Study highlights forests’ capacity to regenerate themselves and will guide reforestation projects to help tackle climate crisis, researchers say
Over the past two decades, 59 million hectares of forest – an area equivalent to the size of France – have regenerated around the world with minimal human intervention, a new study shows.
Major hotspots where woodlands have recovered include parts of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, areas of northern Canada, central Africa and the boreal forests in Mongolia’s northern wilderness.
This area of forest has the potential to store the equivalent of 5.9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide – more than the annual emissions of the US.
The authors said forest regeneration is where “nature takes the lead”. Some areas require no human activity to help them regenerate, while others require invasive species or farm animals to be removed or fenced out of the area.
The research, which was based on satellite imaging and ground surveys, comes amid a growing awareness of the importance of tree cover in efforts to mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
The analysis was carried out by Trillion Trees, a joint venture between BirdLife International, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the WWF, which is aiming to “urgently speed up and scale up” forest regeneration, and is aiming to protect and restore one trillion trees by 2050.
An area roughly the size of the Netherlands has regrown in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest since 2000 (Getty)
As well as specific regeneration areas, the study’s authors said other reasons for forest expansion included more responsible industry practices and factors such as human migration towards cities.
The WWF’s William Baldwin-Cantello said allowing woodlands to naturally regenerate is often more effective than human efforts to bring back trees.
He said: “The science is clear: if we are to avoid dangerous climate change and turn around the loss of nature, we must both halt deforestation and restore natural forests.
“We’ve known for a long time that natural forest regeneration is often cheaper, richer in carbon and better for biodiversity than actively planted forests, and this research tells us where and why regeneration is happening, and how we can recreate those conditions elsewhere.”
But he warned that despite the good news the study highlighted, the rate of deforestation is still far outpacing that of regrowth, and called on the government to take action on supply lines which result in deforestation around the world.
He said: “We can’t take this regeneration for granted – deforestation still claims millions of hectares every year, vastly more than is regenerated.
“To realise the potential of forests as a climate solution, we need support for regeneration in climate delivery plans and must tackle the drivers of deforestation, which in the UK means strong domestic laws to prevent our food causing deforestation overseas.”
The researchers highlighted the Atlantic Forest in Brazil as one particular area which was seeing considerable regeneration. An estimated 4.2 million hectares – an area roughly the size of the Netherlands – has regrown since 2000.
In the boreal forests of Mongolia’s northern wilderness, the study suggests around 1.2 million hectares of forest have regenerated in the last 20 years. The study said this progress was partly due to the work of the WWF, as well as increased emphasis from the Mongolian government on protected areas.
The WWF warned that despite apparent momentum behind woodland restoration, in many cases, government plans “involve very limited expansion of natural forests, despite the strong climate and biodiversity benefits they offer”.
The authors of the study warn that encouraging signs of regeneration cannot be taken for granted. Forests across Brazil face significant threats today, even the Atlantic Forests – a recognised success story in restoration. Such is the extent of historic deforestation that the area of this unique forest still needs to more than double from currently 12 per cent of its original area to 30 per cent, in order to reach what scientists believe is a minimal threshold for its lasting conservation.
Naikoa Aguilar-Amuchastegui, senior director of forest carbon science at WWF, and who led the data analysis team said: “Even though this is an exploratory effort, it still highlights the potential that enabling and consolidating regeneration has for mitigating climate change and securing its biodiversity benefits. However, this remains difficult to map and a lot of additional work lies ahead.”
Trillion Trees said it is now planning to invite local groups and green funding organisations to work on new landscape restoration ventures, focusing on areas offering the maximum benefit for vulnerable ecosystems and local communities.
A new study by UK’s Intellectual Property Office has explored gender profiles in patenting across the world.
The research titled: ‘An analysis of female inventorship’, found that the highest share of female inventors are in Africa.
According to the study, Togo has the highest proportion of female involvement in patent applications from 1998 to 2017.
Female inventors in patent applications (statista)
Uganda is second in the world with 44.55 per cent followed by Europe’s Latvia in third place with 39.05 per cent.
Overall, there are five African nations on the list of the top 10 countries with the most female inventors.
Here are the top 10 countries with the highest number of female inventors:
Togo — 57.14%
Uganda — 44.55%
Latvia — 39.05%
Liberia — 38.89%
Rwanda — 37.50%
Cuba — 36.73%
Botswana — 35.71%
Sri Lanka — 34.22%
Papua New Guinea — 29.63%
Georgia — 29.56%
Female representation within inventors
Looking at the recent trends in female inventorship across the world, the report also found a slow but gradual increase in the number of female inventors in all global patent applications.
Before 1965, the share of female inventors in the world was generally between 2% and 3%. This has since grown from 6.8% in 1998 to 12.7% in 2017. Now, over one in five applications have at least one female inventor.
More women are applying for patents (Intellectual Property Office)
This indicates that a growing increase in the share of female inventors in patent applications across the globe.
Estimated tenth of the world’s population could be affected by most serious outbreak in 70 years, says International Rescue Committee
Close to five million people in East Africa could be at risk of famine and hunger as the ‘worst locust invasion in a generation’ continues to destroy crops, contaminate water sources and displace thousands of households, a new report has warned.
The infestation, which first appeared in the region last June and has already passed through a number of generation cycles, is feeding on hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops across at least eight countries, compounding an already dire food situation heightened by disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic and flooding.
