping along the coast for centuries, but this was the start of an unprecedented wave of European intervention in Africa. Today we know it as the Scramble for Africa.
  • The German flag soon became a beacon for thousands of colonists in southern Africa—and a symbol of fear for local tribes, who had lived there for millennia. Missionaries were followed by merchants, who were followed by soldiers.
  • Indigenous people didn't accept all this willingly. Some German merchants did trade peacefully with locals. But like Belgians in the Congo and the British in Australia, the official German policy was to seize territory that Europeans considered empty, when it most definitely was not.
  • During apartheid, he explains, blacks were forcibly displaced to poorer neighborhoods, and friendships with whites were impossible. Apartheid translates to “apartness” in Afrikaans. But many African women worked in German households. “Germans of course had relationships in secret with African women,” says Kaunatjike. “Some were raped.” He isn't sure what happened to his own grandmothers.
Javier E

How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war | News | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...y-truth-of-the-first-world-war

imperialism racism wwi white supremacy history Crisis

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.
  • But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.
  • In the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power
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  • In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.
  • “These savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.
  • The first world war, in fact, marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west today is greater than at any
  • In one predominant but highly ideological version of European history – popularised since the cold war – the world wars, together with fascism and communism, are simply monstrous aberrations in the universal advance of liberal democracy and freedom.
  • In many ways, however, it is the decades after 1945 – when Europe, deprived of its colonies, emerged from the ruins of two cataclysmic wars – that increasingly seem exceptional. Amid a general exhaustion with militant and collectivist ideologies in western Europe, the virtues of democracy – above all, the respect for individual liberties – seemed clear. The practical advantages of a reworked social contract, and a welfare state, were also obvious.
  • But neither these decades of relative stability, nor the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, were a reason to assume that human rights and democracy were rooted in European soil.
  • debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.
  • In this new history, Europe’s long peace is revealed as a time of unlimited wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas. These colonies emerge as the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal 20th-century wars – racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives – were first forged
  • Whiteness became “the new religion”, as Du Bois witnessed, offering security amid disorienting economic and technological shifts, and a promise of power and authority over a majority of the human population.
  • The resurgence of these supremacist views today in the west – alongside the far more widespread stigmatisation of entire populations as culturally incompatible with white western peoples – should suggest that the first world war was not, in fact, a profound rupture with Europe’s own history.
  • Our complex task during the war’s centenary is to identify the ways in which that past has infiltrated our present, and how it threatens to shape the future: how the terminal weakening of white civilisation’s domination, and the assertiveness of previously sullen peoples, has released some very old tendencies and traits in the west.
  • Relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia
  • A broad account of the war that is attentive to political conflicts outside Europe can clarify the hyper-nationalism today of many Asian and African ruling elites, most conspicuously the Chinese regime, which presents itself as avengers of China’s century-long humiliation by the west.
  • in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history – one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.
  • Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered.
  • At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”
  • this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.
  • it is too easy to conclude, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, that Germany broke from the norms of civilisation to set a new standard of barbarity, strong-arming the rest of the world into an age of extremes. For there were deep continuities in the imperialist practices and racial assumptions of European and American powers.
  • Rhodes’ scramble for Africa’s gold fields helped trigger the second Boer war, during which the British, interning Afrikaner women and children, brought the term “concentration camp” into ordinary parlance. By the end of the war in 1902, it had become a “commonplace of history”, JA Hobson wrote, that “governments use national animosities, foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising resentment against domestic abuses”
  • With imperialism opening up a “panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism”, ruling classes everywhere tried harder to “imperialise the nation”, as Arendt wrote. This project to “organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples” was quickly advanced through the newly established tabloid press.
  • In 1920, a year after condemning Germany for its crimes against Africans, the British devised aerial bombing as routine policy in their new Iraqi possession – the forerunner to today’s decade-long bombing and drone campaigns in west and south Asia. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” a 1924 report by a Royal Air Force officer put it. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This officer was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in the second world war unleashed the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, and whose pioneering efforts in Iraq helped German theorising in the 1930s about der totale krieg (the total war).
  • the frenzy of jingoism with which Europe plunged into a bloodbath in 1914 speaks of a belligerent culture of imperial domination, a macho language of racial superiority, that had come to bolster national and individual self-esteem.
  • One of the volunteers for the disciplinary force was Lt Gen Lothar von Trotha, who had made his reputation in Africa by slaughtering natives and incinerating villages. He called his policy “terrorism”, adding that it “can only help” to subdue the natives.
  • his real work lay ahead, in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) where an anti-colonial uprising broke out in January 1904. In October of that year, Von Trotha ordered that members of the Herero community, including women and children, who had already been defeated militarily, were to be shot on sight and those escaping death were to be driven into the Omaheke Desert, where they would be left to die from exposure. An estimated 60,000-70,000 Herero people, out of a total of approximately 80,000, were eventually killed, and many more died in the desert from starvation. A second revolt against German rule in south-west Africa by the Nama people led to the demise, by 1908, of roughly half of their population.
  • Such proto-genocides became routine during the last years of European peace. Running the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium reduced the local population by half, sending as many as eight million Africans to an early death. The American conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, to which Kipling dedicated The White Man’s Burden, took the lives of more than 200,000 civilians.
  • In light of this shared history of racial violence, it seems odd that we continue to portray the first world war as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, as a seminal and unexpected calamity. The Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose was one among many anticolonial thinkers who predicted, even before the outbreak of war, that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” was already under “a sentence of death”, awaiting “annihilation”
  • These shrewd assessments were not Oriental wisdom or African clairvoyance. Many subordinate peoples simply realised, well before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, that peace in the metropolitan west depended too much on outsourcing war to the colonies.
  • The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed, and entire populations eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies and technologies. Europe’s equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.
  • Populations in Europe eventually suffered the great violence that had long been inflicted on Asians and Africans. As Arendt warned, violence administered for the sake of power “turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate”.
  • nothing better demonstrates this ruinous logic of lawless violence, which corrupts both public and private morality, than the heavily racialised war on terror. It presumes a sub-human enemy who must be “smoked out” at home and abroad – and it has licensed the use of torture and extrajudicial execution, even against western citizens.
  • It was always an illusion to suppose that “civilised” peoples could remain immune, at home, to the destruction of morality and law in their wars against barbarians abroad. But that illusion, long cherished by the self-styled defenders of western civilisation, has now been shattered, with racist movements ascendant in Europe and the US,
  • This is also why whiteness, first turned into a religion during the economic and social uncertainty that preceded the violence of 1914, is the world’s most dangerous cult today. Racial supremacy has been historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration. It has now entered its last and most desperate phase with Trump in power.
  • We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”.
  • Certainly the risk of not confronting our true history has never been as clear as on this Remembrance Day. If we continue to evade it, historians a century from now may once again wonder why the west sleepwalked, after a long peace, into its biggest calamity yet.
Javier E

