Bluebird

March 13, 2012, 9:59 PM

In Africa’s Vanishing Forests, the Benefits of Bamboo

By TINA ROSENBERG

 

In the district of Asosa, the land is thick with bamboo.   People plant it and manage the forests. They rely on its soil-grabbing roots to stabilize steep slopes and riverbanks, cutting erosion. They harvest it to burn for fuel, to make into charcoal sticks to sell to city dwellers and to build furniture.

Asosa is not in China, not even in Asia.    It is a district in the west of Ethiopia, on the Sudanese border.   To many people, bamboo means China.   But it’s not just panda food — mountain gorillas in Rwanda also live on bamboo.   About 4 percent of Africa’s forest cover is bamboo.

Soon it may be much more.  Bamboo may provide a solution to a very serious problem:  deforestation.  In sub-Saharan Africa, 70 percent of the people cook their meals over wood fires.  The very poorest cut down trees for cooking fuel; those slightly less poor buy charcoal  made from wood in those same forests.  Every year Africa loses forest cover equal to the size of Switzerland.  Terence Sunderland, a senior scientist at the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research, said that in southern Africa, even trees that can be used for fine carving, such as ebony and rosewood, are being cut down and made into charcoal.

Deforestation starts a vicious circle of drought and environmental decline.   Burning wood releases the carbon stored inside.   And deforestation accounts for at least a fifth of all carbon emissions globally.  As tree cover vanishes, the land dries out and the soil erodes and becomes barren — a major reason for Ethiopia’s periodic famines.

Reliance on hardwood fuel poses more present dangers as well.   It’s a woman’s job to collect firewood, and when trees are scarce, women must walk farther and farther to find it, an often dangerous journey.

Much cooking, moreover, is done indoors.  The resulting air pollution kills some two million people a year. Almost half the deaths are from pneumonia in children under 5.  Bamboo and charcoal made from bamboo burn more efficiently and cleanly than wood and wood charcoal

Sunderland is talking to several southern African governments about bamboo.  Farther north, the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan, a membership organization of 38 countries based in Beijing, is providing technical support for growing and using bamboo in Ghana and Ethiopia.

InbarHundimo Dedere owns and manages a plantation of African highland bamboo in Southern Ethiopia that was used as a model for modern bamboo cultivation and management training.

How does bamboo improve on hardwood?  Cut down a hardwood tree and it’s gone.  It will take several decades for another to grow in its place; it can take a century for a forest to grow back after cutting. But bamboo is a grass, not a tree.  Under the right conditions, it can grow a full meter a day — you can literally watch it grow.   It is also fast maturing.   A new bamboo plant is mature enough to harvest after three to six years, depending on the species.   Most important, bamboo is renewable.   Unlike hardwood trees, bamboo regrows after harvesting, just as grass regrows after cutting.  After it is mature, bamboo can be harvested every single year for the life of the plant.

Bamboo has other advantages.  Its roots grab onto soil and hold it fast.   Plant bamboo on a steep slope or riverbank and it prevents mudslides and erosion.  And bamboo is parsimonious with Africa’s most precious resource:  water.

“In Africa you want everything,” said Dr. Chin Ong, a retired professor of environmental science at the University of Nottingham in England, who was formerly a senior scientist at the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi.  “You want firewood, you want to reduce erosion, to maintain the water supply, generate cash and employment.   Bamboo comes the closest — it gives you the most things.”

The need for firewood is now critical in Ethiopia; trees covered 35 percent of the country a century ago; by 2000 they covered just 3 percent.   Ethiopia is trying to reverse deforestation by planting trees, and it lags behind only China and India in sheer numbers — in 2007 alone the country planted 700 million trees.   But even a huge, continuing campaign may not be enough to reverse deforestation.  It has been a problem wherever people settled in Ethiopia.   The country’s capital had to be moved five times since the first century B.C., because any concentration of people quickly ran out of firewood. In the 1890s the problem was solved by importing eucalyptus from Australia — a tree that, like bamboo, is renewable.    The first plantations were around Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s new capital, which at times has gone by the name Eucalyptopolis.

But while eucalyptus trees provide a renewable source of wood, they starve other trees and plants of water, and rob water from rivers and reservoirs.  They gobble so much water that they are sometimes planted for the purpose of draining swamps.  By 1913, the government issued a proclamation ordering the destruction of all eucalyptus trees.   It was ignored.

InbarIn Ghana, Chinese experts taught a local man how to use bamboo charcoal and energy efficient stoves.

