Kenya seizes $1 million Asia-bound rhino, elephant ivory

Source: Reuters

* Tusks and horns came from southern Africa * Gangs target African wildlife for Asian market By Ben Makori NAIROBI, July 15 (Reuters) - Kenyan wildlife authorities have impounded nearly $1 million worth of elephant tusks and rhino horns smuggled by poachers from southern Africa and bound for illegal ivory markets in Asia. It was one of Africa's biggest ivory hauls. Sniffer dogs found the nearly 300kg of ivory at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta Airport in cargo crates coming from Mozambique on a Kenya Airways flight, the director of Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) told reporters late on Tuesday. "The rhino horns are freshly cut and one of them has a bullet wound," Julius Kipng'etich said. "It's a sad moment. Remember all wildlife wherever it is, is a world heritage. So if we lose any, it's a loss to all of us as a human race." Kipng'etich said the animals must have been poached from southern African countries like Tanzania, Zimbabwe or South Africa as Mozambique had no rhinos and hardly any elephants. According to the WWF conservation group, the whole continent has about 18,000 rhinos left, while sub-Saharan Africa has 690,000 elephants at most -- where once they were millions. Ivory demand in Asia is stimulating poaching by international criminal rings, wildlife experts say. "In the last year we have witnessed an upsurge in poaching for trophies, especially elephants and rhinos," Kipng'etich said. "In the last year alone Zimbabwe lost 100 rhinos and South Africa 162. This to me is the tip of the iceberg." Kipng'etich said the illegal shipment was bound for Laos, but that China was more likely to be the final destination. "From our own experience of movement of wildlife trophies, definitely this was going to China," he said. Rhino horns are used in traditional Chinese medicine where many people believe it can cure arthritis and fever. Elsewhere, ivory is in demand for carving into dagger-handles and other ornaments. Kipng'etich said a kilo of rhino horn was worth $5,000 on the black market, while a kilo of ivory sold for $3,000 a kilo, meaning the haul in Kenya of 280kg of elephant ivory and 18kg of rhino horn worth almost $1 million.(Writing by Alison Bevege; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)

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The East African Fibre Summit

Nairobi, September 22-23, 2009

East Africa is on the eve on a communications revolution, which will be brought about by the landing of the region’s first undersea cables to the outside world in 2009. Governments and corporate users in the region need to prepare for the transition from a predominantly satellite-based communications infrastructure to a fibre cable-based communications infrastructure.

There is also an urgent need for new approaches to financing and building out information and communication infrastructure to address large unmet demand for information and communication services. Technological innovation helps make these new approaches possible and more flexible approaches to financing, service delivery and regulation will make them effective and sustainable.

The East African Fibre Summit will provide a platform for all stakeholders to assess these exciting developments, the impact they will have on their organizations and the optimum technical implementation strategies to gain maximum benefit from the opportunities they represent.

It will provide practical business and technology briefings to empower resellers, service providers and users to maximise their returns on their existing investments in satellite technologies and how to extend their ROI over the transition period, with blended communication systems as fibre comes on stream. Hybrid systems will be the order of the day, with wireless broadband and VoIP also boosted substantially as available bandwidth multiplies dramatically over the coming years. Satellite and wireless technologies will still have a role to play providing both data and VoIP services to business, residential, government and developmental users in both rural and urban
settings.

The East African Fibre Summit will provide participants with answers to crucial technical and business questions, enabling them to make the right deployment decisions at a time when 3G technologies are making an increasing impact in the region, ahead of the new fibre era. By providing a platform for regulators, policy-makers, vendors, service providers and users to network and share knowledge, the Conference will act as a catalyst to stimulate take-up of the right technologies to multiply connectivity across East Africa.

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African Undersea Cables

Steve Song, a Canadian researcher living in Cape Town, made this very interesting and informative map of telecommunication cables in Africa. While I was in Oman one of these major cables in the Indian Ocean was damaged and it seriously impaired my ability to surf the web and check email. Furthermore this map goes a long way towards illustrating the need for further bridges across the 'digital divide.' Especially in East Africa.

