A hospitable family of the vanishing, poetic Bedouin in Syria

November 26, 2019 — 2 Comments

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

Bedouins, like this family of six, have roamed the Middle East since the Ninth Century and are known for their hospitality, honesty and fierce independence.

Even earlier, Abraham of the Old Testament was probably a Bedouin. They are tribal and patriarchal and have strong codes of honour.

Governments of desert countries

Bedouins regard hospitality as a sacred duty. Visitors like myself are usually invited to share a cup of strong, gritty coffee.

Bedouins are expected to boil their last rice and kill their last sheep to feed a stranger.

But the governments of desert countries where they and their herds of camels and goats roam do not extend the same hospitality to them.

How many Bedouins in the world?

About a million Bedouin of the worldwide total of between three and four million lived in Syria before the civil war started in March 2011 and was continued by the criminal dictator Bashar Hafez al-Assad with help from the criminal dictator Vladimir Putin.

Will they or the many other criminal dictators around the world ever face justice?

How many killed in Syrian War?

The Syrian War has killed 370,000 people, including 112,600 civilians, and caused 5.7million refugees to flee, including many Bedouins who have become refugees in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.

The right-wing Israeli Government of Benjamin Netanyahu has progressively evicted many of the 200,000 Bedouins from the Negev Desert, where they have lived for centuries.

Netanyahu wants the land for Jews.

Bedouins make their own clothes

About one-tenth of the Arabs in the Middle East are Bedouins. They make their own clothes from the wool of their camels, sheep and goats.

The traditional male dress is a long white tunic, a cloak and a distinctive head cloth, like the father in my photo. Let’s call him Amir, meaning prince.

The women wear black, decorated garments, like the attractive mother in the photo.

Let’s call her Amira, meaning princess. Bedouins have a ritual in naming their children.

The parents choose the first name; the baby’s second name is the father’s name; the third name is the grandfather’s name and the last name is the tribe’s name.

Children are expected to help their families survive, and survival is getting more difficult as Middle Eastern governments like Israel expand settlements into deserts occupied by Bedouins.

Bedouins are tribal and patriarchal

Their society is tribal and patriarchal, typically composed of extended families.

The head of each family, called a sheik, settles disputes and distributes grazing rights.

Bedouins tend to be small and thin, partly because food is scarce in the desert.

They have strong honour codes; they love freedom and not being tied down, but as governments such as Israel have hounded them off the land where they graze their animals, some have settled in villages

Sometimes grown-up children have built a house in a village and their parents live in a “granny tent” in the garden.

Bedouin women do most of the work

Men in Bedouin families are admired if they have a gentle way with camels but have not taken up the idea of equally sharing household jobs–women do most of the work.

They raise the children, herd the sheep, milk the animals, cook, spin yarn and make clothes.

Having a poet in your tribe is highly regarded. Tribes take part in poetry readings, sword dances and singing.

Bedouin men gather around a fire to share stories, drink coffee and discuss falconry, the Saluki greyhound and Arab stallions, all of which Bedouins are credited with creating.

The Bedouin diet

They eat goat and rice cooked over an open fire made of camel dung.

A typical breakfast is yoghurt, bread and coffee.

Sometimes they sell animals to buy bags of wheat, rice, barley, salt, coffee and tea. Dates are a staple diet.

Bedouin tents are divided into three sections: The men’s section, the family section and the kitchen.

Bedouin society is also divided into social classes depending on your ancestry, skill or occupation.

Moving from one class to another is easy, but not a marriage of two people from different classes.

Spare a thought for Amir, Amira and their family, facing an uphill trek as fast-changing ways of life replace old Bedouin traditions.

I would love to hear what you think about this blog

November 16, 2019 — Leave a comment

The aim of this blog is to share the experiences that I have had on my travels around the world.

I would really like to hear from you, the readers, to see what you think of the blog, as well as sharing any experiences you may have had in the countries that I have written about and will write about in the future.

I would like to encourage you to comment, good, bad or indifferent, on the articles that are published and if you would like to speak to me directly, please do so by going to the Contact Me section of the blog.

I would like you to share you thoughts about my overall aim of describing the lives of ordinary people, compared with other writers’ reports on politics and international affairs.

Frankly, what you think about subjects, aspects and views I have covered?

What other aspects of the lives of people would you like me to cover?

What have been your experiences in any of the countries I have covered?

What other countries would you like to visit?

Any views you have of what any of the governments of countries I have visited, particularly what they have done, or have not done, to improve the lives of their people?

