#businessmen in africa

[goal-hall]

Top 15 Female Entrepreneurs in Africa

Top 15 Female Entrepreneurs in Africa. 1. Alakija Folorunso (Nigeria) 2. Isabel dos Santos (Angola) 3. Wendy Appelbaum (South Africa) 4...

Africa has witnessed a remarkable surge in female entrepreneurship in recent years, with women across the continent breaking barriers and carving out their niches in various industries. In this post, we have gathered a list of the most successful female entrepreneurs in Africa. These visionary women are driving economic growth, fostering innovation, and championing social change. Therefore, from…

[readyforevolution]

"I wasn’t against communism, but i can’t say I was for it either. At first, I viewed it suspiciously, as some kind of white man’s concoction, until i read works by African revolutionaries and studied the African liberation movements. Revolutionaries in Africa understood that the question of African liberation was not just a question of race, that even if they managed to get rid of the white colonialists, if they didn’t rid themselves of the capitalistic economic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced by Black neocolonialists. There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism.

The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.

I got into heated arguments with sisters or brothers who claimed that the oppression of Black people was only a question of race. I argued that there were Black oppressors as well as white ones. That’s why you’ve got Blacks who support Nixon or Reagan or other conservatives. Black folks with money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as i was concerned, it didn’t take too much brains to figure out that Black people are oppressed because of class as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black. [Earlier in my life] When someone asked me what communism was, I opened my mouth to answer, then realized i didn’t have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy with a Black trench coat and a Black hat pulled down over his face, slinking around corners.

I never forgot that day. We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is… “

Assata Shakur

[ltwilliammowett]

Lieutenant! Can you tell us about Cape Horn and why it was so dangerous?

Of course I would,

So let's get to the location:

Cape Horn is located at 55° 59′ south latitude and 67° 17′ west longitude. The headland is located on the rocky island of Isla Hornos (Horn Island, not to be confused with the Horn Islands in Micronesia, also discovered by Schoutens), which belongs to Chile, and is the southernmost point in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. Like the southernmost 2,000 kilometres of South America, it lies in the cold Antarctic circumpolar current. Unlike South Africa, which is twenty degrees further north with the warm Agulhas Current, Tierra del Fuego is never reached by a warm Atlantic current (Brazil Current). Instead, the cold polar current (Falkland Current) reaches as far as the Río de la Plata in the southern summer and as far as southern Brazil in the winter, meaning that Cape Horn is under the influence of a large-scale subpolar current all year round.

The air temperature at Cape Horn is almost identical to the water temperature all year round - day and night - which is 8 °C in January and 5 °C in July. During the day, it rarely gets warmer than 12-13 °C. There are only occasional frosts in winter and it almost never snows, although it rains over 280 days a year.

With few exceptions, the wind blows from the western half of the compass rose all year round; easterly winds are very rare. However, the wind force in the sea area around the Cape tends to be lower than in the neighbouring south-east Pacific and off the Chilean coast near the Strait of Magellan, for example, where there is always one wind force more and twice as much chance of storms. Nevertheless, the wind blows almost constantly in summer (January) with at least five Beaufort, but only once a month with more than seven Beaufort, and once a week to the west. In July, at least seven Beaufort and one storm per week are recorded every third day, while two storms per week can be expected to the west.

The Cape was rounded for the first time by an expedition of Dutch sailors Willem Cornelisz Schouten and Jakob Le Maire on 29 January 1616, sailing on behalf of the Australian Company, which was founded by Jakob Le Maire's father Isaac Le Maire together with other Hoorn businessmen after an internal dispute with the Dutch East India Company (VOC). As Dutch ships at the time were only allowed to use the Strait of Magellan if they belonged to the VOC, Isaac Le Maire was looking for a passage to the Pacific untouched by the rights of the VOC to trade with the East Indies Spice Islands.

The expedition's mission was to explore a new route to the ‘East Indies’.It was considered fulfilled when a passage opened up between Tierra del Fuego (in the language of the Spanish owner) and the hypothetical huge southern continent of Terra Australis.It was named Fretum le Maire (literally Le Maire Strait) in Latin in honour of the initiator and most important financier Isaac Le Maire, and the ‘peninsula’ to the east belonging to Terra Australis was given the name Staatenlandt in honour of the newly constituted Dutch parliament.The rededication in favour of the son Jakob Le Maire took place after his tragic death at the instigation of his father.The island character of Staatenlandt, which is only sixty kilometres long, could not be recognised, as even at sea you can rarely see further than about forty kilometres. Not being able to see the connection of the state island to the huge Terra Australis only proved that one could not see further than twenty nautical miles - and this was already known.

According to the published records of the ‘shipwrecked passenger’ Jacob le Maires (his expedition ship, the Hoorn, burnt up during cleaning work in Patagonia), he and Captain Schouten were of the opinion that Tierra del Fuego was a rugged, rocky but contiguous island, the supposed southern tip of which was named Capo Hoorn in Latin by Schouten, who was responsible for it, in honour of the second great financier, the council of the city of Hoorn.The Le Maire Strait, the short and easy passage between America and Terra Australis at Staateninsel or Staatenlandt, was the important discovery; Cape Horn was already a clear 180 kilometres into the Pacific. Isaac le Maire had the discovery of this passage, supported by a ‘silent’ Schouten, attributed to his son by court order, with the father as heir.However, the associated and desired exploitation rights of the strait were immediately expropriated and granted to the monopoly of the East India Company.The last lawsuits over this were lost in 1648.