As the most serious desert locust outbreak seen in East Africa in 70 years, an estimated tenth of the world’s population could be affected, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a global humanitarian and aid group. A total of 4.9 million people could be plunged into crisis-level food insecurity, the IRC added.
The outbreak is hitting Somalia the hardest, with Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and South Sudan also heavily impacted ( Getty Images )
And the IRC has warned that another round of hatching could produce swarms up to 8,000 times larger than the first generation, while calling for an increase in preventive measures to stop the locusts from ravaging crops and spreading across West Africa and to the Indo-Pakistan border.
Barri Shorey, senior director of economic recovery for the IRC, said: “The Desert Locust is the world’s most dangerous migratory pest.
“The worst outbreak in 70 years is combined with a year of drought and flooding, and now a Covid-19 pandemic preventing people from working and farming, poses an unprecedented risk to food security.
“Without an immediate increase of prevention measures, we could be on the verge of a famine like we have never seen before.”
A swarm of locusts just more than a third of a square mile can eat the same amount of food in one day as 35,000 people. The insects can travel about 90 miles a day and eat their own body weight in crops.
In Somali, which is still recovering from drought and massive flooding, more than half of the IRC’s supported communities have been affected by the latest infestation. Without immediate intervention, 3.5 million people in the country are expected to face a food crisis and 50-70 percent of cereal harvests could be lost.
Sahal Farah, community resilience committee vice chairman for Docol, an IRC partner organisation, said: “This is the worst locust invasion we have seen in our generation; it has destroyed pastures, contaminated water sources and displaced many pastoral households.
“The worst part is that we do not have the capacity to control it, and so far, we have not received any external support.”
Last month, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said significant gains had been made against locust encroachment in East Africa, with an estimated 720,000 tonnes of cereal saved from the swarms of migratory pests across 10 countries: enough to feed five million people a year.
However, agency chief Qu Dongyu stressed that more action is still needed to avert a food security crisis. “Our gains have been significant; but the battle is long and is not yet over”, he said. “More people are at risk of losing their livelihoods and worsening food security in the coming months.”
Few large groups of English speakers have borne as great a burden of stigma as black people. In the time of slavery, that stigma was enshrined in law—and even after emancipation, legal measures have been used to ensure that black people could not easily vote, could not access decent education and transportation, and so on. Since the civil rights era, many legal barriers to equality have been removed, but society has yet to catch up. As of the second decade of the twenty-first century, black people are almost five times as likely to be jailed as white people, despite making up only 13 percent of the population. It’s not surprising, then, that the dialect many black people speak is stigmatized, too—to such a great extent that it’s often denied the status of dialect, becoming merely “bad” English. That assumption has become so ingrained, it’s even taken up by some black people themselves.
“There is no such thing as ‘talking white’ … It’s actually called ‘speaking fluently,’ speaking your language correctly. I don’t know why we’ve gotten to a place where as a culture—as a race—if you sound as though you have more than a fifth-grade education, it’s a bad thing.” This was the argument of a young black woman whose video on the subject went viral in 2014. In her view, speaking what linguists call African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is not speaking “fluent” English. It is bad English—the kind of English that should be dispensed with by the time you’re eleven years old. As the journalist Jamelle Bouie wrote about the video, “the … ideas that black Americans disparage ‘proper English’ and education and use a ‘broken’ version of the language have wide currency among many Americans, including blacks.”
The funny thing is, most English-speaking people, wherever they live, are to some extent familiar with AAVE. That’s because of the powerful projection of black culture through movies and music, including the massive popularity of hip-hop. Despite being stigmatized in America itself, the dialect has cachet around the world, though arguably that’s because it’s seen as “edgy”—romanticized as the argot of gangsters and drug dealers. So when Britons or Australians read phrases like “I ain’t lyin,” “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it,” “He be workin’ hard,” they can identify the speaker as likely being black; they can conjure up the accent and intonation in their minds’ ear.
And yet because this dialect is one that’s very close to standard English, and is used by a group whose status is generally low, it gets branded as “sloppy speaking,” “slang,” or “ghetto.” The last label, although freighted with racial judgment, could at least make linguistic sense. We know that dialects emerge when there is geographical stasis. In areas of cities that are primarily black for a number of years, even decades, distinctive ways of speaking are likely to develop—more so given that the isolation is in this case both physical and social.
As Geoffrey K. Pullum makes clear in an article entitled “African American Vernacular English is not standard English with mistakes,” AAVE is a dialect no less complex or expressive than more prestigious forms of the language. It is rule-bound and systematic. It also happens to be the means of communication of a marginalized, often economically disadvantaged group of people.
In fact, AAVE possesses at least one fine grammatical distinction that standard English completely lacks. Pullum explains that there is a “remote present perfect” tense in AAVE, evident in expressions like “she been married,” where “been” is emphasized. This doesn’t just mean “she has been married,” but “she is married and has been for some considerable time.” In a similar way, the AAVE form “be” + present participle—“be walking,” “be singing,” et cetera—is often mistaken for the equivalent of the English present continuous tense: “is walking,” “is singing.” In fact, it marks what is called “habitual aspect”—meaning the action is performed as a rule, not necessarily right this minute. “He be singing” therefore means not “he is singing,” but “he sings [as a hobby, or professionally].”
