Bashir Falls in Sudan

Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the dictator of Sudan, has been overthrown by the Army after months of escalating protests against his rule. Bashir survived decades of internal and international opposition, including indictment for war crimes because of actions taken by his troops in the rebellious region of Darfur. What finally undid him? The tripling of bread prices. And why did his government have to cut back on the bread subsidy? Because Bashir agreed to a peace deal with South Sudan that allowed the South to hold onto many of the nation's oil wells.

I'm happy to see the man fall from power, but let's not pretend it was because most Sudanese were appalled by his violations of human rights.

Something I didn't know about Africa

Former Brazilian slaves flocked to Lagos Island (Nigeria) in the mid-1800s, accounting for more than 10 percent of the city’s population and forming the core of its merchant and professional class.

-Armin Rosen at CityJournal

Best to Go Easy on the President's Team

The BBC reports the news from Burundi:

Two Burundi officials have been imprisoned after the African country's president was allegedly "roughed up" in a football match they organised.

President Pierre Nkurunziza is a 'born-again' evangelical Christian who spends much of his time travelling Burundi with his own team, Haleluya FC. He also travels with his own choir, "Komeza gusenga", which means "pray non-stop" in the local Kirundi language.

On 3 February, his team faced a side from the northern town of Kiremba.

Normally, the opposition is well aware they are playing against the country's president, and it has been said they go easy in the games, even perhaps allowing Nkurunziza to score.

But as the Kiremba team contained Congolese refugees who did not know they were playing against Burundi's president, they "attacked each time he had the ball and made him fall several times", a witness told AFP.

Kiremba's administrator Cyriaque Nkezabahizi and his assistant, Michel Mutama, were imprisoned on Thursday, the news agency reports.

AFP cited a judicial source as saying they had been arrested on charges of "conspiracy against the president".

To be clear, Nkurunziza actually plays in these games; no mere manager is this man of the people.

The Folly of National Independence, Continued: Eritrea

Eritrea is a strip of coastal land along the Red Sea, which was historically sometimes part of Ethiopia and sometimes not. When the Italians overran this part of Africa, they smushed them together, and when Ethiopia regained its independence after World War II, Eritrea remained attached. But Ethiopia's history eventually took a tragic and violent turn, with the fall of a dynasty, coups and revolutions. In the 1970s two rebel movements were founded in alliance: the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. But they fell out for reasons of geography, ideology (the TPLF was Maoist, the EPLF Stalinist), and personality, since both were led by megalomaniacs. So when the TPLF revolution triumphed in 1991, taking control of Ethiopia, the EPLF decided to make Eritrea independent. They eventually held a referendum in which 99.83 of Eritreans voted for independence, or at any rate that was the official result.

Since then almost everything possible has gone wrong for Eritrea. This is from a review of Martin Plaut's Understanding Eritrea in the May 5 TLS:

Since independence President Isaias Afwerki has exploited the state of "no peace no war" with Ethiopia to kill or jail perceived political opponents, and to introduce indefinite military conscription for eighteen- to forty-five-year-olds. Draft dodging is punishable by death. "Isaias," as he is universally known, has also created a policy of self-sufficiency, whereby the state owns much of the economy and seeks to prohibit all foreign capital of influence. The resulting poverty, alongside the regime's human rights abuses, mean that hundreds of thousands of Eritreans have fled across Africa (there are 250,000 Eritreans in Ethiopia and Sudan) and Europe. No other country supplies as many asylum seekers to Britain.

Yeah, national independence is doing the people of Eritrea a whole lot of good. Just like a lot of other places. I am especially struck by all the cases in which people from the newly independent state end up living as refugees in the country from which they just gained independence; Moscow, I have read, is full of refuges from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

I don't believe that national independence is always a bad thing; my readers know that I am dubious of the European Union. My point is that who governs you is not the most important thing and is often of no importance whatsoever. What matters is how well you are governed, and how much influence you the ordinary person have over that government. A native dictatorship can end up worse than "foreign" rule, especially when the whole question of who is native and who foreign is highly debatable – as it is in Eritrea and Ethiopia. We humans have a terrible habit of tossing away the rest of reality when we have a chance to celebrate our own ethnic or national pride, and this is an invitation to disaster.