With the realisation that even Staatenlandt was not connected to Terra Australis and that Cape Horn was the decisive landmark, neither the Strait of Magellan nor the Le Maire Strait could be permanently managed with customs duties. Due to the factually and historically incorrect, commercially motivated court judgement that Jacob le Maire found his way into the Pacific via the Le Maire Strait, the discovery of Cape Horn is attributed to him just as incorrectly and abbreviated. Usually, however, all discoveries made on such a voyage are attributed to the captain, as he decides which unknown waters his ship sails into, is responsible for them and also has to assess and interpret what he sees. However, Schouten did not insist on a public acknowledgement of his exploratory achievement, presumably due to an ‘agreement’ between him and Isaac le Maire. In addition, the published documentation of the voyage was undoubtedly written by the representative of the shipping company Jacob le Maire, so that the impression of a discovery by the travelling merchant was already being conveyed to contemporaries

But according to the German author Wolf-Ulrich Cropp, the Englishman Francis Drake was the first European to sail around the Cape 40 years earlier, in 1578, on his circumnavigation of the globe, after he had reached the Pacific through the Strait of Magellan and then travelled south-east for a few days in search of the missing escort ships. However, this discovery was declared a state secret by Queen Elizabeth I.

At the time, it was believed that the Pacific could only be reached from the Atlantic via the Spanish-controlled Strait of Magellan further north, and the British did not want other nations to know about the second route.Drake's first discovery was only claimed after 1618 for political and economic reasons and was quickly disproved by examining the records and voyage reports and by interviewing the surviving travellers.The English naming of the sea area Drake Passage was only given in 1769 by James Cook when he surveyed the coast and is presumably only an expression of general reverence for the greatest English naval hero to date.

In fact, Drake no longer had any escort ships in the Pacific that he could miss; he had already lost them in the Atlantic or in the Strait of Magellan.In the event of a separation, a rendezvous point 2500 kilometres to the north had been agreed with the remaining Elisabeth; a search for missing persons in the south was therefore not very promising. Instead, Drake sought shelter between the islands west of the Strait of Magellan in a supposed ‘50-day storm’ and had no interest in drifting further and further south-east, where he would inevitably be wrecked on the expected Terra Australis in the storm.In any case, he took his time to ‘conquer’ the inhospitable islands of the archipelago one by one.Furthermore, the navigational documents show that he never travelled further south than 55° south, which, in view of his otherwise perfect latitude measurements throughout the voyage, rules out the possibility that he came closer than about 300 km to Cape Horn.Under no circumstances was he south of the Cape, travelling through the Drake Strait and the Le Maire Strait or Falkland Strait to the Atlantic entrance of the Strait of Magellan, in order to make a statement about its passability.The ambitious Drake would have seized even the slightest opportunity to make and verify such a glorious discovery, as he was well aware of the economic, personal, political and military benefits.Similar legends were subsequently spread about the Spanish captains Francisco de Hoces (1526) and Gabriel de Castilla (1603). However, the sources and evidence for both are so sparse and uncertain that the best that can be surmised is that they both sailed past the entrances to the Strait of Magellan for different reasons and then wandered south of it for a short time. In the case of de Hoces, the legend led to the same conclusion as with Drake: the sea area south of Tierra del Fuego, the Drake Strait, is called Mar de Hoces in Spanish.

The rounding of the Cape was one of the most feared passages for ships, as evidenced by the founding of the Cape Horn Community. Commanding captains who conquered Cape Horn on a cargo ship without an auxiliary engine became honorary members of this international community.

Until the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, sailing around the Cape was the slightly more favourable way to reach the west coast of South America from the Atlantic. The Strait of Magellan and the Beagle Channel, which had already been sailed through centuries earlier by ships of the Dutch East India Company and British exploration ships, also offered difficult weather and current conditions for sailing ships.

At Cape Horn, the passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific against the westerly wind drift was particularly dangerous and difficult. It required ships sailing in this direction to constantly cross in high seas, rain, cold, poor visibility and icebergs. The False Cape Horn caused additional navigational difficulties due to the risk of confusion. However, to this day there are still ships that round the cape, albeit with the help of engines and modern navigation. But that does not mean that it is any less dangerous.

