01.21.2006 – Over Namibia, Angola, and the South Atlantic

OUT OF AFRICA

Like our very distant hominid and, later, Homo sapiens ancestors, I am now coming out of Africa.

My nearly two weeks on the southern part of the continent have been a great experience. I have learned many things. The sources of my new knowledge range from professors to San Bushmen.

The FOTIM Gender Conference, the reason for my trip, was very good. Several of the papers provided me with new ideas that are already stimulating my thinking for writing. The keynote speaker, Professor Sheila Meintjes of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits, as everyone here calls it), and Commissioner of the South African Commission on Gender Equality, made several points that are in line with those I’ve been making. She said, correctly in my view, that attempts to establish gender equality are more challenging to basic institutions and thinking than are attempts to establish racial equality. Therefore the gender struggle is much more intractable than even the racial struggle has been. She also said, rightly I believe, that gender meanings, values, etc. are deeply embedded in history and transforming them is something that goes far beyond establishing formal political and social equality. While none of this was new to me, as I listened to her I started thinking about a different meaning for the terms essentialism and fundamentalism. The man-over-woman concept is the essential, fundamental model for all other hierarchies and dominance/subordination relationships And it seems very plausible that this is the fundamental thing that religious fundamentalists—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and others—are insistent upon.

J. Edgar Bauer of Heidelberg, Germany, further stimulated this line of my thinking when he spoke of Magnus Hirschfeld’s concept of sexual intermediariness and racial hybridity. The point about the mistake of seeing sex as a dichotomous divide, rather than a spectrum, is one I have made before. The new idea that came to me as I listened to Dr. Bauer is that it could be that one important, if not fully conscious, reason why some people are so adamant in their opposition to evolution is that they desperately desire to maintain that such differences as race and, especially, sex are absolute, immutable categories. If they accepted that nature is in fact based on continuities and that species are not immutable—that one species can evolve into another—what would that mean for sexes and races? In short, those who want to maintain a belief in absolute difference must reject evolution.

Many other papers at the conference were interesting and useful. Some were very disturbing, particularly that of Yasmeen Mohjuddin of the University of the South on “Trafficking in Women and Children.” There are many millions of people being held in what amounts to sexual slavery and millions more are taken every year. The absurd myth that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS has become widespread in Africa and Asia and has produced a great demand for younger and younger girls to be brought into the sex trade. Aside from what I heard about the extent and impact of HIV/AIDS itself (to which I’ll return later), this report on trafficking in women and children was the most disturbing thing I encountered on my trip.

The conference was very well organized. The only downside was that they kept leading us into temptation by putting before us copious amounts of excellent food. I’m sure that I must have gained a minimum of five pounds on the trip.

The conference was remarkably free of acrimony. The only exceptions were two women who criticized the organizers for not having any “radicals” on the program, whatever that’s supposed to mean. The same two also refused to understand that what I was saying in my paper was not my assessment of how woman are, but of the ways in which women have been wrongly categorized throughout history. As someone put it later, they wanted to kill the messenger. No one else in the audience for my paper failed to see what I was saying. Indeed, everyone else seemed to love my presentation and arguments. Several of them said they plan to read Eve’s Seed as soon as possible.

On Friday, I went to visit the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO World Heritage location northwest of Johannesburg that includes a group of sites where important hominid fossils have been found. I was accompanied by two guides, Gavin Spowart and a paleo-anthropologist from Wits University, Muhammad Spocter. Both of them were great. We had excellent conversations on human evolution throughout the day and I learned a great deal. Muhammad very much liked my ideas from Eve’s Seed and linking biology to history. He invited me to speak at his university, but I told him that wasn’t likely because of the length of the trip involved.

To get to the Drimolen site, we passed through the Lion and Rhino Park. We saw white rhinos (they were brown; “white,” Gavin told me, is a corruption of “wide”; I’m not sure what to make of that, since there is or has been an actually white rhino at the Jackson Zoo), numerous ostriches, some of which raced our vehicle, a small herd of wildebeest, a sable antelope, and an eland.

I walked around the Drimolen site, which was discovered in 1992 and produced in 2002 the most complete skull of a female Australopithecus robustus ever found. Muhammad also spoke of a much bigger find there that has not yet been announced or published. While we had bush tea at Drimolen, Muhammad went through a detailed explanation of hominid evolution with skulls of the various species.

At Sterkfontein, where the first complete Australopithecus africanus skull, known as “Mrs. Ples,” was found in 1947 and “Little Foot,” the most complete A. africanus skeleton ever found, was uncovered in 1999, we toured the site and then ran into Dr. Ron Clarke, the discoverer of “Little Foot.” Muhammad tried to get him to come over so I could meet him, but Dr. Clarke is very shy and he just kept walking.