I will be keen to read and answer any comments.

Philip Luker

Four up-and-coming citizens in still-troubled South Africa

October 31, 2019 — Leave a comment

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

I photographed these children in a childcare centre in Khayelitsha, one of the world’s biggest slums, in Cape Town.

They look happy and I will give them happy names (from the left), Ayo (meaning full of joy), Nuru (filled with light), Abby (my father’s delight) and Jubulani (rejoice).

They have reason to be happier than if they were born in the days before Apartheid ended in 1949, when all black people were officially second-class citizens and prevented from moving outside their district.

South African black poverty, AIDS and HIV

South African black poverty was worse in 2018 than in 2011 and the main reasons are unemployment (27.2 per cent in 2018) and AIDS.

In 2017, 7.2 million South Africans were infected with HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS.

This was 18.8% of adults and includes 280,000 children who had got HIV from their mothers.

In that year, there were 270,000 new infections and 110,000 AIDS-related deaths.

Sixty-one per cent of the adults were getting antiretroviral treatment (the only way for a victim to have a reasonable life) and so were 58% of the children, in the world’s biggest antiretroviral program.

South Africa’s successive bad governments

Bad government under two of Nelson Mandela’s successors as President are largely responsible:

1) Thabo Mbeki refused to accept that a virus causes AIDS and claimed poverty and malnutrition did so—Harvard University research said his attitude caused 300,000 deaths.

2) The next President, Jacob Zuma, claimed a shower would minimise the risks of getting it. And these men were running South Africa!

The next government, under President Cyril Ramaphosa, has campaigned against HIV and AIDS.

Cyril was Nelson Mandela’s choice as successor, which is one of his best points.

He says corruption is at the root of South Africa’s ailing economy, although he himself has been accused of corruption from coal deals.

He says land reform and the economy are his priorities and Parliament has the authority to take over white farmers’ land without compensation.

Sixty-seven per cent of arable land is still in white hands

If the previous Apartheid government had not kept Nelson Mandela in prison for 27 years, South Africa would have had no reason for Mbeki and Zuma

Mandela’s progressive, empathetic policies might have saved South Africa a lot of misery and death and given Ayo, Nuru, Abby and Simba a better future

In their massive slum, one happy story is about Maria “Auntie Marie” Matthews, a firebrand in her late sixties who has driven a community project to bring water, electricity and toilets to every shack in her street, changing the lives of 400 people.

She said, “We had to dig holes to go to the toilet. It was like a pigsty.” She decided things had to change and she changed them.

The childcare centre where I photographed Ayo, Nuru, Abby and Simba is run by its community.

There is a wide variation in the standard of schools the children might go to, between fee-free schools, public private schools (which would cost their parents money) and private schools (even more money).

But 58 per cent of South African children go to upper secondary schools.

Life expectancy is 57 years in South Africa

Life expectancy in South Africa is 57 years, compared with the world’s lowest, 49.8 years in Chad and the highest, 89.5 years in Monaco.

The under-five mortality rate of 34 per cent has stayed the same since 1990, which says a lot about the government.

South Africa has been a racist country since the first white immigrants arrived in 1652 from Holland to what would become Cape Town.

Eighty one percent of South Africans are black

Black Africans had lived there for thousands of years. Now, 81 per cent of South Africans are black, and the white population has fallen to 7.8 per cent.

If white South Africans emigrate leave South Africa, they can take with them up to $A1million (about $U.S. 700,000) a year.

Seventy-eight thousand white South Africans have emigrated to the United States and others to Australia and elsewhere.

Now at least racism is not official and 60 per cent of South Africans say race relations have improved.

Wish Ayo, Nuru, Abby and Simba a better future than their parents or grandparents had.

Nine smiling black schoolgirls in cosmopolitan Harlem, New York

October 20, 2019 — Leave a comment

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

Wandering through Harlem in New York City, I saw these schoolgirls on their lunchbreak.

I asked a teacher if I could take their picture as a visitor to New York. “Of course.” I took the picture. The girls asked where I was from and I replied, “Australia.”

They asked questions about Australia, which they obviously knew little about, and I asked questions about their life in Harlem.

It was the kind of “getting to know you” exchange I want to achieve in this blog.

Harlem in the 1920s

Harlem and East Harlem are next door neighbourhoods but different. Both have a rich, diverse but sometimes violent history.

Harlem in the 1920s became a symbol of African Americans’ struggle for civil and economic equality but also a flourishing centre for black culture.