[fatehbaz]

all the time, gotta walk away, for a moment, take a break, infuriated, when reading about European implementation of forced labour, particularly and especially thinking about nineteenth and early twentieth centuries plantations, whether it's sugarcane or rubber or tea or banana, whether it's British plantations in Assam or Malaya; Belgian plantations in Congo; French plantations in West Africa; Dutch plantations in Java; de facto United States-controlled plantations in Haiti or Guatemala or Cuba or Colombia. and the story is always: "and then the government tried to find a way to reimpose slavery under a different name. and then the government destroyed vast regions of forest for monoculture plantations. and then the government forced thousands to become homeless and then criminalized poverty to force people into plantation work or prison labor." like the plantation industries are central (entangled with every commodity and every infrastructure project) and their directors are influencing each other despite spatial distance between London and the Caribbean and the Philippines.

and so the same few dozen administrators and companies and institutions keep making appearances everywhere, like they have outsized influence in history. like they are important nodes in a network. and they all cite each other, and write letters to each other, and send plant collection gifts to each other, and attend each other's lectures, and inspire other companies and colonial powers to adapt their policies/techniques.

but. important that we ought not characterize some systems and forces (surveillance apparatuses, industrial might, capitalism itself) as willful or always conscious. this is a critical addendum. a lot of those forces are self-perpetuating, or at least not, like, a sentient monster. we ought to avoid imagining a hypothetical boardroom full of be-suited businessmen smoking cigars and plotting schemes. this runs the risk of misunderstanding the forces that kill us, runs the risk of attributing qualities to those forces that they don't actually possess. but sometimes, in some cases, there really are, like, a few particular assholes with a disproportionate amount of influence making problems for everyone else.

not to over-simplify, but sometimes it's like the same prominent people, and a few key well-placed connections and enablers in research institutions or infrastructure companies. they're prison wardens and lietuenant governors and medical doctors and engineers and military commanders and botanists and bankers, and they all co-ordinate these multi-faceted plans to dispossess the locals, build the roads, occupy the local government, co-erce the labour, tend the plants, ship the products.

so you'll be reading the story of like a decade in British Singapore and you're like "oh, i bet that one ambitious British surgeon who is into 'economics' and is obsessed with tigers and has the big nutmeg garden in his backyard is gonna show up again" and sure enough he does. but also sometimes you're reading about another situation halfway across the planet and then they surprise you (because so many of them are wealthy and influential and friends with each other) and it'll be like "oh you're reading about a British officer displacing local people to construct a new building in Nigeria? surprise cameo! he just got a letter from the dude at the university back in London or the agriculturalist in Jamaica or the urban planner from Bombay, they all went to school together and they're also all investors in the same rubber plantation in Malaya". so you'll see repeated references to the same names like "the British governor of Bengal" or "[a financial institution or bank from Paris or New York City]" or "[a specific colonial doctor/laboratory that does unethical experiments or eugenics stuff]" or "lead tropical agriculture adviser to [major corporation]" or "the United Fruit Company" and it's like "not you again"

[dailyhistoryposts]

On This Day In History

August 2nd, 1937: The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 is passed, rendering marijuana and marijuana by-products illegal in the USA.

The Act was largely pushed by businessmen looking to profit from competitors to marijuana products.

William Randolph Hearst, who owned several newspapers, was concerned that hemp paper could threaten his timber holdings.

Andrew Mellon (the Secretary of the Treasury and then the wealthiest man in the US) was heavily invested in nylon, which competed with hemp rope.

Marijuana (then spelled Marihuana in federal documents) was more commonly referred to as ganja or ganjah. 'Marihuana' was used to stigmatize the drug by associating it with Latinos(The word itself possibly comes from Mexico, but other etymologies suggest it could be from Chinese or East Africa. Nevertheless, it 'sounded' Mexican to most people).

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez

The vision of the future is slipping through the fingers of big businessmen who tremble in the face of formidable competition from China, of arms producers bent on confrontation with Russia, of those who wish to get there faster to exploit the natural resources of Africa or Latin America, of those who fear a change in the international order in which the United States will not determine the fate of all.

[ptseti]

ZIONISTS IN HAITI & AFRICA!

Zionism, a political ideology that many say has hijacked Judaism to pursue settler-colonialism in occupied Palestine, does not end at the borders of the state of Israel. Zionist businessmen Gilbert Bigio and Dan Gertler cast a shadow over the economies of Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and occupied Palestine.

Bigio’s business in Haiti, the GB Group, has been involved in ‘infrastructure development’ projects, telecommunications services, oil and gas, and real estate ventures. That has raised questions about Zionist interests in a predominantly African country struggling to overcome the legacies of colonialism and foreign intervention. Bigio, born in 1935 to a Sephardic Jewish family in what is now Syria, is considered a de facto leader of Haiti’s Jewish community and is an honorary consul to Israel. Like many other Zionists, Bigio is reportedly not religious but participates in Jewish cultural activities.

Similarly, human rights activists have criticised Gertler for disregarding environmental and human rights standards as he does business in the DRC. The United States imposed sanctions on Gertler in 2017 for human rights abuses and corruption. However, Israeli financial media outlet @TheMarker claims to have a recent recording of Gertler admitting he skirted those sanctions to pursue a $1.5 billion mine in the DRC. Gertler was born in 1973 in Tel Aviv, learned the diamond trade through his father and grandfather, and started a diamond business after completing mandatory military service.

Since the late 1800s, foreign forces have collaborated with Congolese leaders to exploit the heart of Africa, worsening existing socio-economic disparities and fueling violence. More than 7 million people are internally displaced in the DRC while conflict rages in the country’s eastern provinces.

In this video, TikTok creators iamlaurachung (of @theslowfactory) and @kevin.ug make the connection between Zionist entrepreneurs like Bigio and Gertler and our liberation struggle.

[dasha-aibo]

"Let's just take the money from the rich and give it to the poor" sound so, so good, it plays on our innate sense of justice and fairness and it absolutely never works.