Another distinctive feature of AAVE is the use of the double negative, as in: “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it.” In standard English, this would be “I haven’t ever seen anything like it.” What is the reason for a double-up like this? If you say “I ain’t never,” don’t the two phrases cancel each other out? Aren’t you saying you have in fact seen it? That’s one argument for why this is just “bad,” irrational, sloppy English—but it’s wrong.
What we’re seeing here is not logical negation but, as Pullum points out, a fairly common linguistic strategy called “negative concord”—negative agreement, in much the same way that, in French, nouns and the pronouns and adjectives used to describe them in a sentence must all agree in gender. Plenty of other languages have developed negative concord, for example Italian. “There is no one there” would be non c’e nessuno—literally “not is no one [there],” grammatically closer to the AAVE “ain’t nobody there.” It wouldn’t be plausible to accuse sixty million speakers of standard Italian of sloppiness or speaking in slang. So why would we do the same with AAVE?
AAVE often leaves out what linguists call the “copula”—that grammatical form of the verb “to be” (in other words, not the form that means “to exist,” as in “there once were dinosaurs,” or “to be equal to”—as in “God is love”). So a black speaker might say “How you doing?” or “You late.” But the standard forms of many languages do this—for example Arabic, where “You are late” is Anta muta’akhir—literally, “You late.”
None of these facts dampened the controversy in 1996 when the school board of Oakland, California, passed a motion addressing AAVE, which it called “Ebonics.” The board made clear it would recognize the dialect used at home by many of its pupils and would deploy it in the classroom, for example to “translate” standard English sentences so that students could understand them better. It is a mark of the stigmatization of AAVE that this move was met with fury, igniting a debate across the United States.
A widespread assumption was that it was an example of “political correctness gone mad,” where a clearly substandard form of the language was being elevated simply because it was used by black people. The desire to bend over backward to accommodate an ethnic group’s sensitivities was trumping the need to deliver a high-quality education to the students of Oakland. The move was condemned as dumbing down, and of depriving black students the means by which to improve themselves. It was criticized by pundits both black and white. The civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said: “While we are fighting in California trying to extend affirmative action and fighting to teach our children so they become more qualified for jobs, in Oakland some madness has erupted over making slang talk a second language. You don’t have to go to school to learn to talk garbage.”
Given just how disparaged AAVE is, it’s not surprising that it was viewed as “garbage.” And it’s certainly true, given the way such attitudes permeate the worlds of employment and higher education, that students who could not master standard English would be at a disadvantage. But would using AAVE in classrooms squeeze out standard English, or aid its speakers in getting to grips with the more prestigious variety?
Here’s what the Linguistic Society of America said in a 1997 resolution: “The systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and pronunciation patterns of the African American Vernacular has been established by numerous scientific studies over the past thirty years. Characterizations of Ebonics as ‘slang,’ ‘mutant,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘defective,’ ‘ungrammatical,’ or ‘broken English’ are incorrect and demeaning.” Not only that: “There is evidence from Sweden, the US, and other countries that speakers of other varieties can be aided in their learning of the standard variety by pedagogical approaches which recognize the legitimacy of the other varieties of a language. From this perspective, the Oakland School Board’s decision to recognize the vernacular of black students in teaching them Standard English is linguistically and pedagogically sound.”
In other words, using AAVE to help students acquire standard English actually speeds up that process. So why the fuss? Really, it just comes down to the closeness of AAVE to English—which enables it to be regarded as merely a sloppy version of the latter—combined with the extreme stigmatization of black people, such that symbols of their culture, including dialect, denote worthlessness. Among white people, anger at the normalization of AAVE might have been rooted in fears that it would, as a result, be in a better position to “contaminate” standard English.
Politics and language frequently collide in this way; how could they not? The way we speak becomes distinctive when we are separated from outside influences, either geographically, socially, or both. Over time, distinct dialects become powerfully symbolic of those networks. They can be badges of pride, or of shame. They can be elevated to the status of “language,” remain dialects, or get disparaged as slang. But these decisions are mostly sociopolitical, to do with stigma and status. The linguistic categorization starts with the idiolect—the forms of speech used by a single person. A collection of mutually intelligible idiolects forms a dialect. Where two dialects are not mutually intelligible, they are often called “languages”—unless there is a political or cultural reason not to regard them as such—as with Arabic, for example.
Languages don’t have hard borders. In places where populations have been stable for many centuries a dialect continuum can develop, as in southern Europe, where Italian blends into French and then to Spanish. So what is Italian? What is English, French or Spanish? Are they objects you can point to? Where do they begin and end?
In truth, of course, the mistake lies in taking languages to be “things,” analogous to objects. Once again, we find ourselves under the net. Because we can say “I learned Spanish” using the same syntax as “I kicked a ball,” we take the shorthand—Spanish is a “thing” that can have something done to it—to be reality.
Languages do exist, but they are not necessarily the things we take them for. On the one hand, we each have an understanding of at least our mother tongue that allows us to produce sentences in it according to certain rules. I say “I kicked the ball” not “the ball kicked I.” That knowledge of rules in our brains is one part of the reality of a language. The other part is its existence as an autonomous system, a means of communication whose form is negotiated between speakers. It is not fixed, but changes as it is used in millions of separate interactions.
The world’s most dangerous countries for 2020 have been revealed in a new interactive map.
Libya, Somalia, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, all in Africa, are the riskiest countries, according to the Travel Risk Map.