In the last five years or so, Ong said, Ethiopia has realized that bamboo is a more profitable and greener solution. INBAR’s programis a four-year project financed by the European Commission and the Common Fund for Commodities, a United Nations organization.  The technology comes from China. The project provides bamboo seedlings and trains people to manage bamboo plantations.    It teaches villagers to build kilns to make charcoal, which they can sell to city dwellers (rural people in Ethiopia and Ghana can’t afford charcoal.  They burn wood. )   The program also promotes bamboo as fuel, and has helped village women to set up businesses making and selling a stove with a closed chamber that uses half the fuel of an open fire. In Ethiopia, the stove, locally made of iron and clay, costs only $3.

Coosje Hoogendoorn, INBAR’s director-general, said that while people in Ghana are slower to embrace bamboo because they can still find firewood,  Ethiopians need no convincing — there are hardly any trees left to cut down.

Bamboo is not the perfect plant.   Although the kinds of bamboo that grow in Africa are not invasive — some varieties that grow in cooler climates are — it can be very difficult to get rid of the networks of roots when the plant is no longer wanted.    While bamboo can tolerate dry conditions, like any plant it will grow more slowly with less water, and it cannot grow in desert climates — exactly where it is needed most.   And most bamboo is hollow, which means it burns more quickly than hardwood.  Fortunately, bamboo that grows in Africa’s lowlands is one of the few solid bamboo species.

Because bamboo requires few nutrients, it can grow in soil inhospitable to other plants — not only does it thrive there, it can reclaim the land so other plants can thrive, too.  Its roots leach heavy metals from the soil, hold the soil together and draw water closer to the surface.   One example is a project in Allahabad, India, to reclaim land whose topsoil had been depleted by the brick industry.  In 1996, an INBAR project planted the land with bamboo.  Five years later, villagers could farm the land again.   Dust storms — a local scourge — were greatly reduced.   The bamboo also helped raise the water table by seven meters.   In 2007, the project won the global Alcan Prize for Sustainability.

Charcoal, of course, is not the only thing that can be made of bamboo.  Its tensile strength makes it a good construction material, and it is also used for furniture, flooring and textiles, among other things.   Paradoxically, harvesting bamboo to make durable goods is greener than not harvesting bamboo.  Here’s why: bamboo culms — the poles — do not live as long as hardwood trees, usually up to a decade. When an old culm decays, it releases carbon into the atmosphere. (The root system, which hold 30 to 40 percent of its carbon, last much longer.) This means that an untouched bamboo forest is a poor carbon sink.    Fortunately, the best way to turn bamboo into an excellent carbon sink is to make money with it — harvest the bamboo to make durable products before it starts its decay. Treated bamboo flooring or furniture will last as long as wood, storing its carbon the whole time.

In some ways, the challenge in Africa is not to introduce bamboo, but to persuade people and governments that it has commercial uses.  “We’ve taken policymakers from Africa to China and India where bamboo used in everyday life — and there’s still very poor adoption,” said Ong.   In some countries, for example, Kenya, making charcoal is illegal — a well-intentioned ban that seeks to prevent deforestation, but one that is impractical as long as people need to find their own cooking fuel.   “It is not effective to ban charcoal production,” said Jolanda Jonkhart, the director of trade and development programs at INBAR.  “It is more effective to promote charcoal production with renewable biomass sources such as bamboo.”

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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book is “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.”

 

Africa’s oceans

A sea of riches

Coastal waters could feed many more Africans, but need better protection

Feb 18th 2012 | BERBERA, FREETOWN AND MOMBASA

 

Commuters

 

MELITA SAMOILYS is a leading marine biologist. Since 2010 she has visited 72 coral reefs in east Africa. On only one did she see a shark. That is because so many black-tipped, white-tipped and grey sharks have been served up as shark fin soup, a delicacy in China.

Two-thirds of African countries have access to the sea. Some are making good use of it through fishing and tourism. But the productivity of African waters is plummeting. Kenyan fishermen now catch an average of 3kg of lobster on each trip, compared with 28kg in the 1980s. Grouper fish appear to have become extinct in the Comoros in the 1970s. South Africa’s fishy haul is lower today than in the 1950s.

The main reason is bad governance. African Union calls to fight overfishing with joint navy patrols and co-operation between fisheries have been ignored. Nigeria, among Africa’s richest countries, lacks a serviceable navy. Some governments even collude in overfishing. Angolan fisheries officers rarely report the illegal catches of boats owned by politicians.

At the same time African states are failing to invest in much-needed marine research. They say it is a “donor activity”, meaning they want foreigners to pay for it. The continent has only one large oceanography department, at the University of Cape Town, and that is underfunded.

Coastal wetlands have little protection and fishing grounds are especially vulnerable. In many countries lot of foreign boats operate in areas close to the shore supposedly reserved for locals in dugouts. Some vessels use banned methods like light-luring (attracting fish with floodlights) and pair-trawling (where nets strung between boats are dragged on the sea floor).

