Jane Goodall: Climate, Community, Coffee

I found a recent installment of the BBC radio program HARDtalk to be uncharacteristically uplifting. In a rebroadcast of a segment that originally aired in July 2020, Dr. Jane Goodall did discuss some hard truths, but she also offered listeners hope of a way forward in this most dismal year.

Dame Jane Goodall. Image: BBC

I am sharing this interview with students in several of my courses because she explains the importance of connecting environmental protection with human rights and she describes exactly how that connection is made: by listening to the people most directly involved. She carries out this work with communities and individuals worldwide through two organizations -- the think tank/foundation Jane Goodall Institute and the youth movement Roots and Shoots.

More specifically, I am sharing this with students in my coffee classes because one of her many projects involves a cooperative of coffee farmers near the Gombe National Park, as the site of her original field work is now known. I first learned of the project when Gombe Reserve Coffee was being sold by Green Mountain Coffee. Jane Goodall continues to work with the Kanyovu Coffee Cooperative Society, a consortium of 12 coffee collectives representing 7,600 farmers near the park. Because sustainable coffee farming is a form of agroforestry, it can provide a critical buffer in areas adjacent to protected parks such as Gombe. Since the partnership with Green Mountain Coffee ended, I have not been able to find this coffee at a retail level, but the Goodall Institute and US-AID both continue to support the work of these growers.

Farmers protecting forests near Gombe
Image: Jane Goodall Institute

I was lucky enough to be in a room with Dr. Goodall just once, when she was kind enough to accept the first Atlas Award from the American Association of Geographers in 2010. This award is given by our national organization to a person who advances the values of geography but who does not identify primarily as a geographer. The HARDtalk interview reveals an interesting connection between geography and her work as an anthropologist: at a pivotal moment early in her studies in Gombe, National Geographic decided to report on her work. In the 2010 article Being Jane Goodall, the magazine reflects on the the first half century of her remarkable career. (This link is for NatGeo members only, but the article is available through most libraries.)

January 2022 Update: Amid much sad news at the new year -- including the death of E.O. Wilson -- a BBC interview with Jane Goodall was a bright spot. Her discussion with BBC's Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt is a thorough exploration of Lessons from the forest for climate change. It is a great example of the kind of geographic thinking we need at this crossroads in the life of our planet.

Lagniappe: Gorongosa

Thinking about Jane Goodall's embrace of local communities as an integral part of her environmental work reminds me of another example of a prominent scientist who partners with local experts. In my 2017 post Good News from Gorongosa, I introduce a wonderful documentary about the relationship between Tonga Torcida, a young man in a part of Mozambique that has been inhabited for 300,000 years and the imminent biologist E.O. Wilson.

Thanks to Doctor Ogbuagu

This map depicts key points in the early life and education of Dr. Onyema Ogbuagu, a researcher at Yale University known for his work on AIDS and more recently on Pfizer's vaccine for the Covid-19 Coronavirus.

Like many, I learned of his contribution from this tweet issued last week by the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria. The tweet is put in the context of Dr. Ogbuagbu's overall career in an article by journalist Haleem Olatunji on TheCable, a Nigerian online journal.

The story illustrates the importance of scientific cooperation in general and of the mobility of scholars across international borders. For many, it provides what might be surprising evidence of the high quality of medical education in a developing country. For me, it is a welcome story of diplomatic professionals doing what they do best: highlighting that which unites us.

Lagniappe: Biafra

I am glad I took a moment to map the places that were mentioned in Olatunji's article. For then it becomes clear that Dr. Obguagbu was raised and educated primarily in Biafra, a region whose attempt to secede from Nigeria was the crux of a civil war and the subject of Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel I have been reading with students in my course Africa: People, Resources, and Development. Reading that novel helps me to understand some of the quite negative replies I found under the aforementioned tweet -- the division in Nigeria is very much alive, a half century after the civil war.

Approximate boundaries of Biafra within Nigeria: Wikipedia

Warm Heart of Malawi

The World Through a Lens is a weekly series of explorations provided by the photojournalists of the New York Times  as a welcome diversion from the isolation many are experiencing during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Malawians: What turned a single visit to Malawi into a lifetime connection.
Photo credit: Marcus Westburg

The contribution of Sweden's Marcus Westberg begins with a two-day assignment in Malawi that has turned into a relationship lasting most of his adult life. We went to the small village of Senga Bay to take photos 14 years ago, when a water-supply well (borehole) was being installed. He was soon captivated by the country, the people, and the lake that helps to define both.

