Fossils Shed New Light on Human Past

A partial skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus graces the cover of the latest issue of the journal Science.






After 15 years of rumors, researchers made public fossils from a 4.4 million-year-old human forebear they say reveals that our ancestors were more modern than scholars had assumed, widening the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from apes and chimpanzees.

The highlight of the extensive fossil trove was a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings.


More interactive graphics and photos

Ardipithecus ramidus

October 2, 2009
Fossil Skeleton From Africa Predates Lucy
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Lucy, meet Ardi.

Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, is the newest fossil skeleton out of Africa to take its place in the gallery of human origins. At an age of 4.4 million years, it lived well before and was much more primitive than the famous 3.2-million-year-old Lucy, of the species Australopithecus afarensis.

Since finding fragments of the older hominid in 1992, an international team of scientists has been searching for more specimens and on Thursday presented a fairly complete skeleton and their first full analysis. By replacing Lucy as the earliest known skeleton from the human branch of the primate family tree, the scientists said, Ardi opened a window to “the early evolutionary steps that our ancestors took after we diverged from our common ancestor with chimpanzees.”

The older hominid was already so different from chimps that it suggested “no modern ape is a realistic proxy for characterizing early hominid evolution,” they wrote.

The Ardipithecus specimen, an adult female, probably stood four feet tall and weighed about 120 pounds, almost a foot taller and twice the weight of Lucy. Its brain was no larger than a modern chimp’s. It retained an agility for tree-climbing but already walked upright on two legs, a transforming innovation in hominids, though not as efficiently as Lucy’s kin.

Ardi’s feet had yet to develop the arch-like structure that came later with Lucy and on to humans. The hands were more like those of extinct apes. And its very long arms and short legs resembled the proportions of extinct apes, or even monkeys.

Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, a leader of the team, said in an interview this week that the genus Ardipithecus appeared to resolve many uncertainties about “the initial stage of evolutionary adaptation” after the hominid lineage split from that of the chimpanzees. No fossil trace of the last common ancestor, which lived some time before six million years ago, according to genetic studies, has yet come to light.

The other two significant stages occurred with the rise of Australopithecus, which lived from about four million to one million years ago, and then the emergence of Homo, our own genus, before two million years ago. The ancestral relationship of Ardipithecus to Australopithecus has not been determined, but Lucy’s australopithecine kin are generally recognized as the ancestral group from which Homo evolved.

Scientists not involved in the new research hailed its importance, placing the Ardi skeleton on a pedestal alongside notable figures of hominid evolution like Lucy and the 1.6-million-year-old Turkana Boy from Kenya, an almost complete specimen of Homo erectus with anatomy remarkably similar to modern Homo sapiens.

David Pilbeam, a professor of human evolution at Harvard University who had no role in the discovery, said in an e-mail message that the Ardi skeleton represented “a genus plausibly ancestral to Australopithecus” and began “to fill in the temporal and structural ‘space’ between the apelike common ancestor and Australopithecus.”

Andrew Hill, a paleoanthropologist at Yale University who was also not involved in the research, noted that Dr. White had kept “this skeleton in his closet for the last 15 years or so, but I think it has been worth the wait.” In some ways the specimen’s features are surprising, Dr. Hill added, “but it makes a very satisfactory animal for understanding the changes that have taken place along the human lineage.”

The first comprehensive reports describing the skeleton and related findings, the result of 17 years of study, are being published Friday in the journal Science. Eleven papers by 47 authors from 10 countries describe the analysis of more than 110 Ardipithecus specimens from a minimum of 36 different individuals, including Ardi.

The paleoanthropologists wrote in one of the articles that Ardipithecus was “so rife with anatomical surprises that no one could have imagined it without direct fossil evidence.”

A bounty of animal and plant material — “every seed, every piece of fossil wood, every scrap of bone,” Dr. White said — was gathered to set the scene of the cooler, more humid woodland habitat in which these hominids had lived.

This was one of the first surprises, said Giday WoldeGabriel, a geologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, because it upset the hypothesis that upright walking had evolved as an adaptation to life on grassy savanna.

The discovery site, on what is now an arid floodplain along the middle stretch of the Awash River in Ethiopia, is 140 miles northeast of Addis Ababa and 45 miles south of Hadar, where Lucy was found in 1974 by Donald Johanson, with whom Dr. White collaborated in analyzing those fossils.

Gen Suwa, a paleoanthropologist now at the University of Tokyo, made the first discovery in 1992: a single upper molar. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, an Ethiopian curator of anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, uncovered the first skeletal bones. A preliminary report on the new species was published in 1994.

But the fossils, which are housed at the anthropology museum in Addis Ababa, were so plentiful, fragmentary and potentially significant that Dr. White held back from further public discussion of the research, even while discoveries of older fossils were being made.

One discovery was of an earlier species of Ardipithecus from elsewhere in Ethiopia. Other finds, perhaps from more than six million years ago and given other species names, were excavated in Chad and Kenya. Their bones indicate that they also walked upright, scientists say, but the fossils are too few to draw any definitive conclusions.

Ardi’s skull, Dr. Pilbeam said, appears to be more similar to the older Chad hominid than to younger australopithecines. This indicates that the fossils from Chad and Ethiopia possibly represent species of the Ardipithecus genus, or closely related genera.

From the new research, scientists inferred that Ardi was female, based on its small and lightly built skull and its canine teeth, which are small compared with other individuals at the site.