Industrial fishing has been encouraged by rising global demand. The European Union has a series of agreements for its boats to fish in African waters. China has moved in too. The Russian fishing fleet is resurgent. In many cases, says André Standing, a researcher into fisheries agreements in Africa, it is not clear how much money is being paid for licences, or to whom. Critics say Africa’s failure to protect its ocean is political, the definition of a continent too weak to exert full control over its resources. A recent deal between Mauritania and China makes it hard to reduce the catch even if it is unsustainable.

Meanwhile the human footprint along Africa’s vast coastline is growing. The UN says African seaside cities are spreading by more than 4% a year. By 2050, a corridor along the Gulf of Guinea from Côte d’Ivoire to Cameroon is likely to be one of the world’s most densely populated areas. It may also be one of its most unstable. Many of the cities are vulnerable to rising sea levels predicted by climatologists.

Making the sea safer and more productive may be the best way to keep landlubbers peaceful. Experts have plenty of suggestions. Community initiatives could help get rid of dynamite-fishing and its ruinous effects. Conservation no-catch schemes such as one run by Blue Ventures, a Madagascan outfit, have proven their value. But there is too little money to scale them up. The best way to find the cash would be to point out the security costs of unhappy fishing communities to rich governments. Somalia’s piracy problem began in part as an armed response to illegal fishing in Somali waters. Some banditry in Nigerian waters started as a protest against the threat to fishing from the oil industry.

Scientists would like to see more sanctuaries, starting with a big area in northern Mozambique. Mr Standing suggests that one radical idea might be to ban industrial fishing in the worst performing African countries for ten years, which would favour labour-intensive fishing from dhows (traditional sailing boats). But given the local and global hunger for protein, such schemes could only work if fish farms were expanded.

The tributaries of Africa’s oceans are mostly clean and its mangroves in good condition, especially compared with those of Asia. But abuse is growing. With the sharks almost gone, Chinese diners are demanding manta rays and mobulid rays as ingredients for their expensive banquet stews. Frank Pope, an Africa-based writer on oceans, says that the slow-breeding rays could be gone even sooner than the sharks they used to swim alongside on the glittering reefs.

From the Economist:

Do a little dance...roll a pile along...get dung tonight!

OBSERVATORY

The Hasty Retreat of the Dung Beetle

Emily Baird

The dung beetle's dance puts it on a straight escape route.

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

Published: January 23, 2012

After dung beetles collect the substance that gives them their name, they do a little dance, swinging around in one direction, and then sometimes the other.

Multimedia

Dancing Dung Beetle

That dance is not one of joy, however. A new study in the journal PLoS One reports that dancing helps the beetles move away from a dung pile as quickly as possible.

To avoid other beetles that might want to steal their haul, the insects need to move on a direct course. “And that is in a straight line,” said Emily Baird, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden and the study’s first author.

She and her colleagues studied dung beetle behavior in South Africa.

In their rotations, the scientists say, the beetles are somehow taking a compass reading from the sky. (How they do this is still not clear.)

“It seems that they’re looking at cues from the sky, and the image of the sun,” Dr. Baird said.

The beetles also have four eyes, so as they roll away from the dung pile, their top eyes may be constantly watching the sky to help them keep their bearing.

Dr. Baird and her colleagues plan to continue their study to try to understand what cues they are relying on to take their compass reading.

“It could be that at different times of day it’s different things,” Dr. Baird said. “It could be the polarized light pattern in the sky in the morning, and at noon perhaps the position of the sun.”

 

January 1, 2012, 10:01 AM

A Boom Year for Illicit Elephant Ivory

By BETTINA WASSENER

If you think you had a bad year, spare a thought for Africa’s elephants. They are being killed in ever greater numbers for their ivory, which is smuggled these days mostly to Asia. Rising wealth has led to a boom in demand there in recent years.

ReutersKenyan officers inspecting tusks seized at a warehouse in Mombasa in late December.

The 13 largest hauls of ivory intercepted by customs officials around the world in 2011 weighed in at a combined 23 tons, probably taken from more than 2,500 slain elephants, according to Traffic, an international organization that monitors wildlife trade.

2011 “has truly been a horrible year for elephants,” Tom Milliken, Traffic’s elephant expert, said in a press release detailing the organization’s preliminary findings for the year.

Once the records of hundreds of smaller ivory seizures are included, 2011 could well prove to be the worst year for elephants in a database of ivory seizures going back 23 years, Traffic said.

As I report at greater length here, much the same can be said in regard to some other rare and endangered animal and plant species.

Despite efforts by enforcement agencies and campaigners, that overall demand shows no sign of abating. Smuggling rare creatures for use as pets, food, decoration or their (often disputed) medicinal benefits is a profitable business.

Mr. Milliken said that most of the illegal shipments of African elephant ivory end up in China or Thailand.

The rise in the ivory trade reflects the growing sophistication of the gangs behind the trafficking, he said. Given that most large-scale ivory seizures fail to result in any arrests, he added, “I fear the criminals are winning.”