It is the world’s black mecca, although now ten per cent of Harlem people are white.

Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Sammy Davis Jnr, Fats Waller and Paul Robeson were born there. So was stride jazz.

It used to be a white neighbourhood. The white gangster Owen Madden opened the Cotton Club in 1923 and served his white audience beer in coffee cups during the prohibition era.

620,000 Americans killed in its bloody Civil War

Harlem’s rhythms were the lackadaisical rhythms of a transplanted minority.

The Civil War from 1861 to 1865 killed 620,000 Americans – almost as many as in all wars since then – and thousands of blacks facing harsh racial prejudice in the Southern States moved north.

The 1950s, 60s and 70s were bad and dangerous times not only in Harlem but in Manhattan overall.

By 1950, white people had left Harlem and black gangs replaced the mafia. The Harlem murder rate rose to six times the U.S. average.

Many of the gangs were based in housing blocks. When a gang member was killed by another gang, revenge violence could last for years. In the 1990s, aggressive policing slashed the crack wars

Since then, there has been a resurgence of neighbourhood pride.

Now, go by bus up Fifth Avenue (the street of Saks and Bergdorf Goodman fashionable department stores) and in one block it becomes Harlem, which in the 1960s was a risky place to walk but is now pleasant and perfectly safe, certainly in daylight.

It is known for its jazz clubs and soul food shops and its mix of 19 th Century brownstone terraces and modern high-rise apartment blocks.

Harlem has been surveyed, explored and exploited for decades and is considered the most interesting part of New York City.

Its fame is international and its personality is individual and unique.

How big is Harlem?

It is only 25 blocks long and seven blocks wide but there is no comparable black settlement anywhere, just as there is no city like New York.

From 5pm to past midnight, Seventh Avenue in Harlem is one electric-lit line of brilliance and activity.

Harlem’s main street, 125 th Street, has been gentrified.

East Harlem is part-black but mostly Latin American, full of immigrants and their descendants from Puerto Rica, Dominica, Cuba, Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

It has contributed to Latin Freestyle and Salsamusic.

The Puerto Ricans have established bodegas (small stores) and botanicas (herb stores).

How many black Americans say they face discrimination?

The schoolgirls I photographed in Harlem don’t suffer discrimination as bad as their parents and grandparents did in the Deep South but 87 per cent of black Americans say black people face a lot of discrimination whereas only 49 per cent of white people say the same.

Blacks receive longer prison terms than white people for the same crimes; blacks take the topic a lot more seriously than whites do; discrimination is prevalent in health care, education and real estate.

It all started when white settlers, mostly from Britain, took 350,000 black slaves from Africa between 1619 and 1866.

Slavery was abolished in New York State in 1799 and later in other states but its effects last to this day, although less in Harlem than elsewhere, in the country that boasts of its freedoms and opportunities for everyone.

Mother-to-be Binti looks enviously at a Congo toyshop window

October 7, 2019 — Leave a comment

By Australian journalist Philip Luker

I took her picture in Lubumbashi, the second biggest city in the so-called Democratic Republic of Congo, which is far from being democratic.

It is the world’s richest country for minerals, the world’s poorest country for average annual income per person ($A394) and according to the Save the Children Fund the toughest country for mothers.

Malaria death rates in the Congo

One in thirty mothers like Binti die in childbirth. One province, North Kivu, has three practicing gynaecologists for 800,000 people.

Women average six births each, illustrating the worldwide need for a massive contraception campaign organised by the United Nations and backed by all governments and particularly by the Catholic Church and Islam.

Nineteen per cent of the Congo’s children under five die from malaria. Most people do not have access to clean water.

The Congo has gone downhill since the British explorer Henry Stanley was sent by King Leopold 11 of Belgium in 1871 to find the missing explorer David Livingstone.

Stanley’s welcome, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume,” went into history.

How many people were killed in the Congo genocide?

The criminal king claimed Congo as his personal territory and sent his soldiers there to kidnap Congolese men to work as slaves to mine Congo’s wealth.

Of 5,000 government jobs before independence, only three were held by local people and there was not a single Congolese lawyer, doctor, economist or engineer when the Belgians packed their bags and returned to Belgium.

They left the country they had taken over for plunder with no administration and no skilled professional or tradespeople.

Second biggest city in the Congo: Lubumbashi

Binti’s home town used to be called Elizabethville, named by the king after his wife.