First and foremost, money is absolutely meaningless. It only has a role because we give it value and it reflects an aspect of our economy. By itself, you could be living in a mansion, decked out in gold and expensive furs and still be poor as shit.

This is what happened in the USSR following the revolution. Yeah, all the aristocrats and businessmen were killed or exiled, their factories and mansions sacked, their gold and luxuries taken. And people were starving on the street, because there was no one to manage proper food supply chains.

For its entire existence USSR wasn't under heavy sanctions. Like, yeah, it didn't trade with the US, but it did trade with Europe, India, China, Africa, Vietnam, the entire Warsaw pact and so much more. Factories were built by foreign specialists using money USSR bought with raw resources, because it was all it could produce.

The cars were shit, household electronics were terrible, the food supply faced constant shortages and overall the quality of life of a soviet man was miles behind the life of anyone in the poorest Western country.

Because the Soviet system as a whole stole all the money and had no way to meaningfully produce anything of value. The entire incentive system was shot, when factory bosses weren't chosen by their skill, but by their loyalty to the party. All USSR knew is how to extract raw resources from the Earth and sell it.

And if you bring up "well, the Soviets ate more meat than Americans!" shit I will fucking explode, because that was a blatant lie. My mother and grandmother grew up in Moscow, the richest city in the country and they couldn't afford enough meat until USSR fell apart.

The statistical bureau was under the party thumb and only produced numbers the Party wanted to see. You have to be either naive or knowingly trying to spin the numbers to trust any Soviet statistics.

You can't "simply redistribute the wealth". It doesn't work. You have to create conditions where the living standards of everyone are way higher, regardless of how the rich live. That is much harder and much less glamorous, but it's the only working solution.

[mumanddadgoglobal]

Cruising past a Prada shop darling on our buggy ride through Dubai International.

A gold shop in the Airport that was 20 times the size of what you can see.

We flew with Emirates airline to get to Vienna, because they have a flight direct to Vienna from their hub in Dubai.  For this reason, we had a four hour stopover at Dubai airport, which gave us a chance to experience the league of nations traipsing through the 38km of shops and air terminal ‘gates’.

Due to its location close to the equator, Emirates is able to hoover up people from north and south, Africa, India, the Middle East, Europe and of course Australia.  The massive airport terminal was filled with a cross section of humanity – or at least those who can afford to fly overseas.  There was an old Arab, who looked like he had parked his camel outside; families big rollie bags from India; more sandaled Arabs, with wives following behind; fat businessmen from India; a lone nun in a habit of Arab white; skinny men from India; overloaded Aussies; busy mothers from India; a couple of tidy lesbians with matching: buzzcuts, yellow sneakers and yellow wheelie bags; old shuffling women from India; colourfully clad tall Africans; young single men from India; and a Chinaman or two.

Dubai is an entrepot, though not in the normal sense: a port where goods are brought for import then export, such as Singapore or Hong Kong.  Instead, it is a city where millionaires are brought to avoid taxes, and store wealth that may be suspect or otherwise subject to sanctions.  According to the Economist magazine Dubai was forecast to add 4,000 millionaires in 2022, as criminals and Russians (not necessarily analogous) moved to secure their wealth, and Indians moved for lower taxes.  This is understandable, since there are no questions asked about whence the money came and there is no taxes on income and capital gains, as it inevitably arrives.

The lack of time and absence of inclination, meant that we did not venture out to experience this Gucci entrepot of the desert.  But the fly in got me sufficiently curious to read up on how rapidly this city has expanded.  In 1950, it had 20,000 people rising to 3.6 million today.  90% of the population are expatriates, so not citizens, most of whom are the help from India and Pakistan.

In some respects, the free-for-all method of expanding this city has created opportunity and employment for people from poorer countries, that enables them to send money home.  But this laissez-faire approach to growing a metropolis has a dark side.  It is home to a lot of shady money owned by shady people.  It is also the home of no choice for at least 20,000 Nigerian women who have been trafficked into the city, had their passports and phones taken, and then enslaved as prostitutes to minister to the needs of shady people that no taxes and no questions attract.

I wonder if they have a community library.

[dwellordream]

“Women’s associations, both old and new, experienced tremendous growth throughout the Progressive period. By the first decade of the 20th century, the foreign mission crusade had grown to astonishing proportions, with nearly three-quarters of a million members enrolled in local church auxiliaries all over the country. Foreign missionary work--the worldwide endeavor to convert non-believers to Christianity--was organized independently by each of the major American Protestant denominations. Missionary auxiliaries reflected middle-class interest in domesticity, marriage, and motherhood, while focusing on the lives of women in those distant lands that Americans saw as most backward and primitive. Local auxiliaries met weekly to study reports from women missionaries in Africa, Asia, or the Pacific Islands.

Contrasting these reports with their own lives of relative freedom and protection, middle-class Christian women deplored foreign customs that compelled women to live in harems or other polygamous marriage arrangements, forced them into marriage as children, or subjected them to ancient cultural rituals such as nose piercing or foot binding. Missionary enterprises connected American women to the rest of the world and also confirmed their sense of American cultural superiority. The women’s enthusiasm provided public support not only for missionary work in other countries, but also for the growth of American imperialism during the years in which the United States first joined other Western military powers in the conquest of weaker nations and the attempt to westernize their societies.