Over time, he came to understand the phrase Malawians use to describe their culture: the warm heart of Africa. His photo essay is a treasure; and though it captures a single recent journey, both the words and the images are borne of a connection built over more than a decade.

Please enjoy the photographs Westburg shares with us; you will feel the warmth and the heart. You will also gain some insight into matters that are important in Malawi and throughout many other countries of the African continent.

I am always intrigued by the map of Malawi -- the country and its eponymous inland sea are almost the same shape. 

BONUS: For his second entry in the NYT series, Westburg shares his experiences in and along the Luangwa River of Zambia. In this case, humans are not his focus: these photos are all about the charismatic megafauna.

Frolicking hippos -- their name is from the Greek for "river horse."
Photo: Marcus Westburg. 

If you like Westburg's work -- and how can you not? -- consider following his social-media links at the bottom of the article.

Lagniappe

I am grateful for Westburg's essay because he so beautifully conveys something similar to my own experiences in a couple different places. My choice of a human-centered photo and my awkward caption about finding Malawians in Malawi are deliberate. In 2006 --- around the same time as Westburg's first visit to Malawi -- I went to Nicaragua with the intention of leading a coffee tour there one time, and moving on to another coffee country the next year. I have taken more than 100 people there during 12 visits so far, and I am in touch with someone from Nicaragua almost every day. In turn, many of those 100 people who went with me for a single visit have returned and built long-term relationships. The reason: we did not just meet Nicaragua; we met Nicaraguans.

Plantation Discourses

The story of Dutch podcast partners Peggy Bouva and Maartje Duin began with an awkward conversation about the connections between their families. Both live in Holland, but Duin -- a journalist -- discovered that they were connected by a plantation in the former Dutch colony of Suriname.

They discuss their podcast, their friendship, and their travels together in a recent appearance with Joanna Kakissis on NPR's Morning Edition. (Careful listeners will notice that "slaves" is used as a noun in the introduction to the conversation, though "enslaved persons" is used in the conversation itself. This reflects a growing recognition that it is dehumanizing to identify people solely by the bad circumstances or crimes that have affected them.)

Although the podcast itself appears to be available only in Dutch at the moment, Google Translate offers some sense of the summary of each episode of The Plantation of Our Ancestors in other languages, and includes links to other resources, some of which are available in English. These include Mapping Slavery NL, which portrays historical places relating to slavery on the map of the Dutch colonial empire.

The description of the mapping project highlights on advantage Dutch and some other European folks have over those of us in the United States: they know that their countries were part of the metropol, that is, at the centers of global empires. Denial of its imperial nature is a treasured myth in my country, even though no empire has ever been bigger.

As pro-slavery statues are toppled by vote, by edict, or by protestors, some decry the loss of history. In most cases, however, the history remains to be uncovered, whatever happens to icons of bronze men on bronze horses. As we finally grapple seriously with the ongoing implications of slavery, conversations such as those between these Bouva and Duin are essential. 

Lagniappe 

Even at my seemingly far remove, I have derived a benefit from the ill-gotten glories of Holland's trafficking in humans. Among the artists supported by that immense wealth are both Rembrandt and Vermeer. My answer to the Getty Art Challenge of 2020 was a recreation of Vermeer's The Geographer. 

My entry in the Getty Art Challenge, special edition for Pride Week.

Angola's Singer, Sprinter ... and Geographer

 

Bonga Kueda: His beard is no simple matter

Harry Graham's 2018 interview with Angolan musician Bonga Kueda is a half hour very well spent. It is an engaging conversation with an artist whose life traces the arc of modern Angolan history. He describes his journey from music to running and back to music, all while telling Angola's colonial and post-colonial story. 

He mentions three major genres of Angolan music, and it might be difficult to know what he is saying if these are unfamiliar; a friend who has worked in Angola shared the correct spellings: Kuduro, Kizomba, and Semba. This is not the same as Brazilian Samba, though the latter may have been derived from Semba.

The stories of independence in Angola, Cabo Verde, and other Lusophone nations are intertwined with the 1975 fall of Salazar in Portugal itself. These events are much more recent than many of our contemporaries seem to think; it is almost too soon to talk about post-colonialism.