It is Congo’s mining centre for copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt, uranium, oil and coltan, a key component of mobile phones. But only foreign mining companies and crooked local politicians have benefitted.

Trainloads of copper go straight from foreign-owned mines to the border. Now as Lubumbashi, Binti’s city has 1.5million people and is Congo’s second biggest city after its capital Kinshasa, the world’s poorest city.

Kinshasa used to be called Leopoldville, which the king named after himself.

Congo has had almost continual civil war since independence in 1960. It is the bloodiest war since World War II. Six million people have died from the war or because of the disease and malnutrition it caused.

Congo has few public services. Health and education have declined since the war started.

The stunted chidlren in the Congo

The plight of women like Binti and children like the one she is expecting is terrible: Congo has the world’s second-highest rate of infant mortality after nearby Chad.

Thirty per cent of children under five are malnourished and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund says 43.5 percent of children under five are stunted.

In March 2018 the UN estimated that two million Congo children risk starvation.

Mobutu Sese Seko ruled Congo from 1965 to 1997 and temporarily renamed it Zaire.

A relative told the sordid story of how he collected money for himself and his family.

“Mobutu would ask one of us to go to the bank and take out a million. We’d go to an intermediary and tell him to get five million. He would go to the bank with Mobutu’s authority and take out ten million. Mobutu would get one and we would get the other nine”

Of all Africa’s corrupt politicians, Mobutu was probably the worst.

The governments of neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda sent soldiers into Congo to get rid of Mobutu and he died of prostate cancer in Morocco in 1997.

But peace and prosperity from its huge mineral wealth did not come to the Congo.

Warring tribes started a civil war. There are now many soldiers in Congo but no effective government, more than 19,000 UN peacekeepers but no peace and countless armies with no real purpose except plunder.

If you ever feel life has not been kind to you, think of Binti and the millions like her, born in a country raped for plunder from King Leopold to the present day.

Shanghai is a notorious, rebellious, hectic old and young city

September 30, 2019 — Leave a comment

Australian journalist Philip Luker continues his photographic and pen pictures of life with a city and a country that has changed more than any others, Shanghai and China.

When his father, Sidney Luker, planned the sewerage of Shanghai’s English Concession in 1920, garbage trucks used to pick up the bodies of dead beggars.

Now Shanghai has the same population as the whole of Australia (24 million) and China is a modern, powerful, prosperous enterprise-driven dictatorship with few personal freedoms.

The rest of the world wonders and worries what China will do next.

Shanghai is the home of the three boys I have photographed, Hung (meaning courageous), Jin (gold) and Li (strong).

Chinese Communist Party

Shanghai was where the Chinese Communist Party was founded in what was then the French Concession, in 1921, one year after my father Sidney Luker began two years’ work as a civil engineer planning the sewerage of the British Concession.

Opium Wars

The British, French and American Governments had demanded that China allow them to administer parts of the city after China was defeated in the Opium Wars from 1839 to 1860 and Britain flooded China with opium to weaken it and make trading one-sided.

China’s economic and trading centre: What a contrast with now, when governments around the world worry what China will do next.

Shanghai thumbs its nose at China’s own government in Beijing because Shanghai is China’s economic and trading centre.

Even after the government decreed that China should dress in boring blue cotton, women in Shanghai dressed a little more provocatively, even sexily.

Shanghai has always been the forerunner of new Chinese styles in values, fashions and customs.

One Child Policy in 1980

Hung, Jin and Li have benefited from the government concentrating on feeding and educating children.

The one-child policy in 1980, which resulted a high abortion rate (336 million babies were aborted) has now been replaced by a two-child policy: Too few workers were supporting people living longer because of better medical care and China needed army recruits

It also benefitted me after I fell ill travelling by train in “hard” (second) class on my first of three visits to China for four days from Guangzhou (Canton) to Beijing.

Doctors kept visiting me in my hospital bed because they had then seen so few western patients.

On the train, I asked a fellow traveller who spoke English what was the tune played constantly on the train’s loudspeaker system.

He replied, “We are determined to liberate Taiwan.” It is still China’s policy. I hope, for peace’s sake, it is never carried out.

In so many other ways, China has been transformed into a modern, powerful, prosperous, enterprise-driven dictatorship with 18 per cent of the world’s population.

Young people in China like Hung, Jin and Li socialise with each other much less than those in the west, partly because they are very much urged by their parents and the government to study and work hard.

So they suffer more from stress.

But they are much more exposed to the outside world than young Chinese used to be.