…For many women of the established black middle class, the response to instances of rising racism in the 1890s was to join the black women’s club movement. The movement’s growth in the 1890s paralleled the development of the federated club movement of white women at the end of the 19th century. Few black clubs were dedicated to culture, however. From their very beginnings, most black women’s clubs were more radical and activist than their white counterparts. Although the clubwomen were mostly middle-class and educated, their concerns were for the race as a whole and for the elevation of all black women, regardless of class. Their practical efforts were concentrated in education, health, housing, domestic training, and prison reform.

The slogan of the movement, “Lifting As We Climb,” reflected the club women's recognition that, although they were themselves privileged, their own survival and advancement, both as women and as African-Americans, depended on helping their less fortunate sisters. They knew that all black women were judged by the poorest and most disadvantaged of their sisters. They also knew that all black women were victims of the prevailing stereotype of black female immorality, a relic of the days of slavery when African-American women were at the mercy of their white owners’ sexual demands. No matter how ladylike her manners, how educated her speech, or how elegant her dress, in many parts of the country a black woman would be treated like a prostitute by contemptuous whites.

..Although the overall proportion of American women who attended college was very small--7.6 percent of all women aged 18 to 21 in 1920--the increase in attendance was significant: by 1920 women made up nearly 50 percent of all enrolled college students. It was mostly middle-class women, the daughters of professional men and businessmen, who went to college. Upper-class white American women tended to be educated at home, later traveling in Europe to expand their knowledge of Western art and culture. After they made their social “debuts,” sometime between the ages of 18 and 21, they lived a life of leisure, waiting to make good marriages. Eleanor Roosevelt, the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt and later the wife of President Franklin Roosevelt, always regretted the rigid social rules that had denied her a college education.

Considering its middle-class clientele, college was expensive: tuition, room, and board at Wellesley in 1906, with pocket money and books, never cost less than $350 annually. At the University of California at Berkeley, students spent between $90 and $495 a year. In an era in which annual middle-class family incomes ranged from $1000 to $3000, college for daughters was often out of the question. Scholarships were still rare. As time went by, it became increasingly respectable for a young woman to work her way through college. After graduation, many women progressed to good jobs as teachers, accountants, private secretaries, librarians, or journalists. Others sought advanced study in science and liberal arts, training that would lead to professional careers in medicine and academia. Women college graduates who went to work tended to marry later than their non-college-educated counterparts. More than half of college-educated women with full time-professional careers never married at all, instead finding their fulfillment in work, collegiality, travel, and good times spent with other single women.

…The anti-suffrage forces were everywhere, though they tended to surface mostly in response to specific woman suffrage campaigns in the states. Especially powerful in the Northeast, anti-suffragists called themselves “remonstrants,” though the suffragettes liked to call them “antis.” Most anti-suffragists believed that woman's subordinate position in society was ordained by God and that woman’ s weak, gentle nature did not fit her for active participation in the world beyond the home--most especially not for the man’s world of politics, with its smoke-filled conventions, rough language, and “shady” transactions.

Some argued that if women wanted the vote they would have to bear arms in defense of their country---a possibility few Americans could even contemplate in 1900. Others based their arguments on the widespread 19th-century belief that the basic unit of society was not the individual but the family. The family, they reasoned, needed only one voting member: its male head. Particularly painful to hardworking suffragists was the antis’ argument that women did not want suffrage. Indeed, there was plenty of apathy among women, and the number of registered suffragists was undeniably small.

Anti-suffrage sentiment found powerful and influential supporters among conservative clergymen, businessmen, and political and social leaders. Many anti-suffragists were women. Anti-suffragism was also backed by those who made and sold alcoholic beverages, because they tended to associate suffrage with prohibition. The liquor interests feared that if women got the vote they would find a way to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol and their businesses would be ruined. Many suffragists were indeed prohibitionists, but by no means all; and many anti-suffragists were prohibitionists.”

- Karen Manners Smith, “Women in Public Life.” in New Paths to Power: American Women, 1890-1920

[quotesfrommyreading]

One final point. The history of response to the human rights and democracy movements in China has, I think, a special inflection. For a long time almost all influential foreign scholarship and thinking about China started from the assumption that China was an essentially collectivist society with no indigenous tradition of individual rights. Hence, Sinologists argued, we shouldn’t expect a real movement for democracy and for individual rights as these are understood in the West to emerge in China. This double-standard thinking about China reflects the general decline of universalist moral and political standards—of Enlightenment values—in the past generation. There is an increasing reluctance to apply a single standard of political justice, of freedom, and of individual rights and of democracy. The usual justifications for this reluctance are that it is “colonialist” (the label used by people on the left) or “Euro-centric” (the label used both by multiculturalist academics and by businessmen, who talk admiringly of authoritarian “Confucian cultures”) to expect or to want non-European peoples to have “our” values. My own view is that it is precisely the reluctance to apply these standards—as if “we” in the European and the neo-European countries need them, but the Chinese and the peoples of Africa don’t—that is colonialist and condescending

  —  On Wei Jingsheng (Susan Sontag, 1996)

[oldshowbiz]

The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, Fred Koch (father of the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries), and eight other businessmen - several of whom were infamous bigots.