 

Au Revoir, Black Rhino

Africa's Western black rhino declared extinct

November 10, 2011 | 10:29 am

Africa’s Western black rhino has officially been declared extinct and other subspecies of rhinoceros could follow, according to the latest review by a leading conservation organization.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the Northern white rhino in central Africa as “possibly extinct in the wild” and the Javan rhino as “probably extinct” in Vietnam.

The organization blamed a lack of political support for conservation efforts in many rhino habitats, international organized crime groups targeting the animal, increasing illegal demand for rhino horns and commercial poaching.

PHOTOS: Threatened with extinction

“In the case of both the Western black rhino and the Northern white rhino, the situation could have had very different results if the suggested conservation measures had been implemented,” Simon Stuart, chairman of IUCN's Species Survival Commission, said in a statement Thursday. “These measures must be strengthened now, specifically managing habitats in order to improve breeding performance, preventing other rhinos from fading into extinction.”

The last Javan rhino in Vietnam is believed to have been killed by poachers in 2010, reducing the species to a tiny, declining population in Java.

The rhinos were among more than 61,900 animal and plant species reviewed for the IUCN's latest Red List of Threatened Species. A quarter of the mammals on the Red List were found to be at risk of extinction. But the organization said there have also been conservation successes.

Fewer than 100 Southern white rhinos survived at the end of the 19th century, but the population in the wild is now believed to number over 20,000.

Numerous other species are threatened, including many types of plants.

The Chinese water fir, which used to be widespread throughout China and Vietnam, was listed as “critically endangered,” due primarily to expanding intensive agriculture.

The IUCN also listed five out of eight tuna species as "threatened" or "near threatened," and added 26 recently discovered amphibians to the Red List, including the blessed poison frog.

“This update offers both good and bad news on the status of many species around the world,” said Jane Smart, director of the IUCN Global Species Program. “We have the knowledge that conservation works if executed in a timely manner, yet, without strong political will in combination with targeted efforts and resources, the wonders of nature and the services it provides can be lost forever.”

-- Alexandra Zavis in Los Angeles

Be like Africa

Is It a Crisis? Maybe So, if You're a King

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: November 4, 2011

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — When the earth was discovered to orbit the sun, it was a world in crisis to those invested in the idea that things revolve around us. At the moment in history when power began to flow from kings to the people, it was a world in crisis if you were sitting in a royal court.

But these were not crises so much as paradigm shifts. They were passages from one system, and total way of seeing, to another. And once the new paradigm came, people got over it and went on with making their lives amid new realities.

And so we must ask about the present worldwide blues: What if all this is not, as we keep calling it, a crisis? What if this is a choppy but unavoidable transition between one paradigm — one coherent ball of ideas, power structures, economic theories, values, behaviors — and another?

This thought has stirred of late in moving back and forth between two very different worlds. The first is the world in self-declared crisis, racked by downgrades and bailouts, foreclosures and protests, by polarization and widening inequity, by anxieties that children will be worse off than parents and the future less glorious than the past.

In many places, this narrative indeed feels frightfully true. On the other hand, one also has the privilege of encountering a diffuse global community of naysayers, who refuse this story of crisis and are busily inventing the paradigm they believe we will inhabit before long.

These builders speak about “the crisis” very differently. They see not the end of things — of capitalism, of the West, of the middle class, of liberty — but rather a turning: a comfortable old rug of understandings pulled out from beneath our feet, without convincing understandings to replace it. So here, to make you feel better, are two aspects, among many, of the new paradigm they are weaving.

The first is a shift in the nature of power and influence. It goes by many names and takes many forms. It is open-source software and encyclopedias written by crowds and revolutions seeded on Internet portals. It is the idea of the United States “leading from behind” in Libya rather than fiercely commanding. It is newspapers linking to other newspapers on their Web sites rather than walling everything in. It is Kickstarter, Meetup and Ushahidi and any number of other platforms that allow disparate, diffuse strangers to marshal the kind of influence that once only centralized institutions could.

If you’re stuck in the old paradigm, these developments could seem like a crisis. You might fret that no one is reading encyclopedias anymore. Or that these kids who resist newspapers are so ignorant. Or that your nation used to lead from the front and now lurks in the back. Or that the government should be “creating” jobs but isn’t.

The builders would ask you to step back, because the “who” and “how” of influence have changed, and it may require many of us to adapt to new roles. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, a political science professor at Princeton University and former U.S. State Department official, puts it, the leader must now become a catalyst, the diplomat a connector and the public-relations agent a convener.

Media outlets might rethink themselves as curators of complex reality rather than purveyors of wholly produced scoops — much as the Al Jazeera English program “The Stream” does, inviting viewers and social-media users to help craft its topics and ask questions of its guests, then reading their feedback live on the air.