They are spoilt, like young people in the west, particularly if they were born in the one-child period.

Young Chinese now have few ties to the Mao era after the 1949 revolution.

Shanghai property prices

Old streets like the one I photographed are being replaced by huge government and private-developer blocks of flats, each flat costing about $Australian 1.5million or $ 1U.S.million or a million Euros.

Shanghai property prices rose by a third in 2018.

Shanghai people working six days a week for the Shanghai minimum monthly wage of $A509 ($U.S. 363)—and Shanghai’s minimum is the highest in China—have to rent their accommodation or live with their parents, as many do.

They have only one day off a week and five paid holidays a year.

The government retains some memories of the Shanghai of my father’s day, such as “Chinese are not allowed” signs in a park and a swing band I visited in a bar: The band was dressed in dinner jackets and played current western hits while young couples made expensive drinks last as long as possible.

The decadent Shanghai of my father was known as the Paris of the East and was nothing like the Shanghai of today.

The famous Bund is still lined with western banks. But “cap in hand” they now seek business in the booming Chinese economy that their grandfathers’ banks dominated.

In the 70 years since Mao’s Long March in 1949, no country has changed more than China and no city more than Shanghai.

Hung, Jin and Li have no more freedom than their grandparents had when the Kuomintang guards used to beat-up any opposition citizens. But they now live much better.

Serene Mother Born to Himalayan Hardship in Nepal

September 22, 2019 — Leave a comment

Australian journalist Philip Luker took this photo of a Sherpa family in Lukla, which has the world’s most dangerous airport and is where most Himalayan treks start. Hardy Sherpas guide the trekkers and carry their gear, to supplement their meagre incomes from growing crops on harsh, very cold mountainsides. They are friendly, caring, likeable people.

The Sherpa people of the Himalayas laugh a lot, although they don’t have a lot to laugh about.

They work hard, when they find work to do. Their work is trying to grow crops in pockets of infertile land on the harsh, cold Himalayan slopes; carrying their own needs in a country with hardly any roads; carrying trekkers’ gear; and catering for trekkers with weak tea, dull food and huts made of stone and wood.

They are the porters and labourers of Nepal, a country dominated by the Nepalese, who are the traders and employers and are similar to Indians.

The world’s most dangerous airport

I took this photo of a Sherpa mother, who I will call Dechen (meaning health and happiness) and her three boys, Dawa (meaning born on a Monday), Torma (magic stone) and Temba (good) at Lukla, a village with the world’s most dangerous airport. Its height is 2,890 metres (9,380 feet), only a third of Mt Everest’s height at 8,848 metres (29,029 feet).

Lukla has one short, sloping landing strip. So the two-propeller planes from Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, pull up very quickly and when they take off they run quickly down the hill over a steep valley.

Flying to Lukla is the only way to climb the Himalayas without walking for three days from crowded, hectic Kathmandu, with a million people, to Lukla before you start to climb. The airport has no landing devices so everything depends on the pilot and what he can see from the cockpit.

More than 500 years ago the Sherpas, a group of Tibetan Buddhists, walked over the Himalayas into what is now Nepal to be closer to Mt Everest, the mountain they hold sacred as Goddess Mother of the Earth. The closer I got to Mt Everest, the more its awesome sight cast a spell over me, unlike any feeling I have ever had.

There are now about 40,000 Sherpas in Nepal. Tibetans still walk across the Himalayas to trade in Nepal, mostly at Namche Bazaar, the last town on the usual way up Everest via Tengboche Monastery and Everest Base Camp.

What Sherpas earn for Everest treks

In her younger days Mother Dechen would have carried up to three European trekkers’ gear on her back for days on end.

In the male-dominated Sherpa society, she probably did not learn English, whereas her brothers probably did so, became guides and did not have to carry trekkers’ gear.

Several members of a Sherpa family are often away for a week or more, carrying trekkers’ gear, setting up camp for them in tents or huts, for a handful of dollars a day. But Sherpas earn about $3,000 for an Everest trek.

Dechen and her boys live in a two-storey house made of stone and timber, the timber being cut from the diminishing forests. Stones collected from the countryside are fixed together with cement and mud. Small windows are made in the walls and fitted with glass to keep out the cold.

Temperatures in Nepal

Nepal is cold! Temperatures in Nepal in January, when I was there, ranged from minus 18deg C to plus 4deg.