Robert Welch’s racist reviews were on display when he wrote glowingly of Apartheid South Africa:

“Of all the nations of the world today, the Union of South Africa is most similar to the United States. It is composed of Europeans of various nationalities who migrated to a continent inhabited by savages, to extend civilization to another area of the globe and to build a new and freer life for themselves … The people must have the courage not only to ignore insults vomited at them by the enemies of civilization; but to resist the economic sanctions officially imposed by their enemies … The natives … are typical survivals of the Stone Age. They are mostly docile while under strict white supervision and sober. But they naturally revert to savagery when unwatched."

[cryingoflot49]

Book Review

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

by Paul Theroux

Two decades ago, the novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux took an overland trip through Africa, starting in Cairo, Egypt and ending in Cape Town, South Africa. This certainly isn’t the safest or the most comfortable means of experiencing the supposed “dark continent”, but it makes for some interesting experiences and insights. Keeping in mind that Theroux’s observations are just one point of view among many, his resulting book Dark Star provides a unique look at a region of the world that holds a permanent place off the beaten path.

While Dark Star is an easy book to read, breaking it down into its individual elements is a good way to approach its merits and examine its flaws. The first element of importance is Theroux’s sense of place. Wherever he goes, the author describes what he sees and the vibe he gets from his surroundings. Starting on the tourist trail in Egypt, he heads south through Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa. You quickly get a sense of what he appreciates and what he doesn’t. He doesn’t like sites that are swarmed with tourists, nor does he like cities with their concentrations of crime and poverty. He also doesn’t like the “death traps” as he calls public transportation which are usually over-croded minivans driven at dangerous speeds on poorly maintained roads, pockmarked with hippopotamus-sized potholes. If you’ve ever traveled in a Third World country, you will know exaclt what he is talking about.

The places that Theroux does like are usually rural, especially farm lands or jungle villages. These are the places where he sees Africans at their best, meaning Africans being Africans in the absence of corrupt and filthy cities built up on the foundations of European colonialism. Some of the book’s best passages involve descriptions of the pyramids in Sudan which are rarely seen by tourists, a boat trip across Lake Victoria, another boat trip from Malawi across the Zambezi over the border into Zimbabwe, and the pristine countrysides of Zimbabwe and South Africa. All places, whether Theroux likes them or not, are described with language that is clear, simple, and direct, making it easy to visualize what he sees.

Another element that is done to near perfection is writings about the people. Theroux talks with tour guides, people on the streets and in the villages, farmers, nuns, educators, government officials, Indian businessmen, prostitutes, authors, intellectuals, and ordinary people. Just like with the places he goes, he describes these people vividly with precision so that you feel like you quickly get to know them. But not everyone is to his liking. He gets into small argument with a fanatical Rastafarian in Ethiopia, a little ornery with physically fit young men who refuse to work, government officials who demand bribes to do their jobs, and he really gives a hard time to a young American missionary woman about the psychological damage that her evangelical ministry is doing to the local people. There is also plenty of anger directed at clueless tourists as well as NGO and charity workers who he sees as being the Westerners who do the most damage to Africa.

The third element of importance is the author, Paul Theroux himself, and his thoughts and commentaries on everything he sees. Before getting into this subject, it should be mentioned that Theroux had a purpose to his journey. In the 1960s he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching in Malawi. After getting involved with a Leftist political group, he got fired then accepted a teaching position at a college in Uganda. He wanted to return and see what results, if any, his contributions to Africa grew into. What he found was a major disappointment. The charming campuses and villages where he had lived were in ruins and instead of a thriving civilization, he saw emaciated beggars, starving children, an ignorant populace, and chronically corrupt politicians. Shops that were formerly owned by Indian immigrants were abandoned and burnt to the ground, the result of a campaign of ethnic cleansing. African people wanted to buy from shops owned by Africans, but Africans never took control over the businesses after the Indians were killed or chased away. They resorted to begging, theft, petty crime, prostitution, and laziness instead of making an effort to build better villages for themselves. Due to the hopelessness of African society, the most educated citizens fled to America or Europe instead of staying in their home countries where they were most needed.

Throughout his travels in Tanzania, Uganda, and Malawi, Theroux gets increasingly bitter and cynical. He wanted to see Africans thriving and they weren’t. He directs all his wrath towards the Western charities and NGOs who he says are making the local people dependent on aid rather than learning how to run their societies for themselves. Even worse, these organizations work by bribing corrupt politicians to allow them to do work there, keeping greedy and psychotic leaders in positions of power they don’t deserve. Theroux points out that rural people who have given up on the hopeless market economy and returned to subsistence farming are the happiest and healthiest Africans he encounters. Heecomes close to advocating for a type of post-capitalist agrarian anarchism.