Created by global risk experts, International SOS, the map ranks countries’ safety across three different criteria: medical, security and road safety.
For the first two categories, countries are given a rating out of five, while road safety is rated out of four based on the mortality rate per 100,000 people.
Only the four countries mentioned scored the lowest safety band in each category: “very high” for travel medical risk; “extreme” for travel security risk; and more than 25 (deaths per 100,000) for road safety risk.
At the other end of the spectrum, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Andorra and Svalbard all achieved the highest safety marking for all three criteria.
The UK scored “low” for medical risk and the lowest mortality rating for road safety, but was ranked as “low” rather than “insignificant” in the travel security risk category.
Other countries graded “extreme” for security risk include Mali in northwest Africa and Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan in the Middle East.
Venezuela, Haiti, North Korea, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Eritrea, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau and Burundi all scored “very high” for travel medical risk.
International SOS says it assigns its travel medical risk ratings by assessing a range of health risks, including: infectious disease burden, environmental factors, medical evacuation data, road trauma data, standard of emergency medical services, outpatient and inpatient medical care, access to quality pharmaceutical supplies, and cultural, language or administrative barriers.
The travel security risk rating evaluates the threat posed to travellers by political violence (including terrorism, insurgency, politically motivated unrest and war); social unrest; and violent and petty crime.
Other factors, such as the robustness of the transport infrastructure, the state of industrial relations, the effectiveness of the security and emergency services and the country’s susceptibility to natural disasters are also considered.
The Travel Risk Map was published alongside the Ipsos MORI Business Resilience Trend Watch survey of more than 1,300 business travel decision-makers.
Some 51 per cent of respondents believed that health and security risks had increased in the past year, while 47 per cent anticipated risks – including security threats, civil unrest and geopolitical unrest – would rise in the year ahead.
Exclusive: perpetrators could face up to 10 years in prison under new legal guidance
Relatives who “iron” a young girl’s chest with a hot stone or other objects to delay breast formation could face up to 10 years in prison, under new guidance published by the Crown Prosecution Service.
The guidance makes clear to police and prosecutors that breast-ironing, a ritual common in parts of Africa that now sometimes happens in the UK, is a crime that can be charged under existing law even if the victim is said to have consented.
In January the Guardian revealed anecdotal evidence of dozens of British cases of the practice, in which a girl’s chest is “ironed” with a hot stone to delay breast formation, thereby supposedly protecting them from unwanted male attention. The government issued a statement promising to tackle the practice, which it described as child abuse.
“The message that we have is quite clear – breast-ironing is child abuse,” said Jaswant Narwal, a chief prosecutor who specialises in so-called “honour” abuse. “What we want is for these practices not to happen, because these are essentially criminal offences,” she told the Guardian.
While the move does not change the law to make breast-ironing a specific offence, the CPS said it hoped the guidance would provide reassurance to victims and a warning to perpetrators. “We hope this new guidance will give victims, police and prosecutors the confidence they need to bring perpetrators of this cruelty to justice,” Narwal said.
She said victims may be dissuaded from turning to the police because the practice may occur in the family home, where the perpetrator could be the victim’s own mother.
“Another reason is that they may not understand or believe that a crime has indeed been committed. That’s why this guidance is important - because it’s going to go someway to confirm the legal position … so that we can have some viable cases coming forward for prosecution.”
In March the National Education Union said breast-ironing awareness should be made part of the mandatory school curriculum to protect young girls from abuse.
Alex Carlile, a QC and peer who in January tabled questions in parliament concerning the practice, said the CPS guidance was “a welcome step forward”. “It is a clear warning that breast-ironing gives rise to a serious criminal charge. Those who do it are likely to be jailed,” he said.
Comfort, a woman who has spoken out about undergoing breast-ironing as a nine-year-old, said: “It’s a start at least. Now those [affected] children will know that the police are aware of it, that it’s nothing new … so that it doesn’t sound like they are talking about something foreign. And even the children themselves will now know that if there’s guidance, it’s serious – it’s a crime.”
Leyla Hussein, a British-Somali anti-FGM campaigner and psychotherapist, said prosecuting cases of breast-ironing under existing legislation was better than having a separate law, as is the case with female genital mutilation (FGM).
“Abuse is abuse,” she said. “We are not going to have a separate law if people started cutting hands or fingers. We got that so wrong when it came to FGM.”
Narwal stressed that the new guidance was not about criminalising families for their cultural practices. “It’s not a new law – it’s existing legislation. We respect families and we respect cultures. But where actual harm is being caused to children, that’s where it can be considered to be a criminal offence.”
Activistsestimate that at least 1,000 women and girls have been subjected to the abuse in the UK, but there has been no formal assessment of the prevalence of breast-ironing in the country.
The continent needs $66 billion to avoid a crisis of disease and dehydration
One of every three people in Africa is affected by water scarcity— the circumstance in which a region's available water supply isn't enough to meet demand.
In nations like Ghana, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, water shortages can raise people's risk of getting sick, since when water is in short supply, households often hoard the precious resource indoors, creating a breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes.
Water is also needed to run toilets and basic sanitation facilities. In its absence, residents are often forced to defecate in rivers, a practice that contaminates fresh water with bacteria, viruses, and parasites. Contaminated water also puts residents at increased risk of diseases like cholera and typhoid fever, which can cause dehydration and malnutrition.