The ground floor of Dechen’s house, seen behind her in the photo, serves as a storeroom and shelter for livestock, such as the big, gentle yaks that carry the heaviest trekkers’ gear, tents and cooking utensils.

Wooden steps lead up to the main living room with benches around the walls for sitting in daytime and sleeping at night.

Sherpa living standards: The Sherpas have, of course, raised their living standards by helping trekkers but the increasing flow of trekkers has generated a warm feeling between trekkers and Sherpas not based only on money.

A friendly people

Sherpas are friendly people, not as sharp in making money as the Nepalese and more devoted to serving others—the Nepalese and the trekkers.

They know the trekkers have helped their country and try to help them wherever possible without asking for handouts or tips.

A few Sherpa children asked me for sweets or money but not nearly as often as Nepalese children did in Kathmandu. The Sherpas and Nepalese live separate lives but in peace.

Almost every Sherpa I passed on a track each morning gave me a “Nameste” (good morning) greeting.

Along each track to Namche Bazaar I found teahouses set up for trekkers and Sherpas to have a break.

I needed it, especially as I suffered from altitude sickness, unlike the Sherpas, who are born at high altitudes.

Dechen and her boys suffer from lack of education and medical and dental care in Lukla, which in spite of the flow of trekkers is still a village with a few hundred people.

Both the birthrate and deathrate are high among Sherpas although I saw few people with serious illnesses, probably because the Sherpas are not only friendly but hardy people. I like them.

Little Badru Looks: What’s Going on in Zanzibar?

September 22, 2019 — 1 Comment

Australian journalist Philip Luker tells how Zanzibar has evolved over 20,000 years of human history from being one of the world’s biggest and most horrific slave ports to become a happy, safe and tourist-favourite island with comparatively high living standards. Its street food market is a boisterous hub of colour, noises and smells.

Badru might not know it but his home town on an island off the African East Coast has 20,000 years of human history.

He lives in Zanzibar’s Stone Town, which blends the cultures of Arabs, Africans and Europeans.

Its whitewashed buildings are made of stone and wood; its Teak doors are elaborately-carved like the one behind Badru. Most buildings are set around a courtyard.

Zanzibar was also the birthplace of the late Queen frontman, Freddie Mercury.

Zanzibar is my favourite place in Africa, partly because it is the safest. It attracts so many European backpackers and other tourists.

Stone Town’s higgledy-piggledy streets—too narrow for vehicles—are safe to walk in at any time of the day or night. It is fun getting lost.

That is not the case in Dar es Salaam, 90 minutes away by ferryboat, the biggest city of Tanzania.

Dar es Salaam has a population of five million people. There, I was worried about walking alone at night.

The shortest declared war

Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous island in Tanzania. It has a unique distinction which I wish other nations would copy: The shortest declared war in history (38 minutes) happened there on August 25, 1896, when the puppet Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini died three days after the British appointed him, poisoned by his cousin Sultan Khalid bin Barghash.

The cousin tried to take over.

The British didn’t like him and told him to quit. When, 38 minutes later, he had not, they fired at his palace from gunships in the harbour and the palace collapsed.

Sadly for this masterpiece of British sabre-rattling, 500 Africans and Arabs died in or around the palace, which has since been restored.

Sultan Khalid sought asylum in Dar es Salaam, which was then part of German East Africa, and died in Mombasa, Kenya, in 1927. The British gave Tanzania independence in 1963.

Zanzibar slave trade

Many former residents of Zanzibar have had a far worse time than the sacked sultan. Until 1873, it had a flourishing slave trade: 30,000 men and women were shipped in dhows from around Africa and imprisoned in appalling conditions, tied up and whipped before being sold in an open slave market that still stands.

Up to 75 slaves at a time were held in windowless cellars with no food, fresh air or toilets.

Street food market

Zanzibar’s street food market is a boisterous hub of colour, noises and smells. Besides tourism, spices are its lifeblood: cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg.

The language of Zanzibar and elsewhere in East Africa is Swahili. The people eat seafood and curry if they can afford it, which, in spite of the tourist trade, unfortunately many can’t.

Zanzibar has three universities but 12% of the children are malnourished, although the World Bank says extreme poverty fell by 1% between 2010 and 2015. The Tanzania Government takes a lot of Zanzibar’s tourism profits.

Zanzibar religious denominations

Black Africans comprise more than half the population but they, Arabs, Indians and Europeans live in peace together, a good lesson for the rest of mankind. Zanzibar religious denominations: Most of the 200,000 people are Muslim; a small minority are Christian. Many Arab women cover their hair but never their faces.