The conversation is presented for an English-speaking audience, but Bantu, Portuguese, and French are heard in the background throughout. Despite the deep pain Portugal has caused for his country, the main interview takes place by phone from a barber shop in Lisbon.

I add the label "geographer" to his story even though it is not cited in the interview. Growing up in colonial schools, Bonga had to learn the rivers of Portugal, but his own country was not part of the curriculum. At a young age, he taught himself the geography of his own country and took "Bonga" as a way of rejecting the name given him at birth as the subject of an empire. It is therefore quite ironic that he conducts the interview quite in the seat of that empire.

Lagniappe

When looking for the music of Bonga online, I found a recording of Sodade that he made with Cabo Verde's national treasure Cesária Evora.

Coffeeland as Empire

I had already begun to read Augutine Sedgewick's hefty tome Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug when a fellow geographer passed along Oliver Taslik's much more manageable review, The callous roots of caffeine capitalism.

Taslik confirms my impression that Sedgewick's work has a great tendency to wander and meander across time and space, making me feel a bit better about already having gotten a little bit lost in its pages. He also reminds us that the James Hill -- the "One Man" of the book's subtitle -- is not the real subject of the book.

Rather, it is the broader story of the hazards of economic and social -- and political -- development that is dependent on a single crop. Diversification to other crops is scarcely better, if they remain within a narrow range and share post-colonial patterns of dependency.

I hope to have more to say on the work when I reach its end, and I hope some day to reach El Salvador itself -- a country I have studied a fair bit but not yet visited.

Lagniappe

Those who know me well may notice that the title of this book is very similar to a word I use often -- Coffeelands -- as a term of endearment for all of the places around the world that provide our coffee, and to the people of those lands. It is also the name of one of my very favorite coffee shops, whose owner has been with me on three coffeelands journeys (so far).

Isolating During Ramadan

One of the stories I heard on PRI's The World yesterday afternoon caught my attention in several phases. The report by PRI journalist Halima Gikandi begins with a broad assessment of the likely impact of the Covid-19 virus on the continent as a whole. Almost every country has reported cases, but they have been relatively few so far. The pandemic is spreading slowly but is expected eventually to overwhelm health-care resources in many places.

The report then turned to the experience of one family in Nairobi. Like approximately 10 percent of Kenyans, this is a Muslim family, and like all Muslim families, Ramadan is a time for being together. I had been only vaguely aware of Ramadan this year, and certainly had not realized we were 3/4 of the way through the month. The reporting describes the difficulty of the neighborhood of Eastleigh, where part of this family lives.


Note that the place names are a remnant of Kenya's colonial past: they are almost equally divided between English and Swahili. 

Eastleigh is a struggling neighborhood in the best of times, and its normally limited access to food has been reduced by public-health closures. The municipal government is struggling to assure residents that it is the high concentration of virus cases and not the religious identity of residents that is responsible. As with many places -- including the United States -- the pandemic is highlighting social issues that might be present but not be widely acknowledged in "normal" times.

The full title of Gikandi's report is Ramadan in Nairobi during a pandemic.

Cabo = Cape Verde

Having read earlier today that Cabo Verde had not yet reported any Coronavirus cases, I was saddened and surprised to see it marked on the definitive Global Cases map from ESRI and Johns Hopkins, which as of this writing (10pm EDT) indicated 305,234 cases worldwide, up by five thousand from when I checked earlier today.

When I zoomed in, I noticed two dots where Cabo Verde should be. Clicking on each in turn, I noticed the problem:

and 

The country has 4 active cases, reported under the new and old names of the country. A former Portuguese colony that became independent in 1975, it has been called Cabo Verde for centuries, Cape Verde in English.

It has also represented incorrectly on maps in many ways over the years. I completed my doctorate in geography without being quite sure where or what these islands were, because I saw so many contradictions on maps -- some of them suggesting they were still part of Portugal, others indicating that the name referred both to the islands and to a point of land (a cape) in Senegal.

In 2013, the United Nations ceased using the name "Cape Verde" at all, insisting that Cabo Verde should be used, even in an English context. In southeastern Massachusetts -- home of the biggest Cape Verdean / Cabo Verdean / Kabuverdianu community outside the country itself -- I often read and hear both of these versions of the name, and a couple more.