African cities are running out of water. Eric Bouvet/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
That's the case even in major cities like Nairobi, Kenya, and Accra, the capital city of Ghana, which are becoming more dense and urbanized.
Between 2016 and 2050, Africa's population is expected to double, with 80% of new residents located in urban areas. This growth could provide new economic opportunities and higher living standards for urban residents — but only if cities are equipped to handle the strain on their water resources.
What's more, when women and young girls are forced to walk miles to the nearest water supply, their ability to attend school or earn an income becomes significantly diminished.
The African Development Bank estimated last year that it would require as much as $66 billion to provide universal access to water and sanitation across Africa. That doesn't include the more than $170 billion needed to build critical infrastructure like dams and purification plants.
Without these resources in place, cities like Cape Town, South Africa could find themselves ill-equipped to deal with drought — and might eventually run out of water.
David Lammy’s attack on Stacey Dooley exposes the troubled relationship between fame and charity
If it’s overdue (and it is) to crash the patronising, self-serving western narrative of the “white saviour” in Africa and elsewhere, then isn’t it also important to ensure that all charitable white-on-black endeavours aren’t automatically dismissed as condescending and offensive?
The latest white saviour row is a rerun of what has become a cyclical, increasingly heated debate, turning on charity and race. Documentary maker and Strictly Come Dancing winner Stacey Dooley appeared in photographs holding a child in Uganda, for a Comic Relief film.
David Lammy responded that the last thing the world needed was another white saviour. Lammy was then accused of turning down an opportunity to work with Comic Relief, which he denies. And so it goes on.
In the line of fire: Stacey Dooley in Uganda for Comic Relief. Photograph: @sjdooley Instagram
The white saviour debate is complex and valuable, going far beyond, but also including, charity. Just as a gap-year stint in troubled areas shouldn’t be (only) a way for middle-class kids to boost their CVs, starvation and despair shouldn’t be “good PR” for halo-polishing celebrities. No one is arguing with that. However, in 2009, Ricky Gervais’s spoof of such visits (for Comic Relief) got widely slammed as tasteless. As far as I could tell, Gervais was making the point about how crass such appeals could sometimes be and Comic Relief was allowing him to do so. I thought then, as I do now, if even self-awareness ends up criticised, then where is any charity supposed to go from there?
While it’s good to learn that experts and locals are to feature more prominently in on-the-ground charity appeals, in the UK and abroad, could cynicism about the use of celebrities be taken too far? It’s as though they must be kept away from affected regions in case they invalidate the appeal. The brutal truth is that celebrities are there for a reason. Presumably people are aware of how difficult it is for charities to raise awareness and funds. That, with someone such as Dooley, it’s about using a celebrity, black or white, to draw people in.
Then there’s the issue of celebrity motivation. Sure, some celebrities might be egomaniacal monsters, whose only concern is that they look hot in cargo pants, but with most, the basic human instinct would be to want to help. If that’s your motivation, then why the grim rush to question theirs?
That Africa needs white saviours is a dangerous, insulting, shabby narrative. However, there are also issues with the idea that white westerners visibly helping black people must be instantly slammed for… what, exactly? Colluding in the warped sociohistorical continuum? Is that always true, every single time – or is there a danger in being overly cynical?
Researchers urge cautious optimism as experimental treatment moves on to next stage of testing
Scientists are cautiously optimistic after a trial HIV vaccine showed promising results in initial tests on humans.
A study published in medical journal The Lancet examined the effects of the vaccine in 393 test subjects, who were chosen from 12 HIV clinics in East Africa, South Africa, Thailand and the US.
Seven groups were given different combinations of the vaccine, while one group was administered with a placebo.
All subjects who received a vaccine responded by producing some form of immune response against HIV during the course of testing.
A side-study carried out by researchers tested strains of the vaccine on rhesus monkeys for resistance against the simian-human immunodeficiency virus, a disease similar to HIV that affects monkeys.
The most effective vaccine combination was found to protect 67 per cent of monkeys used in the trial against the virus.
Close to 37 million people worldwide are thought to be living with either HIV or Aids, of which more than two million are children ( AFP )
As the tests were deemed successful, a second round of trials is now taking place on a group of 2,600 women in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr Dan H Barouch, a principal investigator on the study and a professor at Harvard Medical School, said he was “pleased” with the research, but urged the results should be treated with caution.
“I would say that we are pleased with these data so far, but we have to interpret the data cautiously,” he told CNN.
“We have to acknowledge that developing an HIV vaccine is an unprecedented challenge, and we will not know for sure whether this vaccine will protect humans.”
Close to 37 million people worldwide are thought to be living with either HIV or Aids, of which more than two million are children.
According to UNAIDS, the joint United Nations programme on HIV and AIDS, an estimated 1.8 million people worldwide become newly infected with the virus each year – roughly 5,000 new cases every day.
Although HIV treatments have become exponentially better since the disease was officially identified in the early 1980s, a vaccine has proved elusive.
Prep, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, can prevent HIV being transferred sexually between partners, with experts suggesting it could prevent one in four cases.
However, the drug must be taken regularly, unlike a vaccine, in order to prevent the user contracting the virus.
The population of mountain gorillas, one of the world’s most endangered species, which survives on the forest-cloaked volcanoes of central Africa, has increased by a quarter to over 1,000 individuals since 2010, wildlife authorities said.
