Humans of Africa

Ethiopia Escalates Fight Against Its Powerful Tigray Region

Nairobi, Kenya- Ethiopia appeared to be careening toward civil war on Friday.

Ethiopian fighter jets bombed targets in the restive northern province of Tigray, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said on Friday, in the latest escalation of a three-day old conflict that is driving the populous African nation toward a potentially destabilizing civil war.
When its military stepped up hostilities against the powerful ruling faction in the northern region of Tigray, mustering troops from across the country as its leaders ignored international pleas to step back from the brink.
“Our country has entered into a war it didn’t anticipate,” Gen. Birhanu Jula, the deputy chief of the Ethiopian National Defense Force, said on state television Thursday afternoon. “This war is shameful, it is senseless.”
In early clashes, there were “injured soldiers on both sides,” he added.On Wednesday, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced military operations in Tigray, accusing the region’s ruling Tigray People’s Liberation Front of arming irregular militias and orchestrating an attack on a major federal army base in the region.
Western officials reported clashes between federal and local security forces in Tigray on Wednesday that left dozens of casualties. But details have been sparse because internet and phone services to the area were cut off.

to be continued

Credit - Ethiopian Public Broadcaster, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

E.S. Reddy, Who Led U.N.’s Efforts Against Apartheid, Dies at 96

Photo credit - Yutaka Nagata/UN

E.S. Reddy in 1983 with another United Nations official, Ernest B. Maycock of Barbados. President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa hailed Mr. Reddy's commitment to human rights.

An Indian-born acolyte of Gandhi, he campaigned for boycotts, divestments and other protests against the South African government. E.S. Reddy, an Indian-born acolyte of Gandhi who spearheaded efforts at the United Nations to end apartheid in South Africa, died on Sunday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 96. His death was announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, who hailed Mr. Reddy’s “commitment to human rights” and his epitomizing “social solidarity.” From 1963 to 1984, Mr. Reddy oversaw the U.N.’s efforts against apartheid first as principal secretary of the Special Committee Against Apartheid and then as director of the Center Against Apartheid. He campaigned for boycotts and other economic sanctions against the white South African government, which segregated and oppressed Black people and subordinated the country’s large population of Indian immigrants.

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At last...only the strong survive

How a Human Cousin Adapted to a Changing Climate

On Father’s Day in June 2018, Samantha Good was working on an excavation in the Drimolen cave in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind. She uncovered what appeared to be a canine tooth jutting out from the loose brown sediment. Ms. Good kept digging until she found two more teeth and a partial palate, and then alerted her instructors. “I think I said ‘There’s something interesting happening,’” remembered Ms. Good, an undergraduate student studying anthropology at Vancouver Island University in British Columbia who was participating in a field school at the site.

Angeline Leece, a paleoanthropologist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, came to see what Ms. Good had found. Dr. Leece said. “I looked up at her, and I hadn’t said anything. But she saw my face, and she goes, ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’” Ms. Good would eventually learn that she had unearthed a two-million-year-old skull that belonged to Paranthropus robustus, our large-toothed, small-brained ancient human cousin. It is the earliest and best-preserved specimen found so far of the species, which lived alongside and may have competed for resources with our direct ancestor Homo erectus. And the skull provides the best-known evidence of an ancestor of humanity evolving to adapt to a changing climate, which a team of researchers detailed on Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Around two million years ago, this area in South Africa is believed to have undergone a chaotic climate shift.

The regional environment transformed from wetter and more lush conditions to drier and more arid ones. In order for a species like P. robustus to survive in such terrain, it probably would have needed to be able to chew on tough plants. But the specimen found in the cave at Drimolen didn’t seem to fit with what some scientists had previously stated about the human cousin.They labeled the skull DNH 155 and determined that it belonged to a male. While other skulls had been found at Drimolen, they were primarily female, and this male was smaller than the P. robustus males found at a cave nearby called Swartkrans, which was 200,000 years younger than Drimolen.