ca 140 killed in Congo boat sinking
Up to 140 people are feared dead after a boat carrying passengers and goods capsized on a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials say. The accident happened on the Kasai river – a...
View ArticleA Bend in the River: Get Bent
On of my favorite books is A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul. It is a story set in at the junction of a native and expat community in an African rain forest country with a not very despotic leader...
View ArticleSelected Posts about the Efe and the Congo
A compendium of selected posts written about the Ituri Forest, the Efe Pygmies, and other folks and other things in the region: In the matter of insects: No Place to Sit Down The reason the Efe won’t...
View ArticleIs it appropriate to use the term “Pygmy” when speaking of…Pygmies?
Some of the people who live in the rain forest of Central Africa are known widely as “Pgymies.” That word…Pygmy…is considered problematic for a few different reasons. It refers to a person’s physical...
View ArticleIn search of the elusive Sungudogo …
…Sungudogo is a little known zoological mystery, an “undiscovered” primate living in the remote and rugged region of the eastern Congo, where the Central African Rain Forest fringes the high walls of...
View ArticleSomebody said something nice!
Check it out: Thank you Sarah! Here’s the Sungudogo Page in case you want to experience the pain of reading it too! (I mean the good kind of pain, of course.)
View ArticleSungudogo is on Smashwords
Sungudogo, the highly entertaining and exciting adventure novella set in the Central African rain forest, which provides the Skeptics Movement with its own Origin Myth, has been available on the Kindle...
View ArticleWhy are some animals rare, and why is this very important?
A friend of mine told me this story: As a special forces soldier, a Green Beret, he was alone and traveling through a dense area of jungle in or near Viet Nam during the 1960s. Enemy soldiers were...
View ArticleKing Leopold’s Soliloquy
This is the book: King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule. If you prefer, this is the on line version. I first became aware of, and read, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, which is not his...
View ArticleNew Stanley
… As instructed, I arrived at the New Stanley Hotel, in downtown Nairobi, at just before 11:00 AM, to meet Pat Soffer, primatologist. Willoughby didn’t have to tell me about the fish and chips at the...
View ArticleSungudogo Second Edition
As you know, I wrote a novella as part of a fundraiser a while back. It is called “Sungudogo” and it is the story of the origin of the Skeptics movement and modern cryptozoology. It is also an...
View ArticleEbola and “the French Disease”
Jim Moore and I were both students in the PhD Program in Anthropology at Harvard a few years ago. He graduated about the time I entered the program. To give a rough historical touchstone, I remember...
View ArticleOn cannibalism and Jameson
A recent twitter conversation prompted me to dig up some old posts on cannibalism, and maybe a few memories of my time in Central Africa. The twitter conversation concerned a story in which it is...
View ArticleEbola: Have more knowledge, need vaccine more
I just watched, at a the Twin Cities Science Film Festival, a film called Nzara ’76, which is about the first known Ebola outbreak, the one that gave it its name, in southern Sudan. That’s about 150...
View ArticleWhy I ate a Pangolin
The Lese people practice swidden horticulture in the Ituri Forest, Congo (formerly Zaire). Living in the same area are the Efe people, sometimes known as Pygmies (but that may be an inappropriate...
View ArticleIn search of the elusive Sungudogo …
…Sungudogo is a little known zoological mystery, an “undiscovered” primate living in the remote and rugged region of the eastern Congo, where the Central African Rain Forest fringes the high walls of...
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