Safari Notes

Rebel, Revolutionary, Freedom-fighter, Leader, Statesman, Legend, Icon, Saint - all these can be used to describe the One and Only: Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela . He is comparable to no other leader in Africa or out of it. For a man to have spent 27 years incarcerated for no crime but because he dared speak out his mind; he dared struggle and fight for justice, equality and honor for his own majority citizens - for that man to be released from that prison and still be so humble, kind, forgiving, merciful and magnanimous to friends and foes, and those who hated and imprisoned him; and for that man to rule the country he set free for only four years and then had over power; for that man to treat all alike and equally, be they foes or friends or children or servants or heads of states; for that man, for most of his life until recently, to wake up each morning and still make his bed - these will go down in history as one of Mandela's greatest legacies and gifts to his Rainbow Nation an...

Bena Nakijoba, fondly and respectfully called Jaja ba all - is seventy two years old. Very few life stories are as touching, as moving and as dramatic as Jaja's. She went to school up to the 6th grade; she got married at age fifteen; she was barren, could not conceive and so her husband broke-up with her; she then got a job looking after children of expatriates; and after three years looking after the children, she left and moved to Katanga, Kampala in 1971. In 1971, Katanga was small and had very few people; but through the years it has grown up too fast, become over-populated and is one of the worst slums in East Africa. For the last forty or so years, Jaja has been opening her doors in Katanga and her heart to abandoned children and caring for them. At first, it was those of working parents who would live their children with her, for a little pay, while they worked. Then, in the early 1980s - with war raging around Uganda, people, mainly young girls who mistakenly got pregnant,...

Ramah Nyang On Africa, few business news presenters are as persuasive and as absorbing to watch as CCTV Africa Live's Ramah Nyang. In fact, of all Africa Live's presenters and correspondents, he is the most articulate, with the best speech delivery and with the clearest presentation. And is the real unsung star of Africa Live. Business news can be very boring, but Nyang makes it interesting and informative. He does a great job in delivering commercial news and makes one watch. As young as he is, if he continues for long in the field of business news, Ramah Nyang - with his distinct style, with time and experience - will go far and undoubtedly rise and could be as dynamic and as internationally known and commanding as CNN's Richard Quest (the present real shining star of CNN) and the BBC's Aaron Heslehurst.

Photos: PhotBlog

Whatever might be said about Michael Jackson , whatever one might think of him - one thing is certain: he defined an era. As for his lifestyle, it's not for us mortals to judge others; that is only God's prerogative. He will judge him the way He will judge each of us. One thing is certain too: Michael Jackson is a genius and undoubtedly one of the greatest musicians, one of the most talented entertainers and one of the best dancers of all time; and one of the top ten African American entertainers ever, right there with - Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, James Brown and Harry Belafonte. " Star of records, radio, rock video. A one-man rescue team for the music business. A songwriter who sets the beat for a decade. A dancer with the fanciest feet on the street. A singer who cuts across all boundaries of taste and style, and color too. " TIME Magazine 1984 "It's one of the greatest losses,...

"It is the people who must save the environment. It is the people who must make their leaders change. And we cannot be intimidated. So we must stand up for what we believe in." Wangari Maathai For any one who loves and cares for wildlife and the environment, the documentary: Taking Root - The Vision of Wangari Maathai is a must watch. TAKING ROOT: The Vision of Wangari Maathai tells the story of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organization encouraging rural women and families to plant trees in community groups, and follows Maathai, the movement’s founder and the first environmentalist and African woman to win the Nobel Prize. Maathai discovered her life's work by reconnecting with the rural women with whom she had grown up. They told her they were walking long distances for firewood, and that clean water was scarce. The soil was disappearing from their fields and their children were suffering from malnutrition. “Well, why not plant trees?” she suggested. Maat...