Africa's coronavirus caseload has remained relatively low. Experts say the explanation ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-aad9-8959227280c4_story.html

africa pandemic history policy culture response strategies

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • NAIROBI — The top headline last week on a popular Kenyan news website could barely contain its sarcasm: "America, with 270K deaths, 13M infections, warns citizens not to travel to Kenya over high risk of COVID-19."
  • To many here, American fears of catching the coronavirus in Africa seem particularly ludicrous.
  • Almost every one of the continent’s 54 countries, while home to some of the least developed health-care systems in the world, have registered fewer deaths from the virus in the last nine months than the United States now suffers per day.
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  • While testing has been comparatively limited, the continent appears to have bucked the doomsday predictions of global health experts. The telltale signs of severe outbreaks seen elsewhere — crowded hospitals and a spike in deaths — have emerged in only a handful of African countries. Surveys done by the World Health Organization have found negligible excess mortality rates in most African countries, reducing suspicion that many covid-19 deaths are going uncounted.
  • even as more research emerges, public health experts caution that the explanation for why Africa’s caseload has remained low will be complicated.
  • “It is highly unlikely that there is a single, definitive answer as to why this is the case,” said Ngoy Nsenga, a Congolese epidemiologist and the WHO’s program manager for emergency response in Africa. “Youthful populations, warmer climates, less time indoors, less traveling, less obesity and diabetes, immunities derived from other diseases — even other coronaviruses — are all playing a part, we think. But what distinguishes Africa from other places like Brazil that might share those factors, but were still hard-hit, are our human interventions.”
  • Those interventions have exacted immense economic damage, however, and with many African governments not seeing uncontrolled growth in cases, they have been rolled back in many places.
  • Preliminary analyses done by the WHO indicate that Africans may be twice as likely to experience covid-19 without any illness, and that more than 80 percent of cases on the continent have been asymptomatic — a far higher percentage than elsewhere in the world.
  • “During the holiday season, there will be a tendency for large movement from capital cities to villages, remote areas, for people to connect with families. That might drive the pandemic,”
  • Ndongo Dia, head of the respiratory virus diagnostic laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, isn’t sure why Senegal dodged the worst of the pandemic.
  • The nation has garnered widespread praise for its quick response, which included sealing its border, rolling out four-hour tests while Americans waited days for results, and imposing a curfew until infections slowed.
  • Beyond that, Dia said, “our luck is the composition of our population. The number of severe cases is going to be much lower compared to the northern countries, where there are more elderly people.”
  • Death rates have been higher in South Africa, Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, where a larger percentage of the population is over the age of 65. Those four countries make up two-thirds of all coronavirus deaths in Africa.
  • Health officials, however, caution that the threat is far from over — even if hospitals aren’t filling up.
  • “It is not different strains — that I can refute. We have a network of laboratories all over the continent and the world,” he said. “We have sequenced from many places, we haven’t seen dramatically different strains here.”
woodlu