Dr. Suwa, a specialist in fossil teeth, said the more than 145 teeth collected at the site were of the size and shape and had wear patterns showing that the individuals were omnivorous eaters of plants and nuts, as well as small mammals, but were not as big consumers of fruits as are living chimps and gorillas. Ardi probably fed in trees and on the ground.

Dr. Suwa also noted that males had stubby canine teeth, more like those of modern humans, in contrast to the projecting tusklike upper canines of chimps and gorillas, suggesting that Ardipithecus teeth no longer functioned as weapons or displays in male-male or male-female conflicts. In fact, the male and female upper canines are similar.

This was seen as further evidence that the species had already evolved a distinctive trait of early prehumans. C. Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Kent State University and lead author of two of the journal reports, speculated that these hominids had a social system that involved less competition among males and that this suggested the beginning of pair bonding between males and females.

Dr. Pilbeam disputed this conjecture, saying, “This is a restatement of Owen Lovejoy’s ideas going back almost three decades, which I found unpersuasive then and still do.”

In his articles and an interview, Dr. Lovejoy described the five years he spent analyzing the Ardipithecus pelvis, which appeared to be in transition between a structure originally suited for life in trees and one modified for early upright walking. By contrast, the pelvis of the Lucy species had already evolved nearly all of the adaptations for bipedality.

Although the lower pelvis is still primitive, Dr. Lovejoy found, changes in the upper pelvis enabled the species to walk on two legs with a straightened hip, “but probably with less speed and efficiency than humans.” A few scientists think this walking evidence to be only circumstantial. The lower part of the pelvis, “still almost entirely apelike,” indicates retention of powerful hamstring muscles for climbing.

Dr. White, Berhane Asfaw of the Rift Valley Research Service in Ethiopia and other team members concluded that “despite the genetic similarities of living humans and chimpanzees, the ancestor we last shared probably differed substantially from any extant African ape.”

As Dr. Hill of Yale said, “It is always new specimens, particularly those from little known time periods or geographic areas, that provoke the greatest changes in our ideas.”

Looking ahead, Dr. White lamented that there were so few sites in Africa known to have fossil deposits six million to seven million years old. “We are getting so close to that common ancestor of hominids and chimps, and we’d love to find an earlier skeleton,” he said.

Muammar rambles

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, took the lectern at the United Nations on Wednesday morning for his first address at the General Assembly, and delivered a long and rambling diatribe — far exceeding the 15-minute limit on speeches — against the United Nations Security Council and a host of other perceived enemies, while urging the world to welcome President Obama, referring to him as “our son.”

Of Africa?

In the first third of a speech that lasted more than 90 minutes, Colonel Qaddafi focused on what he called the inherent unfairness of the United Nations, which gives the five permanent members of the Security Council far more authority than the nations in the General Assembly. This, Mr. Qaddafi said, was dictatorship, not democracy, and as such, “was terrorism itself.”

And when was the last time the Colonel held elections in his democracy?

The Afghan war, too, he said, should be investigated for possible prosecution. At times, Colonel Qaddafi veered into conspiracy, saying, for example, that the H1N1 influenza virus, also called swine flu, might be a military or corporate weapon that got out of a lab and intimating an Israeli hand behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, should be solved by the creation of a single state, which Mr. Qaddafi calls Israteen, but Mr. Qaddafi stressed it is wrong to infer that Arabs hate the Jews. “You are the ones who burned them, not us. You expelled them,” he said, referring apparently to European nations.

For Mr. Obama personally, however, he had only warm words, calling on the collected nations to welcome “our son” on the occasion of his first United Nations appearance. “We are content and happy if Obama can stay forever as the president of America,” he said, saying he feared America would return to its old ways after the end of his term.

Oy vay.

Gani Fawehinmi: 1938-2009

Gani Fawehinmi, leader of the unregistered National Conscience Party, died on Sept. 5.










Remembrances - September 15, 2009

An Advocate for the Masses, He Braved Nigerian Dictators

By Stephen Miller

A persistent critic of the military dictators who ruled his nation for decades, Gani Fawehinmi was Nigeria's leading human-rights lawyer.

Mr. Fawehinmi, who died Sept. 5 at 71, took some of Nigeria's most controversial cases, including that of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a critic of the government who was executed in 1995 to gales of international protest.

Mr. Saro-Wiwa was one of a string of Mr. Fawehinmi's clients who had run afoul of Nigeria's government for offenses ranging from speaking out against the military to leading protests against foreign oil companies.

Mr. Fawehinmi was jailed and harassed by successive governments. Many in Nigeria expressed astonishment that the legal gadfly survived, given the number of powerful people he offended.

"I called him 'Ayorumbo' -- that's a Yoruba expression for somebody who has gone through the door of death and somehow come back," says Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright and human-rights activist.

Mr. Soyinka and Mr. Fawehinmi first established contact via smuggled notes, when both were imprisoned on political charges in the 1960s. Later, they worked on several cases, including one in which Mr. Soyinka was the plaintiff in a lawsuit Mr. Fawehinmi brought challenging the constitutionality of the Abacha military government in the 1990s. Mr. Soyinka fled the country, but Mr. Fawehinmi remained in what many political activists characterized as a perilous environment.

"I nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in that period," says Mr. Soyinka, himself the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986.