 Geographer Tanya Basu reported on the name change for National Geographic at the time, and explained the bit about Senegal in the process.

The Johns Hopkins map synthesized databases from at least six organizations: Esri, WHO, HERE, GARMIN, NOAA, and USGS (all of these employ geographers, by the way). It appears that at least one of these is using the old name. I will of course be contacting some of these agencies to report the error while the numbers are still small.

Lagniappe

For general information about the geography of Cabo Verde, see my 2018 Basics post. For the story of another mistake I noticed in an online map of the country, see my 2013 Google In, Google Out post.

For the story and photos of my 2006 travel course, see my Cabo Verde - Cape Verde
Geography of Sustainable Development - Geografia do desenvolimento sustenavel web page. Since then, I have had the opportunity to learn a lot more about the country, and to give a presentation at a Cabo Verde conference at my own university. I have also begun to study Kriolu (one of the two national languages, similar to but distinct from Portuguese) and to help develop a minor in Cape Verdean Studies at Bridgewater State University. I will eventually be offering a Fogo version of my Geography of Coffee travel course as my own contribution to that academic minor.

Update

About 15 hours after I contacted the Johns Hopkins team, the error was corrected. It appears the total incidence as of this writing is 3. I do not know if they are on more than one of the islands or all on the same island.

1:30 p.m. EDT, March 22, 2020

Mozambique Bard?

I first learned of Bob Dylan's 1976 song Mozambique from a 2016 article in Adrian Frey's Club of Mozambique newsletter. Frey points out that many people in Mozambique had -- like me -- never heard of the song until Dylan won (reluctantly) the Nobel Prize in Literature four decades later.

Frey outlines reasons that some in the former Portuguese colony were pleased at the attention while others were offended by the breezy lyrics about a place that was in such real duress at the time of its struggle for independence and subsequent civil war. Among the YouTube comments associated with the live video above is a post by user gardenofthegods, defending the song as a sophisticated but widely misunderstood commentary on the dire situation in Mozambique at the time. Of course, being a YouTube comments section it is not surprising to see the same user yammering on about the volume controls in his phone. Better audio is available on the studio version.

I will be looking for more insight from those who know Dylan or Mozambique better than I do.

Lagniappe

I learned of this song from Fascinating Facts About Every Single Country on Earth, posted on Far & Wide by Max DeNike last week. As the title suggests, he shares just one item about each country, and most of them are rather interesting.

Lalibela's Black Jerusalem

Image: CBS News

The scale of the carving in the image above is easier to grasp once one notices the humans walking around the edges of the pit in which it rests. It is, in fact, a church carved into this slab of basalt in Ethiopia more than 800 years ago. 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley explored this church and the ten others like it -- each carved as a unitary structure on a 62-acre site in Lalibela, on the northern basalt highlands of Ethiopia.

His reporting includes an introduction to the geology that makes these carvings possible and the connections between Jerusalem and this site, considered sacred to Orthodox Ethiopians. He speaks with clergy, pilgrims, and experts on the architecture and stonemasonry of the remarkable site -- while the camera reveals many of the remarkable details of carvings made flawlessly and largely in the dark.

Lagniappe: Coffee

As students of my coffee classes know, Coffea arabica is misnamed because it is native only to the highlands of Ethiopia. Oromia is an important growing area within coffee's native territory, and site of the essential coffee documentary Black Gold. I include it on the map below to signify that although the churches of Lalibela are rely on the same geologic underpinnings as coffee, they are separated by a rift valley and about a 1,000 kilometers of distance from the southern coffee regions.

Run, Nina

From the today's episode of BBC Witness History, I learned that Nina Simone had lived in Monrovia, Liberia for a three-year period when she was quite a prominent performer in the soul genre.

BBC reporter Lucy Burns combines her interview of Simone's friend James Dennis with archival interviews of Simone herself to tell the story of how personal and political motivations came together to lead the singer to a country that was at the time attractive to many African Americans. The discussion moves on to changes both in the singer's personal circumstances and in the country itself, which has fallen into very difficult times since its cultural heyday in the 1970s.

Liberian Calypso was written by Simone, but draws heavily on Maya Angelou's marvelous 1957 calypso tune Run Joe.