He is fast. Very fast. And in the ring, very smart and relentless. Unbeaten. And he is the greatest and best professional boxer today. He is not only the most popular sportsman in his home country, the Philippines but also he is the most admired person in that country. In boxing, he is undoubtedly on his way to becoming one of the all time greats; to rank as high as Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson.     More on Pacquiao: Official Website , LA Times , HBO , TIME , BoxRec , Boxing Gurus , Fan Site , Times Online , Wikipedia , News , Videos Image: GMANews

I read the report and have watched CNN"s revealed on Wangari Mathai , twice. Some of what Wangari said: "In any society, if there is no regulation, if there is no control, you will always get greedy and selfish people who are prepared to take the economy very far for their own selfish ends." "People get leaders they deserve," she continued. "So if they are getting leaders in Africa that are not caring about us, it's because they let them." "If we want a responsible leadership, the African people have to rise up and demand that kind of leadership from their leaders." "We see time and time again that the ruling elite are the least concerned about the poor and not only use the poor to argue their case, but when the money is available they're not paying attention to the issues that would make a difference in the lives of the poor people." Watch the very interesting and absorbing video on Wangari Mathai - here .

Any one who listens to African music or has followed South Africa's struggle for independence, will undoubtedly have heard of Mama Afrika . She is no longer with us: Miriam Makeba died on Sunday after a concert in Italy . What they say about the greatest songstress from South Africa: The sudden passing of our beloved Miriam has saddened us … For many decades, starting in the years before we went to prison, MaMiriam featured prominently in our lives and we enjoyed her moving performances. When she went into exile she continued to make us proud as she used her worldwide fame to focus attention on the abomination of apartheid. Her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us. She was a mother to our struggle and to the young nation of ours. Nelson Mandela ...the world was slightly better because of Makeba's serenading and was now poorer for her death......We give great thanks to God for this tremendous gift of Miriam Makeba. May she rest in peace and rise in glory. Our co...

Joachim Chissano won before ; now it's another South African leader who has scooped it again : "The coveted $5-million Mo Ibrahim Prize for African leadership has been conferred on former Botswana President Festus Mogae. He was rewarded on Monday for maintaining stability, prosperous path and leading the fight against AIDS. His efforts won Botswana the name 'the African Shining Jewel.' Mogae becomes the second recipient of the prestigious annual award. The Mo Ibrahim Award is the biggest individual prize in the world. The inaugural prize went to former Mozambican President Joachim Chisano last year. The Batwana are reportedly brimming with pride after Mogae is regarded internationally as an exemplary African leader who ensured that the tenet of democracy flourished under his rule, making Botswana a rare political and economic success story on the continent, VOA reported." AfricaNews

Retired American sprinter - Carl Lewis, one of the greatest athletes ever, is questioning Usain Bolt's incredible Beijing Olympics achievement: "..... for someone to run 10.03 one year and 9.69 the next, if you don't question that in a sport that has the reputation it has right now, you're a fool. Period." It has been a Jamaican love-in since Usain Bolt bestrode the Olympic Games and won a hat-trick of gold medals, but a voice from the past urged caution as the new sprint sensation was heralded as the king of Kingston. With Bolt in the throes of a national party after his homecoming this week, Carl Lewis said that his achievements are questionable. Times on Line Carl Lewis could be wrong; I very much hope so. But then, it's the same Carl Lewis who questioned Ben Johnson's wins way back in the late 1980s; but, as then - 1980s - Carl Lewis was losing to Ben Johnson, very few people could believe him. Carl Lewis was right. Then. Could he be right this time to...

Usain Bolt's feat at the Beijing Olympics, will awe and be talked about - for years and maybe - for generations to come. He has taken the sporting world by storm: "I blew my mind," he said, "and I blew the world's mind." His own blown mind should cause no worries -- it will be put back together with another night of prodigious sleep and perhaps some more Chicken McNuggets, his prerace meal of choice this week. But the world's mind may take some time to recover. Track and field, the Olympic Games and the sporting world at large witnessed something Wednesday that cannot quickly be processed, for it involved the utter rewriting of the laws of human athletic possibility. On a hot, steamy night that would have felt familiar in Kingston or the sugar cane fields of his native Trelawny, Bolt obliterated another world record, torching a world class field in the 200-meter dash in a time of 19.30 seconds, .02 of a second better than American Michael Johnson's ...