That is despite the threat posed by poachers and armed groups in the Virunga Massif, a spine of volcanic mountains in the western Rift Valley straddling eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Rwanda, where most of them reside.
The latest census put them at 1,004 individuals: 604 in Virunga, and 400 in Uganda’s nearby Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Joel Wenga Malembe, spokesman for the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature, told Reuters.
The last survey, in 2010, found just 786 of this critically endangered eastern gorilla sub-species, of which 480 were in Virunga.
Gihishamwotzi, 18, an endangered silverback high mountain gorilla from
Sabyinyo family, rests atop trees inside the forest in the Volcanoes
National Park near Kinigi, northwestern Rwanda, January 9, 2018.
REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya/File Photo
“These numbers are truly remarkable, far exceeding our expectations, and are the result of a collaborative, three-country effort with governments and partners all playing an important role,” Mike Cranfield, of charity Gorilla Doctors, said in a statement.
Partly because they are so rare, the mountain gorillas are a major source of tourist revenue for the three nations, and their habitat supports other rare species found nowhere else such as golden monkeys.
But they are under constant threat of encroachment by farmers in one of Africa’s most densely populated rural regions, and hunting for bush meat or bizarre trophies sold abroad.
Congo has also invited oil companies to start drilling in Virunga, Africa’s largest tropical rainforest reserve, which conservationists worry will put the environment in greater danger.
Adding to Virunga’s woes, rangers banned tourists this month from entering the park during investigations into the kidnapping of two Britons by an armed militia.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon was written in the 1930s, but has only just been published. Why has it taken so long for the remarkable story of Oluale Kossola to be made public?
“We stand as living monuments,” wrote the historian Len Garrison, of the black British descendants of slavery and empire. “For those who are afraid of who they must be, are but slaves in a trance.” For Garrison, the idea of the African diaspora as “living monuments” was to some extent figurative. But a new book makes it literal. Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave presents the remarkable fact that there were people alive in America who had experienced abduction from Africa – being examined, displayed, traded and enslaved – well into the 20th century.
Oluale Kossola was taken from the Yoruba kingdom of Takkoi to Alabama in the 19th century. Photograph: Courtesy of McGill Studio Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama
The book is the story of Cudjo Lewis; a man born Oluale Kossola in the Yoruba kingdom of Takkoi. Kossola was the last survivor of the last known slave ship to sail from the African continent to America with a human cargo. Written in the 1930s, but hidden away from a public audience until now, it is also perhaps the last great, unpublished work by the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston.
The word “barracoon” refers to the enclosures in which captives were held on the coast before being loaded on to ships. In Kossola’s case it was the Alabama vessel the Clotilda, which played its own gruesome part in the slave trade in 1860, half a century after its official abolition, transporting 130 men and women from the west African kingdom of Dahomey – modern day Benin.
By 1931, when Hurston interviewed Kossola – sweetening him with peaches, Virginia hams and late summer melons –, he was around 90 years old, and yet able, over a period of three months, to recall his life in Takkoi in great detail; his grandfather, an officer of the king; his mother and siblings; law and justice; love and adolescence. He spoke in heartbreaking detail of watching his community annihilated during a raid by Dahomey’s female warriors, leading to his capture and enslavement, the torture of the “middle passage”, and life in 19th and 20th century Alabama. Through all these years – many more lived in America than he had spent in his African birth nation – he never let go of the unspeakable loss of his homeland. When Hurston takes his photograph, Kossola dresses in his best suit, but removes his shoes, telling her: “I want to look lak I in Affica, ’cause dat where I want to be.”
The Point of No Return monument in Ouidah, Benin. Photograph: Gallo/Getty Images
The uniqueness of the story and that of the writer who tells it are layered and intertwined. The old, poetic Kossola, generous with his parables and storytelling, is one of almost four million Africans enslaved late in the history of the transatlantic trade. And while the full history is documented in countless accounts of slave traders, merchants, plantation owners and masters, ledgers and auction records and court documents, the number of first-hand accounts of Africans forced to become Americans can be counted on two hands. It is Hurston, and perhaps Hurston alone, who could have drawn this heavy tale out of the often melancholy old man, and have the vision and skill to make it sing, in the way that Barracoon does, for reasons rooted deeply in her own life story.
Hurston was born in 1891 in Eatonville, Florida, a small town with an entirely black population, which she would later describe as “the city of five lakes, three croquet courts, 300 brown skins, 300 good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools and no jailhouse”. She would keep close links to her hometown, despite leaving when she was just 13, and then drifting – working as a manicurist and achieving a degree part time at Howard University – until she arrived in New York in 1925. By then she was in her mid 30s (but convinced those whom she met that she was a full decade younger) and had – as she wrote later in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road – “$1.50, no job, no friends, and a lot of hope”.
Hurston began studying anthropology at Barnard College and, having received a fellowship to gather material in her home state, set about documenting African American folk traditions in towns like Eatonville, and later in the southern states, the Bahamas and Haiti. It was during this period, right at the beginning of her career, that she first met Kossola, interviewing him several times in the late 1920s. It was her first major project, but also her first major failure. An article she published about Kossola in the Journal of Negro History would be accused of plagiarism, allegations which scholars now contest, and which in any event drove Hurston to return to Alabama, to conduct the series of interviews that would form the core of Barracoon, and, this time, to do so in a manner that would cast the work beyond any doubt.
