More than 2000 years ago, Herodotus (484-425 B. C.), the ancient Greek historian, described the Sahara as a region of sand and heat, with high dunes and salty hillocks, and vast waterless areas. He said that it was inhabited by people with strange and exotic customs. But it was not always like this. The Sahara was once a green and fertile country. What transformed this region of lush vegetation into an arid desert? What caused the rainfall to stop abruptly, bringing about a drastic climatic change? Will the Sahara green up again?
The Sahara, meaning “desert” in Arabic, covers an area of 9,200,000 km² and it is the largest hot desert in the world. The desert comprises much of North Africa. To the south, it is bounded by a belt of semi-arid and tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudan region of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Few know that this vast Sahara desert was not always a horrid wasteland with sand dunes where people and animals die of thirst. Centuries ago, the Sahara was a pleasant fertile land where rainfall was a common feature and where trees and grass grew and streams flowed abundantly. Many wild animals had made it their habitat while art and culture too were very impressive.
The Negroid people, who lived there, hunted a large variety of land and water animals as geological and archaeological factors corroborate this fact. The number of rock paintings and engravings in the Sahara, left behind by early Holocene artists of the current geological period, is much higher than those found anywhere in the world. For instance, the cave paintings, discovered at Tassili N’Ajjer in Southern Algeria, highlight this bewildering truth. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site having one of the most important groupings of prehistoric cave art in the world and covering an area of more than 72,000 km².
How this green fertile land became one of perfect death as it is today has always puzzled scientists. They now attribute the change to monsoon rains. Northern Africa, according to their latest research, was wetter between 15,000 and 11,000 years ago and this ended around 5000 years ago. Geologists and modern climate scientists call this span of time the African Humid Period (AHP), also known as the “Green Sahara”. The area of the present-day Sahara was covered with lush vegetation, stretching right up to the Arabian Peninsula. The main factor behind this humid period with heavy monsoon rains, in fact, is planetary in scale: cyclical changes to both the tilt and orbit of our planet Earth, resulting in about 4%-8% more solar energy hitting the planet than it gets today. Solar radiation is always changing due to natural orbital cycles. This warmed up the northern hemisphere, causing powerful winds to move towards it, shifting up the monsoons which drench South Africa today, thus pouring water onto the Sahara and allowing the vegetation to grow there. Dust records indicate that there was a dramatic decrease in moisture around 5500 years ago when a slight wobbling once more of the Earth’s orbit caused a decrease in the solar energy. At this point the AHP ended quickly and the Sahara returned to a sandy desert as it is now and people clustered back around the Nile and other water resources for their existence, founding the great pharaonic civilisation. Meanwhile, some geologists have even hypothesised that 230 green Sahara periods may have occurred in the past eight million years.
The orbital shifting and the resulting climatic changes were not the sole factor that has led to this depraved condition of the Sahara. Human beings too have had their part in these climate changes. The increasing number of domestic animals destroyed plant life while mountainous woodlands were burnt off and reduced to grazing land. Vegetation, gradually, deteriorated: from savanna it became steppe and from steppe it became desert. The only remnants left were paintings and artefacts that boast of the past glory and legacy of this once hospitable land of luxuriant foliage and moist environment. In Algeria and Libya, scholars have found astounding evidence of earlier human occupation. Along the waterways that are nothing but sand today, vestiges of fireplaces, grinding stones, hunting tools and even mounds of fish bones have been found. In 2000, a team of archaeologists hunting for dinosaur bones stumbled upon a graveyard in Niger: traces of a community who had lived in the Green Sahara. Languages of Mali in Western Africa and Ethiopia in Eastern Africa are very different from each other, but strangely they still have similar words for “hippo”. Some linguists claim that this could bear abundant evidence of the fact that people from these cultures, though separated by a vast distance today, once lived in the same place among these semi-aquatic African mammals.
Early explorers of the Sahara
The first adventurers were English explorer Dixon Denham (1786-1828), Scottish explorers Bain Hugh Clapperton (1788-1827), Walter Qudney (1790-1824) and Major Alexander Gordon Laing (1794-1826). Laing became the first European to cross the Sahara and reach the fabled city of Timbuktu in Mali, a landlocked country in West Africa. Although he was murdered there, the French explorer René Caillié (1799-1838), who came there, disguised as an Arab, succeeded in leaving the place unscathed. He reached Morocco after facing torrid heat, whirlwinds and scarcity of water and often lured by the torment of the mirage.
