Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red

At Amazon, Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives.

Boris Johnson Announces New Travel Restrictions (VIDEO)

Following-up, "New South Africa Covid Strain Omicron Sends Shockwaves Across the Globe."

And at the BBC, "LIVE: Travel and face mask rules tightened over new variant."

New South Africa Covid Strain Omicron Sends Shockwaves Across the Globe

There's a lot of hype, but Dr. Peter Hotez, at the video, says he's not panicked, as he's not seen anything as infectious as the Delta variant so far. Still, the U.S. has imposed travel bans on eight African nations, and the U.K. announced travel curbs on six nations as well.

At the BBC, "Coronavirus variant fear sparks Africa travel curbs," and the Telegraph U.K. "Coronavirus latest news: EU suspends all flights to southern Africa over omicron Covid variant fears."

More at NYT, "Variant Detected in South Africa Prompts Travel Restrictions":

The World Health Organization said a newly identified coronavirus variant in southern Africa was “of concern” on Friday, as countries around the world moved to restrict travelers arriving from that region to keep it from crossing their borders.

So far, only a few dozen cases of the new variant have been identified in South Africa, Botswana, Belgium, Hong Kong and Israel. There is no proof yet that the variant is more contagious or lethal, or could diminish the protective power of vaccines, but uncertainty on those questions was one factor in the speed of countries’ move toward restrictions.

On Friday evening, the World Health Organization gave the new version of the virus the name Omicron and called it a “variant of concern,” its most serious category. “This variant has a large number of mutations, some of which are concerning,” the W.H.O. said in its official description. “Preliminary evidence suggests an increased risk of reinfection with this variant.”

Earlier on Friday, the European Commission proposed that its member countries activate the “emergency brake” on travel from countries in southern Africa and other affected countries to limit the spread of the variant.

“All air travel to these countries should be suspended until we have a clear understanding about the danger posed by this new variant,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, said in a statement. “And travelers returning from this region should respect strict quarantine rules.”

In the past, governments have taken days, weeks or months to issue travel restrictions in response to new variants. This time, however, restrictions came within hours of South Africa’s announcement. At least 10 countries around the world had announced measures before South African scientists finished a meeting with World Health Organization experts about the variant on Friday.

The United States and Canada announced restrictions on travelers arriving from countries in southern Africa. Other governments that halted or restricted flights from South Africa included Bahrain, Belgium, Britain, Croatia, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malta, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore.

The new variant, initially called B.1.1.529, has a “very unusual constellation of mutations,” according to Tulio de Oliveira, director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation Sequencing Platform. On the protein that helps to create an entry point for the coronavirus to infect human cells, the variant has 10 mutations, many more than the highly contagious Delta variant, Professor de Oliveira said.

Still, even epidemiologists who have been the most outspoken in supporting precautions against the virus urged calm on Friday, noting that little is known about the variant and that several seemingly threatening variants have come and gone in recent months.

“Substantively NOTHING is known about the new variant,” Roberto Burioni, a leading Italian virologist, wrote on Twitter, adding that people should not panic...

 

Indian vs. Black: Vigilante Killings Upend South African Town

Ugly down there. 

Just nasty.

At the New York Times, "As rioting and looting swept the country this summer, Indians in the suburb of Phoenix set up roadblocks to police their streets. Dozens of Black people passing through wound up dead":

PHOENIX, South Africa — The blows thundered down — bats, a hammer, a field hockey stick — as Njabulo Dlamini lay curled on the pavement, trying to summon the strength to move.

He and five friends, all of them Black, had been driving in a minibus taxi through the streets of Phoenix, a predominantly Indian suburb created from the forced racial segregation of apartheid South Africa.

A mob surrounded them, dragged them from the taxi, made them lie on the pavement and beat them furiously, according to witnesses and video footage obtained by The New York Times. Some of Mr. Dlamini’s friends managed to escape. Others were chased and beaten again by the crowd, which had been whipped up in recent days by WhatsApp warnings and reports of violence by Black people streaming into their community to loot shopping centers. Mr. Dlamini barely made it across the street. He later died of his injuries at the hospital, his family said.

South Africa was convulsed this summer by some of its worst civil unrest since the end of apartheid. The imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma for refusing to appear before a corruption inquiry set off violent protests by his supporters. Soon, riots and looting erupted in parts of the country, fed by broad disgust at poverty, inequality and the government’s failure to provide even the most basic services, like water or electricity. Officials have called the violence an insurrection — an attempt to sabotage Mr. Zuma’s rival and successor, President Cyril Ramaphosa, in part by stoking some of the nation’s oldest racial tensions.

Nationwide, more than 340 people died in the mayhem, many in stampedes or circumstances that remain unclear. But government officials have been alarmed by a dynamic that, they say, dangerously undermines the social order: dozens of vigilante killings by ordinary citizens.

The vigilantism was especially pronounced in Phoenix, a working-class community of about 180,000 near the country’s east coast. The country’s police minister said that 36 people there — 33 of them Black — were killed in what some officials are calling a massacre. Fifty-six people have now been arrested in connection with the violence in Phoenix.

“Most of the people who died were innocent people who were traveling,” said Sihle Zikalala, the premier of KwaZulu-Natal province, where Phoenix is.

Mobs of mostly Indian residents, worried that their community was under siege, erected roadblocks on street corners. They indiscriminately stopped Black people, and sometimes beat or killed them, the police said, inflaming the long-fragile relationship between Black and Indian South Africans — two marginalized groups under white apartheid rule.

“We need to confront racism in our society,” Mr. Ramaphosa wrote in a letter to the nation, specifically addressing the Phoenix unrest. “We need to have honest conversations not only about our attitudes to one another, but also about the material conditions that divide us.”

The authorities have been far less open about their roles in the upheaval. Interviews with dozens of Black and Indian residents in the Phoenix area, as well as a review of previously unreported video footage, show that at least some of the violence and deaths could have been prevented if the police had provided basic security...

Why Violence in South Africa?

Following-up, "South Africa Violence (VIDEO)."

A damned astonishing situation down there. 

At the Guardian U.K.:

South Africa Violence (VIDEO)

At least 100 dead and 25,000 troops deployed.

Needless to say, it's not going too well down there.

At the Guardian U.K., "South Africa’s leaders fear fresh wave of violence by Zuma loyalists: Attacks by supporters of jailed former president ‘are bid for pardon or to unseat government’":

Looting and Rioting Break Out in South Africa (VIDEO)

At the Los Angeles Times, "Death toll rises to 72 in South Africa rioting after jailing of ex-president":

More than half of South Africa’s 60 million people live in poverty, with an unemployment rate of 32%, according to official statistics. The COVID-19 pandemic, with layoffs and an economic downturn, has increased the hunger and desperation that helped propel the protests triggered by Zuma’s arrest into wider rioting.

And watch: "Looting and rioting break out across South Africa in wake of former President Zuma’s imprisonment."

Since Apartheid Ended, A.N.C. Leaders Have Siphoned Off Tens of Billions of Dollars

Corruption. And pogroms against white Afrikaners.

That's the reality in South Africa today.

At NYT:

In the generation since apartheid ended, tens of billions of dollars in public funds have been siphoned off by leaders of the African National Congress. Will South Africa's new government confront such epic graft? https://t.co/5vUnhRuXCa

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 16, 2018

Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War

At Amazon, Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa.

Katie Hopkins in South Africa (VIDEO)

At the Rebel:



ADDED: "SHOCK: Katie Hopkins detained at South Africa airport," and "Katie Hopkins in South Africa: Is “freedom fighter” Malema “afraid of meeting a little white woman?”

Wilbur Smith, A Falcon Flies

*BUMPED.*

Wilbur Smith is really good!

At Amazon, Wilbur Smith, A Falcon Flies: A Spectacular Epic of a Wild Continent and the Few Who Dared to Tame It.

Wilbur Smith, Men of Men

I gotta say Wilbur Smith's books are irresistible, man.

At Amazon, Wilbur Smith, Men of Men (The Ballantyne Novels).

We Need to Talk About Jacob Zuma

Speaking of South Africa, here's a great piece at Johannesburg's Mail and Guardian, "After 10 years at the helm of the ANC— We need to talk about Jacob Zuma":

"One of the paradoxes of Zuma’s time as ANC president is that a man who came to power largely through the efforts of the SACP and Cosatu was, in the final analysis, the catalyst for the decisive collapse of the tripartite alliance." https://t.co/Osv1TGX1Z2

— Mail & Guardian (@mailandguardian) December 20, 2017

Of all the deleterious aspects of Zuma’s legacy in the ANC, this is perhaps the most significant: in 10 years of disastrous and amoral leadership, the ruling party has lost all capacity for self-examination. This is why most have waited in vain for the start of the party’s mythical and supposedly inevitable “self-correction”. Self-correction is a result of self-criticism, and self-criticism itself results from self-examination. Under Zuma, the ANC has become the hapless victim of malign forces, foreign powers, enemies, fifth columnists, the media, and every other external influence you can think of. Nothing is of its own doing; no problem is ever self-inflicted. This is pretty much Zuma’s personality, which has imprinted on the ANC. And it is not obvious that this unfortunate trait will cease to be a part of the ANC’s DNA when Zuma is gone.

RTWT.

Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War

I'm on a sort of Africa jag right now. It's been off and on, but since teaching South Africa in my comparative politics class this fall, I'm getting excited about further reading.

At Amazon, Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa.

Economic Freedom Fighters

Katie Hopkins was tweeting about her supposed upcoming visit to South Africa yesterday, but those tweets have been taken down. Here's a blog post (attacking her) with some screen shots, "Katie Hopkins Joins Apartheid Deniers."

She tweeted:

“If you are a white farmer / former farmer in #SA and would be prepared to share your truths face to face - katie@katiehopkins.co.uk Jan 2018 … Thank you. I am hoping to inspire ‘real journalists’ to get off their sofa / WiFi to search for the stories that matter” she Tweeted. So what are these “stories that matter”?

She also engaged the Economic Freedom Fighters, and I checked them out. They're freakin' hardcore, man. From their "about" page":

Remembering Frantz Fanon who died on this day in 1961 #ForwardToDecolonization pic.twitter.com/I5Ml74OyMr

— EFF (@EFFSouthAfrica) December 6, 2017

1. The ECONOMIC FREEDOM FIGHTERS is a radical and militant economic emancipation movement that brings together revolutionary, fearless, radical, and militant activists, workers’ movements, nongovernmental organisations, community-based organisations and lobby groups under the umbrella of pursuing the struggle for economic emancipation.

2. The EFF is a radical, leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement with an internationalist outlook anchored by popular grassroots formations and struggles. The EFF will be the vanguard of community and workers’ struggles and will always be on the side of the people. The EFF will, with determination and consistency, associate with the protest movement in South Africa and will also join in struggles that defy unjust laws.

3. The EFF takes lessons from the notation that “political power without economic emancipation is meaningless”. The movement is inspired by ideals that promote the practice of organic forms of political leadership, which appreciate that political leadership at whatever level is service, not an opportunity for self-enrichment and self-gratification.

4. The EFF draws inspiration from the broad Marxist-Leninist tradition and Fanonian schools of thought in their analyses of the state, imperialism, culture and class contradictions in every society. Through organic engagement and a constant relationship with the masses, Economic Freedom Fighters provide clear and cogent alternatives to the current neo-colonial economic system, which in many countries keep the oppressed under colonial domination and subject to imperialist exploitation.

5. The EFF is a South African movement with a progressive internationalist outlook, which seeks to engage with global progressive movements. We believe that the best contribution we can make in the international struggle against global imperialism is to rid our country of imperialist domination. For the South African struggle, the EFF pillars for economic emancipation are the following:

a. Expropriation of South Africa’s land without compensation for equal redistribution in      use.
b. Nationalisation of mines, banks, and other strategic sectors of the economy,       
    without compensation.
c. Building state and government capacity, which will lead to the abolishment of 
    tenders.
d. Free quality education, healthcare, houses, and sanitation.
e. Massive protected industrial development to create millions of sustainable jobs,
     including the introduction of minimum wages in order to close the wage gap
     between the rich and the poor, close the apartheid wage gap and promote rapid
     career paths for Africans in the workplace.
f. Massive development of the African economy and advocating for a move from
   reconciliation to justice in the entire continent.
g. Open, accountable, corrupt-free government and society without fear of
    victimisation by state agencies.

6. The EFF appreciates the role played by the fathers and mothers of South Africa’s liberation movement. The EFF draws inspiration from the radical, working class interpretation of the Freedom Charter, because, since its adoption in 1955, there have been various meanings given to the Freedom Charter. The EFF’s interpretation of the Freedom Charter is one which says South Africa indeed belongs to all who live in it, and ownership of South Africa’s economic resources and access to opportunities should reflect that indeed South Africa belongs to all who live in it. The EFF’s interpretation of the Freedom Charter is that which says the transfer of mineral wealth beneath the soil, monopoly industries and banks means nationalisation of mines, banks and monopoly industries.

7. The EFF’s interpretation of the Freedom Charter also accepts that while the state is in command and in control of the commanding heights of South Africa’s economy, “people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions”, meaning that there will never be wholesale nationalisation and state control of every sector of South Africa’s economy. Nationalisation of strategic sectors and assets will be blended with a strong industrial policy to support social and economic development.

8. Economic Freedom Fighters will contest political power, because we are guided by the firm belief that we need political power in order to capture the state and then transform the economy for the emancipation of black South Africans, especially Africans. The forms in which the EFF contests political power will, from time to time, be reviewed in the light of prevailing circumstances, but the primary role of mass organisation and activism, as a means to raise the political consciousness of the people, will remain the bedrock of our political practice.

9. Therefore, the EFF will be involved in mass movements and community protests that seek the betterment of people’s lives. The EFF will also associate with movements that demand land through land occupation, aimed at making the message clear that our people do need land. The EFF will support all trade unions and workers that stand up in demand of better working conditions and salaries wherever and whenever they do so. The EFF will not be bound by narrow alliance loyalties that compromise the interests of workers just because they are in a different trade union. Our pursuit of the basic demands of the Freedom Charter is above forms of organisation that the working class, and indeed black people, may fashion in the course of struggles. In other words, alliances and other forms of organisation are relevant to the extent that they maximise our march towards realising the vision outlined in the Freedom Charter.

10. The EFF is guided by revolutionary internationalism and solidarity that defined the politics of the July 26 Movement, which led the Cuban Revolutionary struggles. We will partake in international struggles that seek to emancipate the economically unliberated people of Africa and the world. We will form part of the progressive movements in the world that stand against continued imperialist domination.

Aims and Objectives:

To establish and sustain a society that cherishes revolutionary cultural values and to create conditions for total political and economic emancipation, prosperity and equitable distribution of wealth of the nation.
To attain and defend the National Integrity and Liberation of the oppressed black majority of South Africa.
To participate in the worldwide struggle for the complete eradication of imperialism, colonialism, racism and all other forms of discrimination.
To participate in, support and promote all struggles for the attainment of the complete independence and unity of African states and by extension, the African continent.
To oppose resolutely, tribalism, regionalism, religious and cultural intolerance.
To oppose oppression of women and the oppression of all other gendered persons.
To oppose patriarchy, sexism, and homophobia and any cultural or religious practices that promotes the oppression of anyone, women in particular.

End of Apartheid in South Africa?

This is depressing.

At NYT, "End of Apartheid in South Africa? Not in Economic Terms":

End of Apartheid in South Africa? Not in Economic Terms. This a powerful @NYTimes read ... https://t.co/jyNPeqaTYT

— Jason Burke (@burke_jason) November 15, 2017

CROSSROADS, South Africa — The end of apartheid was supposed to be a beginning.

Judith Sikade envisioned escaping the townships, where the government had forced black people to live. She aimed to find work in Cape Town, trading her shack for a home with modern conveniences.

More than two decades later, Ms. Sikade, 69, lives on the garbage-strewn dirt of Crossroads township, where thousands of black families have used splintered boards and metal sheets to construct airless hovels for lack of anywhere else to live.

“I’ve gone from a shack to a shack,” Ms. Sikade says. “I’m fighting for everything I have. You still are living in apartheid.”

In the history of civil rights, South Africa lays claim to a momentous achievement — the demolition of apartheid and the construction of a democracy. But for black South Africans, who account for three-fourths of this nation of roughly 55 million people, political liberation has yet to translate into broad material gains.

Apartheid has essentially persisted in economic form.

This reality is palpable as turmoil now seizes South Africa. Enraged protesters demand the ouster of President Jacob Zuma over disclosures of corruption so high-level that it is often described as state capture, with private interests having effectively purchased the power to divert state resources in their direction. The economy keels in recession, worsening an official unemployment rate reaching nearly 28 percent.

Underlying the anger are deep-seated disparities in wealth. In the aftermath of apartheid, the government left land and other assets largely in the hands of a predominantly white elite. The government’s resistance to large-scale land transfers reflected its reluctance to rattle international investors.

Today, millions of black South Africans are chronically short of capital needed to start businesses. Less than half of the working age population is officially employed.

The governing party, the African National Congress, built empires of new housing for black South Africans, but concentrated it in the townships, reinforcing the geographic strictures of apartheid. Large swaths of the black population remain hunkered down in squalor, on land they do not legally own. Those with jobs often endure commutes of an hour or more on private minibuses that extract outsize slices of their paychecks.

“We never dismantled apartheid,” said Ayabonga Cawe, a former economist for Oxfam, the international anti-poverty organization, and now the host of a radio show that explores national affairs. “The patterns of enrichment and impoverishment are still the same.”

South Africa began the post-apartheid era facing challenges as formidable as those confronted by Europe at the end of World War II, or the Soviet Union after communism. It had to re-engineer an economy dominated by mining and expand into modern pursuits like tourism and agriculture, while overcoming a legacy of colonial exploitation, racial oppression and global isolation — the results of decades of international sanctions.

“It’s a very deep structural problem,” said Ian Goldin, who served as a senior economic adviser to Nelson Mandela when he was president of South Africa, and is now a professor of globalization at the University of Oxford in Britain. “The Russians had capitalism before the Soviet Union. Africans lost their rights 300 years ago. It’s a much longer period of subjugation.”

Even so, from 1998 to 2008, the economy expanded by roughly 3.5 percent a year, doubling the size of the black middle class. The government built millions of homes, extended the reach of clean water and electricity, and handed out cash grants to millions of poor people.

But the global financial crisis of 2008 ravaged South Africa, destroying demand for the mineral deposits at the center of its economy. It wiped out half of the roughly two million new jobs that had been created in the previous four years.

Today, South Africa is a land of astonishing contrasts.

In the Sea Point neighborhood of Cape Town, a sweep of apartments and restaurants alongside the Atlantic Ocean, women gather on the beach for an evening yoga class — some black, some white, some Asian. Children of multiple races scamper through a playground, a scene unthinkable during apartheid.

High above the city, atop the ridgeline at Table Mountain, American exchange students recount a sky diving experience while pointing smartphones at the orange sun arcing toward the ocean.

To the east, the parched land vibrates in the golden light. Judith Sikade’s tin roof is down there somewhere, reflecting the last rays of the sun.

In her community, people are cooking over coal fires and breathing in fumes. Children run barefoot on paths littered with broken glass. Grown-ups exchange word of the latest armed robbery.

All the while, they keep an eye out for the police, who frequently descend bearing sledgehammers to tear down the shacks, given that they sit on private land.

“Where’s the freedom?” Ms. Sikade said, anger rising in her voice. “Where are the changes?”

Still more.

Protecting Rhinos in South Africa

This is genuinely sad.

This piece wants to turn you into a nature-protector-enviro-radical, at LAT, "Armed only with her grandmother's shotgun, a South African woman fights to save her rhinos":

Lynne MacTavish lives in a small wooden house on her South African game reserve with a fierce pet emu, a juvenile ostrich, a flock of geese, two Jack Russell terriers and her grandma’s double-barreled shotgun to protect her rhinos.

She keeps an ugly statue at her gate: a tokoloshe, or evil spirit in the local traditional belief, installed by a witch doctor to ward off superstitious rhino poachers.

Every night MacTavish gets up after midnight, grabs her shotgun, clambers into her SUV and patrols for poachers.

She still gets flashbacks of the scene she found one windy October morning in 2014 and still cries telling the story. Poachers had killed two rhinos, including a pregnant cow she had known since the day it was born. Two more died as an indirect result of the attack and a calf, days from being born, was lost.

MacTavish, as tough as the spiky bush on her animal reserve in South Africa’s northwest, struggles to cover the cost of security guards. One local poacher has threatened to kill her.

South Africa is home to 80% of the world’s 25,000 rhinos. Hamstrung by corruption and security lapses, it loses three rhinos a day to poaching, 85% of them in state reserves. Private owners such as MacTavish have become important to the species’ survival, nurturing more than 6,500 rhinos on an estimated 330 private game reserves, spanning 5 million acres, that provide a relative degree of safety.

But security is costly — so much so that many reserves are closing their doors. To help generate revenue, private reserve operators have successfully sued to resume South Africa’s limited trade in rhino horns, which had been banned since 2009. The government is finalizing new regulations that will allow foreigners to export up to two horns apiece for personal use.

The measure has rocked the wildlife preservation world. Most wildlife advocates say opening the door even to “farmed” rhino horn sales could threaten an international effort to wipe out the trade across the globe. About 2,200 horns a year flow into the illegal trade, mostly poached, and opponents of the new trade rules argue that criminals will find ways to funnel poached horns into the new legal market.

“Reopening a domestic trade in rhino horn in South Africa would make it even harder for already overstretched law enforcement agents to tackle rhino crimes,” World Wildlife Fund policy manager Colman O’Criodain said in a statement...

More.

Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa.

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Big Game Hunter Crushed to Death by Falling Elephant in Zimbabwe

The elephant was wounded. Once shot, it had apparently grabbed the hunter by its trunk, then falling dead, crushed the guy under its weight. Talk about taking 'em out with you, heh.

That was some righteous karma at the end there.

At the Telegraph U.K., via Memeorandum, "South African hunter crushed to death by elephant."

On Twitter, one woman writes, "Big game hunter crushed to death under an elephant he's just shot? Good."

Actually, I wish they weren't hunting big game myself, but it's not illegal. And I wouldn't wish the man killed. I get the karmic justice, but it's still a sad loss of human life.

South African hunter crushed to death by elephant https://t.co/MFU6lZ8rmr

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) May 21, 2017