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Content Ideas: The Azanian Sea

Interested in Writing For Us? Here are some of the topics we're interested in. Don't find your's listed? Email nmathews@azaniansea.com with your idea:

Content Areas:

Politics: country profiles, elections, young people organizing, emerging trends, maritime security, regional cooperation, revolution and Islam, Is democracy the best form of government?, the African diaspora in the Arab world

Business, Technology, and Development: appropriate technology, development, infrastructure, cell phones, wireless internet, challenges of the 2/3rds world, pitfalls of tourism, Islamic banking

Music, Art, and Culture: ngoma, bongo flava, taarab, Islam, hip hop, globalization of American youth style, hybrid musical forms, artist profiles, record reviews, religious art, interreligious cooperation, educational policy, emerging trends in teaching Kiswahili, the Arabic origins of Kiswahili, youth culture in the Indian Ocean

History: emerging historical trends, historiography of the Indian Ocean, scholarly resources, slavery, race, maritime empires, colonialism, pre-colonial Africa, cultural mixing, origins of humankind, the impact of global hegemony on the Western academy

Environment: fishing resources and Somali pirates, deforestation, water conservation in the desert, oil and natural gas, landfills and waste removal, power crises in Africa, the politics of land usage

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African Slaves in Islamic Lands: Afropop interview with Eve Trout Powell

B.E: You make an important point about the different kinds of people involved in Islamic slavery. Of course, we are really looking at just one part of the story, how the Arab and Islamic slave trade affected Africa.

E.T.P.: And how the African slave trade affected the Middle East. It is important to make the distinction because people goof all the time on this. By coming out of old Western concept of slavery, it is automatically assumed that slavery bears a certain kind of stigma, and it is really important to differentiate. Sometimes it did, if it was for Africans, but not necessarily the way would for African Americans. If you were Circassian in the Ottoman Empire, it was a wonderful thing in some ways to be a slave, because when you were freed, you could often reach the uppermost levels of power, short of being the Sultan himself. All the great viziers in the Ottoman Empire were trained as part of an elite institution. This was true within the Mamluk Empire as well, which was earlier. So you basically have different classes of slaves going on. And there were black slaves who could achieve those levels as well, so it is important to keep that in mind. You can't just exclude the Circassian slaves out of the picture, because there's a whole racial gradation that comes out. It is very complex, and we don't like to talk about how complex it is because we have a very black and white interpretation of slavery in this country, which just doesn't work in the context of the Middle East or East Africa.

Within the Islamic world, within the Middle East, there all kinds of racial gradations of slavery. They were whites. There were Abyssinians (Ethiopians). There were Sudanese. There were Nubians. There were Circassians. There was a whole complicated racial gradient going on which is very difficult for Westerners to wrap their minds around because slavery in the West, particularly African American slavery was black-white. Either you were black and you are enslaved, or you were white and you owned. This is something very difficult it seems for us, to intellectually divorce ourselves from our own racial constructions.
B.E: At a high level, what are the important things that distinguish the Western, European slave trade, from what was going on in the Middle East?

E.T.P.: I'm going to start my answer from the 19th century. I'm a specialist in 19th-century history, and I think it also the height of the African American slavery institution that is so iconographic for us, and then the Middle Eastern one that we’re talking about, is the 19th century. So here are some of the differences. In the United States, of course, and the Caribbean, you had agricultural slavery. You had plantation slavery. In the Middle East, this was very rare. You did not see this certainly in the 18th and 19th century. So African slaves in Egypt would work in people's households, would be part of people’s families, would live in the household, would not have a huge community of other slaves around them, but really would be surrounded by the family of their owners. This is very different from what you have in the United States south, where you have large numbers of slaves on many plantations. The slave-owning family could often be the minority in many cases. The slavery that we’re talking about in the Middle East is much more domestic.

Now there was also a military slavery, which you do not find all in the west. There was a military institution along the Nile Valley in the 19th century. This was known as the jihadiyya, in which you had particularly Dinka tribes conscripted into the Egyptian army as slave soldiers. And this is an old tradition in the Islamic Middle East. It goes way back: having slaves be soldiers loyal only to the ruler. Of course, in the United States, the idea of putting guns into the hands of slaves would have been just totally anathema to the whole institution. It is exactly the opposite in the Middle East. And finally, again, you don't have slavery as an inherited status. It just doesn't carry that same weight through the generations.

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Top of the Hip Hops (Afropop in Dar 2004)

It was a long taxi ride from Dar es Salaam center to the Steers hamburger restaurant outside town, and we were already late. What seemed to be a disastrous start to an interview turned out to be the beginning of a very exciting journey through the lively Tanzanian hip-hop scene. I was curious to meet them, Tanzania's Top of the Hip-hops. As it turned out it was all very easy; the hip-hop community in Dar es Salaam is small and friendly. Different from what I expected, most artists do not have a manager or agent who deals with the media. From the first contact it was a very personal encounter. In just one week, photographer Lydia Martin and I went to see more then ten of the hottest artists and groups in the hip-hop scene, producers and promoters. I was amazed how ambitious and professional the artists are. It was my second time in East Africa, and not knowing much about Tanzania's music industry I had not expected to find hip-hop such a big business. Most of the artists have been working successfully in the music scene for more than five years, and Tanzanian hip-hop, better known as Bongo Flava, continues to grow in popularity. TV and radio programs are dedicated to Bong Flava, which is also reflected in the sales figures of some of hip-hop albums, eg. T.I.D's album Sauti ya Dhahabu sold over 200,000 copies in Tanzania alone.
FOR MORE CLICK HERE

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Spatial Analysis of Somali Pirate Activity (Reuters)

Click the Title to go the Report on the Reuters website.