Around this time, black art began asserting itself brazenly in an America still emerging from four centuries of slavery and legalised white supremacy, and the belief that the African had no civilisation to offer. By the time of her death in 1960, Hurston would have published more books than any other black woman in America. But it wasn’t until she caught the attention of sociologist Charles S Johnson, champion of the Harlem Renaissance and the editor of Opportunity, the official journal of the National Urban League (which published her work as well as that of Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen), that she got her break.
Even within the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston’s approach was radical. Inspired by her Eatonville roots, she was instinctively compelled by the folklore, the idioms, customs, worksongs, spirituals, sermons, children’s games, folktales and practices of African American communities of the south. While other members of the black intelligentsia were celebrating racial uplift, and while hundreds of thousands fled the rural south in the “great migration”, in search of what they imagined to be progress in northern cities, Hurston was interested in “the Negro farthest down”. Her goal as an author, anthropologist and essayist, was – the scholar Karla Holloway has said – “to render the oral culture literate”.
“The unlettered Negro,” Hurston wrote, was “the Negro’s best contribution to American culture.” It was this belief which inspired Barracoon – a book in which there is little of Hurston herself, but plenty of her ideology, in capturing Kossola, a man whose culture slavery both created and destroyed. Like the language of some of Hurston’s later works – Mule Bone, the play she would write with Hughes in 1931; Mules and Men, a compilation of oral folklore in 1935; and her most famous work, the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 – Kossola’s narrative plays the music of history itself within its tonalities, rhythms and inflections. But the narrative, like Kossola, stands apart from Hurston’s others; his speech is more a recognisably African Creole than the African American vernacular, and despite all his decades living in America, Kossola is steeped in the thought of Africa, the world – as he calls it – “in de Affica soil”. Hurston’s fidelity to the manner and content of Kossola’s storytelling is the book’s strength. Yet within it were also contained the seeds of Barracoon’s downfall. When Hurston took the manuscript to publishers, they wanted her to anglicise his English, which she resolutely refused to do.
American slaves on a plantation in South Carolina, 1862. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
“Hurston was not interested in, as Toni Morrison might put it, the white gaze, and how ‘they’ would perceive us,” explains Deborah Plant, a Hurston scholar who edited Barracoon. “She was interested in what was specific in African American culture, those aspects which were rooted in African tradition, African history, African civilisation, because in that authenticity lay the genius – the spirit, as Hurston describes it – that which the soul lives by.”
For Cheryl Wall, Zora Neale Hurston professor of English at Rutgers University, “this impatience with Hurston’s determination to transcribe Kossola’s speech faithfully is enormously frustrating”. It was “part of the pattern of Hurston’s life that she had to fight so hard to have her voice heard, and the voices of those whose stories she wanted to tell. We are told the dialect is too difficult. Is it really any more difficult than the dialect of Mark Twain or James Joyce? Yes it requires some extra effort, but it’s the kind of effort we usually put into a literary text without complaint.”
The irony is astounding. Kossola, a man denied his home and his voice by American racism, would have the telling of his story silenced too. Barracoon, having been met with intransigence by publishers, remained unpublished, ending up in a private collection that was passed to the archive at Howard University in 1956, where it remained inaccessible to all but a handful of scholars who read it and cited it in their work.
Hurston found her own life mirroring this cycle of narration and dispossession. After the success of her work in the 1930s and 40s, her hugely productive career spiralled downwards. She lived hand to mouth, writing articles for magazines while working at odd jobs, including one stint in Miami for an employer who saw her byline in the Saturday Evening Post and tipped off a reporter that the author was her maid. Hurston was humiliated, and spent the next decade in a series of small towns in Florida, plagued by health and money problems, until she ended up in a welfare home where she died, penniless, of heart disease in 1960.
A slave’s cabin at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Edisto Island, South Carolina. Photograph: Courtesy of NMAAHC
At the time of her death, none of her seven previously published books was in print. Neighbours collected money for her funeral and it made front page news in the local black weekly, the Fort Pierce Chronicle. But she was buried in a segregated cemetery, in an unmarked grave.
For the novelist and feminist Alice Walker, who in 1973 set out to discover what had become of Hurston, finding this grave in a “field full of weeds” was a devastating experience. “There are times,” wrote Walker, “and finding Zora Hurston’s grave was one of them, when normal responses to grief, horror and so on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of emotion one feels.” Walker was determined to restore Hurston’s legacy and reputation. She obtained a gravestone, and had it inscribed with the words: “Zora Neale Hurston – A genius of the south. Novelist. Folklorist. Anthropologist.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God, still considered Hurston’s greatest work, was soon back in circulation. That edition, by the University of Illinois Press, sold more than 300,000 copies, making it, as Wall says, “one of the most dramatic chapters in African American literary history”.
The publication of Barracoon thus represents a recovery within a recovery; the works of Hurston having been so dramatically resurrected, but this one languishing in obscurity until now. And its publication comes at an emotive moment in the African American experience – an experience loaded not just with historical trauma, but very contemporary pain. Alice Walker writes, for example, in the foreword to the book, that in reading Kossola’s story, African Americans “are struck with the realisation that he is naming something we ourselves work hard to avoid, how lonely we are too in this still foreign land”.
Karla Holloway, professor of English at Duke University, says: “The irony is that the loneliness that echoes through Kossola’s account, and that Walker so poignantly notices, is our collective legacy.
