You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [62]
President Omar Bongo of Gabon talked the French into spending more than half a billion dollars building the most ambitious railroad on the continent. It required some fifty bridges, made with the finest hardwood, each spanning enormous canyons, but eventually it was done. What’s unusual about that? Gabon’s only export, the only thing they would ship to the coast aboard their state-of-the-art train, was hardwood; they used it all up building the railroad.
Remember our old pal the deposed Emperor Bokassa? Everything was going well for him until he decided to build a factory that made uniforms for the local schoolchildren. And since it was his idea, and he was the emperor, of course he owned it. What’s unusual about that? Well, the average outfit cost $100, and the average family earned about $150 a year, so they were understandably reluctant to purchase the outfits. Then Bokassa passed a law — when you’re the emperor passing laws is pretty easy — making it mandatory that all schoolchildren wear his company’s outfits. That’s when the students, most of them not yet adolescents, marched on the capital in protest. And that’s when Bokassa decided they were an irritant and ordered them shot. And that was the beginning of the end for Bokassa.
The Ivory Coast’s late President for Life, Houphouet-Boigny, ruling a country that was saddled with one of Africa’s biggest per capita debts, built a huge cathedral in the capital of Abidjan. He was so pleased with it that, while rescheduling the country’s debt payments, he decided to build the world’s biggest church, and not in Abidjan, but in the little village of Yamoussoukro.
The structure, which was designed to dwarf St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, was about halfway up when it was finally shown off to foreign journalists in 1987. An American writer asked if it might be considered folly to build the world’s biggest church in the middle of the African bush, especially when so many of the people were hungry. The guide, who had been well schooled by the 150 Frenchmen who were getting rich off the project, replied, “Don’t you think there were starving and homeless people when the cornerstone was laid for Notre Dame?” End of discussion.
You Stocked the Lake with What?
KENYA, STILL
Ecology, African-Style
The Nile perch, which inhabits Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, sometimes grows to three hundred pounds. Why not, reasoned the government, capture some young ones and put them into Lake Tanganyika, the largest freshwater lake on the continent, and let them breed? Think of how much protein we can pull out of the lake in a few years to feed our hungry masses.
The Nile perch proceeded to eat almost everything else in the lake. They themselves made slow, easy targets for the thousands of crocodiles. It’ll be years before the last of them is dead and the lake’s balance is restored.
The same geniuses put beautiful, flowering water hyacinths into Kenya’s Lake Naivasha. Why not? They were lovely, and the hippos liked eating them.
But they multiplied a lot faster than the lake’s hippos, and on any given day 40 percent to 50 percent of the lake’s surface is covered by the things.
You can go too far in the other direction. Botswana has done such a splendid job of protecting its elephant population — and word went out on the elephant grapevine, because elephants who were being decimated by poachers in Angola, Zimbabwe and Zambia migrated there — that suddenly what Botswana has is a lot of starving elephants. The Chobe National Park, which can reasonably support about 18,000 to 22,000, currently has 60,000 and the number is growing as the food supply is vanishing. But because Botswana is a signatory to the CITES Agreement — a total continentwide ban on ivory, created because other countries couldn’t control their poachers — they cannot even cull their own herds and use the proceeds from the ivory to relocate some of the hungrier survivors.
Are