Mr. Fawehinmi was often referred to as "chief" because his father and grandfather had been prominent leaders in the southwest Nigerian city of Ondo. His own leadership abilities appeared early, and he was nicknamed "Nation" during his legal studies at the University of London. After joining the Nigerian Bar in 1965, he gained a reputation for defending clients unfriendly to the government. It was an unsettled time as Nigeria fell into civil war, and a series of military coups ensued.
Obituaries

* Notable deaths from the business world and entertainment industry from Tributes.com.

Starting out in his brother's law office, Mr. Fawehinmi built a thriving practice of his own. He became publisher of the Nigerian Weekly Law Report, and his salary supported him through much pro-bono work. Despite offers from nongovernmental organizations, he refused foreign funding for his human-rights work, insisting that it be bankrolled from within the nation.

Mr. Fawehinmi came to international prominence as an opponent of Nigerian ruler Ibrahim Babangida's military junta. Mr. Fawehinmi accused the government of murdering one of his clients, a national magazine editor and critic of the regime named Dele Giwa who was killed by a letter bomb in 1986. When his court actions failed to bring Mr. Giwa's killers to justice, Mr. Fawehinmi was again imprisoned. He was still trying to reopen the case last year from his hospital bed.

Mr. Babangida left office after successful elections in 1993, and Mr. Fawehinmi declared a rebirth of democracy. He was quickly disappointed after another coup, this one led by General Sani Abacha, and became a determined critic of the new regime.

To protest the Abacha government, Mr. Fawehinmi sued on behalf of Mr. Soyinka and established his own political party, the National Conscience Party. He held a rally in one of Lagos's most notorious slums.

During the years of military dictatorship, Mr. Fawehinmi told a group of supporters, "I was beaten, tear-gassed, detained, jailed and humiliated. I lost my health, but I did not lose my life." In 2001, after civilian rule was re-established, Mr. Fawehinmi was named Senior Advocate of Nigeria, the nation's highest legal title. He had been denied the title and targeted more than once for disbarment in previous decades. He became known as the "Senior Advocate for the Masses," an informal title. He was also the recipient of the 1993 Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights.

In an interview published in 2008 by the All Africa news service, Mr. Fawehinmi, ailing with the cancer that killed him, spoke of his legacy.

"I want to exhaust this brain, put everything on paper, so that Nigerians yet unborn would learn from the way I lived."

African gems

Bridges Family - Campbell Bridges, pictured in 2006, lived in a tree house near his mine to avoid the local wildlife, from scorpions to lions


It all began, Campbell Bridges liked to say, the day a charging cape buffalo forced him to flee into a ravine. That was where he discovered a cache of small green garnets that turned out to be the making of his career.

Mr. Bridges went on to become the leading miner of tsavorite, the gemstone he first sighted in 1961 in Zimbabwe. A geologist and an African adventurer known for living in a tree house and setting a cobra to scare off intruders at his mine, Mr. Bridges was a legendary figure in the world of gemology.

Tsavorite is named for the Tsavo national parks.

To avoid the scorpions, army ants and other hazardous fauna including lions, Mr. Bridges took to living in tree houses, 25 feet off the ground. "They are safe and cool," he told a jewelry trade magazine in 2007. "And the views are spectacular."











blue-purple tanzanite.

In Africa, Clinton Balances

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greets Liberians as she arrives at the presidential palace in Monrovia on Thursday. Mrs. Clinton offered support for Liberia's President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who has faced calls to resign.
Slideshow


Mrs. Clinton's seven-nation trip through Africa, which ends Friday, has been a balancing act between calling for good governance, while protecting U.S.-African economic ties. Those relationships are especially important now, as China, a U.S. economic competitor in Africa, has increasingly invested in the continent, offering loans, building roads and striking deals for commodities.

The US has neglected Africa for decades, only stepping in during times of crisis, and then in a rather perfunctory way -- although George W. Bush did provide a major contribution to fighting AIDS. Africa will become more valuable as a market and of greater strategic importance in the years ahead, dn it behooves the US to act.

Mrs. Clinton's Africa trip is the latest example of her push for so-called personalized diplomacy, which focuses as much on meeting businessmen and civil-society groups as heads of state and diplomats. In her speeches, the secretary underscored the Obama administration's commitment to "soft power" and using trade, technology and aid in addition to military power to protect American interests.

The shift in strategy may improve relations with African governments that chafe at Western criticism, but win less support from Africans themselves. Mrs. Clinton's trip comes as Africans have begun to question their leaders, even under oppressive regimes, more openly.

Cape Verde is a major US aid recipient.

The approach is a stark departure from that of the Bush administration, which in some cases openly challenged close allies. But the soft approach may cause problems of its own. Human-rights organizations could seize on the strategy as a waning of American resolve to exert influence. President Barack Obama's political critics could claim the approach places economic interests over moral obligations.

Such stentorian lecturing of waning political resolved does much to mollify the consciences of the lecturers, yet accomplishes little in practical terms. Moral obligations? To do what? Lecture? Pontificate? How about practical accomplishments?

Clinton Says Liberia Making Progress

Clinton Says Liberia Making Progress in Fighting Corruption

Voice of America - Scott Stearns - ‎1 hour ago‎

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's government is making significant progress in the fight against corruption.

Preaching reform, Clinton wins African hearts The Associated Press

Clinton Backs Liberia's Leaders New York Times

BBC News - Bloomberg - TIME - NPR

Clinton’s Flash of Pique in Congo

Hillary Rodham Clinton in Africa


It was hot. She was tired. And it had been a long day in Africa.