Travel bans and the Omicron variant are hurting southern Africa | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21806542

politics pandemic economics policy

shared by woodlu on 30 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • It was local virologists and epidemiologists who had honed their skills studying another virus, HIV, who discovered the new Omicron variant of covid
  • When cases spiked unexpectedly, they studied samples, determined that it was a new and worrying variant and—most importantly—shared their findings immediately.
  • Britain shut its airports to flights from South Africa and several other southern African countries. America and the European Union soon followed suit, banning flights and closing their borders to travellers from the region.
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  • Many South Africans felt they were being unfairly punished for their country being scientifically rigorous and open.
  • some South African scientists have pointed out that the travel ban may also be hampering the race to learn more about Omicron by blocking supplies of the reagents they need to study it.
  • Partly because of this South Africa was, until recently, recording less than one-tenth as many daily covid cases as Britain. “It boggles the mind that people in the United Kingdom can pile into a full football stadium and in the United States it appears as though it’s business as usual, but as soon as something happens on African soil, those countries go into a hysterical tailspin,”
  • The new travel restrictions will wallop the region’s tourism industry, just as hotels, game reserves and wine estates were preparing for their busiest months of the year
  • Tourism contributes about 3% of South Africa’s GDP and much more to some others in the region, such as Namibia (11%) and Botswana (13%).
  • Last year covid and travel restrictions cut foreign visits to South Africa by 71% and threw some 300,000 people out of work.
  • Because of the drop in tourism and the imposition of lockdowns the economy shrank by about 6% last year. Thousands of small businesses collapsed
  • The ripples may spread far beyond southern Africa to countries such as Kenya and Uganda that do not yet face travel restrictions.
  • South Africa’s health workers are gearing up for another December of mayhem as covid’s fourth wave washes over the country.
  • Modelling suggested that fewer people would end up in hospital than during a vicious third wave that crested in July. In part this was because antibody tests suggested that in many parts of the country a whopping 59-69% of people had already been infected. And around a quarter of people have been fully vaccinated.
  • The emergence of Omicron, which seems to spread easily, will probably upset those estimates. “It looks like it's spreading quickly but there’s so much that’s unknown, specifically if it will evade the vaccines and its severity,”
  • In previous lockdowns the government banned the sale of alcohol to prevent drunks from occupying precious beds in hospitals. Although this did indeed reduce hospital admissions from car accidents and drunken fights, it also taught many that lockdowns divide people into two groups: the quick and the thirsty.
  • It is difficult to fault governments elsewhere for trying to slow the spread of the new variant, after they were roundly criticised for having failed to act quickly when covid first emerged. But, in turn, South Africa deserves more than just praise for having informed the world quickly about the new variant.
  • If other countries are to be encouraged to do the same with future variants, rich countries should lift travel bans as quickly as it is safe to do so. Many South Africans think rich countries should go further, and compensate South Africa for taking an economic hit that may well spare the rich world a great deal of pain
anniina03

Plan to Cut U.S. Troops in West Africa Draws Criticism From Europe - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...milley-troops-withdraw.html

politics US trump Policy

shared by anniina03 on 14 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A Pentagon proposal to greatly reduce American forces in West Africa faced criticism from allies on Tuesday, with French officials arguing that removing United States intelligence assets in the region could stymie the fight against extremist groups.
  • While no final decision has been made on how many troops will be transferred from Africa and the Middle East as the Pentagon refocuses its priorities to confront “great powers” like Russia and China, America’s top military officer said the United States needed to shift its forces to better counter China in particular.
  • The killing of General Suleimani, who was the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, has raised questions from America’s military allies about whether commanders of sovereign countries are now fair game for drone strikes.
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  • One way European allies could help in Iraq, he said, was to provide ballistic missile defense systems at bases that house troops from the American-led coalition that has been fighting the Islamic State.
  • About 200,000 United States forces are stationed abroad, a similar number to when President Trump took office with a promise to conclude the nation’s “endless wars.”
  • The Pentagon says that the overhaul of African deployments will be followed by one in Latin America and that drawdowns will occur in Iraq and Afghanistan, as it has outlined in recent months.But the killing of General Suleimani, which has sharply exacerbated tensions between Washington and Tehran, could undermine the Pentagon’s plans. Since that killing, it has sent thousands of additional troops to the region to protect against possible strikes from Iran.
Javier E