Embassies might refocus from addressing governments to addressing local people and institutions directly. Americans might learn to appreciate led-from-behind, drone-enhanced, coalitional wars that provide fewer heroic thrills but also cost less in blood and treasure. Citizens might find ways to increase employment without the government’s help, as the new Starbucks initiative, Create Jobs for USA, is asking them to do with $5 donations to fund small-business loans.

A second shift involves the desertion of the traditional divisions between public and private, the collective and the market.

We still live with language and institutions and rules derived from a world in which people are either doing good or doing well, either solving collective problems or merely pursuing a buck. But already in our midst is a parallel universe, with very different rules, that can be called the impact economy.

As publics around the world argue about the 99 percent and the 1, the impact economy is breaking the trade-off, applying the 1 percent’s methods to the 99 percent’s needs.

It encompasses entrepreneurs in the developing world who obsess over making things like heart surgery, cellphone service and insurance vastly cheaper, so as to make them available to billions, not mere millions.

It includes public-private partnerships as well as investors like the Omidyar Network that are strangely agnostic between earning financial returns and not — pumping money into businesses and charities alike in pursuit of better societies.

It even includes some of the world’s largest corporations, from PepsiCo to Levi Strauss, who have come to recognize the force they exert on the planet’s people and resources and are engaged in unilateral social policy to improve their net effect.

It involves an emerging global cadre of talent who spend careers bouncing among the social, private and public sectors, applying the methods of each to problems in the others, refusing to accept that one of them holds all truth.

Today this impact economy is especially vital outside the West, where the lines between banker types and Occupy types are these days creatively blurred.

As Erik Hersman, a son of American missionaries to Sudan who now runs a startup incubator in Kenya, says: “Instead of thinking of Africa as a place that needs to be more like us, we should think about how we need to be more like Africa

Oakland Zoo Field Trip

Senegal Curbs a Bloody Rite for Girls and Women

By Nicholas Loomis

The Fight Against Female Genital Cutting: New York Times reporter Celia Dugger reports from West Africa on progress in community-based efforts to eradicate female genital cutting.

By CELIA W. DUGGER

Published: October 15, 2011

• SARE HAROUNA, Senegal — When Aissatou Kande was a little girl, her family followed a tradition considered essential to her suitability to marry. Her clitoris was sliced off with nothing to dull the pain.

Multimedia

Photographs

Abandoning a Controversial Tradition

 

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Sare Harouna, in southern Senegal, is one of more than 5,000 villages where female genital cutting has been abandoned. More Photos »

But on her wedding day, Ms. Kande, her head modestly covered in a plain white shawl, vowed to protect her own daughters from the same ancient custom. Days later, her village declared it would abandon female genital cutting for good.

Across the continent, an estimated 92 million girls and women have undergone it. But like more than 5,000 other Senegalese villages, Sare Harouna has joined a growing movement to end the practice.

The change has not yet reached Ms. Kande’s new home in her husband’s village, but if elders there pressured her to cut the baby girl she is taking into the marriage, she said, “I would resist them.” Her parents back her up.

“They would never dare do that to my granddaughter, and we would never allow it,” said Ms. Kande’s mother, Marietou Diamank.

The movement to end genital cutting is spreading in Senegal at a quickening pace through the very ties of family and ethnicity that used to entrench it. And a practice once seen as an immutable part of a girl’s life in many ethnic groups and African nations is ebbing, though rarely at the pace or with the organized drive found in Senegal.

The change is happening without the billions of dollars that have poured into other global health priorities throughout the developing world in recent years. Even after campaigning against genital cutting for years, the United Nations has raised less than half the $44 million it set as the goal.

But here in Senegal, Tostan, a group whose name means “breakthrough” in Wolof, Senegal’s dominant language, has had a major impact with an education program that seeks to build consensus, African-style, on the dangers of the practice, while being careful not to denounce it as barbaric as Western activists have been prone to do. Senegal’s Parliament officially banned the practice over a decade ago, and the government has been very supportive of Tostan’s efforts.

“Before you would never even dare to discuss this,” said Mamadou Dia, governor of the Kolda region where this village is located. “It was taboo. Now you have thousands of people coming to abandon it.”

The night before Sare Harouna joined 118 other villages for a ceremony to abandon the practice, people poured in by horse cart, bus and truck. As darkness fell, women illuminated by wood fires stirred vats of couscous and beef stew for the hordes of visitors.

The next day’s event had the feel of a county fair. Dignitaries spoke over a tinny public-address system. Teenagers staged plays about the dangers of genital cutting. Traditional storytellers known as griots entertained the throng gathered around a dusty field.

Over the past 15 years, the drive to end the practice has gained such momentum that a majority of Senegalese villages where genital cutting was commonplace have committed to stop it, Tostan and United Nations officials say.