And the media has made her remark the story. All the other things she has done have been buried under the trivial.

After the forum, her aides told the traveling press corps that there might have been a mistranslation, and that the student actually wanted to know the opinion of her boss, not her husband. But that interpretation did not dispel the controversy either, since it gave new life to the nagging question of whether Mrs. Clinton felt marginalized in the Obama administration.

Palace intrigue seems more important than substantive issues.

Her talk with the students had started out friendly enough, with questions about human rights and the environment. But it got a little edgy when several students pushed her on why Congo, whose first prime minister was ousted with the help of the C.I.A., should now trust the United States. She then became a little prickly.

the hubbub seemed to drain Mrs. Clinton. Until then, she had seemed impervious to the jet lag that was stalking her entourage from the moment they plopped down in Kenya. But on Tuesday, especially after meeting Congolese rape victims and touring a squalid refugee camp where thousands of people lived cheek by sunken cheek, Mrs. Clinton seemed enervated. Perhaps it was the sight of so many civilians suffering from a conflict the world has failed to stop. She said a few words on the plane ride back from Congo, but her language was not as emotional as it had been, or as urgent.

No matter the issues she was talking about — encouraging good governing, ending Africa’s wars, lifting women up from their lowly position in a place like Congo. The interest in this trip, it seemed, was not about the problems facing Africa. It was about her.

As one journalist covering her trip put it: “She is a celebrity. We have a celebrity secretary of state. When you have a celebrity, you get celebrity coverage.”

What does say about the media covering her? Nothing good about that media covering her.

Hillary meets Mandela

Day four of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 11-day tour of Africa has landed her in South Africa, where she met with former South African President Nelson Mandela, a meeting she said left her with "admiration for his public work but an even greater affection for the man." She is scheduled next to meet with President Jacob Zuma, the current South African president, to discuss reform, business and health in Zimbabwe. She will leave for Angola on Sunday, before heading to Nigeria, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cape Verde.



















Hillary's Gutsy Mission
by Eliza Griswold
August 7, 2009 | 12:47am

Hillary Clinton AP Photo Hillary Clinton met with Nelson Mandela in South Africa Friday, which she said left her with "an even greater affection for the man." But her trip isn't just friendly encounters. The Daily Beast's Eliza Griswold writes that instead of paying lip service to Africa’s woes on her 11-day trip to the continent, Hillary is courting controversy by meeting a Somali leader Bush deposed and taking on rape in Congo—and it’s a major step forward.

There’s a cynical kind of math that comes along with reporting on Africa. Forget positive, or complex coverage; the bottom line is death tolls have to be high for anyone to care at all, or for any news outfit to foot the bill on a given story.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 11-day trip to Africa is a promising indication that may be changing. First, it’s the longest venture she’s taken out of the country thus far. Second, it comes on the heels of her boss’ trip to Ghana three weeks ago. Such heavy hitters so early on in Africa? It’s unheard of.

And then there’s the nature of the business at hand. In Kenya, Clinton has called out the wobbly-at-best coalition government over the deaths of 1,000 people during last year’s election. She is also risking the conservative political fallout at home to meet with the soft-spoken, smoky-eyed president of Somalia, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. (The Bush administration helped to oust him three years ago in the name of anti-terror.)

This is an aggressive agenda for the secretary of State, who could use such a trip to bolster approval ratings.

Clinton also is not shying away from addressing the horrors unfolding in Zimbabwe. And she’s taking up an age-old unpopular issue of rape as a crime of war in eastern Congo. Nigeria is yet to come—a country the State Department has called “probably the most important in Africa.” (Read: It’s our fifth-largest oil supplier.) And to round out the itinerary, she’s stopping in Angola, Liberia, and Cape Verde.

This is an aggressive agenda for the secretary of State, who could use such a trip to bolster approval ratings, but in a way it’s uncontroversial foreign policy that pays lip service to Africa’s woes without having to do much but promise American money for intractable far-away problems—malaria, AIDS, global poverty. This on a continent where most people nearly deify the Clintons, and almost all American presidents. (Even George W. Bush was popular here.) But she’s taking on controversial issues and desperate problems without easy solutions.

Two examples: Somalia and Congo.

In Somalia three years ago, under Bush, the U.S. backed an invasion by neighboring Ethiopia, which ousted a popular Islamist government headed by the man Clinton met this week. America was then looking—and in the right place, it turned out—for three suspected al Qaeda members, but the fallout of that invasion was that it created a popular militant insurgency, the very enemy America was seeking to defeat. As Somalis put it: In the hopes of getting three bad guys, you supported the attack of 7 million people? Bad math.

It’s true that the U.S. initiated low-level talks before Barack Obama took office. But people who have urged such a high-level meeting in the past have been scoffed at as idealists, or simply idiots. Clinton’s choice to meet Sheikh Sharif not only will lend him the tremendous legitimacy he needs to try to bring peace to his country, it’s also a very smart move of trying to separate friends from foes, and not letting the foes borrow the too-easy banner of religion to mask an increasingly brutal insurgency. Now, thanks to this meeting, it’s indisputable that the U.S. is willing to work with those who want an Islamic state in Somalia. That will be hard for the militant thugs to spin on the sandy streets of Mogadishu. It is a major step forward.

