There was a major finding in the dinosaur world in Africa recently. As a parenthesis, I have always wondered why there are always several dinosaur sites around the globe, but very few on the African continent… as if dinosaurs somehow preferred to live on other continents but Africa. Given that Africa is the cradle of humanity, shouldn’t there be big findings on the continent as well? It most likely has to do with funding and interests of the people looking (who are mostly westerners), or could it be a deliberate need not to shed any lights on dinosaurs in Africa? Well, recently paleontologists have found the skeleton of the oldest ankylosaur so far in the world. Excerpts below are from an article on the Guardian.

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Extraordinary ankylosaur remains dating back 168m years a first for Africa

Fossil hunters have unearthed remnants of the oldest – and probably weirdest – ankylosaur known so far from a site in the Middle Atlas mountains in Morocco.

The remains of the heavily armoured animal are extraordinary in being the first to have defensive spikes that are fused to the skeleton, a feature researchers say is unprecedented in the animal kingdom.

… Dr Susannah Maidment, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, [said], “Normally when we see armour in stegosaurus and ankylosaurs, the dermal armour is embedded in the skin, not attached to the skeleton. In this case, it’s not only in contact with the skeleton, it’s fused to the ribs.”

Researchers at the museum obtained the fossil from a private collector for an undisclosed sum. They originally suspected the bones might belong to a new species of stegosaur they identified from the same region in 2019, but microscopic analysis of thin sections of the fossil revealed distinctive patterns of fibres unique to ankylosaurs.

The discovery was so unusual that scientists wondered whether the fossil might be a fake, but further inspection using a CT scanner found no signs that it had been constructed or tampered with.

The fossil dates to the middle Jurassic, about 168m years ago, suggesting the animal was one of the earlier ankylosaurs to roam the Earth. Beyond ranking as the oldest ankylosaur fossil known so far, it is also the first to be found in Africa.

… Details are published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

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This is a bit of old news, but it sheds more light on the participation of European nations in slavery… it is about the Dutch part in the slave trade. This may be a hard read for some. Excerpts below are from the article on the Guardian website. For the full article, go to the Guardian.

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The aim of a first exhibition on the Dutch slave trade to be shown at the Rijksmuseum, launched on Tuesday by King Willem-Alexander, is not to be “woke” but to be a “blockbuster” telling a truer story of the Golden Age, the director general of the national institution has said.

…The Slavery exhibition, showcasing 140 objects, ranging from two Rembrandt portraits of married and lavishly wealthy owners of enslaved people to a display of ankle chains, examines 10 lives caught up in the Dutch slave trade between the early 17th century and 1863, when the practice was finally made illegal in Suriname and the Antilles.

An audio guide for the exhibition includes the voice and thoughts of a Ma Chichi, a woman born into slavery in 1853, who in turn tells how her grandmother, enslaved in 18th-century Curaçao, urged her to always remember that she was equal to anyone. “She never did what the lords wanted,” Chichi says in the recording dating from 1958, when she was 105 years old.

Valika Smeulders, a curator of the exhibition and the Rijksmuseum’s head of history, said it had been vital to unearth oral history due to the lack of property and written evidence of enslaved people. “[Chichi] talks about her grandmother telling her you are equal to everybody else, you are equal to the children of the master of the house,” she said. “It gives you a female perspective, which is pretty rare, and it gives you the perspective of the people who were so aware of their humanity even though they lived in a system that took all that humanity away from them.”

Documents on show also detail the horrific fate of many of those who resisted. One, Wally, who worked on a sugar plantation called Palmeneribo, Suriname, in 1707 was sentenced to be slowly burned to death, with the stipulation added by the magistrate Cornelis de Huijbert that he was to have his flesh torn off with red hot pincers in the process in order for his death to be “the most painful and protracted possible”.

Dutch traders shipped over 600,000 Africans [as we now know, this number is mosy likely higher] to north and South America and between 660,000 and 1.1 million people around the Indian ocean. Last year King Willem-Alexander apologised for the “excessive violence” of the Dutch colonialists in Indonesia. There remains a live debate in the Netherlands about the treatment of empire and slavery in schools and public places through street names and statues, as there has been in the UK.

… One of the confronting revelations of the exhibition, Smeulders said, was that a richly decorated brass collar donated to the Rijksmuseum in 1881 and engraved with the family crests of the Nassau, Vianden and Dietz families, dated 1689, was likely not to have been a dog collar, as originally thought, but one worn by black enslaved people brought back to the Netherlands as servants. “For the longest time people have not wanted to come to terms with the meaning of those collars,” she said. “They were always described as being dog collars but if you look at the paintings, the ones wearing those collars are never the dogs, they are the men.”