With too few resources to replicate Tostan’s health and human rights classes across Africa, Nafissatou Diop, who coordinates the United Nations-led campaign to end the practice, is looking for quicker, cheaper strategies to change social conventions on cutting. Tostan has pursued an ambitious effort here with support from Unicef and others, but its two- to three-year program costs about $21,000 per village — a substantial sum considering the countless villages that continue the practice.

“The program is transformative, and I love that as an African woman,” said Ms. Diop, who is Senegalese, “but we need to move faster.”

An improbable collection of characters shaped Tostan’s methods: Molly Melching, a friendly, irrepressible educator from Illinois; Demba Diawara, a revered imam from a Senegalese village; and Gerry Mackie, a political theorist and associate professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Ms. Melching, 61, came to Senegal as an exchange student when she was 24 and never left, working with street children for the Peace Corps, devising a rural education program in a village where she lived in the 1980s, and starting Tostan 20 years ago. The group aims broadly to improve health and spread awareness of human rights. Women in village classes themselves raised the issue of genital cutting. They told of daughters and sisters who had hemorrhaged and sometimes died from botched circumcisions.

In 1997, women in the village of Malicounda Bambara declared their determination to end the practice — a stand that made news.

But Mr. Diawara, an imam in the village of Keur Simbara and a Tostan student, warned Ms. Melching that a single village could not stop such a deeply rooted tradition. The only way, he said, was to persuade villages whose young people intermarried to abandon the practice simultaneously — the defining idea for Tostan. “Even though our villages seem small, behind each village are many other villages,” Mr. Diawara said in an interview.

So Mr. Diawara, 77, visited the 10 intermarrying villages of his extended family. He won over the village chiefs and convinced imams that there was no religious requirement for cutting, which predates Islam by centuries. He was tactful, never using the term “female genital mutilation,” but he explained its consequences. At his family’s annual council, the villages agreed to give up the tradition and in 1998 held what is believed to have been Africa’s first collective abandonment.

That June, Professor Mackie, then a research fellow at Oxford, was proctoring an exam when he read an article in The International Herald Tribune about what Tostan had done. “My heart was pounding,” he said.

He bolted from the room after the test, he said, and mailed Ms. Melching a copy of his 1996 article from a sociological journal, proposing a strategy that was similar to Mr. Diawara’s.

Professor Mackie contended that genital cutting, unlike rape or wife beating, was a convention parents followed out of love for their daughters. He likened it to foot binding, which had disfigured Chinese girls over centuries.

A Western woman — Alicia Little, a British novelist — had played a catalytic role in ending foot binding in China, much like Ms. Melching was doing with genital cutting.

Mrs. Little had written literary depictions of Victorian mothers who raised their daughters to win wealthy husbands, and after moving to China in 1887, she researched foot binding and discovered that a congregation’s public pledge to end the practice had worked. Parents pledging neither to bind their daughters’ feet nor to allow their sons to marry women with bound feet ultimately ended the practice within a generation, Professor Mackie wrote.

“I went nuts!” Ms. Melching said of her reaction after reading Professor Mackie’s article. “Here’s our answer: it has to be a collective pledge.”

Professor Mackie, Ms. Melching and Mr. Diawara have collaborated ever since, influencing places like Sare Harouna, a village where the voices of children chanting Koranic verses waft through dirt alleyways at dusk.

Bassi Boiro, the elderly woman who was Sare Harouna’s so-called cutter, said she always performed the rite before dawn under the spreading arms of a sacred tree, away from the settlement.

“Men couldn’t hear the girl’s screams,” she explained. “They are not part of this.”

Four women would hold down the arms and legs of each girl, usually ages 5 to 7. For years, Mrs. Boiro said, she used a knife handed down through generations of cutters in her family until it became “too dull to even cut okra.” She then switched to razor blades.

But Mrs. Boiro says she has now accepted Sare Harouna’s decision to end the practice and speaks about the harm caused by her life’s work. “I didn’t realize it was my doing,” she said.

Muusaa Jallo, the village imam, was convinced of the need to stop the practice and has spread the word in many other villages. As his toddler impishly poked her finger through a hole in his sock, he placed his hand gently on her head and said, “I have already decided this one will not be cut.”

His 8-year-old, Alimata, sat solemnly to the side, her eyes downcast.

“I will abandon it like my parents,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I won’t do it to my daughters. It’s not good to do that, and they did it to me.”

Songs from the Sahara

Blues From the Desert, Recorded On-Site

More Photos »

By LARRY ROHTER

Published: August 31, 2011

In the language of the Tuareg nomads who for centuries have roamed the most remote reaches of the southern Sahara, “tinariwen” means “deserts.” But ever since the musical group of that name released its first CD in 2001, its members have recorded not on their home turf but in much the same way that American and European bands do: in the artificial environment of a recording studio, in cities like Paris and Bamako, Mali.