Lagniappe

When I am rowing in New Bedford harbor, we often see the word Monrovia on the stern of ships at anchor, and fellow rowers will ask about the name, or about the Liberian flag, which looks vaguely like the U.S. flag. Although it is a small country with a proportionally even smaller economy, Liberia is the registry of record for many ships; it is one of the world's most important flags of convenience.

This ship is not registered in Brazil.
Photo: Maritime Studies

Squaring History

Amidst the jumble of place names strewn across this scene from a busy part of the Belgian capital is symbolic but hard-won effort to right -- albeit in a very small way -- an historic wrong of European colonialism in Africa.

The square recognizes the 1960 independence of the Belgian Congo -- now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- by honoring Patrice Lumumba, its first prime minister. In 2018, officials in Brussels renamed Bastion Square in his honor; as of this writing, Google Earth continues to use both names.

As reported by Times journalist Milan Schreuer, the honor is in stark contrast to the brutality of Belgium in the Congo in general and of its treatment of Lumumba in particular. That he would be honored in a neighborhood that is both in the metropol and populated by many of his compatriots gives the irony of the honor a spatial manifestation.

Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo in New York in 1960.
Allyn Baum/The New York Times

Dam Problems

Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Journalism can also serve as a window on geography. That is often the case with the work of journalist (and fellow employee of Massachusetts public higher education) Steve Curwood. The view is amplified by the journalists and scholars he brings onto his show, Living on Earth.

I recently found his January 2018 conversation with environmental journalist Fred Pearce is an excellent example. Wetlands are seasonally inundated areas that play a vital role in ecosystems throughout the world.

In the segment (13 minutes) entitled African Dams Dry Up Wetlands & Local Jobs, Pearce explains the causes and consequences of wetland losses in several parts of Africa. His emphasis is on the lost of riparian wetlands lost as annual floods are eliminated by the construction of dams. The conversation illustrates how environmental problems interact with economic security, migration, and even national security. He links the loss of wetlands to decisions about migration on the part of people who would have much preferred to stay home.

Manantali Dam, Senegal River Basin

The conversation also reminds us that although climate change has wide-reaching consequences, it is not always the primary driver of environmental problems. Sadly, humans have no shortage of ways to disrupt the natural systems upon which we depend.

Lagniappe

The very first project initiated by the World Bank was the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, which created electricity and extended growing seasons, but disrupted the floods that had supported Egyptian civilizations for thousands of years and made farmers there dependent on chemical fertilizers. It would be the first of many dams that came to symbolize the arrogance of Rostovian  development theory (simply build infrastructure and everything will improve).

December 2020 update: BBC Witness History includes The building of the Aswan Dam as part of a series on the work of UNESCO. This focuses on the scramble of scholars from all over the world to move Nubian artifacts from the threat of rising waters and on the dislocation of 100,000 Nubian people. 

Dams featured prominently in the very first book I read as a geography student, and small dams were essential parts of my master's thesis, Source-area erosion rates in areas tributary to Miami Whitewater Lake (Ohio). Finally, this blog includes the story of the Rio Doce, a dam failure in Brazil that did incalculable damage.

Bamako, The Trial

As part of my Africa sabbatical, I have been exploring quite a few works related Mali and its neighbors along the Niger River. The 2006 film Bamako somehow got onto my list, and by the time the DVD arrived from Netflix, I had forgotten exactly why. Seeing the title, I assumed it had something to do with the music festivals for which that city was once known.


This impression was reinforced by the opening scene in which Senegal-born actress Aïssa Maïga portrays the lounge singer Melé, but I soon realized that this would be a very different sort of film than I expected. The film takes place in a wide courtyard near her family's home, and intertwines local and global stories of dysfunction.

While a tragedy involving Melé's husband unfolds, characters walk back and forth through some sort of legal proceedings. The exact nature of the legalities are not revealed until almost a full hour into this two-hour film; the audience becomes aware only gradually how the trial connects the lived experience of Africans with the policies that shape that experience from very far away.

The film has several valuable soliloquies, delivered both by African and European speakers. Each is a well-crafted indictment (or in one case defense) of the status quo that should be heard in its entirety. The best single line comes during closing arguments:

"We cannot throw Paul Wolfowitz into the Niger (River). The caimans (alligators) wouldn't want him."