Caillié’s journey through the Sahara was a remarkable feat as it paved the way for further regular encroaching journeys of the French. Frenchmen soon embarked upon colonial activities, military campaigns and building of the Trans-Saharan Railway through Algeria to Sub-Saharan Africa to the south, intended originally to connect coal mines and boost trade throughout North Africa. For their excursions they had to produce the definite maps of the area that revealed the true picture of the Sahara with high mountains, dotted with olives and cypresses. These maps were prepared by the German explorer Heinrich Barth (1821-1865). His findings sowed the seeds for archaeological research that proved that the Sahara period was divided into two pre-camel and post-camel periods: a finding supported by French geologist G. B. M. Flamand who did a comparative study of the cave engravings of Southern Oran in Algeria.
By 1956 the scientific interest in the Sahara had grown and numerous French expeditions were sent to Tassili N’Ajjer. The earliest paintings were found to be produced by a Negroid ethnic group, but other primitive artefacts, found at various places, showed that this region may have been inhabited from the very dawn of man’s existence.
Besides the art, research equally unmasked the political history of the Sahara desert: the continuous struggle between the tribes. The semi-nomadic Tuareg people, who practise Islam and belong to the Berber branch of the Afroasiatic family, are the predominant ethnic group that inhabits the region. The frequent warfare diminished the population and the kingdoms disintegrated. The severe droughts may have been the cause of such warfare. In 1913, a terrible famine struck the region and over one million people perished of hunger, disease, murder and fratricide. In 1972-74 the disaster hit the Sahara again: famine and influenza epidemic aggravating the horror of the region. Hunger made people commit the most dreadful acts: murder, looting and killing one’s own children. Despite such natural disasters, the Sahara continues to exist and people are still inhabiting the area.
Ecological link between the Sahara desert and the Amazon rainforest
The Sahara desert in Africa and the Amazon rainforest in South America are so different and far apart from each other, but surprisingly, both share a vital ecological link. A new geophysical research proves that without the more than a hundred million tons of dust that blows in the wind across the Atlantic Ocean from the Sahara desert, the Amazon rainforest, the largest on earth, would cease to exist. The research paper says that this dust from Africa contains the vital source of plant nutrient: phosphorus. It is a tiny 1/10th of 1% of the Sahara dust but in total 22,000 tons of it fall upon the Amazon annually. This amount of the nutrient is equal to what the constant rainforest rains wash away each year. What an astonishing and perfect balance of nature!
A large part of the African dust blows from the Bodélé Depression in Chad in north central Africa. The 500 km long, 150 km wide and around 160 m deep depression is an ancient lake bed containing huge deposits of dead microorganisms loaded with phosphorus. Ocean pastures of the Atlantic and Amazonian soils, in turn, are short of this important chemical element. Thus, the entire Amazon ecosystem depends on the fertile Saharan dust to replenish the loss of a vital plant nutrient caused by rains. ***
]]>Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu, South African Anglican churchman, theologian, politician, anti-apartheid and human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, passed away on 26th December last year (the day after Christmas) at the Oasis Frail Care Centre in Cape Town at the age of 90. The cleric was suffering from cancer.
Tutu was born of a mixed Xhosa and Motswana descent to a poor family in Klerksdorp (the first capital of the then Transvaal Republic) in northwestern South Africa on 07th October 1931. Tutu later said that although they were not affluent, they were not destitute either. He was trained as a teacher and in 1955 he married Nomalizo Leah Shenxane, a Roman Catholic and a friend of his sister, fathering four children. Respecting the faith of his wife, Tutu agreed to hold a Roman Catholic wedding ceremony at the Church of Mary Queen of Apostles.
In 1960, Tutu was ordained an Anglican priest. Although he had been baptised into the Methodist Church in 1932, he later changed his original denomination, becoming a member of the Anglican Church. From 1978 to 1985, Tutu served as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches and from 1986 to 1996, as Archbishop of Cape Town. During the early 1970s, Tutu’s discovery of liberation theology and his attraction to black theology brought about a shift in his theological concepts. He equally sought to fuse concepts from black theology with African theology.
Liberation theology, a new form of Christian theology, developed mainly by Latin American Roman Catholic theologians, emphasises liberation from social, political and economic oppression as an anticipation of ultimate salvation, and preferential option for the poor. Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino of Peru, ex-Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff of Brazil, Jesuit priests Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay and Jon Sobrino from Spain, are among the founders of this theology. Black theology originated among African-American seminarians and scholars while African theology is based on the African cultural context.
