Africa, Uncolonized: A Detailed Look at an Alternate Continent

What if the Black Plague had killed off almost all Europeans? Then theReconquista never happens. Spain and Portugal don't kickstart Europe's colonization of other continents. And this is what Africa might have looked like. 

The map – upside down, to skew our traditional eurocentric point of view – shows an Africa dominated by Islamic states, and native kingdoms and federations. All have at least some basis in history, linguistics or ethnography. None of their borders is concurrent with any of the straight lines imposed on the continent by European powers, during the 1884-85 Berlin Conference and in the subsequent Scramble for Africa. By 1914, Europeans controlled 90% of Africa's land mass. Only the Abyssinian Empire (modern-day Ethiopia) and Liberia (founded in 1847 as a haven for freed African-American slaves) remained independent. 

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This map is the result of an entirely different course of history. The continent depicted here isn't even called Africa [1] but Alkebu-Lan, supposedly Arabic for 'Land of the Blacks' [2]. That name is sometimes used by those who reject even the name 'Africa' as a European imposition. It is therefore an ideal title for this thought experiment by Swedish artist Nikolaj Cyon. Essentially, it formulates a cartographic answer to the question: What would Africa have looked like if Europe hadn't become a colonizing power? 

To arrive at this map, Cyon constructed an alternative timeline. Its difference from our own starts in the mid-14th century. The point of divergence: the deadliness of the Plague. In our own timeline, over the course of the half dozen years from 1346 to 1353, the Black Death [3] wiped out between 30 and 60% of Europe's population. It would take the continent more than a century to reach pre-Plague population levels. That was terrible enough. But what if Europe had suffered an even more catastrophic extermination – one from which it could not recover?

Allohistorical Africa, seen from our North-up perspective. The continent's superstates (at least size-wise): Al-Maghrib, Al-Misr, Songhai, Ethiopia, Kongo and Katanga.

European colonies in Africa in 'our' 1913. Blue: France, pink: Britain, light green: Germany, dark green: Italy, light purple: Spain, dark purple: Portugal, yellow: Belgium, white: independent. Lines reflect current borders.

Cyon borrowed this counterfactual hypothesis from The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. The book, first published in 2002, explores how the depopulation of Europe would have altered world history. Robinson speculates that Europe would have been colonized by Muslims from the 14th century onwards, and that the 20th century would see a world war between a sprawling Muslim alliance on the one side, and the Chinese empire and the Indian and native American federations on the other.

Cyon focuses on Africa – or rather, Alkebu-Lan – which in his version of events doesn't suffer the ignomy and injustice of the European slave trade and subsequent colonization. In our timeline, Europe's domination of Africa obscured the latter continent's rich history and many cultural achievements. On the map of Cyon's Africa, a many-splendored landscape of nations and empires, all native to the continent itself, gives the lie to the 19th- and 20th-century European presumption that Africa merely was a 'dark continent' to be enlightened, or a 'blank page' for someone else to write upon. 

Basing himself on Unesco's General History of Africa, Cyon built his map around historical empires, linguistic regions and natural boundaries. His snapshot is taken in 1844 (or 1260 Anno Hegirae), also the date of a map of tribal and political units in Unesco's multi-volume General History. 

Al-Andalus, in this timeline still a dependency of Al-Maghrib; and the Emirate of Sicily to the left of the map.

Zooming in on the northern (bottom) part of the map, we see an ironic reversal of the present situation: in our timeline, Spain is still holding on to Ceuta, Melilla and other plazas de soberania in Northern Africa. In Cyon's world, most of the Iberian peninsula still called Al-Andalus, and is an overseas part of Al-Maghrib, a counterfactual Moroccan superstate covering a huge swathe of northwestern Africa. Sicily, which we consider to be part of Europe, is colored in as African, and goes by the name ofSiqilliyya Imārat (Emirate of Sicily). 

The Arabic is no accident. Absent the European imprint, Islam has left an even more visible mark on large swathes of North, West and East Africa than it has today. Numerous states carry the nomenclature Sultānat, Khilāfat or Imārat. The difference between a Caliphate, Sultanate and Emirate? 

A Caliph claims supreme religious and political leadership as the successor (caliph) to Muhammad, ideally over all Muslims. I spot two Caliphates on the map: Hafsid (centered on Tunis, but much larger than Tunisia), and Sokoto in West Africa (nowadays: northwest Nigeria).

Sokoto, Dahomey, Benin and other states in country-rich West Africa. 