The alternative i

I recommend seeking the DVD from Netflix or Amazon, as I do not know of a legitimate streaming source. At least at the moment, however, the entire film is on YouTube.

Toto's Rains of Africa

Toto Forever, 2019
Max Siedentopf
plinths and solar powered music system

Early in my Africa sabbatical, I spent about 15 minutes going down the rabbit hole of the eponymous 1981 song by Toto. I reemerged quickly, but the song is still with me, consarnit! In a undoubtedly vain effort to stop it from playing in my head before I board a plane to Africa next month, I'm returning to that rabbit hole for a bit, this time bringing along any willing readers.

After all, if a serious public intellectual like Meghna Chakrabarti can devote 26 giggling minutes of her show to the questions raised by Weezer's unfortunate cover of the song (and the Twitter campaign that made it inevitable), I can justify a couple hours delving into some geographic considerations.

This Radio Boston program aired in August 2018, just before I was to teach  GEOG 388 -- Africa: People, Resources, Development for the first time. Because I somehow ended up teaching the course before the sabbatical in which I would plan the course, I grasped at more than a few straws for content, and playing the original music video on the first day was one of these straws.

I did so by waying of highlighting the fact that in the United States Africa exists primarily as a vague cluster of stereotypes, rather than the world's second-biggest continent. The original MTV video has two things to recommend it: is set in an imaginatively-staged library and it features a globe. Its connection to Africa is in the form of overworked and disjointed tropes.

This may be seen as ironic -- just as Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" was explicitly not "about" its subject, so too "Africa" has nothing to do with the place it names. The irony is celebrated by Namibian artist Max Siedentopf, who is -- as you read this -- playing "Africa" in Africa. Specifically, he has installed an armored, solar-powered, omni-directional speaker system that plays the song on infinite loop in an undisclosed location in the tractless Namib desert. He chose the oldest desert in the world, and though it is not as big as the Sahara, its very name means "vast," so that Toto has a good chance of playing for years without being heard.

BBC's report on this installation is what started me down this rabbit hole back in January, starting with a link to another BBC article about the surprising endurance of the song and its malleability into memes and parodies. By hiding the song in plain sight in a tangible but unknown place in Africa itself, Siedentopf in part reclaims continent's ownership of its own discourse. He disrupts -- or at least interrogates -- the problematic imbalance between the narrator and the periphery that is "down in" his subject.

Learn more -- and find a link to some other extremely remote artworks -- from Siedentopf's own Toto Forever web page.

Lyrics

It was from the reporting of Meghna Chakrabarti that I learned that "Africa" is an exemplar -- perhaps the exemplar -- of something known as yacht rock, a genre whose name derived from an internet television program produced only after the genre had been put to rest. Catchy tunes and vacuous lyricare hallmarks of yacht rock. This explains the longevity of a song that nobody can -- or even tries to -- explain.

I hear the drums echoing tonight
But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation
She's coming in, 12:30 flight
The moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide me towards salvation
I stopped an old man along the way
Hoping to find some long forgotten words or ancient melodies
He turned to me as if to say, "Hurry boy, it's waiting there for you"

It's gonna take a lot to take me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never had

The wild dogs cry out in the night
As they grow restless, longing for some solitary company
I know that I must do what's right
As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti
I seek to cure what's deep inside, frightened of this thing that I've become

It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never had

Hurry boy, she's waiting there for you

It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
I bless the rains down in Africa
(I bless the rain)
I bless the rains down in Africa
(I bless the rain)
I bless the rains down in Africa
I bless the rains down in Africa
(Ah, gonna take the time)
Gonna take some time to do the things we never hadSongwriters: David Paich / Jeff PorcaroAfrica lyrics © Spirit Music Group

Coming the lyrics for geographic meaning, I find nothing more significant than a weak metaphor involving Kilimanjaro. I am still likely, however to play this song on opening day of my next GEOG 388 section in September.

Lagniappe

In my "research" for this post, I learned of the existence of this artifact, an Africa picture disk (or disc). Rather than plunking $275 to buy one for a phonograph I no longer own, I tried to share a virtual version. Revisiting this post in 2022, I found it has been removed on copyright grounds, so to recreate the effect, you can play the song with a link above and spin your computer while looking at this picture of the picture.