Paying Libya's Militias to Cut Off Migrant Flows

Over the past few years, hundreds of thousands of migrants have passed through Libya on their way to Italy and the rest of Europe. Many were helped along the way by the armed militias that dominate big swathes of Libyan territory. The groups have been happy to help human smugglers in return for cash. But now the Italians have found a way to change the equation:

The seas off western Libya have been quiet since late July. Before that, they swarmed with smugglers’ boats overfilled with migrants, mostly sub-Saharan Africans heading for Europe. From 23,000 migrants per month, the flow of arrivals has slowed to a trickle.

The migrants are accumulating on Libya’s coast and many are incarcerated in opaque circumstances. Their movement has been stymied by militias, who have turned on the northbound flow of migrants they once profited from. Deep in the southern desert, emergent militia groups evince the goal of closing the border with Niger and Chad to migrants moving north — attempting to patrol areas that none of Libya’s three rival governments ever secured.

Motivating the Libyan militias’ newfound zeal for blocking migrant movement is a new policy spearheaded by the Italian government and embraced by the European Union. The approach relies on payment to militias willing to act as migrant deterrent forces. Italian government representatives use intermediaries such as mayors and other local leaders to negotiate terms of the agreements with the armed groups. They also build local support in the targeted areas by distributing humanitarian aid. . . .

The pay-them-to-stop scheme has introduced a novel way for amoral, uncontrolled armed groups to carry on extracting rents from the still-raging migrant crisis. Previously, migrants and smugglers paid militias a tax to depart for Europe. Now, the E.U. — coordinated by Italy — in effect pays a tax to the same groups to keep the migrants in place.

A clever scheme, I guess. But this has to be terrible for Libya's future. Half the reason migrants pass through Libya rather than Algeria is that Algeria has a government up to the job of stopping them. This may slow the flow of migrants in the short term, but at the price of putting off that day when Libya has a stable state for a long, long time.

Walter Mittelholzer in Africa

Walter Mittelholzer was a Swiss aviator, aerial photographer, and travelogue producer, famous in the 1920s and 1930s for his world-spanning adventures.These photographs come from two of his expeditions, the first flight north to south across Africa (1929-1930) and the first flight from Africa's west coast to Lake Chad (1930-1931). Above, City in the Desert, 1930, from the Chad expedition.

Wikimedia has more than a thousand of Mittelholzer's photographs as large tif files, and some of them are amazingly detailed. Desert and Lake, 1930.

Graveyard in the Desert, 1930.

Foot of the Atlas Mountains, 1930

Citadel of Cairo, 1929

Village near Lake Chad, 1931

King of the Masai, 1930

Monastery Ruins in Egypt, 1929

Egyptian Fortress, 1929

Western edge of the Nile Valley, 1929

Gate of Fez, Morocco, 1930

The Strange Tale of the Somali Shilling

JP Koning:

Somalia has long played host to one of the world's strangest monetary phenomenon, a paper currency without a central bank. Despite the fact that both the Central Bank of Somalia and the national government ceased to exist when a civil war broke out in 1991, Somali shilling banknotes continued to be used as money by Somalis. Over the years, Somalis also accepted a steady stream of counterfeits that circulated in concert with the old official currency. . . .

Old legitimate 1000 shilling notes and newer counterfeit 1000 notes are worth about 4 U.S. cents each. Both types of shillings are fungible—or, put differently, they are accepted interchangeably in trade, despite the fact that it is easy to tell fakes apart from genuine notes. This is an odd thing for non-Somalis to get our heads around since for most of us, an obvious counterfeit is pretty much worthless. The exchange rate between dollars and Somali shillings is a floating one that is determined by the cost of printing new fake 1000 notes. For instance, if a would-be counterfeiter can find a currency printer, say in Switzerland, that will produce a decent knock off and ship it to Somalia for 2.5 U.S. cents each (which includes the cost of paper and ink), then notes will flood into Somalia until their purchasing power falls from 4 to 2.5 U.S. cents... at which point counterfeiting is no longer profitable and the price level stabilizes.

