Congo

This is actually an issue I have been working on for more than 6 years. It was 6 years ago that I realized how close to extinction the Mountain Gorillas had come. At the time there were some 650 known alive in the wild. That's it. That is so dangerously tiny a population that it is on the border of not being genetically viable. Since then there has been an improvement (there are now about 700 Mountain Gorillas alive in the wild.) But the situation has also gotten even more dire since the civil war in the Congo is threatening the Virunga, the single national park where Mountain Gorillas live, and in the past year, 10 gorillas have been killed...really murdered. That is more than 1% of their population killed in one year.

And today, the Virunga National Park has been overrun by the Congolese rebels. The army is counter attacking, but in essence the Congolese civil war now has completely engulfed the Mountain Gorillas. This is happening right now. Today. As you read this.

Chimps and Bonobos are are closest relatives, being about 98-99% identical to us genetically. That means that looking at the exact order of nucleotides in any given Chimp and you, 98%+ of those nucleotides will be exactly the same. The difference is so close compared with some animals considered branches of the same species (e.g. dogs and wolves), that technically speaking, Chimps, Bonobos and humans really should be lumped together in the same genus. Humans are merely a third chimpanzee, as outlined very effectively by Jared Diamond in his book of that name.

[editor's note: While I am on vacation I am reposting some of my earlier diaries that I consider particularly important, interesting or well read. This was originally posted on Columbus Day]

I experienced an odd sensation today as I was on the subway today. Today was Columbus Day but I had to go in to work for part of the day anyway. The book I am currently reading is King Leopold's Ghost, a pretty horrifying history of the Congo under colonialism.

Reading about colonial genocide in Africa on Columbus Day. Had a kind of irony to it.

I have been ambivalent, in the litteral meaning of the word, towards Columbus Day for years now. I celebrate America and Columbus' "discovery" of the "New World" because the result of his discovery and the ultimate founding of America is that my family, myself included, is alive and thriving today. Without America, my family would have been exterminated in the genocide of Nazi Germany if not before that in the genocide of the pogroms in Tsarist Russia and later Stalin's genocide in the Soviet Union.

But I am reminded every Columbus day of the genocides on which the founding of America was based. My family had a refuge from genocide because of a previous genocide committed against the natives of America. How's THAT for ambivalence?

King Leopold II set out to turn the entire Congo basin into his own personal colony. It wasn't a colony of Belgium until later. It was a colony held by a single man. According to some estimates, ten million people were killed so that one man could make the modern equivalent of $1 billion. Those people were killed to keep costs down in production first of ivory, then of rubber. Eventually, outrage from Britain, the US, France and Germany led to the transfer of the Congo from Leopold to Belgium...without much change in the genocidal practices.