Update Yourself on Africa

Africa has been in the news a lot in the past couple of weeks.  Sure, the biggest story is the death of Gaddafi, but the news wire is buzzing with major events all over the continent.  As I've mentioned before, you should keep yourself up to date on these current events, because they impact us, and will continue to impact us and our foreign policy for years to come.

For social issues perhaps the biggest story is Morgan Tsvangirai's about-face on gay rights.  Gay rights is a really hot topic across Africa, particularly because of the harsh punishments, including death to the openly gay.  Not only has the Zimbabwean Prime Minister changed his tune, but he is referring to sexual choice as a human right.  Now, if we could only get rid of the nemesis, Mugabe.

Earlier today there were two bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, one at a bar and one at a bus stop.  This is particularly concerning because they come just days after threats from al-Shabab, the al Qaeda linked terrorist extremists.  The group has had a strong hold on much of Somalia, including Mogadishu but an African alliance of troops has recently made significant gains in the area.  In fact, they've almost completely forced al-Shabab from Mogadishu.

And we recently heard the US was sending a small cadre of troops into Uganda to fight the Lord's Resistance Army.  The LRA are a scary bunch of brainwashed central Africans led by a mad man.  I was unaware of the extent of their terrorist reign over the region.  I came across a fantastic website that you should visit LRACrisisTracker.org.  These folks are doing amazing work assembling critical information and attempting to spread the word.

Take a look at one of their videos. It's powerful stuff

Is that a Dam typo?

One of things I enjoy most about maps is to immerse myself in thoughts of the physical places I'm peering at through the looking glass. My imagination runs wild thinking about all the locations on a world map. For me, this wanderlust and mapgazing is a daily activity. In doing so, occasionally I'll run into a map feature that is a real head-scratcher.

Last week I was searching in the area around the Okavango Delta in Botswana and Lake Kariba between Zambia and Zimbabwe when I came across what looked to be a phantom "l" on the map.

I was quite pleased with myself as I thought I had discovered an error on the National Geographic 2007 Africa map. I became puzzled when I found a similar "l" to the east at the eastern edge of Lake de Cahora Bassa in Mozambique. While it was hard to believe National Geographic made a mistake, two mistakes right next to each other was a laughable notion.

The image below shows the area in question and both lines. One is to the southwest of the City of Kariba, the second is on the eastern end of Lake Cahora Bassa.



I scoured the legend on all my National Geographic maps but couldn't find anything that matched the symbol. It most closely matched that of passenger railroad but both the size and logic of placement was off. Why would someone build a railroad bridge across a large body of water if it didn't connect to anything on either side?

Time to search Google Earth and put the mystery to bed!

It turns out that the mysterious line represents a dam. With the help of a friend we quickly discovered another dam in Turkey. They are only visible in the continent blow up maps from National Geographic.

Below, in this week's Google image of the week, we see the Cahora Bassa dam in Mozambique.

The image can be found at 15° 35' 7" S 32° 42'18" E

Remember, clicking on the images will take you to a full sized image.