People are writing about this now because the central bank is being reformed and plans to start printing official money again, and nobody knows what will happen. Most likely Somalis, used to getting by with little government help, will sigh and treat the new bills just like the old ones.

What Kenyans Want in Democracy

According to this article, Kenyans feel disappointed in the choices they get in their elections. They suspect the reason is that all the candidates for every office are picked by party bosses, and they think the answer is US-style primaries.

Because as we Americans know, that always guarantees candidates people are excited about.

Thread Cultural Center, Senegal by Toshiko Mori

Thread is an artists' residence and cultural center in Sinthian, a village in Senegal. It was designed pro-bono by Japanese architect Toshiko Mori.

The design "combines local materials and building customs with an innovative design and specific geometry," and it has won a stack of awards. The project web site says,

Thread is a socio-cultural center with a residency program to allow local and international artists to live and work in Sinthian, a rural village in Tambacounda, the southeastern region of Senegal. It houses two artists’ dwellings, as well as ample indoor and outdoor studio space. . . .

The mission of Thread is twofold: to allow artists access to the raw materials of inspiration found in this rarely-visited area of the world; and to use art as a means of developing linkages between rural Senegal and other parts of the globe.

The center was conceived by a local Sinthian doctor, Magueye Ba, who talked the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation into funding the venture. I think connecting local African artists to the international scene might turn out to be a great use of aid funding, since art is one area in which Africans are highly competitive in the global economy. Plus the center looks amazing.

Random Notes on Africa

I'm reading The Rift: a New Africa Breaks Free by Alex Perry, an American-born, British-educated journalist whose bio says he has "reported on more than 35 wars." It's a rather strange book. The introduction and the conclusion are full of optimism about Africa, but in between is a compendium of reportage from the 2002 to 2014 period that mainly focuses on crisis zones. Many of these stories are terrible, some almost unbearable. There is a sort of message, which is that while things in Africa can be pretty awful, part of the reason they are so awful is the misguided efforts of outsiders to "help." Perry is angry and disgusted with both Africa's homegrown villains and the wicked or foolish westerners determined to make things better whether Africans want it or not.

Remember the civil war in Mali? After the fall of Qaddafi in Libya, the story went, a bunch of his former soldiers went south to Mali and helped the desert Tuareg and Islamists from AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) rebel, creating a huge Saharan state and threatening the populated core of the country. Then the French intervened, the Islamists quickly faded back to the desert, and order was restored. What you probably have not heard – I never heard it, anyway – is that both the "Islamists" and the "government" were actually mainly fighting over the profits of drug smuggling. Gangsters had been flying 727-loads of cocaine from South America to Mali and then either distributing it among dozens of "mules" headed for Europe or loading it onto convoys 4x4 trucks that crossed the Sahara on the ancient caravan routes to Algeria. Both the army of Mali and AQIM were at the time mostly funded by drug profits. At various times both would pretend to be against the trade and launch anti-corruption crusades, but it was all show. For example, the government once "arrested" the senior general who was in charge of their smuggling operation, but his "prison" was a luxurious villa within the presidential compound in the capital. For the past two few years we have had comparative peace because both sides are sticking to their agreements over the division of the spoils; when you hear about peace talks, one local tells Perry, "it's not a political thing, it's two cartels doing a business deal. They just put a political hat on it."