This report contains a detailed spatial analysis of the dramatic upsurge of pirate activity in 2009, focusing on changes in attack locations within the Gulf of Aden, changes in the attack success rate by month as well as on the unprecedented expansion of attacks in the Indian Ocean.
Pirate Incident Reports: ICC-IMB, ONI
IMO, NATO, Garowe Online & MSC(HOA)
GIS Data: NASA, USGS, UNOSAT
KEY FINDINGS:
- The overall pirate hijacking success rate for 2009 (vessel hijackings / total attacks) is currently at 23%. This is significantly lower than
the average in 2008 of 40% and is likely due to the increased naval patrols and heightened security practices of the merchant vessels in
the Gulf of Aden.
- Despite this relative decline in the pirate success rate, there is an alarming increase in the absolute number of pirate attacks and an
unprecedented expansion of pirate activity in the Indian Ocean, constituting a new phase of Somali piracy.
- There have been a total of 19 successful hijackings and 81 reported pirate attacks in 2009, an increase of over 650% from the same
period last year. If this attack rate is sustained, it will easily surpass the record number of attacks (115) in 2008 and could climb above
200 attacks in 2009.

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Sauti ya Ghetto (Professor Jay)

New(ish) hip hop from Professor Jay!

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Rwandan Governor Jailed For Life For Genocide (Reuters)

* Former Kigali chief gets life for genocide, rape, murder

* Indictment said Renzaho ordered killing of 60 boys

(Adds quotes in paragraphs 9, 10)

By George Obulutsa

DAR ES SALAAM, July 14 (Reuters) - A U.N. court trying the architects of Rwanda's 1994 genocide jailed a former Kigali governor for life on five counts including ordering the killing of 60 Tutsi boys in a church-run pastoral centre.

The Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) had indicted Tharcisse Renzaho of genocide, complicity in genocide, murder and rape in the massacres in which 800,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed.

The court found him guilty of all except complicity in genocide.

"He has been imprisoned for life. He has been found guilty on five counts, that is of genocide, two counts of murder as crimes against humanity, two counts of rape as crimes against humanity, " Danford Mpumilwa, associate information officer, said from the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha, the court's seat.

Prosecutors said he was one of the massacre's main perpetrators. His name figured among nine major suspects for which the U.S. government had put out a $5 million bounty.

The court said Renzaho took part in arming participants of the genocide. He had pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

The court accused him, along with others, of ordering the removal and killing of 60 Tutsi boys from a church-run pastoral centre. Prosecutors say Renzaho was near a Kigali hotel when an army tank shot at Tutsi houses, killing at least 40 people. He did not try to intervene.

The 65-year-old was also accused of broadcasting orders over Radio Rwanda asking police, soldiers and militia to put up roadblocks to identify and kill Tutsis.

"The chamber found that Renzaho supported the killings of Tutsis at roadblocks, which were set up following his directives. It concluded he ordered the distribution of weapons, and that persons who received them, then killed Tutsis," the ICTR said in a statement.

"He also made remarks encouraging sexual abuse of women and was found criminally liable for rape that followed."

The former army colonel was arrested in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2002.

Six other prime suspects with bounties on their heads are still at large including Felicien Kabuga, said to be the main financier of the genocide.

Renzaho's sentencing brings the number of ICTR's judgments to 39. Six of these were acquittals.

The court had until the end of last year to complete all trials, and until 2010 to hear all appeals before winding up. (Editing by Richard Balmforth)

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Afropop Podcast

AfroPop Worldwide has a TON of dope content relating to African music. They "offer choice segments from our Afropop Worldwide programs as weekly podcasts delivered to you. You can now hear our cultural reportage from Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. You will also get segments from our Hip Deep series-within-a-series on history, music and ideas."
"A Podcast is a MP3 audio file that can be automatically downloaded to your personal computer and in turn transferred to an iPod or other MP3 player. In order to do this, a Podcasting application is used to "subscribe" to a Podcast, the program checks the site regularly and starts a download whenever it finds a new MP3 file. That means you can listen to it any time you like!"

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Copy the URL in the box below into your preferred podcasting tool software (e.g. iTunes, Odeo, iPodder). You will automatically receive this podcast each time it's published.
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