Some readers have criticized Theroux for his pessimistic views on contemporary Africa, but he does cite studies that support what he says. He also encounters a lot of Africans in several different countries that agree with him. To make sense of his negativity, you also have to remember that traveling overland through Africa is not exactly stress free. Anybody who has been on an extended backpacking trip anywhere in the world will tell you that traveler’s fatigue is a real thing. Theroux took a longer than average trip through one of the most underdeveloped regions in the world, got shot at by Somali bandits, stuck in the middle of nowhere when his transportation broke down, and got sick with food poisoning, magnifying his traveler’s fatigue to a outsize extent. These circumstances would make you grouchy too. But even in the darkest times, Theroux never loses his appreciation for Africa, the wildlife, the landscapes, and the people who are trying to make the best of their situations. Besides, by the time he crosses the river from Malawi into Zimbabwe, his mood really lightens up.

Dark Star is an engaging travelogue that should be read both critically and with an open mind. All the while, remember that this is Paul Theroux’s singular point of view. That doesn’t make it wrong; that just means that there are other points of view to take into account that may go against what he says even if they don’t necessarily invalidate his opinions. He saw what he saw and he expresses it well. This is raw and honest travel writing and if you haven’t been tough enough to make the same kind of journey, you’re not in a good place to be judgmental of the conclusions he draws.

[scotianostra]

On January 27th 1784 the newspaper the Glasgow Herald was published for the first time.

As the birth of America brought the decline of the city’s lucrative tobacco trade and an end to its first phase of imperial expansion, the first issue of a newspaper called The Glasgow Advertiser was published.

When John Mennons - writer, editor, printer and publisher of The Glasgow Advertiser - sold the few hundred copies of his first issue around the coffee houses of Glasgow in 1783, he was already dealing with international businessmen, the tobacco lords and the other members of the Merchants’ House who traded with the Americas and Caribbean, who owned plantations and mansions across the Atlantic and whose fortunes would provide the basis for Glasgow’s early and hugely successful participation in the Industrial Revolution. The American colonies were lost, but the city continued to trade across the Atlantic, and soon added businesses in Africa, Australia and the Far East.

That first issue of The Herald showed the international interests of the Glasgow business community. On the front page alone there was intelligence from London, Dresden, Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Jamaica, New York, Gibraltar and Madrid, and reports of ships belonging to the East India Company sailing for Africa and the South Sea (the South China Sea). In addition, a disapproving account of the princes and princesses of Europe changing their religion “as if it were part of their dress” when marrying for family or national advantage was enlivened by the news that the Sultan of the Ottomans (Turkey) and the Sophia of Persia (Iran) had sent ambassadors to south Germany to ask for the hands in marriage of two princesses of the House of Wurttemberg.

The Glasgow Herald is the longest running national newspaper in the world and is the eighth oldest daily paper in the world. The paper was originally named the Glasgow Advertiser, and after a short spell as The Herald and Advertiser and Commercial Chronicle, became The Glasgow Herald in 1804.

The paper’s first editor John Mennons worked from offices at Duncan’s Land on Gibson’s Wynd, with the company moving to ‘The Lighthouse’ in Mitchell Street in 1895,the building is creditted cto architect John Keppie, but he apprenticed the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

On the 19th of July, 1980, the paper moved to offices in Albion Street. It is currently printed at Carmyle just south east of Glasgow.

[adamwatchesmovies]

Sahara (2005)

While I didn't enjoy this film, that doesn't mean you won't. No matter what I say, the people involved in this project did it: they actually made a movie. That's something to be applauded. With that established...

On paper, Sahara sounds like a slam dunk. It’s Indiana Jones meets James Bond with big stars like Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz and armed with a budget to make all the stunt-filled adventure come to life. In practice, it’s devoid of any joy or excitement. Director Breck Eisner makes 124 minutes feel so much longer than two hours.

In 1865, the ironclad CSS Texas disappeared with the last of the Confederacy’s treasury gold. In present day, Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey) has finally found a clue to its final resting place: Mali. With his longtime bud and fellow treasure-hunter Al Giordino (Steve Zahn), he investigates. Along the way, the meet WHO doctor Eva Rojas (Penelope Cruz) as she investigates a mysterious plague she fears will soon ravage the country.

Based on the novel by Clive Cussler, this film adaptation tries to do too much. Sahara is essentially two movies slammed together. The first is a swashbuckling adventure in the vein of Indiana Jones. Boat chases, car chases, fist fights, impromptu survival techniques in the desert and a long-lost treasure? There’s no mistaking it. The other movie has an inconspicuous, beautiful doctor embroiled in a plot that begins as a threat to Africa but could endanger the whole world and includes a solar-powered laser beam, a mad dictator and businessmen devoid of morals. The problem is that these two plots exist independently and are not well blended. In one scene, Dirk and Al are dodging entire clips’ worth of bullets with big smiles while coming up with crazy ways to take down the villains on their tail by blowing up their own boat. In the next, a single bullet is treated with enough gravitas to give you a headache.

Also problematic are the actors. Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz are talented actors. Here? they’re awful. They’re even worse together. They have no chemistry whatsoever, which makes their plots feel even more akin to a mix of oil and water. You know they’re going to fall in love from the beginning but you’ll believe a metal boat from the American Civil War will make it across the ocean on no rations before you’ll believe that romance.