Inspired by these different forms of theology, Tutu became a tireless and vehement campaigner against apartheid (meaning “Separateness” in Afrikaans language), which was a system of racial stratification enforced by the white minority regime against the black majority in South Africa. Under this institutionalised racial segregation that prevailed from the late 1940s until the early 1990s, the white citizens enjoyed the highest social status while the black Africans were relegated to the lowest class.
Archbishop Tutu, who has always seen himself as the moral voice and conscience of South Africa, could not tolerate this racially biased system and fought hand in hand with Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) and the ANC (African National Congress) which Mandela had joined in 1944, to dismantle it and bring about racial reconciliation. Mandela was another anti-apartheid revolutionary who was imprisoned and on being released after 27 years in 1990, became the first black president of South Africa in a democratically held election in 1994. Both Tutu and Mandela received Nobel Peace Prizes in 1984 and 1993 respectively, in recognition of their struggle to abolish apartheid. Both were recipients of many other awards as well. Tutu was the second South African to receive the peace award, after Albert John Luthuli in 1960 for his non-violent role against apartheid.
Mandela selected Tutu to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in his coalition government to investigate past human rights abuses committed by both pro and anti-apartheid groups. Tutu was also credited with coining the term “Rainbow Nation” to describe the ethnic mix of post-apartheid South Africa.
Tutu described his friend Mandela as a “nation builder” but was later increasingly disillusioned with the post-apartheid ANC due to its factionalism and corruption. He dared to criticise Mandela on several points, such as his tendency to wear brightly coloured Madiba shirts, regarding them as inappropriate. He was also critical of the other succeeding presidents Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. It was said that the Anglican prelate was deeply concerned about the squandering of many hard-won achievements of liberation and therefore he welcomed the formation of the opposition party Agang South Africa which challenged the governing ANC in the 2014 and 2019 general elections. But, in 2019 this opposition party was defeated, losing all its seats.
Tutu’s attitude towards same-sex marriages
He was quite outspoken in his opinion on gay rights. According to a canon of a cathedral, Tutu has become a hero all over the world for the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) community. The valiant and controversial stance he took as an influential cleric on the rights of this community sounds “groundbreaking” and “rebellious” in view of the prohibition of same-sex marriages in the Christian churches. His speeches and homilies lamented discrimination against homosexuals which he regarded as being equivalent to discrimination against black people and women. In 2007, Tutu accused the church of being obsessed with homosexuality and he went even further by saying that if God, as said, was homophobic, he would not worship that God. In 2011, Tutu called on the Anglican Church of South Africa to accept and conduct same-sex marriages. In 2015, he attended the marriage of his daughter Mpho Andrea Tutu, Anglican priest and activist, to another woman in the Netherlands and gave his blessing in spite of Anglican opposition to such marriages.
Same-sex marriages date back to the 1st century. In our era same-sex couples were legally acknowledged for the first time in the Netherlands in 2001. As of 2021, these marriages are legally performed and recognised in 29 countries, the most recent being Costa Rica (2020). Following a referendum held in September 2021, resulting in a 64% vote in favour of such marriages, Switzerland is to allow same-sex couples to marry starting from July this year.
His concern for social and international issues
Tutu, a personage easily identifiable in his purple robe, bravely championed the equality of all people and transformed the church by ordaining women to the priesthood. He spoke in support of voluntary euthanasia or assisted dying when a patient’s life is ended at his request to relieve him of further suffering. Tutu advocated non-violent protest and foreign economic pressure to bring about universal suffrage. Insisting on the urgent need to act against HIV/AIDS, with the 2005 election of Pope Benedict XVI, who was known for his conservative views on gender and sexuality issues, Tutu regretted that the Roman Catholic Church was now unlikely to change its opposition to the use of condoms to help prevent the disease. In 2006, he launched a global campaign to combat child trafficking, ensuring that all children are registered at birth.
Way back in the 1960’s Tutu decried the widespread corruption and poverty in Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo) under the regime of its president Mobutu Sese Seko (1965-1997). He expressed concern for the crushing of the Republic of Biafra, a secessionist state that existed in southeastern Nigeria from 1967-1970, predominantly populated by Igbo people. In his travels around East Africa in 1972, Tutu witnessed the expulsion of the Asian minority of Uganda by its military dictator Idi Amin Dada who gave them 90 days to leave the country.