A Sultan is an independent Islamic ruler who does not claim spiritual leadership. Five states in the greater Somalia region are Sultanates, for example: Majerteen, Hiraab, Geledi, Adāl and Warsangele. Others include Az-Zarqa (in present-day Sudan), Misr (Egypt, but also virtually all of today's Israel), and Tarābulus (capital: Tripoli, in our Libya). 

An Emir is a prince or a governor of a province, implying some suzerainity to a higher power. There's a cluster of them in West Africa: Trarza, Tagant, Brakna, all south of Al-Maghrib. But they are elsewhere too: Kano and Katsina, just north of Sokoto. 

Islam of course did not originate in Africa, and some would claim that its dominance of large areas of Africa, at the expense of pre-existing belief systems, is as much an example of foreign cultural imperialism as the spread of Western religions and languages is in our day. But that is material for another thought experiment. This one aims to filter out the European influence.

Neither European nor Arab influence is in evidence in the southern part of Africa – although some toponyms relate directly to states in our timeline: BaTswana is Botswana, Wene wa Kongo refers to the two countries bearing that name. Umoja wa Falme za Katanga is echoed in the name of the DR Congo's giant inland province, Katanga. Rundi, Banyarwanda and Buganda, squeezed in between the Great Lakes, are alternative versions of 'our' Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.

Some familiar-sounding names around the Great Lakes.

There is an interesting parallel to the Africa/Alkebu-Lan dichotomy in the toponymic ebb and flow of Congo and Zaïre as names for the former Belgian colony at the center of the continent. Congo, denoting both the stream and the two countries on either of its lower banks [4], derives from 16th- and 17th-century Bantu kingdoms such as Esikongo, Manikongo and Kakongo near the mouth of the river.

The name was taken up by European cartographers and the territory it covered eventually reached deep inland. But because of its long association with colonialism, and also to fix his own imprint on the country, Congo's dictator Mobutu in 1971 changed the name of the country and the stream to Zaïre. The name-change was part of a campaign for local authenticity which also entailed the Africanisation of the names of persons and cities [5], and the introduction of the abacos [6] – a local alternative to European formal and businesswear.

Curiously for a campaign trying to rid the country of European influences, the name Zaïre actually was a Portuguese corruption of Nzadi o Nzere, a local term meaning 'River that Swallows Rivers'. Zaïre was the Portuguese name for the Congo stream in the 16th and 17th centuries, but gradually lost ground to Congo before being picked up again by Mobutu.

After the ouster and death of Mobutu, the country reverted to its former name, but chose the predicate Democratic Republic to distinguish itself from the Republic of Congo across the eponymous river.

Kongo - a coastal superstate in the alternative timeline.

This particular tug of war is emblematic for the symbolism attached to place names, especially in Africa, where many either refer to a precolonial past (e.g. Ghana and Benin, named after ancient kingdoms), represent the vestiges of the colonial era (e.g. Lüderitz, in Namibia), or attempt to build a postcolonial consensus (e.g. Tanzania, a portmanteau name for Tanganyika and Zanzibar). 

By taking the colonial trauma out of the equation, this map offers a uniquely a-colonial perspective on the continent, whether it is called Africa or Alkebu-Lan.

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Ebola Continues to Ravage West Africa

Polyclinique Pasteur clinic in Mali (Baba Ahmed/AP)

The Great American Ebola furor of 2014 was more or less declared over with Dr.Craig Spencer's release from a New York hospital yesterday. This happy moment followed Monday's conclusion of the 21-day monitoring period for Kaci Hickox, the nurse and Maine resident who was once quarantined against her will, ending the idea that anyone currently in America is infectious. Remarkably, the Drudge Report was also found to be free of Ebola on Wednesday.

Overseas, however, the news on the largest outbreak on record isn't getting any better. In Sierra Leone, as the BBC reported, the only Ebola treatment clinic in the southern part of the country may be shut down as nurses and other hospital employees strike for the $100 weekly "hazard pay" they say they are owed by the government. Sierra Leone ranks as the second hardest-hit country where nearly a fifth of the deaths from the virus have taken place.

In Bamako, the capital of nearby Mali, which has been largely untouched by the outbreak despite sharing a long border with struggling Guinea, nearly 100 people were quarantined following two Ebola deaths. One victim was a nurse who had treated a patient with Ebola-like symptoms who also died of the virus, but was never tested. Reuters notes that the patient's "highly contagious body was washed in a Bamako mosque and returned to Guinea for burial without precautions against Ebola." Health officials fear that many people could be exposed as a result. This is the country's second outbreak, after the first was successfully contained.

