A Bit More Detail

• The Counterfactual History Review takes/u> a look at the plausibility of Wakanda, as a society, and finds it holds up. (There's something to be said about having the problems of one's own society being indigenous, not imposed by colonizers.)


• This article takes a look at the interest of Lesotho, a mountainous kingdom of southern Africa that was never quite fully colonized, on the idea of Wakanda.


• What is the relationship of Wakanda to Africa and the wider black diaspora? This article makes an argument. (Spoilers.)


• Queer representation in Wakanda is a real thing. All the more frustrating, then, if it is not quite realized.


• The Toronto Public Library's The Buzz points readers to more comics exploring Black Panther and Wakanda.


• Vulture takes a look at Christopher Priest, the writer who helped make Black Panther the character he is today more than a decade ago but then disappeared.

• blogTO notes how expensive Toronto's rental market is.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanet system.


• Crooked Timber engages with the complexities of racism.


• The Crux shares some oral history about the detection of the first gravitational wave.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports about the difficulties involved with detecting exoplanets around red dwarfs and describes the discovery of a super-Earth orbiting an orange dwarf in the Pleiades.


• Joe. My. God. notes that New York City ended free web browsing at browsing stations because people kept looking up porn.


• Language Log notes that a partially shared script does not make Chinese readable by speakers of Japanese, and vice versa.


• Marginal Revolution cautions against the idea that Brexit is over.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer talks about the usefulness of counterfactuals, especially good counterfactuals.


• Torontoist argues that the TTC needs more cats. Why not?


• The Volokh Conspiracy links to a comparative global study of settlements in occupied territories.


• Window on Eurasia reports that Google has displaced television as a primary source of news for Russians.

German authorities are set to officially recognize as "genocide" the colonial-era crackdown in Namibia by German troops more than a century ago in which over 65,000 ethnic Hereros were killed.

Talks with Namibia on a joint declaration about the events of the early 20th century are ongoing, and it isn't clear when they will be concluded, German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said Friday.

The basis for the German government's approach is a parliamentary motion signed three years ago by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, stating that "the war of destruction in Namibia from 1904 to 1908 was a war crime and genocide," Schaefer said. Steinmeier was an opposition leader at the time, and the motion didn't pass.

German Gen. Lothar von Trotha — who was sent to what was then South West Africa to put down an uprising by the Hereros against their German rulers in 1904 — instructed his troops to wipe out the entire tribe in what is widely seen as the 20th century’s first genocide, historians say.

On Oct. 2, 1904, Trotha issued a proclamation: “Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle will be shot. I shall not accept more women and children. … I shall order shots to be fired at them.”

Rounded up in prison camps, captured Hereros and as well as members of the Nama tribe died from malnutrition and severe weather. Dozens were beheaded after their deaths and their skulls sent to German researchers in Berlin for "scientific" experiments.

• At Geocurrents, Asya Pereltsvaig takes on the provocative, if apparently ill-founded, thesis that Ashkenazic Jews trace their ancestry to the medieval Khazars of the Russian steppe by taking a look at the structure of the Yiddish language.


• Language Hat claims that, with the advent of electronic communications which make them difficult to insert into text, diacritical marks are endangered in the Polish language. A campaign has been launched.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis links to an essay by feminist and historian Ruth Rosen wherein she states--basically--that early feminists didn't think about campaigning against violence against women in the 1970s because violence against women was taken for granted as inevitable.


• British journalist Mark Simpson unearths a vintage article about Napster and the Internet and free culture from 2001 that's still relevant today.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen links approvingly to a book, Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, that examines "Korean-Japanese relations, the early history of Korean industrialization, and the rise of industrial food, as well as the evolution of Korean food in recent times". It does look interesting.


• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes a look at the ways in which the sex industry of New York City's Times Square was an integral part of the neighbourhood, in photos and posters.


• Torontoist notes that City Council has just declared Toronto a sanctuary city, guaranteeing undocumented residents access to municipal services. More on this later.


• Eugene Volokh in a couple of posts (1, 2) starts speculating whether or not indigenous peoples in the New World would have seen European migrants as illegal immigrants and starts to head in problematic directions. Again, more later.


• John Scalzi at Whatever shares his love of libraries.