A friend of mine learnt to carve wood when he was a child. He made his very first wooden figurine at a tender age, it was the head of a woman with cornrow braids. He had a good teacher, and learnt to understand the art of being one with the wood, carving to perfection, and of course that it required a great deal of patience. He is from a long line of wood carvers. Wood carving, making a sculpture is a very refined art. Don’t be fooled, it is not just cutting the wood, thinking of a design, then chipping parts of it, and then carving… oh no… it is much more than that, it is an art, and I would even go further to say that it is a science. Wait, I am not talking about these modern sculptures where dimensions are not respected, and you wonder if the artist was on crack or something… No… I am talking about the great art of African sculptors. Just a look at Bamileke masks and sculptures, or Senufo masks, Shona sculptures, there is so much geometry involved. I have always balled at hearing people say that Africans were not advanced, or like Sarkozy that they have not entered enough into history… I have also heard people referring to these African artists as illiterate because they have not gone to the “white” man’s school… Have you looked at African sculptures? The Mwash-a-mbooy of the Kuba? or the Kuosi, Bapi, Katso, and other masks of the Bamileke? or the Ashanti stools? or Chokwe masks? and so many others?  Do you think that whoever made these is not versed in geometry, symmetry, and precision? Do you know how much details goes into making some of these? Isn’t it odd that these advanced sculptures of a so-called backward people are still in museums in Europe generating millions of dollars every year (and these museums are only making ‘promises’ of maybe returning)?

Wood carving in Africa is a very old tradition, and wood carving was an integral part of Ancient Egypt (and these carvings and sculptures clearly show African features – some even wear the Afro) like the Ancient Egyptian priest Kaaper’s statue, and many more. Check out the link for Ancient Egyptian wood carving. In the Cairo museum in Egypt, there is a statue of a man from the period of the Great Pyramid of Giza, possibly 4000 B.C. The expression of the face and the realism of the carriage have never been surpassed by any Egyptian sculptor of this or any other period.

Not just any wood from any tree can be carved into x, y, or z; it requires knowledge of the type of wood. The African teak wood is frequently used, but other woods such as Ebony and others are also used for carving. The hard woods are used for sculptures, masks, doors, utensils, while the soft woods are used for drums. The video below follows modern wood carvers in Nigeria. Enjoy!

A court has finally ruled that Shell Nigeria must pay for oil damage. How long has it been? Wasn’t Ken Saro-Wiwa already working on such issues in the 1990s? This ruling deals with oil pollution in the Niger delta region of Nigeria. Well, a Dutch court has finally asked the oil giant Shell to compensate Nigerian farmers for oil damages. This is a first… and we just hope that Shell will not play the French card, and will actually compensate for all the environmental damages, the loss of livelihood, and probably the loss of lives they caused while they made humongous benefits. This is a major win for Nigerians, for Africans, and for all the communities around the world whose environments have been polluted by these giant corporations. Excerpts below are from the Guardian.

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A Dutch court has ordered Shell Nigeria to compensate farmers for major oil spills they say caused widespread pollution.

On Friday an appeals court in The Hague rejected Shell’s argument that the spills were the result of sabotage, saying not enough evidence had been provided.

The court ordered Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary to compensate the farmers for the losses caused by the oil spills in the two villages of Goi and Oruma in 2004 and 2005. The amount of compensation had not yet been decided.

It also ruled the parent company, Royal Dutch Shell, and its subsidiary must install warning equipment on its Oruma pipelines to limit the environmental damage in case of another spill.

The farmers claiming compensation argued the damage was caused by oil leaking from the pipeline, which could have been prevented if Shell had installed the correct detection systems.

“Finally, there is some justice for the Nigerian people suffering the consequences of Shell’s oil,” said Eric Dooh, one of the Nigerian plaintiffs, in a statement released by Friends of the Earth Netherlands, which supported the case. “This verdict brings hope for the future of the people in the Niger delta.” Dooh’s father was one of two complainants who died during the case, which has gone on for 13 years.

The Hague appeals court ruled in 2015 that Dutch courts had jurisdiction in the case, seven years after the four farmers first sued, and after debate over whether Shell’s parent company should be held liable for the Nigerian subsidiary’s actions.

“This is fantastic news for the environment and people living in developing countries,” said Friends of the Earth’s Netherlands head, Donald Pols.

“It means people in developing countries can take on the multinationals who do them harm.”