He is the fastest man on Earth and is nicknamed "The Lightning Bolt." He is Usain Bolt and has taken not only the athletics world by storm, but - the whole world. The old and the young, newsmen and laymen are all in awe of the super, amazing Jamaican. He is so fast, that many, including his competitors believe that he is using some form of drugs or is super-normal. Today, 'usain bolt' is one of the most searched terms on Google, Yahoo and all other international search engines. More on Bolt: TIME , IAAF , ABC.net , Sports Illustrated , Times On Line , Trackfield.about , Wikipedia , The Washington Post , YouTube , News

Graça Machel is a renowned international advocate for women’s and children’s rights, and has been a social and political activist for decades. She is President of the Foundation for Community Development (FDC), a not-for-profit Mozambican organisation she founded in 1994. The FDC makes grants to civil society organisations to strengthen communities, facilitate social and economic justice, and assist in the reconstruction and development of post-war Mozambique. In 1994, the Secretary General of the United Nations appointed Graça Machel as an independent expert to carry out an assessment of the impact of armed conflict on children. Her groundbreaking report was presented in 1996 and established a new and innovative agenda for the comprehensive protection of children caught up in war, changing the policy and practice of governments, UN agencies, and international and national civil society. More from The Elders More on Graca: BBC , niza.nl , UNICEF , UN Foundation , people.brandeis , ...

Mohammed Wardi began singing at the age of five; his first hit was in 1960, and he still has the most extraordinary effect on a Sudanese audience, having come to embody the collective memories and aspirations of an entire nation. Mohammed Wardi sings not only in Arabic but also in his native Nubian - a quite different sound from Ali Hassan Kuban - drawing on 7,000 years of culture. The soaring voice of "golden throat" Mohammed Wardi has won acclaim right across the African Sahel and the Arab world. Although this singer from Nubia is now in exile, his music always stirs emotion for many Sudanese, sometimes with directly political allusion - to the October 1964 popular uprising, for example - and sometimes more obliquely, but always with powerful resonance. He was born in 1932 near old Wadi Halfa. Schooled across the border in Egypt, he returned as an elementary school teacher, then moved to Khartoum in 1957 and became a professional singer two years later. Four decades and 30...

Very few people live their lives to the fullest and as whole and adventurous as Sir Edmund Hillary did. Not only did he, and his Sherpa guide, became the first to scale the 29,035-foot summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak; not only did he once 'dash' across the Antarctic; not only did he explore places where no human being had gone before and captured a world's imagination, but Sir Edmund too - is said to have been a humble, down to Earth man; a man who helped much in making a difference and positively changing lives of many in Nepal. May God rest his soul in Peace. Photo: ABC News

"A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at." "A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer." "As you think, so shall you become." "If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done." "Real living is living for others." More on Bruce Lee: All About Bruce Lee , TIME 100 , ocf.berkeley , The Divine Wind , The Bruce Lee Club , Wikipedia , Books Image: Bruce-lee.com

In 1992, in Nairobi, I was flipping through the TV channels looking for the news on CNN (aired through KTN, then); as I was about to flip on, further, some thing captured my attention on the KBC: a voice. The Voice. Singing on the TV, was a man. A man in dreadlocks. It was not the way he looked, that captured my attention first. Not the way he moved or danced. And not even the words he sang. But: the voice. It was unique; one of a kind; a voice that simply, I could not help wanting to listen on and on. But the song ended; rather too fast it seemed to me. I didn't know the man singing. I had never heard that voice before. Though I am not much in to reggae, I, like millions around the world, very much loved and still love, the late Bob Marley's music and revolutionary message. After Marley, there didn't seem any one else who could sing in reggae and completely capture my attention. Well, the song on TV had ended abruptly and after a few minutes, I seemed to have forgotten ab...

In the summer of 1960, 26-year-old Jane Goodall arrived on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in East Africa to study the area's chimpanzee population. Although it was unheard of for a woman to venture into the wilds of the African forest, the trip meant the fulfillment of Jane Goodall's childhood dream. Jane’s work in Tanzania would prove more successful than anyone had imagined. Read more...... Janegoodall.org More on Goodall: WIC , wibster.edu , pbs.org , Animal Discovery , janegoodall.ca , Wikipedia , Google Books , Google Scholar Image: Google

"The man who kills the animals today is the man who kills the people who get in his way tomorrow." "When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future." "I feel more comfortable with gorillas than people. I can anticipate what a gorilla's going to do, and they're purely motivated." More on Fossey: Gorilla Fund , The Goriolla Org. , webster.edu , unmuseum , mnsu.org , Boigraphy Channel Diane Fossey Googled: News , Books , Scholar , Video Image: rwandagateway.org