Africa's Involvement in the World Wars

As I was working on my presentation for my African Cultures class about how World War I and World War II affected Africans, I came across an interesting website talking about the forgotten stories of African involvement in the war. I found out that out of all the World War I campaigns, the longest was the East African one. As the years pass, people continue to honor those involved in the war, directly and indirectly, but no one seems to know about Africa's side of the story, even though they too lost a lot of soldiers during battle. Africans also faced a considerable amount of consequences dealing with the future of Africa.

The East Africa campaign involved a lot of moving around, quick invasions and long journeys on foot. There were only 25,000 German Schutztruppe, white German commanders and black African soldiers, while The British created 150,000 armed forces. The British army started with South Africans and Indians and were later unified by Kenyans and Nigerians.

For every one soldier that the German and British army had, they had four porters. A porter was someone who brought food, weapons and artillery to the soldiers. They also cooked, cleaned and cared for the soldiers needs. These porters comprised of women and children, and they often passed away due to tiredness, lack of nutrition, and diseases. The British armies had 105,000 deaths and 90% of that were the porters. That's 94,500 deaths alone for the people who were taking care of the soldiers. About half of those deaths were people from British East Africa, which is now Kenya. 

Language Born in Africa

In an article that I came across, in the New York Times, it discusses how a researcher who was analyzing the sounds in different languages spoken all around the world determined an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated. Discoveries of evidence of fossil skulls and DNA matches this finding that modern humans originated in Africa. This article suggests that modern language originated only once, which has caused great controversy. 

Some linguists find this discovery shocking, and believe that since words change so quickly, languages can't be traced very far back in time. The earliest language tree goes back only 9,000 years at the most, according to this article. A biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand named Quentin D. Atkinson has found ways of making that a false statement. He looked at phonemes instead of individual words. Through doing this, Dr. Atkinson found a pattern in around 500 languages spoken all over the world. According to his discovery, the farther away that early humans traveled away from Africa, the fewer phonemes that language area uses.

The map above shows the number of phonemes around the world. As Dr. Atkinson said, the further away from Africa, the less phonemes that are used. 

Dr. Atkinson said that the pattern of decreasing diversity with distance as well as the decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, signifies that southwestern Africa is where modern human language originated. His findings were published in this article. 

I find Dr. Atkinson's findings to be very interesting. He put in a lot of time and effort to discover his claims that language all originated in Africa. 

Here is a picture of the language trees with all of the different languages.

Ebola in Guinea

I came across an interesting article about ebola from February 21, 2015. Since ebola was a well-known topic this past year when it came to Africa, I thought it would be an interesting blog topic. The subtitle of the article is "To end the outbreak in west Africa, Ebola must be snuffed out where it began." The article states that there have been over 9,300 deaths in western Africa caused by ebola. 

Above is a map of where ebola has occurred in Africa. 

The darker the color, the more cases that have been identified. 

Since cases of ebola have spread throughout Africa, it has made it a lot more difficult to end the epidemic. Just in the week that this article was written, (February 21) there had been 128 new confirmed cases, and over 800 in the fall of 2014. Most of the cases were in Sierra Leone, but according to the article, they are more worried about Guinea because most of the cases there were people who health workers did not even suspect having ebola. In order for ebola to be contained, those with the virus must be isolated, but if these people are not even known to health workers, then it is almost impossible for the virus to be ended. While people in Liberia and Sierra Leone have begun to take caution and changing their behavior in order to stop the spread of ebola, people in Guinea have not taken that sort of care. There, they kiss and shake hands, unafraid of catching ebola.

The article states that the longer the virus continues, the harder it will be to completely stop it. Since there have been so many cases that healthcare workers did not even know about, it makes it very difficult to end the virus.