My Thirty-Year Love Affair With "Shithole" Countries

 Annamaria on Monday

Here below is my post from January 2018, when then President Trump had bemoaned the immigration "only of people from shithole countries.".  This past Saturday, I commented on Jeff's post, which was a nasty indictment of President Joe Biden's presidential candidacy, based on about 23 seconds of confusion during a debate last week.  In my comment to Jeff, I referred to the post below from January 2018 and characterized it as "funny."  I brought it up because, I thought it was amusing in comparison to the tone of Saturday's blast on Biden,  I harkened back to what Jeff had said of  the words below when they were first posted. He asked me then to take down these words, because what I wrote was too "political" for MIE.  Citing my first amendment rights, I refused to do so.  Fast forward to this past Saturday.  When I compared my past "amusing" post to Jeff's long and critical one, he responded with: "You, humorous? Come-on , Sis, get real."

So here is that post of mine again.  I leave it up to you, MIE readers to decide.  Do you think this six-year-old sketch lacks humour.  Or is it amusing compared that dreadful rant from last Saturday?  Do I have to "get real" and stop trying to be funny?        

Norway is renaming itself in solidarity with the shithole countries

Stan calls him The SCROTUS.  Just this week my friend Ann Daniels gave him a new moniker: His Shitholiness--in honor of this past week's new low in Trump's presidential pronunciamentos: a declaration that some countries are shitholes.  (He would, he declared, rather that we bring in people of better countries, like Norway.)  Thereby, he vilified many of my favorite places.  And he inspired me to show you how happy it has made me, over the past thirty years or so, to visit sixteen of our sacred planet's marvelous, splendid "shitholes."

Take a look a these photos, arranged by continent.  Here they are--my favorite places that are NOT Norway:

Argentina

Bolivia

Brazil

Cuba

Ecuador

Paraguay

Jordan

Turkey

Botswana

Egypt

Two of the smiling men in this photo are of Norwegian descent.  Neither one is
wishing he had gone to Oslo instead of Cairo

Kenya

Morocco

Namibia

South Africa

Tanzania

Zambia

 

I set out here. not to try, with my photos, to prove how wonderful these countries are.  Many photos better than mine are readily viewable on the Internet.  I want to show you how happy these places have made me and my friends.  All those smiles come from being in beautiful places where we found fabulous sites and great people.  True the citizens of the shithole countries are not all tall and pale like Norwegians, but I found the them to be fun, funny, warm, welcoming, and brilliant.

His Shitholiness is famous for not stopping to think.  But if we do, we will remember that Norwegians were the most dangerous, violent, destructive immigrants in human history.  In fact, one might conclude that they invented terrorism.

Just sayin'

The Lunatic Express Again

Annamaria on Monday

This past week, a writer friend told me that he has, in his future, a meeting with a person who is researching "railroads in East Africa!"  He asked me if one of my books takes place against the building of the railway. But that all happened about seventeen years before my stories start.  The railway is, however, an essential part in most of my stories.  My characters travel by train, beginning with the first book in the series: Strange Gods, just now out in a new edition. 

Since the new edition of that book just launched, I took that question as a suggestion for today's blog.  Here is repost of my blog about the creation of what came to be known as "The Lunatic Express."

It was called the Uganda Railway, but all of it was in the Protectorate of British East Africa, now Kenya.  It goes 660 miles from the port city of Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean, to Kisumu on the Eastern shores of Lake Victoria, across the water from Uganda.

It is credited with cementing Britain’s colonial power in East Africa.

But also with being instrumental in stopping the “trail of tears”—the route where slaves were dragged from the interior to the coast and then shipped to work in the households of Asia Minor and on the sesame plantations of the Zanzibar.

Construction began in 1896.  It cost Great Britain’s taxpayers 55 million pounds sterling: £20.1 Billion or $33 Billion in today’s money.

If the indigenous people tried to stop its progress through their territory, “punitive expeditions” were sent out to put them in their place.  Keep in mind that the King's African Rifles had firearms.  The tribal people fought with iron (not even steel) spears and swords.  Still, the Maasai won one of those battles.

32,000 Indians were shipped in from the Raj to build it.  6,724 of them stayed after the work was done and made a life there—many of their descendants remain today.  

It crosses 35 viaducts, 120 bridges and culverts.

Its engineers and construction crews braved man-eating lions and deadly scorpions.

2,498 perished during its construction.

Before the Brits built the railroad, the route from Mombasa to Kisumu was an oxcart trail.  To traverse from the coast took about three months with most of the party walking, carrying water and food.  Ordinarily around three hundred at a time, most of them tribal porters, made the trip.  People died.

A new way to travel that distance was called for.  But not everyone agreed.

Calling the railroad a “gigantic folly,” Liberals in Parliament were against the project, saying that Britain had no right to drive what African’s called the “Iron Snake” through Maasai territory.  The magazine Punch called it “the Lunatic Line.”  In 1971, Charles Miller wrote a book about it: The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism.  Many politicians and newspaper editors called it a waste of the taxpayer’s money.  Shaky wooden trestles over enormous chasms, hostile tribes, workers dying of until-then unknown diseases—much of what transpired seemed to support those against the idea.

But from the outset, the Uganda Railroad had its adherents.   Conservatives saw it as an important salvo in the “Scramble for Africa,” that Nineteenth Century madness of the European powers to take over whatever chunks of the African continent they could lay their hegemony on.  Winston Churchill admired it as “a brilliant conception."  He said, “The British art of ‘muddling through’ is seen here in one of its finest expositions.  Through everything—through forests, through the ravines, through troops of marauding lions, through famine, through war, through five years of excoriating Parliamentary debate, muddled and marched the railway.”

In the end it was seen as a huge achievement—both strategically and economically.  It became vital to the suppression of slavery.  Its existence eliminated the need for huge squads of human beings to carry goods.

The American President Teddy Roosevelt rode the railroad during his visit to British East Africa in 1909.  He wrote, "The railroad, the embodiment of the eager, masterful, materialistic civilization of today, was pushed through a region in which nature, both as regards wild man and beast, does not differ materially from what was in Europe during the late Pleistocene."  On his way into the interior from the coast, he often rode on a platform on the front of the locomotive, giving him a great vantage point for viewing the huge array of wildlife along the way.  According to Teddy, "...on this, except at mealtime, I spent most of the hours of daylight."  It's a view I sorely wish I could have seen.

Here is a link to give you a glimpse of the line as it passes through some of the most incredible scenery on earth, as shown in the opening credits of Sydney Pollack’s brilliant Out of Africa.

 htttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FB1LS3WhIU

From Kenya to Zanzibar

 Annamaria on Monday

I am being roasted in Zanzibar, a fascinating place nonetheless.  Here are some highlights of this past week  

Samburu:  

The airstrip as we were leaving

Zanzibar: Day one