A Bit of Perspective

A friend and colleague from South Africa shared a 2018 article -- originally published in Rolling Stone -- that attempts to make sense of the strange popularity of the song. Rob Sheffield's insight is best captured in his use of the phrase even by clueless eighties standards. It is a song about placelessness, literal and metaphorical.

I have returned to this post at the end of 2022 because a friend just shared the following silliness.

And now for the actual rains ... 

Rainfall, climate, and biogeographic patterns in Africa exhibit more symmetry (north-to-south) than other continents because Africa is essentially centered on the equator and stretches from small Mediterranean climate zones at each end, through regions dominated by subtropical high-pressure belts, to a center in which the Intertropical Convergence Zone (Our Friend the ITCZ) migrates as it tries to follow the sun.

BBC Great Lakes

Just yesterday,  I learned about a special service of the BBC, known as BBC Great Lakes. It was established in 1994 by BBC journalists seeking to help reunite families in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda. It continues to broadcast in the Kinyarwanda and Kirundi languages. Its online presence includes the newsy BBC Gahuza page,  as well as social media channels.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was from PRI's The World that I learned about this news service, in a piece entitled Memories of growing up in Bujumbura, in which producer Robert Misigaro reflects on the importance of a youth center in his home city, the capital of Burundi and shares music from that city.


Lagniappe

The Great Lakes region of Africa is not merely a BBC construction; the term is sometimes used narrowly to refer to the are bordering Lakes Victoria and Lake Tanganyika.

Map source: ACCORD

More broadly, it refers to the 12 member countries of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, which was established by the United Nations Security Council in 2000, as the international community formally recognized the importance of cooperation on the many cross-border conflicts in this part of Africa. Scholar Patrick Kanyangara examines the background and current dynamics in his 2016 article Conflict in the Great Lakes Region.

Nameless City

Sometimes a large city can give a person a feeling of profound anonymity. I felt it the first time I flew over São Paulo -- among the millions there, I envisioned myself as nameless. But what if the city itself had no name?

That is exactly what the new urban place at 30°01'48"N 31°46'48"E is: a nameless city.

I will be interesting to compare this July 2018 screenshot with the imagery of Egypt's new capital as it continues to be built out.

Even now it is a bit difficult to see what is emerging in the Saharan sands some 30 miles to the east of Cairo (and not to be confused with New Cairo City, about halfway between the two).

Journalist Jane Arraf told the story of Egypt's new capital, as officials decide that relief from congestion and pollution in centuries-old Cairo cannot be provided otherwise. Wikipedia simply calls the emerging city Proposed new capital of Egypt in its description of the details of its establishment.

Unlike the original Cairo -- whose origins are in the murky recesses of time -- this ex nihilo city was not even a proposal until 2015, deep in the social-media age. So it will the best-documented national capital ever, with both scholars and selfie-sticks capturing its every achievement and growing pain. It will be interesting to compare this master-planned capital with others, such as my home town of Washington, D.C. and the swimming-pool mecca of Brasília.

Lagniappe

I have not yet seen any indication of how the name of the new city will be selected, but a fellow geography professor has already suggested what is obviously the best choice: Triangle McTriangleface.

Geography, Race, and Colorism

The April 2018 issue of National Geographic focuses on race, and begins with a critical look at the magazine's own sordid history on the topic. As new Editor-in-Chief Sarah Goldberg writes in her introduction, "It’s possible to say that a magazine can open people’s eyes at the same time it closes them."

From the NatGeo 2018 caption: Photographer Frank Schreider
 shows men from Timor island his camera in a 1962 issue.
The magazine often ran photos of “uncivilized” native people
seemingly fascinated by “civilized” Westerners’ technology.

Editor Goldberg was also part of a broader discussion about representations of the past in a March 2018 episode of On the Media.
On the same day I first read the National Geographic editorial (I got a bit behind on the magazine), I heard Shades of Privilege, an intriguing and important story about colorism as a particularly insidious form of racism in several national contexts.

Together, I believe these items are good starting points for deeper discussion about the depths of bias. The National Geographic article is particularly important for geographers who are trying to renew interest in geographic education. We already must overcome a stereotype of geographic education as boring; to the extent that the magazine spoke for the discipline, we must also overcome the notion that doing away with geography might have been a progressive choice until the very recent past.