Perry has spent a lot of time covering the civil war in eastern Congo, which grew out of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Perry's favorite African leader is Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda. It was Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front that put an end to the genocide (with semi-secret help from the CIA and others), and just 15 years later Rwanda was one of Africa's success stories. To Perry, Kagame is exactly the kind of leader Africa needs: incorruptible, forward-thinking, determined to make his nation independent of outside assistance. So, of course, westerners keep accusing him of crimes against humanity. Not that Kagame is any sort of saint, but as Perry points out what he has done is only what any western leader would have done. After the RPF drove the genocidal militias out of Rwanda they crossed to Congo. There the UN and others set up a chain of refugee camps for the murderers and their families. Those refugee camps were soon taken over by Interhamwe, an organization led by the organizers of the genocide, and Interhamwe then began launching attacks on Rwanda. So Kagame attacked the refugee camps. What was he supposed to do? If this led to the near complete collapse of government in eastern Congo, and a bloody civil war, was that his fault, or that of the entirely hopeless government of Congo?

The outside world responded by setting up MONUSCO, the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Perry is at his best in describing the bizarre uselessness of UN "peacekeepers," who mostly stay inside their air-conditioned trailers, inside their compounds, sending reports home via satellite hookups, next to posters saying things like WE ARE HERE FOR THE PEOPLE. Actually the people are kept outside these safe compounds by massive barriers of razor wire; only UN employees are allowed into these safe zones. At the height of the mission there were 17,000 UN soldiers in the Congo, outnumbering the biggest non-UN fighting force in the region 4:1. Their budget was $1.5 billion a year, while the various armed factions managed to scrape together perhaps a few hundred thousand selling coltan and diamonds. Yet the UN did nothing to stop the violence. In one of Perry's most surreal stories, a rebel commander decides that he really wants to drive a UN base out of his district but doesn't want to assault their razor wire. So he takes a bunch of hostages and starts to behead them one at a time right outside the UN's gates, thinking that surely they will have to emerge and try to stop him. He underestimated their lethargy; his men ran out of heads before a single UN soldier or even a messenger emerged from their compound. And this:

Two months later, with the M23 rebels still on the outskirts of Goma, the UN peacekeepers in eastern Congo finally took decisive action. They fled.

An M23 tank fired a single shell into Goma. Around 1,000 guerrillas began advancing on the city. The UN immediately abandoned the civilian population, retreating in convoys of trucks back inside their bases or moving clean outside the city. The rebels took Goma that afternoon without a shot. By the evening, crowds were gathering in front of UN bases, demanding that those peacekeepers who had not left do so forthwith. 'You could not defend us,' shouted Amani Muchumu, 18. 'You are useless. You are dismissed.'

Perry also has a field day with the way western aid groups routinely exaggerate the human suffering these wars involved. According to the International Rescue Commission, the civil war in eastern Congo claimed 5.4 million lives; according to the US military, it was more like 40,000. After one Rwandan attack into Congo,

The UN said Rwanda's actions had displaced 53,000 people. Oxfam's Congo director, Elodie Martel, made that 500,000, and on Twitter Oxfam said the figure was '2 milion +'.

Aid groups, Perry argues, need African catastrophes to raise money, so when none are handy they simply invent them.

Here is Perry on why South Africa's ANC has had so much trouble transitioning from rebel movement to governing party:

Freedom fighters fought the law. Under an oppressive state, breaking the law was freedom. It was freeing your mind and snatching back your authority. And if you were breaking the law, why not work with the experts? In its fight with apartheid, the ANC, and its Durban branch in particular, had worked in close alliance with black organized crime.

The problems began once the Struggle was over. Once they were the law, many of Africa's freedom fighters saw no reason to stop breaking it. It was who they were, after all; free thinkers and revolutionaries, righteously radical entrepreneurs who took what they wanted and, in that act, found their liberation. It was a mindset well suited to rebellion, but it made for horrible rulers. Once in power, numerous ANC revolutionaries who had fought to better themselves made sure they did, helping themselves to state finances, often in alliance with their old criminal friends. With power so lucrative and used so unscrupulously, comrades were soon killing each other over housing deals or government contracts or simply because they thought it was their turn.

This was the paradox of liberation and democracy, said [former ANC operative] Sifiso. The ANC may have fought for democracy. But to do so effectively, it had had to become profoundly undemocratic. The Struggle had required discipline, hierarchy and a willingness to safeguard the movement above all else. When it took power in 1994, the ANC should have adjusted. "But we did not," said Sifiso. "We did not deliver to the people. We continued to deliver only to ourselves."