Zanzibar was not always peaceful: A month after Britain gave it independence in 1963, a Ugandan man, John Okello, staged a revolution to take power from the Arab-Asian ruling class, which had held it for 200 years.

Okello mobilised 600 revolutionaries, overthrew the Sultan and appointed an African, Abeid Karume, as head of state. Karume engineered a merger with Tanganyika to form Tanzania.

All this happened long before little Badru (meaning Full Moon in Swahili) was born. He lives a better life than people in many war-torn countries.

Four Children at Peace Together in a Brazilian Racial Melting Pot

September 21, 2019 — Leave a comment

Australian journalist Philip Luker was walking through a street in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, when four children of three different races spontaneously put their hands together as he took their picture.

It was a sign of races living together in a vibrant city, although informal racism divides Brazilian society.

Luker describes life in Sao Paulo, where a third of the 12 million people live in slums but most do not want police to visit because they kill one person for every 23 arrests.

Two of these children I photographed un-posed in a street in Sao Paulo are black; the girl is of mixed white and American Indian heritage, locally called Pardo; the other boy is of white Portuguese descent.

Let’s call them Gabriel, Julia, Victor and Luiz.

They are happy playing together, like children of mixed race usually are worldwide, and their racial harmony is a lesson to adults everywhere.
Brazil is structurally not racist, but informally is.

The waiter who serves you in a restaurant is usually white, but the person doing your washing-up is probably Pardo or more likely black.

Last country to abolish slavery

The Portuguese who colonised Brazil in the 1500s imported four million slaves from Africa, more than twice the number imported by the British into the United States, and Brazil was the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery, in 1888.

But Brazil did not set up laws and rules for coloured people, as America did, and Brazil’s easy-going nature helps racial integration.

Mixed-race couples are common. But non-white people earn about 60% of the wages of white people in the same job.

Black Awareness Day

On November 20 every year, Brazil celebrates Black Awareness Day. Brazilians say their discrimination is based on class more than colour, but Sao Paulo’s wealthy suburbs are almost entirely white and its favelas (slums) are Pardo or black.

Sao Paulo, which means Saint Paul, is in all ways a melting-pot city. It houses people from more than a hundred countries; with 12 million people, it is the largest Portuguese-speaking city in the world and has more people than any other American city (New York City has nine million); also, Brazil is the only Latin American country where Portuguese is the main language.

Sao Paulo has seven million cars and not only its roads but its whole infrastructure is chaotic. The city authorities do little to make life more pleasant, although almost all the favelas now have access to clean water and electricity. Close to a third of Sao Paulo’s people live in favelas.

Ironically, the biggest is Paraisopolis, literally “Paradise City.” But I found many good points in Sao Paulo: It has amazing mortadella sandwiches, exotic markets, artistic graffiti on many buildings and a good Museum of Modern Art; the samba was born in Brazil; buskers perform in the main streets of Sao Paulo and you can buy and consume alcoholic drinks anywhere.

Brazilians, like most Latin Americans, are expressive and exuberant; they love music, eating, drinking and throwing their arms around.

But like elsewhere in Latin America, drug gangs like the Red Command control many favelas and the people often do not want the police to enter because amazingly they kill one person in every 23 arrests.

Most people believe in the Devil

Almost everyone in Brazil is Catholic and the country has more Catholics than any other country. 97% of Brazilians believe in God and 75% believe in the Devil.

But in contrast with many other Catholic countries, same-sex marriage was legalised in 2012 and Sao Paulo has the world’s largest gay parade.

Forbes magazine says that in 2002, when Lula da Silva was elected president, 12.3% of Brazil’s population lived below the World Bank’s poverty line of $1.90 a day but by 2013, this had fallen to 4.8%.

Lula became one of the world’s most popular politicians but in 2018 was sent to jail for taking bribes. He and his Workers’ Party are still popular among the poor.

Compulsory voting

In 2018, a far-right former army captain, Jair Bolsonaro, was elected President, as both head of state and head of the government.

Brazil, like Australia, is one of the world’s 13 countries with compulsory voting. Gabriel, Julia, Victor and Luiz, who I photographed in Sao Paulo, have to attend school because primary-school education is free and compulsory, but after age 15 the percentage attending school drops to three-quarters.

Brazilian education, like most public services, is not great, although the same could be said about education in most countries.
The three coloured children, Gabriel, Julia and Luiz, will probably find life
tougher than the white boy, Victor, but no more so than most coloured people in the United States and some other countries.