Thanks to coronavirus, South Africa basically skipped flu season - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-82d8-5e55d47e90ca_story.html

flu infection transmission south africa pandemic

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The effectiveness of coronavirus measures in preventing flu transmission has left doctors in South Africa with a riddle: Why did they stop flu in its tracks while South Africa ended up in the top five countries globally for coronavirus cases, which now stand at nearly 600,000?
  • The answer lies in fundamental differences between the two viruses,
  • “It seems quite clear that the coronavirus is simply much, much more contagious than the flu,” she said. “This isn’t a fluke — this is proof that simple containment measures, when broadly followed, are effective against influenza transmission, but not enough for coronavirus.”
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  • Of all the measures South Africa put in place, Dawood said the most important against the flu was school closures. Studies have shown that children exhibit the highest rates of infection and illness due to influenza. “I think that was the one that interrupted flu’s whole chain,”
  • experts have offered numerous explanations for why it is more infectious than the seasonal flu. Foremost is the extent to which it spreads when those who carry it are asymptomatic. Flu is almost always transmitted through symptoms such as sneezing and coughing.
  • Many people also carry “background immunities” for influenza, Dawood said. Repeated infections, as well as worldwide annual vaccination campaigns, have given large portions of the global population at least some influenza antibodies, although new strains appear nearly every year.
  • People also began taking extra health precaution
  • With coronavirus cases climbing steeply at the beginning of the country’s flu season, many people rushed to clinics to get flu shots, hoping to avoid at least one co-morbidity.
  • The continued implementation of personal protective measures may be so effective against flu transmission that entire strains of the virus that relied on incubation in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter before being passed back north might be eliminated for good
  • “If it works out like this, it would be a very beautiful positive side effect of covid, one of the few good things to come of it.”
  • The main threat to that possibility is reintroduction from the Northern Hemisphere, where many countries, and parts of the United States in particular, have not required mask-wearing and school closures.
criscimagnael

Suspect in South Africa's Parliament Fire Is Sent for Psychiatric Check - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-parliament-fire-suspect.html

shared by criscimagnael on 12 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The man suspected of setting fire to South Africa’s Parliament buildings in Cape Town was committed to a psychiatric hospital on Tuesday to determine whether he is fit to stand trial on terrorism and other charges.
  • But prosecutors said he might not be “compos mentis,” or fully sane.
  • If Mr. Mafe is found mentally fit to stand trial, he will face charges that include terrorism, illegal possession of explosives, arson, theft and housebreaking. His legal team has previously indicated that he intends to plead not guilty
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  • He is the only suspect in the destruction of the historic buildings that housed the National Assembly and the offices of lawmakers, the governing African National Congress and several opposition parties.
  • On Tuesday, as the judge, Zamekile Mbalo, ordered Mr. Mafe committed to a psychiatric hospital in Cape Town for 30 days, the suspect appeared visibly distressed. He shook his head from side to side, breathing heavily as he clutched his belongings in a shopping bag. His lawyers said he would go on hunger strike to protest his continued detention.
  • Mr. Mafe’s lawyer, Mr. Mpofu, a former anti-apartheid activist and now a prominent member of an opposition party, has a reputation for taking on politicized cases. He defended a group of veterans accused of briefly holding the defense minister hostage during a meeting over unpaid benefits. Mr. Mpofu is also a lawyer for Jacob Zuma, the former president, appearing on his behalf to appeal his arrest on contempt of court charges last year.
criscimagnael

South Africa Was Hit by Virus Wave, Despite Most People Having Antibodies - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-south-africa-antibodies.html

shared by criscimagnael on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Coronavirus infections surged in South Africa in recent months despite research suggesting that about 98 percent of the population had some antibodies from vaccination, previous infection, or both.
  • But though the vast majority of the South African population had antibodies against the virus, many still became infected in the latest virus wave, which began in April and was driven by BA.4 and BA.5, new subvariants of Omicron.
  • New daily deaths also rose
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  • Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease modeler and epidemiologist at Columbia University in New York, said it was possible that the number of those who had been infected with the virus in South Africa could be even higher than 87 percent, accounting for varying immune responses among different individuals.
  • The researchers say the study provides yet more evidence of the capacity of the virus to evolve and dodge immunity.
  • “At this point we are not able to contain the spread; that’s the sobering takeaway.”
  • “We have to admit the possibility that the number of waves that we’ve seen over the past few years, it may continue at that cadence,” Dr. Shaman said.
  • “The virus will continue to evolve so that it can continue to spread in the population,” Dr. Lessells said. “It doesn’t end,” he added. “This virus is with us for the rest of time.”
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