As Perry notes, more than 16,000 people are murdered in South Africa each year, ten times the death toll of the civil wars in Somalia that get so much American attention.

South Africa's ANC leaders may have enriched themselves, but they are amateurs at theft compared to the insane kleptocracy of Nigeria. The great majority of the billions foreign companies pay for Nigeria's oil is simply stolen by Nigeria's leaders. In the early 2000s, when the price of oil was high, the Nigerian elite was sending more money out of Africa to their own foreign bank accounts than all the aid flowing into Africa from the outside put together. Frustrated people sometimes fought back against their robber princes, but most of these uprisings were quickly crushed. The exception is the revolt led by Boko Haram, who have made themselves famous by embracing violence as a creed, staging stunts like the April, 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls. This kidnapping led to a worldwide outcry, symbolized by the tag #BringBackOurGirls. Americans who rushed in to help were astonished to find that the government of Nigeria seemed not to care:

For close to three weeks after the girls first went missing, the government had appeared not to even notice. It then claimed that they had been set free, then said al-Qaeda was to blame. After that President Goodluck Jonathan's wife Patience accused the girls' parents of inventing the whole affair to embarrass her husband; then had one of the #BringBackOurGirls organizers arrested; then told people not to criticize Jonathan since his presidency was the work of God; then, to press her point, went on live television to evoke God's presence, wailing, "There is God-o!" over and over. The President's office later displayed same sensitivity when it claimed, falsely, that it had a peace deal with Boko Haram, before going on to announce that the slogan for the President's re-election campaign would be #BringBackJonathan.

And so it goes.

In the final section Perry returns to the optimism with which he started. He marvels at Africa's cell phone boom, which was followed by booms in writing cell-phone apps and then a whole system of cell phone banks. Africa went in a decade from having almost no retail banks to being years ahead of the west in mobile banking and payment systems. Perry also talks to people setting up commodities markets and commercial farms and all sorts of business successes. And the one thing all these activities have in common, he says, is that they are not funded with western aid.

Franck K. Lundangi

Franck Lundangi, born 1958, is an artist, poet, philosopher, and former starter on the Angolan national soccer team who now lives in Paris. According to his gallery,

Lundangi ’s art explores the themes of life, death and love. His inspiration comes from silence. Franck Lundangi ’s approach can be described as spiritual, and cosmological.

Strange stuff, I admit, but for some reason I like it.

And when something strange and new grabs you, why argue?

Today's Place to Daydream About: Virunga National Park

Virunga National Park is the oldest in Africa, founded by the Belgians in 1925. Today it is on the eastern border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, adjacent to Uganda and Rwanda. This region, of course, is where the long war that started with the Rwandan genocide was fought, a terrible conflict that some people think has killed more civilians than any other war since 1945. But lately the fighting has died down, poaching has been brought under control, and tourists are coming back to the park.

For a while it seemed that the park might be damaged by oil exploration, but the European firms that hold the oil rights have been pressured into backing off their claims. So with the violence easing and the oilmen scared away, why not think about visiting the park?

Virunga is home to Mt. Nyiragongo, a spectacular volcano that holds what some say is the world's largest lava lake. You can hike up to the top and sleep in shelters overlooking the lava, lit by its glow.

The park is huge, 3,000 square miles (7,800 sq. km), and it contains a variety of different ecosystems: wet highland forests, dry plains, wetlands, enormous lakes, steep mountains.

The park's most famous residents are mountain gorillas. There was a lot of worry that they might be wiped out during the war, when armed bands often funded themselves with poaching, but a recent census showed that their numbers are stable.

There are also chimpanzees, okapi, elephants, lions and many more animals great and small.

So, as long as the fighting doesn't escalate again, the oil companies stay out, the rangers can outfight the poachers, and no other disaster strikes, a truly amazing place.