He stood for the cause of Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, admitting, however, the right of Israel to exist. In 1989, at the invitation of Palestinian Anglican bishop Samir Kafity, he went on a Christmas pilgrimage to Jerusalem and giving a sermon near Bethlehem, he called for a two-state solution. Tutu laid a wreath at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and exhorted the people to forgive the Nazi perpetrators of this massacre, drawing criticism from Jewish groups around the world.
In July 1995, Tutu visited Rwanda, a year after the genocide during the Rwandan Civil War. He preached to 10,000 people in Kigali, the capital and called for justice with mercy towards the Hutus who had orchestrated the genocide.
He opposed the Iraq War (2003-2011) that broke out with the U. S.-led invasion of Iraq which overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. When in 2009 Tutu was awarded the highest civilian honour at the White House by Barack Obama, Tutu asked the president to apologise for that invasion.
In 2005, Tutu declared that the detentions of terrorist suspects at Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba without trial were utterly unacceptable.
When protests and demonstrations were held in 2008 by monks in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, over the Chinese government’s persecution of Tibetans, Tutu marched in a pro-Tibet demonstration in San Francisco, calling the world leaders to boycott the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. Although Tutu invited the current Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, to attend his 80th birthday in 2011, the South African authorities did not grant him entry. Observers suggested that the government did not want to offend the People’s Republic of China, a major trading partner.
In August 2017, Tutu urged the Saudi Arabian government to stop the execution of 14 participants in the 2011-12 protests in the country. In September Tutu asked Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi, another Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1991) to halt the army’s persecution of the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority. In December of the same year, Tutu condemned the decision of U. S. President Donald Trump to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital despite Palestinian opposition.
Tutu was often compared in the United States to the civil rights activist and American Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) although some white conservatives have lambasted him as an alleged communist sympathiser. But Tutu, though identified with socialism, opposed its other forms like Marxism-Leninism, as it promoted communism which advocates atheism. Tutu was a devout Christian from boyhood and prayer was part and parcel of his life. Being a spellbinding preacher, he was a fan of cricket as well, and was fond of reading books on politics and religion, and listening to classical music.
But some argue that his stand on social issues like the use of condoms for safe sexual relations and sexual acts between the same gender is debatable and they question whether these practices, which the Catholic Church, in general, does not favour, can be reconciled with the established Christian teachings on morality. Pope Francis, head of the Catholic Church, lamented Tutu’s demise and lauded him for promoting racial equality and reconciliation in his native South Africa. In 1987, Tutu received the Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth) Catholic Award, named after a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII that exhorts all people of good will to secure peace among all nations.
Tutu maintained that religious leaders like himself should not be engaged in party politics and cited the cases of Methodist Bishop Abel Muzorewa (prime minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia from 1979-1980), Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900-1989), founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 and Archbishop Makarios III (1913-1977) of the Church of Cyprus and also the first president of that country. According to Tutu, such crossovers have proved problematic.
Tutu’s concern for Sri Lanka
On 18th May 2010, exactly a year after the end of the over 30-year-long ethnic war in Sri Lanka, Tutu wrote that if Sri Lanka was to build a more inclusive and democratic state for all its ethnic communities, there should be an urgent need for a far-sighted political leadership, able to reach out to all communities and serve all its citizens.
The National Christian Council of Sri Lanka, in a message of condolences, said that Archbishop Tutu was a moral compass to South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy.
In the almost empty St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, with an unvarnished, rope-handled plain pine coffin, placed before the altar, the countrymen bid farewell on 01st January to Archbishop Desmond Tutu whom they hailed as a hero, after a week-long period of national mourning, with no ostentatiousness or lavish spending as the prelate had wished. Pandemic regulations limited attendance to 100, discouraging mourners outside in a rain-soaked Cape Town. No speeches were delivered except for the eulogy given by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. ***
]]>Though ancient history records many stories of caring for sick and elderly by institutions and individuals, Florence Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing in the 19th century.
To ensure standards are maintained for patience at all times nurses were taught ethics, knowledge, and techniques related to management in nursing. In earlier days many young women were attracted to this noblest profession, and later males too joined in. Caring for the needy had been always a challenge. The ongoing pandemic has relived many stories of nursing staff’s courage and heroism from all over the world. By now they have stretched their services above and beyond, but still continue their efforts in supporting patience and saving lives.
Who can predict what lays in the future? Any medical crises will make the nursing staff tiring and stressed. It is time that health authorities take appropriate measures to ensure nursing staff’s wellbeing further.
Below given facts highlights their present-day role and challenges.
Statistics courtesy by International council of Nurses.
We thank you for your services.
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