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble notes, via various sources, that Chechen refugees in the European Union are facing forced returns to their ever-problematic homeland.

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster writes about long-lived artifacts, such as we or extraterrestrials might make to last for eons.


• Daniel Drezner writes about the ongoing question of what the United States should do in Mali. (Apparently it has to be asked.)


• The Dragon's Tales links to a study suggesting Titan has an active geology, with its carbon sand filling in craters.


• Far Outliers reports on the fine mechanics of racism in colonial Spanish America.


• The Global Sociology Blog notes the many ways in which the Arab Spring does not resemble protests against same-sex marriage in France.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen speculates that cultural tourism will be more resilient than scenery-oriented tourism, on account of the limits of the digital world.


• Torontoist reports on the call by a group of Toronto physicians for more bike lanes sooner.


• Window on Eurasia notes that, after the 1969 Sino-Soviet clashes, landmarks on the Russian frontier with China were given new Russian names.

The French presence in Le Pays des Illinois initially centered around the town of Kaskaskia, some fifty miles southeast of present day St. Louis (itself founded by the French forty-three years later). Already a focus of Illinois Indian population, Kaskaskia attracted Jesuit missionaries who established themselves permanently in 1703. Along with the nearby settlements of Prairie du Rocher and Fort de Chartres, Kaskaskia soon boasted perhaps seven thousand French settlers (including women), who lived relatively peacefully alongside the local indigenes. Seven thousand is of course a tiny population by modern standards, but even half that number would have made it one of the largest European settlements in North America at the time. While the French fought viciously against Indian enemies such as the Fox and the Iroquois, the Illinois Indians they lived among shared their diplomatic objectives, and tranquility remained the norm within French and Indian settlements. Intermarriage was common, and resulting mixed-race children were known as métis, a French cognate of the Spanish mestizo.

The French Midwest boomed in the 18th Century not because of the fur trade, but because it was well positioned to supply another growing city to the South: La Nouvelle-Orléans. New Orleans, as the Americans would later call it, became wealthy through shipping and the production of market crops, creating strong demand for wheat and oats from upriver. This new economic geography led to the reassignment of Le Pays des Illinois from Canada to France’s new colony, La Louisiane. The first African slaves arrived in Kaskaskia in 1718, but price ceilings on grains imposed by French officials made the purchase of slaves for farming uneconomical. Instead, many French settlers brought their slaves west to Missouri, where recently discovered lead mines in the Northeastern Ozarks offered a higher rate of return. Canada had barely been settled before the Mississippi became the new focus of French colonization, and now Missouri seemed destined to eclipse Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, and the like in a similar fashion.

Located mainly in Missouri, the Ozark Plateau includes the highest topographical features in North America between the Appalachian Mountains in the East and the Rocky Mountains in the West. Unbeknownst to most, it is also the site of an unbroken French cultural heritage that stretches back some three hundred years. The etymology of the Ozarks is disputed, but most consider it to be a corruption of the French term aux Arks, or, “of Arkansas”. As previously mentioned, it was lead, or, more precisely, galena ore, that brought the French to the region. Missouri sits on the world’s largest deposit of galena, an ore-body that was close enough to the surface to catch the eye of French explorers. Since galena is often found together with silver, the French naturally imagined they had found their answer to Spain’s Cerro de Potosí, the richest silver deposit ever discovered (located in modern Bolivia). Evidence of this enthusiasm lives on to this day in place names like Potosi, Missouri, currently home to some 2,500 people. The miners’ hopes, however, were misplaced. No silver lay under Missouri’s soil, and settlers were left to mine and farm what they could.

La Vieille Mine, anglicized today as Old Mines, Missouri, is perhaps the most impressive example of French culture in the Ozarks region. Statistics are difficult to come by, but according to residents the region around Old Mines may have been home to over a thousand French speakers (known colloquially as “Paw Paw French”) only a few decades ago. Most were middle aged or elderly at the time, so the area’s distinct Missouri French dialect is likely to go extinct before long. Yet the region remains proud of its linguistic heritage. It stages an annual “Missouri French Festival” replete with dance and merriment. Several buildings remain from colonial French times, including a house still in private use.

• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason wonders about the next generation of birthers, concerned with "natural-born" presidential candidates: what of the genetically engineered?