While rape as a crime of war is hardly a new issue, for Clinton to stop in eastern Congo to address this seemingly intractable problem—from which millions of Congolese women suffer—is an important move toward establishing accountability for the perpetrators. One might think, oh, really, what does it matter that Hillary speaks out against rape? But if ragtag militias fear they might be thrown in jail—or even brought before the International Criminal Court—they will think twice about perpetrating these crimes. Such measures may sound theoretical here in the United States—and in truth, they are mostly bureaucratic nightmares—but sometimes the threat functions as a deterrent. People do think about consequences.

Several years ago, I met three rape victims—euphemistically called bush wives—in a priest’s home not far from the eastern Congolese town of Bunia. They had been held captive for months, and escaped their enemy’s camp by sneaking away in the middle of the night. There was no electricity, so we sat around a wooden table in lantern light, as one woman spoke of overhearing her captors’ instructions on how to handle the United Nations peacekeepers—the blue helmets—patrolling near their camps.

“Just don’t point your guns at them,” one of her captors had said. Meaning: The U.N. peacekeepers in the area—mostly Bangladeshis at the time—would not intervene if Africans were only killing, or raping, each other. They would react only if they themselves were physically threatened.

That was the U.N. mandate, and everyone knew it. The woman’s heart sank as she realized that no one would care; that her life was limitlessly inconsequential to the rest of the world.

It is idealistic to think that Clinton’s visit might turn America’s eye more sharply on Africa. But it is also possible. Six months ago, it was utter lunacy to think that someone as high-ranking as Hillary would meet with the likes of the Somali President Sheikh Sharif. And yet today, it’s yesterday’s news.

Eliza Griswold is a New America fellow and a recipient of the 2010 Rome Prize. Her book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Islam and Christianity, will by published by FSG this spring.

Ghana signs oil development deal

Ghana, riding high from President Barack Obama's visit this month, quietly signed a long-awaited development plan for one of the biggest oil discoveries in West Africa in the past decade.

The agreement -- reached July 15 with a group of international oil companies after months of negotiations -- brings Ghana much closer to its stated goal of producing oil by the second half of 2010.

Celebrated for its democratic rule and stability on a continent more often associated with coups d'état and violence, Ghana is trying to figure out how to handle the oil discovery responsibly and avoid the problems that have beset other oil-rich African nations.

That Ghana has held five consecutive democratic elections -- the most recent one in December -- and is mostly peaceful has inspired confidence among many analysts that the country will better handle its oil and gas resources than Nigeria or Angola and Equatorial Guinea.

Nigeria has squandered hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenue over the past four decades due largely to corrupt government officials. It also faces a violent militant campaign that has led to hundreds of foreigners and locals being kidnapped and pipeline attacks that regularly shut down the flow of oil.

Ghana has a more diverse revenue stream than Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea: It is the world's second-largest cocoa producer after neighboring Ivory Coast and Africa's second-largest gold producer after South Africa.

2nd? I'd no idea.

Cable makes big promises for African Internet

I have long been interested in the economicpotential of Africa. This is a big step forward.

Cable makes big promises for African Internet

CNN

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (CNN) -- A undersea cable plugging East Africa into high speed Internet access went live Thursday providing an alternative to expensive satellite connections.

SEACOM, the cable provider company, opened up its 17000 kilometer submarine cable, capable of 1.28 terabytes per second, allowing the region true connectivity.

Most Africans rely on expensive and slow satellite connections, which make the use of applications such as YouTube and Facebook extremely trying.

"This is going to reduce the cost of doing business in Africa, within Africa and with international parties" said Suveer Ramdhani, SEACOM spokesman in South Africa.

"The cable is as thin as a hair strand and in one second it can download the same amount of data that 160 people use in a month."

SEACOM, privately funded and 75 % African owned, will provide retail carriers with open source access to inexpensive bandwidth.

It has taken less than three years to complete the mammoth project, providing landing stations at South Africa, Kenya, Madagascar and other points along the east coast of Africa.

But telecoms analyst James Hodge said that some of the more ambitious hopes for the system -- such as impacting the continent's socio-economic problems -- will be long-term, and that initially it will be those already connected who will see the benefits.

The launch was delayed by a month because of increased activity by pirates along parts of the African coast.

Security teams were beefed up to protect the slow moving cable layers.

Neotel, a South African communications network operator is the largest shareholder in SEACOM.

It is also the anchor tenant and the South African landing partner, providing both the coastal landing station and Johannesburg data center for the submarine cable.

Neotel managing director Jay Pandey is excited about the opportunities for growth presented by the SEACOM cable.

"With this cable coming in, the pipe size opens up, so more and more people are able to get faster and better connectivity, hopefully at a lower price. It can't be more expensive than what it is today."

SEACOM chief executive officer Brian Herlihy added: "Turning the switch 'on' creates a huge anticipation but ultimately, SEACOM will be judged on the changes that take place on the continent over the coming years."

South Africa has been hobbled by high costs and extremely slow bandwidth, effectively keeping the country on an information back road rather then the superhighway.

There is much anticipation and hope that the cable will ensure Africa keeps up with the developed world in Internet connectivity, providing greater speed, flexibility and, potentially, a complete socio-economic transformation.
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Tanzanian President Josiah Kikwete said in his opening address: "It's the ultimate embodiment of modernity."

His speech was beamed via SEACOM from a launch in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to the simultaneous launch in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Threat to Niger 's Democracy

A woman selling vegetables at a market in Niamey, the capital of Niger. The country ranks fifth from the bottom in the United Nations human development index.
