Australia tolerates, even welcomes, coloured people from other countries but has a bias against its own coloured original inhabitants, aboriginals.

Martin Luther King said: “I have a dream that my four children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their characters.”

I wish the same dream for Pedro, Julia, Victor and Luiz, of Sao Paulo.

A Strong Young Zambian with Energy Going to Waste

August 24, 2019 — Leave a comment

Australian journalist Philip Luker describes how this strong young man he photographed in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, has plenty of energy going nowhere; and how the governments of African countries like Zambia could use marketing graduates to find value-added industries based on food production to create new businesses and new jobs for Zambians now living on less than a dollar a day.

Daniel seems to ask me, as I photograph him in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia in Central Africa, “Who? Me?” He is probably one of the 14 million Zambians living on less than a dollar a day, out of the total population of 18 million.

Washing cars in Lusaka’s main street for pennies

Daniel was one of the many young men I saw standing and sitting doing nothing in the main street of Lusaka and offering to wash the cars of the comparatively-wealthy black and white people who had parked cars in the street.

It was a strikingly-similar scene to what I have witnessed in many other poor countries, the only difference being that elsewhere, men and women with little stalls tried to sell produce or household items on the streets, but all offered the same items at the same prices. They did not follow a basic rule of marketing: Find something that people want to buy but which others do not offer.

One of the simplest and less-expensive ways the governments of poor countries could create industries and jobs for their people would be to find an experienced, skilled marketing person, or to ask their London or Washington embassies to find one, to live for a time in their countries to advise the governments what value-added industries it should set up to produce articles that would be in demand at prices less than they are available elsewhere in the world.

Farming in Zambia: Farming is by far Zambia’s biggest industry, but carefully-selected crops could have value added in factories set up with government help, as long as research and marketing campaigns chose what products would find markets in other African countries or overseas.

Like Daniel with his inquisitive look at me taking his photo, Zambians are full of energy that is going nowhere benefitting them or their country, which is a great shame. Black Africans make up 80 per cent of Zambia’s population.

Poverty in Zambia: Britain made Northern Rhodesia independent in 1964, when it had the strongest economy in sub-Saharan Africa, but today as independent Zambia, more than 70% of the people are poor, like Daniel. Cecil Rhodes became one of the world’s wealthiest people after he founded the British South Africa Company, which from 1899 to 1924 ruled Northern Rhodesia as a Crown colony.

One large fault of socialism is that it does not create enterprise

Kenneth Kaunda, who was aged 94 in 2019, was elected President of Zambia from independence in 1964 until 1991 after he led the struggle for independence. His father was a Church of Scotland minister and he was one of eight children, and to this day Christianity is strong in Zambia. He is a socialist and his government took majority stakes in key foreign-owned companies, which curbed investment. Capitalism has many faults but one large fault of socialism is that it does not create enterprise.

Poverty in Zamia has been caused by decades of economic decline and neglected infrastructure. It is rooted in historical geographical factors and also in government corruption. Zambia has the world’s ninth richest copper deposits but the mining companies and some government members have benefitted, not the people.

The black and the few white elite live in Western style, using energetic people like Daniel to clean their cars and work in their homes or if they are lucky, in tourist businesses, catering for Zambia’s million tourists a year. The main attractions are game parks and the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi (“Great”) River separating Zambia and Zimbabwe. The falls are known to Zambians as “The Smoke that Thunders.”

Mud huts with thatched rooves: Outside Lusaka, most people live in mud huts with hatched rooves. There is much unemployment and under-employment for people like Daniel. Many skilled people have left the country. Often one family member with a job or small business supports the others.

Almost half of all Zambians cannot read or write

Women do much of the manual work, often carrying their babies on their backs. A little over half the Zambians can read and write and well under half the women. Few children have what we would call toys. Most make do with what they find in the streets to play with, like using pebbles to play marbles. Shopping malls cater for the wealthy; most people buy what they need, when they have any money, at little stalls along the streets and roads, most of the stalls selling the same goods at the same prices.

Homosexuality illegal in Zambia: Seventy-three languages are spoken in Zambia but English is the official language and Christianity is the main and official religion. Homosexuality is illegal in Zambia. HIV, Aids and tuberculosis are the main causes of death. Life expectancy is 62, twenty years less than in Australia.

Few African governments devote much effort and resources to giving people like Daniel a better and more fulfilled life than one of finding cars to clean for a few cents.