Earlier this week, the World Health Organization announced that the death toll in the Ebola outbreak had passed 5,000.

Source: Theatlantic.com

Ebola death toll crosses 5,000 mark

Ebola is worryingly popping up in new places while response to the outbreak remains insufficient [Al Jazeera]

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has now killed more than 5,000 people, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said, marking another grisly toll in the epidemic. This is the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, with more than 14,000 people sickened, the vast majority in the West African countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. There are some signs that the rate of new infections may be slowing overall in Guinea and Liberia, but there are still areas of those countries where transmission remains high, and they are surging in Sierra Leone, the health agency said on Wednesday. While the response to Ebola is ramping up, it is still insufficient: In Sierra Leone, for instance, less than 40 percent of cases are in isolation, according to WHO estimates. Worryingly, the virus has continued to pop up in new places, both within the most affected countries and outside their borders. The most recent example is a new Ebola cluster that Malian authorities reported on Wednesday - an alarming setback as the country tries to limit the epidemic ravaging other West African nations. Mali death A nurse working at a clinic in the Malian capital Bamako died on Tuesday, and tests later showed she had Ebola, Communications Minister Mahamadou Camara said. Two other people are also believed to have died of Ebola, though no tests were ever done on them to confirm the disease: an imam, whom the nurse treated at the Bamako clinic, and a friend who came to visit the man there. The announcement of the new cases came just a day after Malian health authorities said there had been no other reported cases - let alone deaths - since a two-year-old girl who had travelled to Mali from Guinea succumbed to the virus in late October. At least 75 people are under quarantine following the new cases in Bamako, including patients and staff from the hospital, said Ousmane Doumbia, secretary-general for the Malian health ministry. Several of the patients under quarantine are troops serving in the country's UN peacekeeping force who were being treated for wounds at the clinic, the force said in a statement. Health officials are also searching the city of about 2 million for those who helped prepare the body of the imam for burial before it was known that the corpse might be highly contagious. Source: Aljazera

Nightmare' for Ethiopian pastoralists as foreign investors buy up land

Suri boys with water gourds herd cattle along a road in Tulgit, Omo valley, Ethiopia.Photograph: Danita Delimont/Alamy

Ethiopia’s policy of leasing millions of hectares of land to foreign investors is encouraging human rights violations, ruining livelihoods and disturbing a delicate political balance between ethnic groups, a thinktank report has found.

The US-based Oakland Institute says that while the east African country is now lauded as an economic success story, the report, Engineering Ethnic Conflict, “highlights the unreported nightmare experienced by Ethiopia’s traditionally pastoralist communities”.

A controversial “villagisation” programme has seen tens of thousands of people forcibly moved to purpose-built communes that have inadequate food and lack health and education facilities, according to human rights watchdogs, to make way for commercial agriculture. Ethiopia is one of the biggest recipients of UK development aid, receiving around £300m a year.

The Oakland Institute’s research, conducted in 2012 and 2013, focused on 34,000 Suri pastoralists who have lived in south-west Ethiopia for up to three centuries. Suri livelihoods consist of herding cattle, goats and sheep, shifting cultivation, and hunting and gathering.

But the recent introduction of large-scale plantations “has not only made important grazing lands unavailable to the Suri and devastated their livelihoods, but disturbed political order between the Suri and other local ethnic groups, escalating violent conflicts”, the report says.

The investigation was prompted by 2012 reports of violence at Koka, a foreign-owned 30,000 hectare (74,000 acres) plantation established two years earlier to produce palm oil, although it has since expanded to grow moringa trees and maize, with plans for rubber trees.

According to a Kenyan NGO, Friends of Lake Turkana, the government cleared grass and trees to allow Malaysian investors to establish the plantation. Water was diverted from the Koka river to these plantations, leaving the Suri without water for their cattle.

In response, the Suri took up arms and battled government forces, Friends of Lake Turkana said. Government forces killed 54 unarmed Suri in a marketplace in retaliation. There have been more killings and arrests since.

Based on interviews with victims’ families, officials and other witnesses, the Oakland Institute found that the plantation exacerbated tensions between the Suri and another ethnic group, the Dizi, seen as collaborating with the government. The first episode of violence in February 2012, in which three Dizi police officers were killed, occurred over police marking land for expansions of the plantation.