Tens of thousands have taken to the streets to protest President Mamadou Tandja’s slow-moving coup d’état, as his critics call it: his plan to stay beyond the legal limit of two terms in his colonial-era palace, a gleaming oasis of whitewashed order amid dilapidated government buildings and mud-brick houses.

In his push for a new constitution that would abolish term limits and give him more power after 10 years as president, Mr. Tandja dissolved a high court that ruled against his bid to remain in office; dismissed a fractious Parliament; took steps to muzzle the press, including shutting down a radio and television station; and arrested opposition leaders.

Just as Chávez, Correa and Morales have done, as Zelaya want to do, In Latin America, one in power in Africa works to perpetuate his power.

Niger’s president, Mamadou Tandja, is seeking a new constitution that will allow him to stay in office past two terms and increase his power.






Democracy is new here in one of the world’s poorest countries, barely a decade old in this vast land of about 14 million people, most of it desert, bigger in area than France, Spain and Portugal together. Uranium deposits, among the world’s largest, provide the government with revenue, but the citizens here do not have much.

Yellow cake, W. Bush announced, Iraq sought to get, and he and Blair used that line to help justify their decision to make war.

Most of Niger’s citizens live on less than a dollar a day.






Most live on less than a dollar a day, and mortality rates for mothers and children are well above the African average — double in the case of women giving birth. The country ranks fifth from the bottom in the United Nations human development index, and persistent malnutrition stalks rural areas, aid workers say. In the capital, the hugely swollen limbs of insistent beggars testify to the effects of unchecked disease.

One thing the people have dearly acquired, though, after decades of coups, military strongmen and weak governments, is a political order that has resembled democracy, albeit with lapses: two successful presidential elections, defeated candidates who go home without causing turmoil, an outspoken opposition and an alert if beleaguered press. The citizens are manifestly unwilling to give up their shaky gains.

In the presidential palace, an airy Moorish-style edifice built for the French governors and well hidden from the road, Mr. Tandja beamed and said he wanted to stay on only because the people were begging him to do so. “The people demand it,” Mr. Tandja said. “My obligation is to never betray the aspirations of the people. It’s the people who asked.”

What people, one wonders.

Although the United States and the European Union have condemned Mr. Tandja’s moves, analysts say that because of an oil deal with the Chinese and support from the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, he may be relatively invulnerable to Western pressure, despite the considerable presence of outside aid in Niger’s budget.

Mr. Tandja insisted that he had not “violated any act of the Constitution.”

A union leader here who also heads the protests angrily disagreed.

“Unfortunately, he’s made us miss our entrance into the great court of democratic nations, like Ghana and Mali,” said Issoufou Sidibé, secretary general of the Democratic Confederation of Workers in Niger. “He’s made us totally miss what would have been our triumphant entry. It’s made every Nigerien who is proud of his country very angry.”

Brother Barack Admonishes - and Encourages - Africa

United States President Barack Obama waves to the crowd in Ghana on Saturday: Obama delivered an uncompromising message to Africa in a speech at Ghana's parliament


2 part interview video












Brother Barack Admonishes - and Encourages - Africa AllAfrica.com - John Allen - Speaking to Africans with the intimacy of a brother, and citing the heritage he shared with them, President Barack Obama of the United States delivered an uncompromising message to the continent on Saturday.

Speaking from Ghana's democratically-elected Parliament, months after the ruling party was dislodged – and accepted defeat – by the narrowest of margins, Obama said much of the hope promised by Africa's liberation has yet to be fulfilled.

"Yes," he acknowledged, "a colonial map that made little sense bred conflict, and the West has often approached Africa as a patron, rather than a partner."

Then came the jab: "But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants."

But the United States had responsibilities too. As AllAfrica's Charles Cobb, Jr. pointed out in analyzing the speech for CNN, Obama didn't offer much in practical terms. For example, despite pledging to make it easier for Africans to grow the food it needs and export it, there was no plan offered for the U.S. to abandon the protection of its farmers, which prevents Africans from reaping the benefits of the free trade the West preaches.

But the president did suggest that "wealthy nations must open our doors to goods and services from Africa in a meaningful way."



AllAfrica interview with President Obama and coverage of Ghana trip
AllAfrica Readers Tell Obama They Want Democracy

Headlines

Sinopec Offers $7.22 Billion for Oil Firm - The takeover of Addax Petroleum would give the Chinese company access to oil fields in Iraq and West Africa.

Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears

O.E.C.D. Improves Outlook for Economy - The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has revised its forecasts for developed countries upward for the first time in two years.

DealBook Blog: KKR Revises Deal for Affiliate, Postpones NYSE Debut - The giant private equity firm said Wednesday that it is seeking to revise a merger with a publicly listed European affiliate that would give it an Amsterdam listing.

Citigroup Has a Plan to Fatten Salaries - The plan is a test for the Obama administration, which wants to limit compensation at companies that have received federal bailouts. These bozos simply refuse to understand what in damnation is going on.

Baucus Grabs Pacesetter Role on Health Bill

A, Sarko

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy. French anti-corruption activists are trying to prod the justice system into questioning how the leaders of Gabon, Congo Republic and Equatorial Guinea and their families could afford to acquire assets worth tens of millions of euros in France

Quite an expression.

