Africa Leads

The capacity to tell good stories and to create lovely things is part of survival. This, about the !Kung Kalahari desert people, from the NY Times Science section, in an interview with anthropologist Pauline Weissner, explains how it works. She also postulates that this capacity was what allowed humans to move out of Africa in the first place.

Africa's natural resources continue to be exploited by richer regions of the world, and thereby further impoverishing Africa's own environment and the people who have depended on them for millennia. Now it's the baobab tree, which almost all of us surely encountered for the first time in Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. His own planet was too small for the baobab to flourish ....

It's been the annual DanceAfrica dance festival here. The author tells us he's ignorant of the vast variety of African dances. Accordingly, he's also ignorant of the music, so his description doesn't help too much. Part of his criticism is that the festival didn't include dances from East Africa, Egypt and Morocco. The title of the festival, "Rhythmic Reflection: African Legacies Revealed," refers to the Atlantic slave trade into the New World. Thus groups from these regions weren't part of the slave diaspora to the New World. Maybe he should read Cuba and Its Music?