9 items | 1 visits
Martin Wolff's List: Africa
-
-
When a girl is taken — usually by her mother — to a free circumcision event held each spring in Bandung, Indonesia, sponsored by the Assalaam Foundation, she is handed over to a small group of women who, swiftly and yet with apparent affection, cut off a small piece of her genitals. The procedure takes several minutes. There is little blood involved. Afterward, the girl’s genital area is swabbed with the antiseptic Betadine. She has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia, where 96 percent of families surveyed reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by the time they reached 14... Female circumcision in Indonesia is reported to be less extreme than the kind practiced in other parts of the globe — Africa, particularly... According to Lukman Hakim, the Assalaam Foundation's chairman of social services, there are three “benefits†to circumcising girls. “One, it will stabilize her libido,†he said through an interpreter. “Two, it will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband. And three, it will balance her psychology.â€
-
-
-
Six thousand years ago, northern Africa was a place of trees, grasslands, lakes and people. Today, it is the Sahara — a desolate area larger than Australia. Lake Yoa, in northeastern Chad, has remained a lake through the millennia and is still a lake today, surrounded by hot desert. Although little rain falls, Lake Yoa’s water is replenished from an underground aquifer. By analyzing thousands of layers of sediment in a core drilled from the bottom of this lake, an international team of scientists has reconstructed the region’s climate as the savannah changed to Sahara.
-
-
May 26, 08
-
Guinea-Bissau, one of the world's poorest nations, has become a major transshipment hub and the epicenter in Africa for the cocaine trade, according to U.S., European and U.N. officials. The shift demonstrates how the flow of drugs adapts not only to law enforcement pressure but also to the forces of global economics. Officials said some of the world's richest criminal gangs are exploiting barely functioning countries such as Guinea-Bissau, which has 63 federal police officers, no prison and a population that still lives largely in thatched-roof homes on dirt roads with no electricity or running water. The Colombian cartels are responding to the pressure for cocaine in nations such as Britain, Spain and Italy, where demand is soaring as the U.S. market has leveled off, officials said. Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, described the strong currencies in Europe, where cocaine sells for twice as much as in the United States, as "a magnet" for the cartels. Police raids in Colombia are increasingly turning up suitcases full of euros instead of the traditional dollars. "West Africa is under attack," said Costa, who recently visited Guinea-Bissau and concluded that it is so overrun by the cocaine trade that it could become Africa's first "narco-state."
-
-
-
Five years after the Darfur conflict began, the nature of violence across this vast desert region has changed dramatically, from a mostly one-sided government campaign against civilians to a complex free-for-all that is jeopardizing an effective relief mission to more than 2.5 million displaced and vulnerable people. While the government and militia attacks on straw-hut villages that defined the earlier years of the conflict continue, Darfur is now home to semi-organized crime and warlordism, with marijuana-smoking rebels, disaffected government militias and anyone else with an AK-47 taking part, according to U.N. officials. The proliferation of banditry has become the biggest threat to humanitarian groups undertaking the largest relief effort in the world and to a nascent U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force. Their trucks and SUVs are stolen almost daily, used as fighting vehicles or sold for cash to middlemen who haul them to Chad and Libya.
-
-
-
“We are back where we started,†said Wilfred Collins Wonani, who leads the Chamber of Commerce here, sighing at the loss of one of the city’s biggest employers. “Sending raw materials out, bringing cheap manufactured goods in. This isn’t progress. It is colonialism.â€
-
-
-
Though it is Africa's biggest killer, malaria has always been a regional blight. In the secluded coffee-farming villages around Mt. Kenya, malaria was rare, something other people had to worry about, in the sun-baked west or along the steamy coast.
-
-
-
Three years after it was burned to the ground, the village of Tulus in Darfur is springing back to life. Corn and sesame sprout from fertile fields. Children play around newly built huts. Smoke from cooking fires once again rises from the land. Problem is, those rebuilding Tulus are not the original inhabitants, who were chased away by pro-government Sudanese militias in 2004 and are afraid to return. Instead, their place has been taken by Chadian Arabs, who recently crossed the border to flee violence in their own country.
-
-
-
When Suleiman Diarra Banani’s brother said that the poisonous black seeds dropping from the seemingly worthless weed that had grown around his family farm for decades could be used to run a generator, or even a car, Mr. Banani did not believe him. When he suggested that they intersperse the plant, until now used as a natural fence between rows of their regular crops — edible millet, peanuts, corn and beans — he thought his older brother, Dadjo, was crazy.
-
-
-
New research from the American Museum of Natural History provides the first detailed study showing that global warming forces species to move up tropical mountains as their habitats shift upward. Christopher Raxworthy, Associate Curator in the Department of Herpetology, predicts that at least three species of amphibians and reptiles found in Madagascar's mountainous north could go extinct between 2050 and 2100 because of habitat loss associated with rising global temperatures. These species, currently moving upslope to compensate for habitat loss at lower and warmer altitudes, will eventually have no place to move to.
-
1 - 9 of 9
20 items/page
List Comments
(0)
List Info