Are bonobos hippie chimps?

Probably not. Very good article in The New Yorker.

Most of our current knowledge comes from observing bonobos in captivity.

Captivity can have a striking impact on animal behavior. As Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the University of Southern California, recently put it, “Stuck together, bored out of their minds—what is there to do except eat and have sex?”

Gorillas murdered

The BBC reports from Congo’s Virunga National Park,

Conservationists have expressed concern over the “senseless and tragic” killing of four mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The bodies of three females and one male were discovered by rangers earlier this week in the Virunga National Park.

Officials said the “executions” were not the work of poachers because they would have taken the bodies.[...]

Because poachers would have sold the bodies as food or trophies, conservationists think the apes were killed by a group that was trying to scare wardens out of the park.

Similar killings of mountain gorillas took place in Rwanda to get back at the late Dian Fossey, of Gorillas in the Mist fame. She was widely hated in the local community because of her outspoken racism and violence against local people. It makes one wonder if community relations in the Virunga National Park are as good as they should be. And do the benefits to the local population of Virunga National Park outweigh the opportunity costs of the park?

Update: National Geographic reports that “Virtually all the charcoal supplied to nearby Goma—worth an estimated U.S. $30 million a year—is made from wood harvested illegally inside Virunga National Park”.

Dress for success

We have previous mentioned the current predicament of the Hadza. Here is an article in the Daily Mail, Face to face with Stone Age man: The Hadzabe tribe of Tanzania.

Ah, journalists. The Hadza don’t live in the Stone Age. “Hadzabe” is the feminine plural of “Hadza”; this usage is usually considered redundant in English, so we speak of the “Swahili”, not the “Waswahili”. The journalist writes,

I introduced myself and Naftal translated my words into clicks and whistles to an older Hadza called Gonga (Good Hunter in Swahili).

He smiled warmly, revealing surprisingly well-kept teeth.

The Hadza language, like many language in Southern Africa, use clicks as consonants, but no whistles.

There is a picture of the journalist in the article. He has surprising well-kept teeth for a British journalist.

What is interesting about the picture is that the young Hadza man is dressed up for the tourism business. Hadza men don’t usually use animal skins for clothing, and they certainly don’t use hoods. A hood makes no sense in the environment in which the Hadza live. There are photographs of the Hadza dating back to the 1930s, taken by Ludwig Kohl-Larsen, and there are later photographs taken by James Woodburn and others.

It is clear that increasing use of skins and also beads is a response to tourism. The Hadza are now on the tourism circuit. They put on their faux-traditional outfits for the benefit of tourists, and take them off when the tourists have left.

If that provides more income, why not? One danger is that government officials will find it embarrassing that there are people walking about in hides and skins, and will do little to help the Hadza with the biggest problem they face, loss of control and ownership of their lands.

Huge underground lake found

The BBC reports that a huge underground lake has been found in Sudan’s Darfur region, which scientists believe “could help end the conflict in the arid region”.

Presumably it is non-renewable fossil water, like the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System.

Why this should help bring about peace, rather that provide another example of the natural resource curse, it not clear.

There is not much water in Dafur. The is no oil in Somalia. If the Chinese state oil company, CNOOC, succeeds in finding oil in Somalia, will that bring about peace in Somalia?

What happens to any system depends not only on the inputs to the system, but also on the state of the system. Just adding an input, be it water or oil, is no guarantee that peace will be the result. The scientists quoted by BBC seem to have an overly simplistic model in mind.

Make Bono History

A fair and balanced view of Paul Hewson (”Bono”) in Spiked,

Bono is a celebrity colonialist. His patronising campaign to single-handedly ‘save Africa’ is actually damaging the continent. It is painting Africa as a pathetic place whose wide-eyed, infantile populations need a loudmouth rock star to fight their corner.

Hadza hunters-gatherers under threat

The Washington Post reports on the Hadza hunter-gatherers,

50,000 Years of Resilience May Not Save Tribe

Tanzania Safari Deal Lets Arab Royalty Use Lands

YAEDA VALLEY, Tanzania — One of the last remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers on the planet is on the verge of vanishing into the modern world.

The transition has been long underway, but members of the dwindling Hadzabe tribe, who now number fewer than 1,500, say it is being unduly hastened by a United Arab Emirates royal family, which plans to use the tribal hunting land as a personal safari playground.

The deal between the Tanzanian government and Tanzania UAE Safaris Ltd. leases nearly 2,500 square miles of this sprawling, yellow-green valley near the storied Serengeti Plain to members of the royal family, who chose it after a helicopter tour.

A Tanzanian official said that a nearby hunting area the family shared with relatives had become “too crowded” and that a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family “indicated that it was inconvenient” and requested his own parcel.

The official, Philip Marmo, called the Hadzabe “backwards” and said they would benefit from the school, roads and other projects the UAE company has offered as compensation…

The long-run threat to the Hadza is habitat loss. Tanzania has for many years had one of the fastest growing human populations in the world, and the Hadza have lost land from encroachment by farmers and the destruction of woodlands. Ironically, what caused the destruction of one forest was the demand for charcoal from the neighboring Ngorongoro Conservation Area.