Three Africa leaders to account for wealth in France

Burundi: Official End to a Civil War

World Briefing | Africa

Burundi: Official End to a Civil War

The off-again-on-again civil war in Burundi that killed more than 200,000 people officially came to an end on Wednesday as the last of its rebel groups formally became a political party. According to the African Union, which has led peace efforts, 3,500 members of the rebel group, the National Liberation Forces, also have started integration into the national police and army. Animosity between Hutu and Tutsi set off the war, which lasted 16 years and became a free-for-all involving warring militias, rival politicians, criminal gangs and child soldiers. Presidential and parliamentary elections are scheduled to take place in 2010.

Imagine: a civil war actually ends. Hallelujah!

Kenyan Town Strikes Back Against Its Tormenters

Residents of Karatina, Kenya, walked by bloody clubs on Tuesday, evidence of the town’s attack against members of a gang.














Just after dusk on Monday, the residents gathered, armed with clubs, machetes and traditional spears. They said they were sick of paying extortion taxes, sick of fearing for their girls and sick of living under the thumb of the Mungiki, an intensely secretive Kenyan group that is part street gang, part Mafia, with an added touch of the occult.





And so the people of Karatina decided to strike back. Under the cover of darkness, a mob of hundreds of young men who were paid by elders, according to several residents, swept across this lush green tea-growing area that seems more like a slice of Eden than a killing field and rounded up dozens of men suspected of being Mungiki members.

The mob pummeled the men suspected of being thugs, and this normally tranquil spot exploded into a melee of killings and counterkillings that left nearly 30 people dead. Witnesses said some victims were beaten beyond recognition. The evidence was on display on Tuesday. The mud roads were still sticky with blood, and children carefully tiptoed around the broken sticks tipped in red.

The Mungiki started in the 1980s as a self-defense force for the Kikuyu ethnic group, Kenya’s largest. Gang members modeled themselves after the Mau Mau, Kenya’s independence fighters who wore dreadlocks, took secret oaths and waged a hit-and-run guerrilla war against British colonizers.

New Status in Africa Empowers an Ever-Eccentric Qaddafi

A billboard in Surt, Libya, depicting Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the new chairman of the African Union, tries to suggest a bright new day is dawning in Africa.











African migrants around a fire last month in Tripoli, where many have flocked to seek jobs










March 23, 2009

New Status in Africa Empowers an Ever-Eccentric Qaddafi

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

TRIPOLI, Libya — Forty years after he seized power in a bloodless coup d’état, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader once called the mad dog of the Middle East by President Ronald Reagan, has achieved the international status he always craved, as chairman of the African Union.

Colonel Qaddafi’s selection last month to lead the 53-nation African Union coincided with his emergence as a welcomed figure in Western capitals, where heads of state are eager to tap Libya’s vast oil and gas reserves and to gain access to virgin Libyan markets. Once vilified for promoting state terrorism, Colonel Qaddafi is now courted.

But Colonel Qaddafi remains the same eccentric, unpredictable revolutionary as always. He has used his new status to promote his call for a United States of Africa, with one passport, one military and one currency. He has blamed Israel for the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, defended Somali pirates for fighting “greedy Western nations” and declared that multiparty democracy was not right for the people of Africa.

“This is a role that Qaddafi has been looking for for 40 years,” said Wahid Abdel Meguid, deputy director of Egypt’s largest research institute, the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “He kept shifting and changing directions in search of this role.”

Each step of Colonel Qaddafi’s calculated transformation from terrorist sponsor to would-be statesman has bolstered the next. The thaw in relations with the West, which began in 2003 when he gave up Libya’s nuclear weapons program, gave him more credibility in Africa; and his rising status in Africa has made him more acceptable to the West. All of which has been aimed at one primary objective: bolstering his image.

At one time, Colonel Qaddafi, who was born in 1942, tried to position himself as the next pan-Arab leader. But he was rejected, at times mocked, for his eccentric style and pronouncements. His country was isolated for decades because he sent his agents to kill civilians, including in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

But now in Africa, he has found traction. African heads of state view him suspiciously, and his one-Africa agenda is generally dismissed as unworkable. But he is embraced for his growing status in the West, the lack of credible alternatives across the continent and his money. Many stories are told in Tripoli of African leaders visiting Colonel Qaddafi and leaving with suitcases full of cash, stories that cannot be confirmed but that have become conventional wisdom.

“They don’t want to lose him because he is a gold mine for solving crises, usually financial crises,” said Attia Essawy, an Egyptian writer with expertise in African affairs. “He is searching for a role; he wants to have a role regardless of where.”

While Libya’s strongman is enjoying his burnished image, it has come at a cost to his nation of 5.5 million people and to the approximately two million Africans who have flocked to Libya believing that they would find warm receptions, good jobs and, perhaps, an easy path to Europe. Instead, they found a hostile environment and a struggle just to eat.

“It is a burden,” Ali Abd Alaziz Isawi, who served for two years as the minister of economy, trade and investment, said of the army of illegal immigrants living in Libya. “They are a burden on health care, they spread disease, crime. They are illegal.”

All over this capital city, illegal African immigrants line up along roadways, across bridges and at traffic circles hoping to be selected for menial day jobs that pay about $8. They call the areas where they congregate “the hustling grounds,” which are always crowded with desperate faces from early morning until well past sundown.