• blogTO notes that People's Foods, an iconic diner in The Annex on Dupont Street, is closing down due to rising rents.


• Far Outliers profiles the displacement of classical Chinese as the written language of Vietnam by Latin-script Vietnamese under the French.


• Geocurrents observes that Eurovision's second-place winners, Russia's Buranovskie Babushki, come from the pagan-inflected Finnic republic of Udmurtia.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis provides a sympathetic review of the Earth Liberation Front and the documentary If A Tree Falls.


• Language Log notes the controversy in Ukraine regarding the introduction of Russian as an official language.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio blogs about his impressions of Kazakstan's new capital Astana--being built practically overnight in the middle of the steppe--and an economic conference being held there that's curiously tone-deaf.


• Torontoist noted that red-paned Toronto skyscraper Scotia Plaza has been sold for a cool $C 1.27 billion.


• Zero Geography's Mark Graham compares English- and French-language geotagged articles on Wikipedia and finds with the exception of France, the Maghreb, and selected points elsewhere, English outnumbers French.

Not far from where HIV-1 group M was born was a major river, the Sangha, flowing toward the heart of Central Africa. This section of the Sangha was not ideal for navigation because of its ribbons of sandbars and the dense vegetation along its banks.

In the especially treacherous middle section, near where Hahn and Sharp’s team found the viral ancestor of HIV, few major human settlements ever developed. But there were numerous communities on the Sangha’s more accessible stretches. And due south, past riverside trading towns, was the mighty Congo River itself, the superhighway of Central Africa.

[. . .]

In December 1895 German colonial authorities heard reports that Cameroon’s southeastern corner contained fabulously rich ivory and rubber stocks awaiting exploitation.

The Germans soon after gave authority to a colonial company to take control of the region by force. Over the next four years they extended their power all the way through southeastern Cameroon and established a trading station on the Ngoko River about 75 miles upstream from where its waters merged with the Sangha. In the wedge of land defined by these two rivers, HIV either had just been born or soon would be.

The trading station was called Moloundou, and a busy town remains there today. But at the time it was almost unimaginably remote. Few human settlements had developed among these forbidding forests. And there were only two practical ways out: by steamship down the Ngoko to the Sangha and on to the Congo River; or overland by foot to the Atlantic.

The river route was the easier of the two, and steamships transported the bulk of the ivory and rubber collected in southeastern Cameroon. But overland routes were necessary to connect Moloundou with other trading stations and inland areas rich with rubber and ivory.

[. . .]

In just a few years [syphillis] reached epidemic proportions along porter routes and riverside trading posts in Cameroon and throughout the Congo Basin. It’s impossible now to determine how much of this spread resulted from rapes as opposed to other kinds of encounters, but it’s clear that colonial commerce created massive new networks of sexual interactions — and massive new transmissions of infections. (In later decades, transmission through the reuse of hypodermic needles in medical care probably had some role in HIV’s spread as well.)

So HIV’s first journey looked something like this: A hunter killed an infected chimp in the southeastern Cameroonian forest, and a simian virus entered his body through a cut during the butchering, mutating into HIV.

This probably had happened many times before, during the centuries when the region had little contact with the outside world. But now thousands of porters — both men and women — were crossing through the area regularly, creating more opportunities for the virus to travel onward to a riverside trading station such as Moloundou.

One of the first victims — whether a hunter, a porter or an ivory collector — gave HIV to a sexual partner. There may have been a small outbreak around the trading station before the virus found its way aboard a steamship headed down the Sangha River.

[. . .]

Most of this colonial world didn’t have enough potential victims for such a fragile virus to start a major epidemic. HIV is harder to transmit than many other infections. People can have sex hundreds of times without passing the virus on. To spread widely, HIV requires a population large enough to sustain an outbreak and a sexual culture in which people often have more than one partner, creating networks of interaction that propel the virus onward.

To fulfill its grim destiny, HIV needed a kind of place never before seen in Central Africa but one that now was rising in the heart of the region: a big, thriving, hectic place jammed with people and energy, where old rules were cast aside amid the tumult of new commerce.

It needed Kinshasa. It was here, hundreds of miles downriver from Cameroon, that HIV began to grow beyond a mere outbreak. It was here that AIDS grew into an epidemic.