The actions of the Abu Dhabi royal family may or may not threaten the Hadza’s livelihood, but obviously some Hadza believe it does. What the Hadza need are clear and well-defined property rights to their land, including rights to charge tourists and hunters.

Here are a few photos.

Good news from Africa

Carl Zimmer writes that the first aerial survey of southern Sudan in 25 years has revealed vast migrating herds, rivaling those of the Serengeti plains, that have managed to survive 25 years of civil war.

Ousmane Sembène is dead

Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest writers and film directors in sub-Saharan Africa. He produced and directed the first sub-Saharan African feature film, La noire de…, released in 1966. His book God’s Bits of Wood, first published in French in 1960, is excellent and deserves to be much more widely read.

“For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”

A notable interview with Kenyan commentator James Shikwati in Der Spiegel.

Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda interviewed in The Times.

Ben-Ami on Sachs

Daniel Ben-Ami reviews Jeffrey Sachs’ first Reith Lecture on Spiked.

Sachs has played a key role in transforming the contemporary mood of pessimism into a coherent intellectual system.

Lunch with Jeffrey Sachs

When British journalists are good, they are very, very good. Read this interview with Jeffrey Sachs by Chris Giles in Financial Times.

Elephant hunting

Shooting an elephant with an .458 Winchester Magnum is about as heroic as shooting a barn, but trophy hunting can be a socially useful activity (via Café Hayek),

Chumbe Island Coral Park Ltd.

From the comments, Sibylle Riedmiller of www.chumbeisland.com replies to a comment on this post:

Answering Peter Gottesman: welcome to check out Chumbe Island Coral Park Ltd (CHICOP) in Zanzibar/Tanzania:… it took a lot of struggle and investment, but it works! See our website for details and a summary below…

Viral marketing

Is this viral marketing? If so, it is an unusually nasty and malignant virus (from Ambuscading via Marginal Revolution),

Advertising Age calculates that around $100million has been spent blanketing billboards and magazines with images of Bono and other “celebrities”, while the total sum raised for Africa is $18million.

Just to be clear…

• Total spent on making Bono more famous = $100million.
• Total spent on drugs for Africans = $18million.

NGO destroys African wildlife

- and subverts democracy in Kenya. A pretty good rant from Michael Norton-Griffiths (who has put some new articles on his website),

“Since 1977, Kenya has lost 60%-70% of all its large wildlife…

Sahara provides nutrients for the Amazon

Absolutely fascinating paper, but what does it mean?

Abstract. About 40 million tons of dust are transported annually from the Sahara to the Amazon basin. Saharan dust has been proposed to be the main mineral source that fertilizes the Amazon basin, generating a dependence of the health and productivity of the rain forest on dust supply from the Sahara. Here we show that about half of the annual dust supply to the Amazon basin is emitted from a single source: the Bodélé depression located northeast of Lake Chad, approximately 0.5% of the size of the Amazon or 0.2% of the Sahara. Placed in a narrow path between two mountain chains that direct and accelerate the surface winds over the depression, the Bodélé emits dust on 40% of the winter days, averaging more than 0.7 million tons of dust per day…

Diamonds and the resource curse

It is often said that Botswana has avoided the resource curse. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Story here.

Declining fish stocks

A Chinese trawler fishes inside the protected marine zone at Conkouati Douli National Park in the Republic of Congo. The area is reserved for local fisherman in canoes who say the trawlers have made fishing very difficult (Source: BBC).

On the connection between declining fish stocks and the consumption of bushmeat, read this post.

War in The Horn of Africa

Background article in the New York Times on Ethiopia, Many in Ethiopia See Premier’s Talk of War As Ploy to Tighten Grip,

“…Meles is using the conflict to distract people from a vast array of internal problems and to justify further repression of opposition groups, including ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia.”

The U.S. Council on Foreign Relations on Proxy War in Africa’s Horn,

Ethiopia “may drag Washington into a conflict that will be framed in many parts of the Muslim world as another U.S.-sponsored attack on Islam.”

Matt Bryden on Washington’s Self-Defeating Somalia Policy,

“Washington’s new Somalia policy is not just self-defeating: it is inflammatory…

The apparent determination of the United States to approach Somalia as a new front in the Global War on Terror is well along the path to becoming a self-fulfilling policy.”

Stumbling towards genocide in Somalia

First we learn that U.S.

General John Abizaid, the head of the United States Central Command, held talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on local and international efforts to combat terrorism, state media said on Tuesday.

The talks came as Ethiopia faced accusations of deploying its troops inside Somalia to protect the country’s fledgling interim government from an increasingly powerful Islamic militia.

The pair held talks “on national and international issues, especially on ongoing efforts in fighting terrorism”, state-run Ethiopia News Agency said in a statement.

Second, we get inflammatory rhetoric about Somalia from a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State,