Many people in Tripoli said they resented the presence of so many illegal workers. “We don’t like them,” said Moustafa Saleh, 28, who is unemployed, echoing a popular sentiment. “They smuggle themselves through the desert, and the way they deal with us is not good.”

For the African migrants themselves, life in Libya is often a dead end. “They call us animals and slaves,” said Paul Oknonghou, 28, a Nigerian who lives with about a dozen other Nigerians in a house under construction that lacks glass in the window frames, running water, a bathroom or a kitchen. He said he and his friends considered themselves lucky that they did not have to sleep on the streets.

Thomas Thtakore, 26, who is from Ghana, entered Libya illegally a year ago after a three-month journey across mountains and desert. “I have no help; I sleep under a bridge near the river,” He said. He said his younger brother died on the way. “If I stay here, I will die.”

Mr. Thtakore was about to be flown back to Ghana by the International Organization for Migration, a nongovernmental group that helps migrants return home. Since 2006, the group has helped about 3,000 travel home.

“If they find a job it can be good, but if they don’t, it can be a nightmare,” said Michele Bombassei, an official with the migration group, adding that most do not find jobs.

That hostile reality contrasts sharply with the image that Colonel Qaddafi likes to portray. His capital city is filled with billboards showing Libya as the one bright spot on the continent. In one billboard, Colonel Qaddafi appears as a savior as sun rays break over his shoulder and a crowd of black men and women reach toward him with outstretched arms.

His Africa agenda helps empower him in other ways, too.

Diplomats here said it gave him leverage in keeping African and European leaders listening and their doors open. If Libya sent all the migrants home, they would become a burden to poorer African nations, which would have to absorb them while losing out on the remittances they send home. At the same time, diplomats here said, Libya has made it plain to European countries, especially Italy, that if Libya chose to look the other way, most of those migrants would head for European shores.

“It’s a kind of soft power they use,” said one Western diplomat who works on Libyan affairs but requested anonymity for fear of antagonizing Libyan authorities.

Colonel Qaddafi will serve only a one-year term as chairman of the African Union, but his quest to use Africa as a stepping stone to greater world influence and credibility is likely to continue well past that. Last August, 200 kings and traditional African leaders traveled to Libya and anointed him with a more permanent moniker; they crowned him king of kings.

Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.

Untried Soldier Carries the Weight of Guinea’s Desperate Hopes

Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, Guinea’s new leader, waving to students on March 5 in Conakry, the capital. He and other junior officers seized power in December.









The captain likes to sleep late. Most days he rises well into the afternoon. Sometimes it is not until after sunset. He governs in darkness, his aides whisper, because that is when coups happen, like the one he staged early one December morning.

Smart.

Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, who seized power along with a group of junior officers after the death of Guinea’s longtime president, is only the third man to rule this abysmally poor, perpetually broken nation.


According to the CIA's World Factbook, its Natural resources are bauxite, iron ore, diamonds, gold, uranium, hydropower, fish, salt.








Guinea has suffered through years of tyranny. The country chose to be independent from a reluctant France in 1958, but a nation that seemed like a beacon of hope for Africa quickly slipped under the shroud of socialist dictatorship, ruled by the charismatic but brutal Sékou Touré. Isolated and impoverished, Guinea became a redoubt of misery.

The warmth with which this young, untested soldier has been welcomed by many of the people is a testament to just how low Guinea, a onetime pioneer in African independence, has sunk, and how desperate for change its people have become.

South American drug traffickers, who ship cocaine to Europe via West Africa, infiltrated the government at the highest levels. Mr. Conté’s son Ousmane confessed on television last month to aiding the cocaine traffickers who had turned Guinea into a virtual narco-state. Senior police officials and some of the country’s top drug enforcers were involved, according to investigators.

Amazing how far narcos reach.

Captain Camara, sensing the public outrage at corruption and the drug trade, vowed to clean up the country. In a bizarre but riveting set of televised interrogations, the compact, square-jawed captain extracted confessions from some of the most feared and powerful figures of the ancien régime.

Under pressure from Western countries and the African Union, the junta has pledged to hold elections by the end of the year, but there is little evidence of preparations for a transition to civilian rule.

What is the hurry? Let the country stabilize first.

The United States has cut off some aid, and has refused to recognize the junta. “By remaining in power through repeated refusals to set a timely election date, the military regime in Guinea is fast becoming the poster boy for misrule in West Africa,” said a statement from Phillip Carter III, the acting assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

Why cut off aid? And what does this diplomat mean?

But some European governments take a softer line, contending that a fragile country like Guinea needs stability as much as democracy, according to diplomats and analysts in the region.

Precisely.

Headlines and Stories

Pope in Africa reaffirms "no condoms" against AIDS Putz. That is almost criminal.

"It (AIDS) cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem," he said in response to a question about the Church's widely contested position against the use of condoms.

The disease has killed more than 25 million people since the early 1980s, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and some 22.5 million Africans are living with HIV.

Recession-weary Americans outraged by AIG bonuses The excuse is that they were contract stipulations that couldn't be abrogated. But the auto workers had to renegotiate their contracts in order for GM and Chrysler to get government money. False outrage by politicians diverts the true question: how come the white collar types got their money? Didn't Geithner know? And if he didn't, why not?

Army puts Madagascar opposition leader in charge

The Associated Press - ‎55 minutes ago‎

ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar (AP) - Military leaders in Madagascar say they have handed over control of this Indian Ocean island nation to the president's rival.

Opposition given Madagascar reins Aljazeera.net