Multimedia

Slide Show

Back to the Desert

 

Chad Batka for The New York Times

Members of the group at its July visit to the Highline Ballroom. Their new album, “Tassili,” was released on Tuesday. More Photos »

With “Tassili,” released on Tuesday, Tinariwen, whose music is a hard-rocking hybrid of Berber, Arab, Western and black African styles, has sought to return to its beginnings. Named for a spectacular area of canyons and sandstone arches near Algeria’s border with Libya, the CD was rehearsed and recorded out of doors there, in tents and around campfires much like those where the group’s founding members, political exiles then living in refugee settlements, first came together to play.

“We wanted to go back to our origins, to the experience of ishumar,” which means exile or being adrift, explained Eyadou ag Leche, the band’s bass player, speaking in French during an interview in New York in July. “Those were times when we would sit around a campfire, singing songs and passing around a guitar. Tinariwen was born in that movement, in that atmosphere, so what you hear on ‘Tassili’ is the feeling of ishumar.”

Tinariwen was founded around 1979 by the singer and guitarist Ibrahim ag Alhabib, who was born in Mali but fled that country as a child after his father was abducted and killed by government forces trying to put down a Tuareg rebellion. Now 51, Mr. Alhabib spent time in Algeria, Niger and Libya, where he joined a Tuareg army backed by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi; there his ability to write songs about the plight of the Tuareg, shuttling from one country to another but belonging to none, made him a leading voice of resistance and autonomy.

By 1985 “Tinariwen’s songs were already circulating across the Sahara on the cassette grapevine, copied over and over again,” said Andy Morgan, the group’s former manager, who is writing a book about the band. For the next four years, he added, “Ibrahim and several others who had already received infantry training were in a camp near Tripoli, where their job was to play music” sympathetic to the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, which aimed to establish an independent Tuareg republic in the Sahara.

Over the last decade, though, Tinariwen has won a following among American and European pop musicians and audiences that crave authenticity and passion in both music and attitude. The guitar is not a traditional instrument for the Tuaregs: Mr. ag Alhabib recalls fashioning one as a child after he saw it being played in a movie, but when he and other members of Tinariwen were able to return to Mali in the 1990s, the band began building or acquiring all the instrumental accoutrements of a modern rock band.

“Theirs is music that at the same time seems very familiar, starting with the guitars and the call and response element in the vocals, but also sounds exotic to the ear,” said the guitarist Nels Cline of Wilco, who supplies an eerily swirling guitar background on “Imidiwan Ma Tennam,” the new CD’s opening track. “You’re listening to stuff that really rocks, but is also very stripped down. There is an air of mystery and longing, and that creates a mood that is palpable, very compelling and attractive for all kinds of people. It’s wonderful music, and not just for guitarists.”

Tinariwen’s music has sometimes been called “desert blues,” and the group’s penchant for writing songs in minor key modes certainly creates a sound that has a blue feeling. But the band’s members prefer to talk about “asuf,” a sentiment from their own culture and Tamashek language that describes both a sense of spiritual pain, yearning or nostalgia and the emptiness of the desert itself. That, they acknowledge, creates a certain kinship with the bluesmen of Mississippi and Chicago.

“We didn’t know about these people at first because we were in our own universe,” Mr. ag Leche explained. “But when we first started hearing Hendrix, just to name someone, we felt something immediately. It was almost as if I had known that music from the day I was born. I’m told that a lot of the Africans who went to North America came from West Africa, from our part of the world. So it’s all the same connection. I think that any people who have lived through something that is very hard, feel this asuf, this pain, this longing. That is what will make their music sound similar to each other.”

For the more organic and acoustic sound Tinariwen wanted on “Tassili,” the group turned to Ian Brennan, an American producer who has worked with other African groups as well as with American artists like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Peter Case. Hundreds of pounds of equipment had to be hauled to a canyon deep in the desert and run off a generator placed about 150 yards from the main tent to eliminate hum from the recording and “to keep any critters from coming closer,” Mr. Brennan said.

“This music needs space, it needs to be wild and free,” he added. “My interest is in capturing and conveying emotion, so I believe that raw and real is almost always better. They feel the same way, and so this was the least overdubbed, most live, band-centric and song-oriented record they have done.”

For the other Americans who were invited to play on “Tassili,” making the record in the heart of the desert was both an adventure and a challenge. As the producer, Mr. Brennan was there for the entire three-week session last November, and for eight days he was joined by two members of the Brooklyn indie rock band TV on the Radio, the guitarist Kyp Malone and the singer Tunde Adebimpe, who had first met Tinariwen a couple of years ago when the two bands were on the same bill at the Coachella festival in California.