“We work hard to escape and slip past that loneliness, but inevitably we are captured, again, by the wake of slavery, a tidal wash as reliable as moonrise.”
The era of Black Lives Matter, of harassment in coffee shops, of a president who has been both overtly racist and also dismissive of racism, and of the disappointment at the first black president having been able to make little real change to poverty, criminalisation and exclusion, has produced a moment in which the struggle has never been more apparent, yet the cultural expression of that suffering has never been more visible.
Illustration by Swain, from 1835, of slaves being put into the hold. Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images
“I do think one of the reasons that the book is so attractive right now is that there is this longing for African Americans to have access to a pre-US life – a connection to Africa,” says Autumn Womack, an assistant professor of English and African American studies at Princeton University. “If nothing else, Barracoon announces the desire for this kind of connection, even if it’s never really fulfilled. People are searching for a vocabulary to make sense of that.”
That struggle is finding expression in film, TV and theatre that focuses on the experience of slavery; from the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, the remake of the memorable series Roots and the multi-award-winning musical Hamilton. It is present in pop culture, with the recent phenomenon of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”, whose video references the violent brutalisation of African Americans. There are new museums – America’s first of African American history, which opened in 2016; the Whitney Plantation, the first plantation museum on American soil; and the nation’s first memorial to the horrors of lynching, in Alabama.
It is abundant in literature too; Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and other influential books such ass Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, which tells the story of the Great Depression in new and profound detail; Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram X Kendi, which chronicles the lifespan of American racism; Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, radicalising readers of young adult fiction to the injustice of police killings; and Jesmyn Ward’s devastating Sing, Unburied, Sing.
The pathos of the African American experience, told with such tenderness in Barracoon, is matched by its complexity. Hurston herself remarked that in writing Kossola’s harrowing account of how the king of Dahomey profited from raiding and selling members of neighbouring kingdoms, she was deeply affected by the question of African complicity in the slave trade. “The inescapable fact that stuck in my craw,” Hurston wrote, “was my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on – that white people had gone to Africa, waved a red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed away.”
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And yet Barracoon also helps deepen the understanding of the context in which slavery took place. “This idea of ‘African complicity’ is more myth than a reality,” Plant says. “Because at that point in history, there was no such thing as an ‘African’. People on the African continent did not self identify as Africans; instead there was a self identity in relation to specific ethnic groups and specific kingdoms, religions or language. So many of us don’t know, because we don’t have these nuances about our history.”
The absence of stories like Kossola’s has hardly helped bring these nuances to the fore. There are other difficult questions arising from the book about the extent to which the African American victims of slavery internalised the attitudes of their oppressors. Kossola recalls how his children in particular endured bullying from neighbouring African Americans, for having two African-born parents.
“All de time de chillun growin’ de American folks dey picks at dem and tell de Afficky people dey kill folks and eatee de meat,” Kossola recounts in Barracoon. “Dey callee my chillun ig’nant savage and make out dey kin to monkey … It hurtee dey feelings.”
“Those acculturated African Americans could have been more open, more receptive, compassionate, and they weren’t,” Plant says. “They were a source of hostility to Kossola and his community. We can explain or rationalise it, but it doesn’t justify it.” The book’s uniqueness is in its recounting of a story in which we are all equally bound up by this cycle of oppression – the former slave plagued by the trauma of losing his homeland and family, the writer whose work survived the desire of intellectuals for white approval, the reader forced to challenge their own ideas about race and the internalisation of oppression. But more than anything it brings an African past up close to an African American present, at a time of great searching. “Throughout her life, Hurston fought against this idea that there was no connection to Africa once people arrived on these shores, and everything was forgotten,” Wall says. “We know that’s not true. But a book like this really brings that to life.”
Note: Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave by Zora Neale Hurston is published by HarperCollins.
Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before “globalization” was a term anybody used. The words that sound like “cha” spread across land, along the Silk Road. The “tea”-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe.
The term cha (茶) is “Sinitic,” meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese. It began in China and made its way through central Asia, eventually becoming “chay” (چای) in Persian. That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, according to a recent discovery, tea was traded over 2,000 years ago. This form spread beyond Persia, becoming chay in Urdu, shay in Arabic, and chay in Russian, among others. It even made its way to sub-Saharan Africa, where it became chai in Swahili. The Japanese and Korean terms for tea are also based on the Chinese cha, though those languages likely adopted the word even before its westward spread into Persian.
But that doesn’t account for “tea.” The Chinese character for tea, 茶, is pronounced differently by different varieties of Chinese, though it is written the same in them all. In today’s Mandarin, it is chá. But in the Min Nan variety of Chinese, spoken in the coastal province of Fujian, the character is pronounced te. The key word here is “coastal.”
Yet the Dutch were not the first to Asia. That honor belongs to the Portuguese, who are responsible for the island of Taiwan’s colonial European name, Formosa. And the Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where chá is used. That’s why, on the map above, Portugal is a pink dot in a sea of blue.
A few languages have their own way of talking about tea. These languages are generally in places where tea grows naturally, which led locals to develop their own way to refer to it. In Burmese, for example, tea leaves are lakphak.
The map demonstrates two different eras of globalization in action: the millenia-old overland spread of goods and ideas westward from ancient China, and the 400-year-old influence of Asian culture on the seafaring Europeans of the age of exploration. Also, you just learned a new word in nearly every language on the planet.