From the unfunny humor meant to endear you to the characters to the action scenes that prove the actors couldn’t throw a decent punch if their lives depended on it, Sahara suffers from major problems. It also gets the little things wrong. When Commander Rudi Gunn (Rain Wilson) approaches the United States Embassy for help, he's warned it’s unlikely aid will arrive in time because “No one gives a shit about Africa”. They're not wrong. Even this movie doesn't care about Mali or its people because moments later, we learn the thing that’s gruesomely killing en-masse will soon spread to the entire world. So it wasn’t enough that Mali would become the world's biggest graveyard; the entire human race has to be at risk? Yikes.

Then, there’s the climax. This is one of those movies where the villains must have the greatest employee benefits package of all time because the baddie's top bodyguard decides to get into a fistfight on top of a building that’s rigged to explode in a few minutes. How was he going to get out of there once he got the job done?

I can give a movie slack and accept a preposterous story but you’ve got to give me something in return. When your actors have no chemistry between them, the bad guys are completely forgettable, the humour falls flat on its face, the action scenes are badly shot & choreographed and none of what you see is interesting, you want to find some way to entertain yourself, perhaps by having some laughs at the film’s expense. You'd think it'd be easy when the Los Angeles Times listed this film as one of the most expensive flops of all time but you'd be wrong. Sahara is too dull to provide any form of entertainment. (Full-screen version on DVD, January 29, 2021)

[ammg-old2]

When I decided to propose to the woman who is now my wife, I gave a lot of thought to how I was going to do it. But I didn't think much about what I was going to do it with. Not only did a diamond ring seem the logical—nay, the inevitable—choice, but I had just the very diamond. My grandfather had scrounged up enough money to buy a diamond ring for my grandmother in the early 1950s, and the stone had passed to me when he passed away. I reset the diamond in a more modern band, got the ring appraised, and slipped it on my fiancée's finger.

It was a beautiful moment—a gesture of love and commitment spanning generations. And it was also exactly what De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. wanted. I was a century-old marketing campaign, actualized. And I'm far from alone; three-quarters of American brides wear a diamond engagement ring, which now costs an average of $4,000.

Every so often, an article comes along that makes you thoroughly rethink a rote practice. Edward Jay Epstein's "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" was one of them. In his 1982 Atlantic story, the investigative journalist deconstructed what he termed the "diamond invention"—the "creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem."

That invention is surprisingly recent: Epstein traces its origins to the discovery of massive diamond mines in South Africa in the late 19th century, which for the first time flooded world markets with diamonds. The British businessmen operating the South African mines recognized that only by maintaining the fiction that diamonds were scarce and inherently valuable could they protect their investments and buoy diamond prices. They did so by launching a South Africa–based cartel, De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. (now De Beers), in 1888, and meticulously extending the company's control over all facets of the diamond trade in the ensuing decades.

Most remarkably, De Beers manipulated not just supply but demand. In 1938, amid the ravages of the Depression and the rumblings of war, Harry Oppenheimer, the De Beers founder's son, recruited the New York–based ad agency N.W. Ayer to burnish the image of diamonds in the United States, where the practice of giving diamond engagement rings had been unevenly gaining traction for years, but where the diamonds sold were increasingly small and low-quality.

Meanwhile, the price of diamonds was falling around the world. The folks at Ayer set out to persuade young men that diamonds (and only diamonds) were synonymous with romance, and that the measure of a man's love (and even his personal and professional success) was directly proportional to the size and quality of the diamond he purchased. Young women, in turn, had to be convinced that courtship concluded, invariably, in a diamond.

Ayer insinuated these messages into the nooks and crannies of popular culture. It marketed an idea, not a diamond or brand:

Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love. In addition, the agency suggested offering stories and society photographs to selected magazines and newspapers which would reinforce the link between diamonds and romance. Stories would stress the size of diamonds that celebrities presented to their loved ones, and photographs would conspicuously show the glittering stone on the hand of a well-known woman. Fashion designers would talk on radio programs about the "trend towards diamonds" that Ayer planned to start. ...

In its 1947 strategy plan, the advertising agency ... outlined a subtle program that included arranging for lecturers to visit high schools across the country. "All of these lectures revolve around the diamond engagement ring, and are reaching thousands of girls in their assemblies, classes and informal meetings in our leading educational institutions," the agency explained in a memorandum to De Beers. The agency had organized, in 1946, a weekly service called "Hollywood Personalities," which provided 125 leading newspapers with descriptions of the diamonds worn by movie stars. ... In 1947, the agency commissioned a series of portraits of "engaged socialites." The idea was to create prestigious "role models" for the poorer middle-class wage-earners. The advertising agency explained, in its 1948 strategy paper, "We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of screen and stage, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer's wife and the mechanic's sweetheart say 'I wish I had what she has.'"

In the late 1940s, just before my grandfather started hunting for his diamond ring, an Ayer copywriter conceived of the slogan that De Beers has used ever since: "A Diamond Is Forever." "Even though diamonds can in fact be shattered, chipped, discolored, or incinerated to ash, the concept of eternity perfectly captured the magical qualities that the advertising agency wanted to attribute to diamonds," Epstein writes. A diamond that's forever promises endless romance and companionship. But a forever diamond is also one that's not resold. Resold diamonds (and it's maddeningly hard to resell them, as Epstein's article details) cause fluctuations in diamond prices, which undermine public confidence in the intrinsic value of diamonds. Diamonds that are stowed away in safe-deposit boxes, or bequeathed to grandchildren, don't.