Southern Africa
Southern Africa is just about as far away from Seattle as you can get without finding yourself in the Indian Ocean. And it’s not just a geographic distance. The distances are also social, economic, environmental, cultural, and political. They are about more than which place has elephants and which has Starbucks’.
Taken together Southern Africa has an immense fragile beauty. Whether camping in the Okavango Delta or hiking the great dunes of the Namib dessert I couldn’t help wondering how these fragile ecosystems could survive the onslaught of global warming and modernization. And no one has even calculated the cost of the greatest scourge of all, AIDS, which has robbed many of these countries of an entire generation.
It’s tempting to either romanticize or condemn this troubled part of the world. But Botswana and Zimbabwe have little in common beyond their shared border. In 1980 nine countries formed the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), the forerunner to today’s Southern African Development Community (SADC). Originally founded to lessen economic dependence on the then apartheid government of South Africa the current organization of 14 nations (including South Africa) that make up the SADC are concerned with various aspects of regional development. The underlying assumption is that to progress the region must work together.
One month is far too short a time to learn anything definitive about such a complex part of the world. Nevertheless, in my next few posts I plan to do a series of quick takes about the countries we visited.
Image: Elephants at dusk, Botswana, September 2007.
This is one amazing photo! As you said, there's more to Southern Africa than elephants, and I'm glad you got a least a little glimpse of that part of the region.
Posted by:Christi Gell | October 01, 2007 at 08:14 PM