“There were cultural differences to consider, but it was one of the most rewarding musical experiences I’ve ever had,” Mr. Malone said. “Making the record seemed almost secondary to the overall experience of people coming to hang out and pay tribute, bringing animals to eat and sitting around the fire with friends of the band who could play rings around me, singing Algerian and Tuareg songs. It felt like a privilege to be there.”

But with a tour scheduled this fall to support “Tassili,” soon it will once again be time for Tinariwen — which operates as a collective, with anywhere from five to nine members, depending on factors like who has herds to tend or whose wife is pregnant — to move out of its cultural space and into ours. And with that, the feeling of asuf will return, feeding a yearning for the desert even as it powers the music.

“You think differently when there are walls around you,” Mr. ag Leche mused. “In a studio or a city you have to eat at a certain time and follow a schedule. In the desert the freedom is total. You do what you want when you like. When we are onstage, you can see us, we are there. But our heads are in a different place. We are at home.”

From proletariat to star

In Egypt, Ghalia Alia Mahmoud is a new kind of TV chef

Leila Fadel/WASHINGTON POST - Ghalia Ali Mahmoud, 33, a breakout Ramadan star in Egypt, hosts a live cooking show. The former maid and cook to the rich picks out tomatoes before her live show last week in Cairo.

By Leila Fadel, Published: August 17

Only in the new Egypt could Ghalia Alia Mahmoud have become a celebrity.

A woman from a poor neighborhood, she cooks in tin pots with no handles, on propane burners lit with a match, in a kitchen without measuring cups. She uses simple, cheap ingredients such as beans, pasta and vegetables, all she can afford.

Ghalia Alia Mahmoud hosts a live cooking show in Egypt.

 

 

In the old Egypt, Mahmoud worked as a maid. But that was before Jan. 25, the beginning of the upheaval in which the destitute and the affluent stood shoulder to shoulder in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to force the ouster of a dictator and the end of a system that celebrated the elite while a huge underclass barely subsisted.

Mahmoud’s rise was the inspiration of Mohamed Gohar, the founder of a new television station named for the day the revolution began. He plucked the 33-year-old from his sister’s kitchen, where she had been employed as a cook, and tasked her with teaching Egyptians to prepare dishes they can actually afford.

With humor and down-home savings, Mahmoud has done it all with ease, becoming an unlikely symbol of a movement aimed at preserving the spirit of change and social justice in this country of more than 80 million people.

“This channel is letting Egyptians see themselves,” said Gohar, a media veteran and founder of Channel 25, where the cooking show, which began Aug. 1, offers niche audiences an alternative to the more popular soap operas broadcast during the long days of Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk.

On her show, Mahmoud cooks in a kitchen that looks like her own at home, whipping up homemade yogurt and the fava-bean mash known as ful. She is tasked with making a meal that could feed a hungry family for just $4; she’s as homespun as Rachael Ray, who hosts the Food Network’s travel show “$40 a Day.”

“All women can cook. They’re smart, and they can do anything if they try,” Mahmoud tells viewers.

At home, she feeds 15 people in her immediate and extended family on an income that even now does not exceed $200 a month. She cooks meat just once a week, because that’s all she and her husband, a minibus driver, can afford; on the show, meat is prepared only on Fridays.

Growing up, she dreamed of getting married and being driven to her wedding in a new Mercedes. Instead, she ended up in a beat-up Fiat more than 20 years old. Her father died when she was a toddler; she and her eight siblings went to work as teenagers to provide for the family. A cousin went to college, but, lacking connections, he ended up working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet.

On camera, Mahmoud is genuine and bubbly. She measures out ingredients in cheap plastic cups and buys vegetables for the show at the market in her poor neighborhood of Waraa. She wears fuchsia jackets and polka-dot aprons; her face is plump and inviting.

She reminds people of their favorite aunt, and her popularity has skyrocketed. Her Facebook page — which had to be set up by a producer, Habiba Hesham, because Mahmoud can’t afford the Internet or a computer — has drawn nearly 4,000 followers in less than two weeks. Hesham sees her as a future Oprah Winfrey, a poor girl who became an American icon.

Children ask her questions and tell her they love her. Men propose. And someone set up a separate Web page calling for her to be president. Last week, chic women in a Mercedes, the kind of women who used to look right through her, called to her from their car.

“Mrs. Ghalia, how do we make lentil soup?” they asked. She smiled. The world was changing for her.

It is the subtle messages on her show that carry bigger lessons than the food. She offers to teach recipes to Coptic Christians who abstain from meat and dairy products during their time of fasting. She said she does it to prove that heightened sectarian tensions, which she believes are stirred up by the government, don’t exist in Egyptian neighborhoods.

She is no longer unseen.

“The government only treated the creme de la creme with respect, and the rest of us were invisible,” she said after a show this week. “I have so much hope that for my two girls, the country will be different.”

Special Correspondent Ingy Hassieb contributed to this article.