what I have learned today.

[Bledlow]

One of my stepfather's uncles was a sergeant pilot in WW2, & was killed when his Hurricane was shot down on 23-11-1941, in Libya. He's buried there. He was 24.

[Mr Larrington]

The recent presidential election in Gabon resulted in a narrow win for incumbent Ali Bongo over challenger Jean Ping

[Nuncio]

Not surprised. A Bongo is very nearly an anagram of Gabon.

I have learned today that Jean Ping is the son of Cheng Zhiping and, as a young boy, was referred to as 'Son of Ping' by his fellow Gabonese villagers.

I have also learned (it's been a busy day) that the phrase 'Stiff upper lip' originates from the United States.

Time for a rest.

[clarion]

Well, I am surprised, since President of the Magic Circle and legendary illusions creator Ali Bongo died in 2009.

[billplumtree]

See?  Magic, innit

[Mr Larrington]

Well, I am surprised, since President of the Magic Circle and legendary illusions creator Ali Bongo died in 2009.

As a result of The Curse of Half Man Half Biscuit.

[Cudzoziemiec]

That the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda are not competing tribes but different castes of the one Banyarwanda people. Tutsis are the aristocratic cattle-owning caste, Hutus the farmers and there is also a very small labourer and servant caste, Twa.

[ian]

That the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda are not competing tribes but different castes of the one Banyarwanda people. Tutsis are the aristocratic cattle-owning caste, Hutus the farmers and there is also a very small labourer and servant caste, Twa.

Blame the Belgians, they decided they needed to put Hutu or Tutsi on the identity cards they issued, so duly did so thus conveniently stratifying Rwandan society. We know how that panned out.

Kigali is probably the tidiest African capital I've been to.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Belgian stirring of the conflict pot goes back to the 50s according to what I've read, when they switched from using the Tutsis as their channels of power to the Hutus, because the better educated Tutsis were getting too uppity and demanding independence. Mitterand is also to blame, indirectly, for the 1994 massacre by sending paras to repel the 1990 invasion in the name of Francophonie. A conflict going back to Fashoda. Apparently.

[ianrauk]

Vacuuming, apparently. You go out each weekend and vacuum your lawn.

My aged MIL replaced a patch of grass in her back garden with fake grass. It looks surprisingly real and she does actually hoover it.

[barakta]

Friends of mine got that fake grass and have been delighted with it, think they wash it once a yr (or pay a person to come and do it) and otherwise it needs no maintenance.

[clarion]

Belgian stirring of the conflict pot goes back to the 50s according to what I've read, when they switched from using the Tutsis as their channels of power to the Hutus, because the better educated Tutsis were getting too uppity and demanding independence. Mitterand is also to blame, indirectly, for the 1994 massacre by sending paras to repel the 1990 invasion in the name of Francophonie. A conflict going back to Fashoda. Apparently.

The IMF is more to blame.

[Bledlow]

That the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda are not competing tribes but different castes of the one Banyarwanda people. Tutsis are the aristocratic cattle-owning caste, Hutus the farmers and there is also a very small labourer and servant caste, Twa.

Banyarwanda just means 'people of Rwanda'. It's a name derived from the state, not an ethnic label. Like Canadian or American. More or less the same language (called Kirundi instead of Kinyarwanda) & same three castes are found in Burundi, but the people there aren't Banyarwanda, because they don't live in Rwanda. Note that both states long predated European colonisation.

Unfortunately for the idea of them being purely castes, it's usually possible to identify which group a person belongs to from physical characteristics, & the fact that historically, most Tutsi weren't aristocratic (only members of specific aristocratic lineages), but were still Tutsi. The 'castes of one people' idea seems to be another over-simplification by outsiders, like the colonial rigid racial classification but in reverse.

The Twa are generally thought to have been there first, living as hunter-gatherers, then Bantu-speakers arrived between 1000 & 1500 years ago. According to local oral histories, the Tutsi arrived maybe 5-600 years ago & adopted the Bantu language of the Hutu, leading Tutsi families establishing themselves as a ruling caste. It's all a bit confused by intermarriage & groups & individuals managing to switch status.

[Bledlow]

Belgian stirring of the conflict pot goes back to the 50s according to what I've read, when they switched from using the Tutsis as their channels of power to the Hutus, because the better educated Tutsis were getting too uppity and demanding independence. Mitterand is also to blame, indirectly, for the 1994 massacre by sending paras to repel the 1990 invasion in the name of Francophonie. A conflict going back to Fashoda. Apparently.

The IMF is more to blame.

It began before the IMF existed. Dammit, why this knee-jerk rejection of analysis? Allocate blame to the usual suspects, then look for evidence. 

Same with the Belgian pot-stirring. That began sort of accidentally, from the Belgians imposing their own over-simplified interpretation of society on their colonies, while thinking that what they were doing was describing reality. And it was mixed up with actions taken by Rwandan kings, such as taking Hutu chiefs (yes, there were such) into the small aristocratic elite around the royal family when, with Belgian help, they integrated Hutu-run districts which had previously been outside their control into the kingdom. Some locals seem to have found the Belgian tidy-mindedness & resultant simple classification a useful tool to help along an already begun (in the 19th century, before the Germans arrived, let alone the Belgians) process of strengthening & making more rigid a division that was previously rather flexible.

The more I read about it (& I've been reading about the histories of Rwanda & Burundi since my attention was drawn to them by the 1972 Burundi massacres), the more complicated I find it is.

The 1972 massacres were far from the first, by the way.

Next, why Tamerlane's conquests were caused by the IMF.

[clarion]

Belgian stirring of the conflict pot goes back to the 50s according to what I've read, when they switched from using the Tutsis as their channels of power to the Hutus, because the better educated Tutsis were getting too uppity and demanding independence. Mitterand is also to blame, indirectly, for the 1994 massacre by sending paras to repel the 1990 invasion in the name of Francophonie. A conflict going back to Fashoda. Apparently.

The IMF is more to blame.

It began before the IMF existed. Dammit, why this knee-jerk rejection of analysis? Allocate blame to the usual suspects, then look for evidence. 

No kneejerk.  This is the result of a great deal of research.  Yes, there were conflicts there, and a divide.  But the difference between Rwanda & Burundi, which meant one descended into brutal civil war, and, despite violence, the other did not, was very much the use of Structural Adjustment Programmes as an act of war.

Fwiw, I am usually the one calling the cause earlier - for example, the cause of the First World War has nothing to do with defending British freedom, or student revolutionaries in Sarajevo.  It most clearly dates back to the Scramble for Africa, and the Berlin Conference of 1884-5.

[ElyDave]

Belgian stirring of the conflict pot goes back to the 50s according to what I've read, when they switched from using the Tutsis as their channels of power to the Hutus, because the better educated Tutsis were getting too uppity and demanding independence. