Dubai.. in pictures

Atlantic The Palm

Burj Khalifa

The Burj Al Arab in the background

The Souk Madinat Jumeirah

Too rich for its own good..

This very interesting piece on the BBC News website caught my attention -

The Democratic Republic of Congo is potentially one of the richest countries on earth, but colonialism, slavery and corruption have turned it into one of the poorest, historian Dan Snow writes..

"The world's bloodiest conflict since World War II is still rumbling on today.

It is a war in which more than five million people have died, millions more have been driven to the brink by starvation and disease and several million women and girls have been raped.

The Great War of Africa, a conflagration that has sucked in soldiers and civilians from nine nations and countless armed rebel groups, has been fought almost entirely inside the borders of one unfortunate country - the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It is a place seemingly blessed with every type of mineral, yet consistently rated lowest on the UN Human Development Index, where even the more fortunate live in grinding poverty.

I went to the Congo this summer to find out what it was about the country's past that had delivered it into the hands of unimaginable violence and anarchy.

The journey that I went on, through the Congo's abusive history, while travelling across its war-torn present, was the most disturbing experience of my career

I met rape victims, rebels, bloated politicians and haunted citizens of a country that has ceased to function - people who struggle to survive in a place cursed by a past that defies description, a history that will not release them from its death-like grip.

The Congo's apocalyptic present is a direct product of decisions and actions taken over the past five centuries.

In the late 15th Century an empire known as the Kingdom of Kongo dominated the western portion of the Congo, and bits of other modern states such as Angola.

It was sophisticated, had its own aristocracy and an impressive civil service.

When Portuguese traders arrived from Europe in the 1480s, they realised they had stumbled upon a land of vast natural wealth, rich in resources - particularly human flesh.

The Congo was home to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of strong, disease-resistant slaves. The Portuguese quickly found this supply would be easier to tap if the interior of the continent was in a state of anarchy.

They did their utmost to destroy any indigenous political force capable of curtailing their slaving or trading interests.

Money and modern weapons were sent to rebels, Kongolese armies were defeated, kings were murdered, elites slaughtered and secession was encouraged.

By the 1600s, the once-mighty kingdom had disintegrated into a leaderless, anarchy of mini-states locked in endemic civil war. Slaves, victims of this fighting, flowed to the coast and were carried to the Americas.

About four million people were forcibly embarked at the mouth of the Congo River. English ships were at the heart of the trade. British cities and merchants grew rich on the back of Congolese resources they would never see.

This first engagement with Europeans set the tone for the rest of the Congo's history.

Development has been stifled, government has been weak and the rule of law non-existent. This was not through any innate fault of the Congolese, but because it has been in the interests of the powerful to destroy, suppress and prevent any strong, stable, legitimate government. That would interfere - as the Kongolese had threatened to interfere before - with the easy extraction of the nation's resources. The Congo has been utterly cursed by its natural wealth.

Limitless water, from the world's second-largest river, the Congo, a benign climate and rich soil make it fertile, beneath the soil abundant deposits of copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt, uranium, coltan and oil are just some of the minerals that should make it one of the world's richest countries.

Instead it is the world's most hopeless.

The interior of the Congo was opened up in the late 19th Century by the British-born explorer Henry Morton Stanley, his dreams of free trading associations with communities he met were shattered by the infamous King of the Belgians, Leopold, who hacked out a vast private empire.

The world's largest supply of rubber was found at a time when bicycle and automobile tyres, and electrical insulation, had made it a vital commodity in the West.

The late Victorian bicycle craze was enabled by Congolese rubber collected by slave labourers.

To tap it, Congolese men were rounded up by a brutal Belgian-officered security force, their wives were interned to ensure compliance and were brutalised during their captivity. The men were then forced to go into the jungle and harvest the rubber.

Disobedience or resistance was met by immediate punishment - flogging, severing of hands, and death. Millions perished.

Tribal leaders capable of resisting were murdered, indigenous society decimated, proper education denied.

A culture of rapacious, barbaric rule by a Belgian elite who had absolutely no interest in developing the country or population was created, and it has endured.

In a move supposed to end the brutality, Belgium eventually annexed the Congo outright, but the problems in its former colony remained.

Mining boomed, workers suffered in appalling conditions, producing the materials that fired industrial production in Europe and America.

In World War I men on the Western Front and elsewhere did the dying, but it was Congo's minerals that did the killing.

The brass casings of allied shells fired at Passchendaele and the Somme were 75% Congolese copper.

In World War II, the uranium for the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from a mine in south-east Congo.

Western freedoms were defended with Congo's resources while black Congolese were denied the right to vote, or form unions and political associations. They were denied anything beyond the most basic of educations.

They were kept at an infantile level of development that suited the rulers and mine owners but made sure that when independence came there was no home-grown elite who could run the country.

Independence in 1960 was, therefore, predictably disastrous.

Bits of the vast country immediately attempted to break away, the army mutinied against its Belgian officers and within weeks the Belgian elite who ran the state evacuated leaving nobody with the skills to run the government or economy.

Of 5,000 government jobs pre-independence, just three were held by Congolese and there was not a single Congolese lawyer, doctor, economist or engineer.

Chaos threatened to engulf the region. The Cold War superpowers moved to prevent the other gaining the upper hand.

Sucked into these rivalries, the struggling Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba, was horrifically beaten and executed by Western-backed rebels. A military strongman, Joseph-Desire Mobutu, who had a few years before been a sergeant in the colonial police force, took over.

Mobutu became a tyrant. In 1972 he changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, meaning "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake".

The West tolerated him as long as the minerals flowed and the Congo was kept out of the Soviet orbit.

He, his family and friends bled the country of billions of dollars, a $100m palace was built in the most remote jungle at Gbadolite, an ultra-long airstrip next to it was designed to take Concorde, which was duly chartered for shopping trips to Paris.

 

Mobutu, pictured with Jacques Chirac, was courted by the West for decades

Dissidents were tortured or bought off, ministers stole entire budgets, government atrophied. The West allowed his regime to borrow billions, which was then stolen and today's Congo is still expected to pay the bill.

In 1997 an alliance of neighbouring African states, led by Rwanda - which was furious Mobutu's Congo was sheltering many of those responsible for the 1994 genocide - invaded, after deciding to get rid of Mobutu.

A Congolese exile, Laurent Kabila, was dredged up in East Africa to act as a figurehead. Mobutu's cash-starved army imploded, its leaders, incompetent cronies of the president, abandoning their men in a mad dash to escape.

Mobutu took off one last time from his jungle Versailles, his aircraft packed with valuables, his own unpaid soldiers firing at the plane as it lumbered into the air.

Rwanda had effectively conquered its titanic neighbour with spectacular ease. Once installed however, Kabila, Rwanda's puppet, refused to do as he was told.

Again Rwanda invaded, but this time they were just halted by her erstwhile African allies who now turned on each other and plunged Congo into a terrible war.

Foreign armies clashed deep inside the Congo as the paper-thin state collapsed totally and anarchy spread.

Hundreds of armed groups carried out atrocities, millions died.

Ethnic and linguistic differences fanned the ferocity of the violence, while control of Congo's stunning natural wealth added a terrible urgency to the fighting.

Forcibly conscripted child soldiers corralled armies of slaves to dig for minerals such as coltan, a key component in mobile phones, the latest obsession in the developed world, while annihilating enemy communities, raping women and driving survivors into the jungle to die of starvation and disease.

A deeply flawed, partial peace was patched together a decade ago. In the far east of the Congo, there is once again a shooting war as a complex web of domestic and international rivalries see rebel groups clash with the army and the UN, while tiny community militias add to the general instability.

The country has collapsed, roads no longer link the main cities, healthcare depends on aid and charity. The new regime is as grasping as its predecessors.

I rode on one of the trainloads of copper that go straight from foreign-owned mines to the border, and on to the Far East, rumbling past shanty towns of displaced, poverty-stricken Congolese.

The Portuguese, Belgians, Mobutu and the present government have all deliberately stifled the development of a strong state, army, judiciary and education system, because it interferes with their primary focus, making money from what lies under the Earth.

The billions of pounds those minerals have generated have brought nothing but misery and death to the very people who live on top of them, while enriching a microscopic elite in the Congo and their foreign backers, and underpinning our technological revolution in the developed world.

The Congo is a land far away, yet our histories are so closely linked. We have thrived from a lopsided relationship, yet we are utterly blind to it. The price of that myopia has been human suffering on an unimaginable scale.

See original story here

Nairobi, Kenya

I've really enjoyed spending the last few weeks in Kenya. I like Nairobi a lot,  and going forward, this is a place I intend to visit as often as I can. My holiday is coming to its end, and in a few hours I should be on an aeroplane ferrying me back to Europe; first to Paris, France and then onward to London; back to the life in England, the stony and expressionless faces you encounter on your daily commute; that cold, dull dreary weather. Whatever one says about Africa, it remains the case that in the overall people in Africa are happy; and certainly happier than people in Europe, in my opinion. I will miss Kenya, and Nairobi in particular.

But of course there are other things that have to be said, issues that I have found particularly unpleasant. Class, is more of an issue in Kenya than it is anywhere else I've been to, except Brazil. With Brazil's history though, the wideness of the gap in the social hierarchy is explainable with a measure of rationality. Much less so with Kenya. There simply is no reason (save for greed and selfishness) why, for example, one kilometre from the splendid, clean and well maintained Central Business District (CBD) of Nairobi, is located Africa's largest slum, Kibera, where more than 2 million of Nairobi's inhabitants live, a significant proportion of the city's population.

Kibera is only one of several slum areas in the city. Indeed much of Nairobi is slummy, even those other areas such as Eastleigh, Juja Road and other such places that are not officially designated as slums. It's particularly bad because these slummy areas are largely neglected, almost as if the inhabitants (usually the poorer lower classes) are insignificant and irrelevant. Street cleaning, for instance, takes place only in the CBD and in those plush highbrow parts of town where well-to-do Nairobians live. Poor people, it seems, are not worthy of having their streets cleaned. 200 metres outside the CBD and every street corner is piled high with rubbish (garbage as my American friends will say), because, of course, there are no upper-class people resident in the vicinity. I have found it deplorable. 

(Following this writing, I learned that municipal workers were on strike, which perhaps explains what I saw and just described). 

The society's sharp class distinction also means that there is much resentment between the classes. Being class-neutral myself, I have found it easy to hold conversations with all kinds of people. Indeed, the most interesting chats I've had since I've been in Kenya have been with two separate individuals; one, Simba, a security guard and the other Moses, a bus conductor. It's interesting to see how truly insightful and philosophical some of these so called "lower-class" people can be. But it's the deep resentment that I observed that has touched me the most. 

In the aftermath of the Westgate Mall tragedy I got the distinct feeling that there were quite a few among the lower classes who were cynical and had little sympathy for the victims of the terrorists. I thought this unfortunate. 

 

Award-winning African author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells Jon Snow why her latest book Americanah mirrors some of the central issues of her own life: race, immigration and the power of hair.

Update Number One

It's nice to be awoken in the early morning by the sound of a cock crowing. It's refreshing and remarkably earthy, and reminds of just how close to nature one has been in the last few days. It becomes even nicer when one realises shortly after waking that the cockerel was only performing a brief solo, and that he's in fact the lead singer in an orchestra of birds, with the amazing dawn chorus in full flow that follows.

It's not that pleasant, however, to be brought round prematurely from one's afternoon nap by the loud 'poom, poom' of next door's lady-of-the-house pounding foofoo, with a mortar and pestle, and with gusto, almost as if how delicious the foofoo will turn out depends upon just how vigorously it is pounded in the mortar.

Another thing, I'm pretty glad I gave up smoking, because, had I still been a smoker, I would be tearing out my hair in frustration by now. I have not seen a single person with a cigarette in their hand since I arrived in Ghana last week, neither have I seen a single cigarette sold in any shop or store. I've even gone so far as to search with my eyes for discarded cigarette butts by the roadside, but have not discovered a single butt as yet. Oh, of course I know there must be some people here who do smoke, but they must be very few indeed, next to being almost completely unnoticeable, invisible. What a far cry from Europe, a continent where the smell of tobacco smoke mixed with perfume hangs heavily over entire city districts; where housewives hang out of windows in high rise apartment buildings puffing away at a cigarette held daintily in one hand, mobile phone clutched to ear with the other, (for that gossip must continue, even while making the effort to spare the toddler in the flat from inhaling second-hand smoke); a continent where workers routinely skive off their duty posts when at work, to go for that "crafty fag".

I've been at a place that thinks of itself as a suburb of a regional capital city, but which in fact is little more than a small rural village that just happens to be located geographically a few miles from that regional capital city. The thought that came to my mind immediately upon arrival here was of the similarity of this place to my own ancestral hometown of Twon Brass, in far away Bayelsa State, Nigeria. The pervasive smell in the air in both places is the aroma of woodsmoke, from the open-air wood fires commonly used for cooking, which is how I remember that place when I visited it for the first time in the 1970s. Unlike in Twon Brass though, where the woodsmoke smell is flavoured with the aroma of smoked fish, because the prevalent occupation there is fishing, here in this place in Ghana where farming is the main occupation, the woodsmoke is complimented by the musty aroma of milled maize and cassava. The woodsmoke aside, the aroma of the homemade alcoholic spirit akpeteshie, also known as ogogoro, kaikai, (or atuwoh in Twon Brass) hangs in the air in both places.

Another point of similarity between the peoples of the two places is in their fondness for a big, noisy, raucous funeral, or "finral" as they say in Ghana.

Let me conclude this update by saying that since my arrival here I have been searching, but in vain, for red bell peppers - 'tatashe'. I have been wanting to surprise my host with my culinary skills by preparing a Nigerian red stew. Alarmingly, I was unable even to convince the lady who sold me some fine large green peppers at the market that there are in fact peppers of that size and shape, but which are red in colour. She was incredulous, she said she'd never seen nor even heard of such peppers. So there I was standing in the middle of the market, confused, bewildered, scratching my head. But I'm now determined to get to the bottom of this and find out why in Ghana's Brong Ahafo Region there appears to be no knowledge of the existence of red peppers. 

So later.

In Pictures

 Street and market scenes

                                        The approaching elections                          

 

Funeral alley

All pics taken this afternoon in Sunyani, the capital city of Ghana's Brong Ahafo Region.