While we were having lunch earlier at Drimolen, something we were discussing had led me to mention to Gavin and Muhammad Mark Twain’s wonderful comment, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Later, when we went through the excellent museum/exhibit at Sterkfontein, they had four or five quotations in large letters on various walls, and one of them was the same one by Twain that I mentioned an hour or so earlier. I don’t think I ever seen it on a wall anywhere before. How weird is that?

The whole day was fascinating and Muhammad and I agreed to stay in contact and exchange ideas.

Now that the trip is over, in the remainder of this journal entry I’ll collect some thoughts and observations and comment on one major topic.

The first thing I saw in Africa, as I was being driven away from the airport, was a large billboard reading: “End the War in Iraq.” I didn’t run into anyone in Africa who is not adamantly opposed to George W. Bush and his war. Several times I heard people say, sadly, that Bush has turned “America” into a bad word in Africa and around the world.

Among the more interesting things I came across was the past practice of two tribes in the area of the Zambesi River in modern day Zimbabwe and Zambia that warred with each other and went to great lengths to differentiate themselves. One of the tribes wore their hair long and high, straight up, so they would look very different from their rivals.

A few miscellaneous observations:

In South Africa, men’s rooms are labelled “Gents,” traffic lights are called “robots,” as in Australia and New Zealand, the response to any request is “No worries,” and—I’m not sure about this one—it appears that they call all meat “beef,” much as many Southerners in our country call all soft drinks “Coke.” On my South African Air flight, I had “beef” for dinner and it was pork, and I had a “beef” sandwich for a snack that turned out to be ham. And here’s something hard to believe: I was told they don’t yet have Starbuck’s in South Africa.

The hotel where I stayed in Pretoria, Casa Toscana, was interesting. Everyone there was very nice. I was in four different rooms (they only have nine). Something didn’t work in each. In one, water poured out of the air conditioning unit, which is high on the wall. In another, the toilet didn’t work properly.

Oh, and the toilets in the hotel must have been designed by a woman. The seat would not stay up!

The food in the restaurant at the hotel was very good. Most of the employees seem to do several different jobs. Chris, the young man who drives to pick up from and take guests to the airport and also to other places they want to go, is also a waiter and does other things. The only problem with him as their driver is that he knows his way around Pretoria, but doesn’t know how to find even the most notable places in Jo’burg. He got lost trying to take a group of us to a gold mine, which turned out to be part of the same complex with the Apartheid Museum, an amusement park, and a casino. By the time he finally got us there, it was too late to tour the mine. A few days earlier, while I was in Botswana, he had been lost for three hours while taking some of our group to Constitution Hill, where the Constitutional Court and the Fort prison are located.

I heard an interesting story from Hillary while I was at Jack’s Camp. A couple of years ago, a disgruntled Air Botswana pilot who had been fired managed to take an empty plane up and crashed into the place where the airline kept all of its planes, wiping out their fleet. And Ross told us that Air France is the only airline in the world that allows its pilots to have a glass of wine while flying. Hmm. Food for thought—or drink for thought.

South Africa has made enormous progress over the past decade-plus. Its constitution is the most progressive in the world. It is very far removed from the days of apartheid, which are still so recent. Nelson Mandela Drives, Avenues, etc. are as common today in South Africa as are streets named for Martin Luther King in the southern United States. Both would have been unimaginable in the not-very-distant past.

Yet the nation faces huge problems. Racism is not remotely as blatant as it was in the nation’s past, but one senses that it just below the surface in many people. Crime is a major problem. We were warned frequently not to walk around or go anywhere alone, although I suspect these fears are exaggerated. And South Africa has a staggering unemployment rate of 40 percent.

But even that is not the greatest problem.

Satellite imaging has shown massive movements of earth in southern Africa in the last few years. The cause is the digging of huge numbers of graves and the building of numerous new cemeteries.

The cause of all the deaths is, of course, AIDS. HIV infection rates in Africa are mind-boggling: 50% in Botswana, which probably has the fullest reporting. A man I sat next to on a flight from Gaborone to Johannesburg who runs a safari camp in the Okavango Delta in northwest Botswana told me that 60% of his employees are HIV-positive, as are 80% of the people who live in the area!

Although South Africa is the first nation to include protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in its constitution, the stigma remains, to the point where families of people who die from AIDS almost invariably refuse to have the cause of death mentioned. And President Thabo Mbeki claims he doesn’t know anyone who has died of AIDS, when in fact close associates of his, including cabinet members, have.

I was told of many upper-middle-class white women about 60 years of age who have been infected by their husbands, who frequented prostitutes.

It is a tragedy of almost unprecedented scope, surpassed, perhaps, only by the Black Death in fourteenth century Europe.

Africans don’t have to wait fearfully to see if there will be a bird flu pandemic. They are already suffering something as bad.

I didn’t really want to end my account of a wonderful trip to Africa on such an unhappy note, but that is the dominant fact that the continent is facing today.

RSM