The institute accuses the Ethiopian government of manipulating these tensions, for example, by favouring the Dizi in employment. “According to field research, the increase in violent clashes between the Suri and Dizi can be linked to the intrusion of the Koka plantation and displacement of Suri from lands vital for cattle raising, one of their most important livelihood resources.”

A generation after the famine that was screened around the world, Ethiopia claims it is on track to meet most of the millennium development goals and become a middle-income country by 2025. But the report contends that the government puts foreign and political interests above the rights and needs of local populations, especially historically marginalised and neglected ethnic groups.

It also argues that the World Bank’s support of three phases of Ethiopia’s pastoral community development project implicates western funds in the coerced settlement of pastoral communities and the conditional – and coercive – distribution of food aid.

“The dramatic reconfiguration of land for foreign investment in the Koka plantation, as well as its alleged failure, illustrates the haphazard manner in which the government of Ethiopia implements its development strategy,” it says.

“While there have been reports of Suri returning to the plantation lands to take corn and sweet potatoes, the palm tree-lined land is no longer suitable for grazing. Although, presumably, investors are unhappy with the failure of their cheaply-leased land, the local impact has been the increase of local ethnic conflicts and the drastic altering of local livelihoods.

“As such, the Koka plantation is representative of the Ethiopian strategy of pursuing foreign investor-led development at the expense of local inhabitants.”

Felix Horne, Ethiopia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said: “Unfortunately, the Suri and other marginalised groups have no ability to voice their concerns over these developments on their land.

“There is little in the way of an independent media in Ethiopia that is permitted to cover this story, civil society that could advocate on these issues have been decimated by repressive laws, any criticism of government is met with harassment and detention. So what options are left for the Suri?”

Source: The Gaurdian

Is the Ebola epidemic ending in Africa?

Q: Is the Ebola epidemic ending in Africa?

A: No one knows exactly what is going on in West Africa. Several medical groups, like Doctors Without Borders, are reporting that they suddenly have far more beds than patients. In some cases, there are empty beds at centers where, just a few weeks ago, people were dying on the streets outside because there was no room.

The trend is especially noted in Liberia, the hardest-hit country. Laboratories are getting fewer samples to test. Ambulance crews are picking up fewer bodies. The World Health Organization confirmed that new cases were dropping.

But health authorities are warning that it is too early to celebrate.

It is important to remember that this happened once before, on a smaller scale. In March, after alarming reports from Guinea that a rural outbreak had reached the capital, the W.H.O. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent experts in to help. The epidemic spread to Sierra Leone, and then to Liberia. But cases grew only slowly, and by May, most of the experts were withdrawn. At the time, there was more worry about MERS in Saudi Arabia.

In early August, the chief scientist for Britain’s foreign aid agency said the “end of the epidemic was in sight.” He was wrong. About 800 people were known to be dead then. Cases had actually begun to explode in July, and now about 5,000 are dead.

There are some theories as to why the numbers seem to be going down. The leading one is that more West Africans now believe that Ebola exists, are afraid of it, and are touching each other less.

In that way, it is like lung cancer, only on a speeded-up time scale. It took 30 years for Americans to fully accept that smoking caused lung cancer. Once they believed, fewer started smoking. Deaths from lung cancer are now much lower than they used to be because many Americans in their 50’s and 60’s didn’t start as teenagers, or quit. But you wouldn’t say that the lung cancer epidemic is over.

Because poor West Africans often have many people sleeping in one room, Ebola spreads in households. Because the incubation period is up to 21 days, it often kills the family slowly, one by one. But for each other family that keeps the virus from entering its household, that can mean five or six fewer deaths.

Other theories are that tens of thousands of home-care kits have been handed out. They contain gloves, bleach, a bucket, plastic bags and a bleach sprayer. Using them around the sick, and especially during burials, may have helped.

Alternatively, hospitals may be empty because more people are dying at home. In Liberia, it has been reported that families are refusing to bring in their relatives because, if they die, they will be cremated.

Another report is that taxi and minibus drivers are refusing to take passengers who are bleeding or vomiting to hospitals. That forces them to die at home – which is cruel, but could slow the spread of disease to other passengers.

It is also important to remember that epidemics typically come in waves. The reasons for some are obvious, like the weather: flu cases rise in winter, polio cases rise in summer. Pox diseases like smallpox, measles and chickenpox used to surge every few years after a new set of young children was born. For other diseases, the reasons are not clear. Ebola may simply be having a moment between waves.

Source: well.blogs.nytimes.com/