The Future is African

My favorite librarian used an excerpt from novelist Chimamanda Adichie's very popular TED Talk as part of a presentation she was giving on religious literacy. In it, she describes the narrow lens of pity through which many -- including middle-class Africans -- view the continent and its people.

We both found that medium is truly the message in this case, in that she has much more to teach us than the avoidance of stereotypes about Africa. Millions of viewers seem to agree.

We also recommend her novel Americanah, especially the audio version.

But her story about stereotypes of Africa is timely, as the Washington Post has recently published an essay on the topic by Salih Booker and Ari Rickman of the Center for International Policy. In The future is African — and the United States is not prepared, they describe demographic and economic trends that will surprise many readers.

Africa is often described as though it were a single country -- although it comprises 55 countries, depending on exactly which island countries are counted -- with 1,216,000,000 people at last count. One of every six people on the planet lives in Africa -- compared to 1 of 23 in the United States -- and the share in Africa will continue to grow grow for the rest of the lives of everyone reading this post. Not only does Africa exist in the North American imagination as a single, pitiable country, but that country is often portrayed as the land of a single tree.

To the extent that the United States government is prepared to interact with the continent's 55 countries at all, it is primarily through an infrastructure that is overwhelmingly military. Opportunities for diplomatic and commercial connections pale in comparison, creating a gap that China has been more than content to fill.

The diplomatic presence in Africa is indeed insufficient, but it is not completely absent. One very positive initiative is the Mandela/YALI Washington Fellowship program, established in 2014. Each summer since 2016, my university has participated, hosting 25 young professionals from more than a dozen countries of Africa for a six-week institute. I have enjoyed meeting the 50 previous BSU-based Fellows, many of whom I count among my friends. I look forward to visiting Fellows in a few different countries during my 2019 sabbatical!

Ethiopia

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was problematic, gutting many embassies and driving scores of career diplomats into early retirement. He was much more humane than his successor, though, and he spent his final hours in the job (before being ousted for something he did right) enjoying the role of top diplomat during a visit to Ethiopia.

Secretary Tillerson enjoying coffee in Ethiopia. Photo: Jonathan Ernst/AP Images

His visit, naturally, included ritual tastings of what is perhaps Ethiopia's greatest gift to the world: coffee. What Linnaeus dubbed "Arabica" should have, in fact, been called "Ethiopica" and Secretary Tillerson enjoyed some in a ceremony that goes back centuries.

Quinnipiac students from Ethiopia shared coffee and coffee knowledge at the fourth annual
Celebration of Coffee in Worcester, held for the first time at the
Worcester Public Library.

I had a similar privilege last October, when students from Ethiopia proudly shared their heritage at the fourth annual Celebration of Coffee in Worcester, Massachusetts. I enjoyed learning more about the coffee ceremony and drinking coffee from a cup identical to that used by Secretary Tillerson.

I am not certain which countries of Africa I will visit next year, but Ethiopia will certainly be one of them, in part because it is the origin of coffee as both a plant and a beverage and because one of the Mandela Fellows with whom I have maintained contact is an Ethiopian diplomat who can acquaint me with many other aspects of the country.

Organizing Africa

Africa is not a country!

When, as I often do, I have students gathered in front of the Africa side of our EarthView globe, I ask them to repeat the phrase, "Africa is not a country!" For a brief time during the month when I was born, however, it was a possibility under serious discussion.

I learned this from BBC Witness, a nine-minute radio program that followers of this blog will recognize as one that has become a favorite of mine. It was through the author John McPhee that I developed an appreciation for biography as a great way to learn geography and history, and Witness gives me such lessons in a small doses. The whole series is available online, but I often plan my morning coffee routine around its local airing on 90.9 WBUR. I have to get the hand grinding done before 4:50 so that I can hear the whole program.

The most recent episode to capture my attention was a rebroadcast that I actually heard in my car, as I drove to early-morning rowing. (My dog, my wife, coffee, and rowing have made me a morning person, though blogging keeps me an evening person as well.)

Africa United is an interview with the Eritrean scholar Bereket Habte Selassie, who now teaches at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, but who was present at the first continent-wide gathering of African leaders. Following successful independence movements throughout the continent, leaders of 32 countries gathered to discuss options for a common way forward. Although some advocated strongly for a federation similar to the United States, the final outcome was to create the Organisation of African Unity.

The organization grew over the next several decades until it was replaced by the African Union in 2002.