Nollywood, or, African Transforming

Wonderful article by Norimitsu Onishi about Nigeria's booming film industry:

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, overtook its rival, South Africa, as the continent’s largest economy two years ago, thanks in part to the film industry’s explosive growth. Nollywood is an expression of boundless Nigerian entrepreneurialism and the nation’s self-perception as the natural leader of Africa, the one destined to speak on the continent’s behalf.

“The Nigerian movies are very, very popular in Tanzania, and, culturally, they’ve affected a lot of people,” said Songa wa Songa, a Tanzanian journalist. “A lot of people now speak with a Nigerian accent here very well thanks to Nollywood. Nigerians have succeeded through Nollywood to export who they are, their culture, their lifestyle, everything.”

Nollywood generates about 2,500 movies a year, making it the second-biggest producer after Bollywood in India, and its films have displaced American, Indian and Chinese ones on the televisions that are ubiquitous in bars, hair salons, airport lounges and homes across Africa.

The industry employs a million people — second only to farming — in Nigeria, pumping $600 million annually into the national economy, according to a 2014 report by the United States International Trade Commission. In 2002, it made 400 movies and $45 million.

Nollywood resonates across Africa with its stories of a precolonial past and of a present caught between village life and urban modernity. The movies explore the tensions between the individual and extended families, between the draw of urban life and the pull of the village, between Christianity and traditional beliefs. For countless people, in a place long shaped by outsiders, Nollywood is redefining the African experience.

While Nigerian movies used to be distributed largely on videocassette, now they are often streamed by satellite services. Fascinating.

The Copper Heads of Ife

Ife was for centuries the capital of Nigeria's Yoruba people. According to their legends, when lord of the sky Oloron sent Odudua to earth to create humanity, he landed at Ife. Ife has been an important town and palace since the eighth century, and from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries it was the center of a great kingdom. It remains an important spiritual and political site for the Yoruba.

In 1910 a German explorer named Leo Frobenius returned from Ife with several sculptures in a naturalistic style. Some were terracotta, others copper alloy. Frobenius was a fascinating character, a pioneer of accurate ethnography but also the author of racist myths. Among other things he recorded the famous oral legend that we know as The Ruin of Kasch. Confronted with these heads he thought they must have been made in some as yet undiscovered Greek colony in southern Africa, perhaps the lost Kingdom of Atlantis. Thus Frobenius: he took African art seriously and thought it was amazing, collected and studied it and contributed much to knowledge of regional styles and the like, but on the other hand he doubted that some of its most famous works could have been made by Africans.

In 1938 workers digging a foundation in the Wunmonije Compound in Ife uncovered a cache of 17 copper heads. Nigeria was then a British colony, and the discovery of the heads created a sensation among British anthropologists and art lovers. Several of the heads ended up the the British Museum, the rest in a new museum in Ife. The heads date to the 1200s CE or possible the early 1300s. This head and the one at top are the two most famous.

The Yoruba have a very elaborate oral history, including a list of kings that goes back a thousand years. Yoruba scholars associated the heads with King Obalufon II, who reigned around that time and was said to have restored the temples of Ife after a period of Civil War. In striving to make the temples more beautiful than ever he became a great patron of the arts, and, his court, the Yoruba experts thought, was the mostly likely source of these amazing works.

Western experts tend to think that the heads were made over an extended period of time. This head is said to be Obulafon himself. You will notice that it does not have the striations that mark many of the others. This is thought to represent a change in royal regalia. The lines most likely represent face paint that the kings and queens put on for special ceremonies; according to some traditions, Obulafon banned that practice. If true, that implies that the heads with striations were made before his time, although it is possible that they were made to replace portraits of past rulers that had been lost when the temples were looted during the Civil War, in a deliberately archaic style. The holes in Obulafon's face were for the attachment of a beard made of human hair.

The copper heads were made using he lost-wax process, a clever trick that people seems to have discovered independently on several separate occasions. The metal is copper alloyed with zinc and lead, in varying proportions that suggest a lot of experimentation to get the color just right; these would have been reddish gold when new.

