Friday, July 22, 2005
Well, I guess I don’t feel quite as angry and dejected as I did when I wrote my last Journal entry. It is clear that there are NO classes going on now in any of the sciences or even in mathematics. So it isn’t just me or just chemistry, and isn’t necessarily a reflection on what I am or am not doing.
This evening I met with a delegation of teachers to talk about my family’s Safari and visit to Mwanza. They have good ideas and hopes to arrange interactions with the school teachers and students, with a visit to a traditional Sukuma home, introduction to traditional food certainly including ugali, and more. Should be interesting to see what they come up with. Now they want to meet among themselves, and we will meet again as a group on Sunday.
Meanwhile, I am trying to pull together the main threads of Jared Diamond’s book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” so I can present them as a history lecture to interested students, here. Assuming there are some. The African history taught in the schools begins with how the big bad colonialists stopped the slow but steady advance of African development, and it pretty much ends there as well. It gets tiresome. Diamond looks ‘way back before that, to try to figure out why development occurred faster in some places than others. As he says in his preface, “This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.” That sure sounds brash enough. So he deals with questions like:
1. Why didn’t Africans develop ships and steel and guns before the Europeans, and so subjugate Europe instead of the other way around?
2. Why did European germs decimate the indigenous Americans in so one-sided a fashion instead of a germ-exchange decimation of both Americans and Conquistadores?
3. Why were the Australian Bushmen the most primitive people of all, still hunter-gathering at the time of their encounter with Europeans?
Can’t go much into his fascinating arguments here, but Diamond builds a very convincing case that all these questions deal with when, where, why and how domestication of both plants and animals took place, and along with those, the impact of details in the development of writing.