The elaborate crowns are full of symbolism, although unfortunately much of the meaning has been lost.

Wonderful works, and evocative of a whole world of cities and people about which I and most other northerners know next to nothing.

Those Ebola Burners Them

Amazing story by Helene Cooper about the men who volunteered to burn corpses during Liberia's Ebola epidemic:

It has been more than a year since this deeply religious country embraced one of its biggest taboos — cremating bodies — to rein in a rampaging Ebola pandemic. In that time, the majority of Liberians have started to move on.

But such is not the case for some 30 young men who were called upon during the height of the crisis last year.

As bodies were piling up in the streets and global health officials were warning that the country’s ages-old traditions for funerals and burials were spreading the disease, these men did what few Liberians had done before: set fire to the dead. And for four months they did so repeatedly, burning close to 2,000 bodies.

Villagers protested near the site, hurling abuse and epithets at the men they called “those Ebola burners them.” The government deployed police officers and soldiers along the dirt road to the crematory site in a field to keep angry locals from the men.

Their families shunned them as they pursued their grim work. One young man — Matthew Harmon — who lived not far from the crematory site here, said his mother refused to see him, telling him never to call again.

“My ma said, ‘You burning body?’ Then I’nt want see you no more around me,” Mr. Harmon said.

The ostracism darkened what was already an abysmal time for the men, so much so that now, a full year after the country has ceased the cremations, their lives remain virtually destroyed.

Their nights are spent with alcohol or drugs — habits they said they acquired to get through the mass burnings. One burner, William Togbah, says no night goes by when he does not dream of seared flesh. Several of the men, shunted aside by friends and family, now live together, sharing the same room in a house not far from the crematory site.

“I’m not in a good life now,” Mr. Togbah said.

Sometimes courageous and virtuous acts are rewarded, but just as often not.

Eritrea: more Perils of Nationalism

After decades of being oppressed by Ethiopia and wracked by rebellion, Eritrea finally achieve independence in 1993, Now, thousands of Eritreans are fleeing the country every day, mainly into Ethiopia.

They are not fleeing civil war. Instead, they are escaping indefinite military service and repressive measures, such as forced labor and widespread imprisonment, that may, according to a recent UN inquiry, constitute crimes against humanity.

Eritrea’s descent into its current humanitarian crisis began with its 1993 independence. President Isaias Afwerki made a set of bad foreign policy choices that entangled the country in conflicts with each of its neighbors. Eritrea began a proxy war with Sudan in 1994, only one year after gaining independence. Two years later it instigated a war with Yemen by forcefully taking over the disputed Hanish Islands in the Red Sea. And as recently as 2008, it was engaged in border skirmishes with Djibouti that resulted in several dozen casualties. Of the many conflicts that Afwerki started, the most consequential was the border war with Ethiopia in 1998, which claimed an estimated 100,000 lives.

Got that: the descent into crisis began with independence. The citizens of many nations that gained their independence in the twentieth century found this rather than solving their problems, this only exchanged their old problems for new ones. Sometimes worse than what they had before.

In Africa, a Year Without Polio

Great news from Africa, where it has been a year since the last official case of polio. Polio is not known to infect any species but humans, so we may be able to eradicate it completely. Which would be a major boon to humankind:

When the global polio eradication drive began in 1988, more than 350,000 children around the world were paralyzed by the virus each year. Last year, only 359 were.

Now polio only seems to survive in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Rock Art of Africa at the British Museum

The British Museum has put online a huge database of rock art from Africa, with around 25,000 images. You can search or peruse the images here. Above is an image from Libya' Acacus Mountains dated to the Round Head period, thought to be around 10,000 to 8,000 years ago.

Famous "Fighting Cats" carving from Libya.

Human figures from Niola Doa, Chad.

Cattle from Jebel Uweinat, Sudan.

Bull from Libya.

Chariot from Libya, dated to the Horse Period, 3,000 to 2,000 years ago.

Collection of images in Libya's Acacus Mountains.

Rhinoceros from Ait Ouazik, Morocco.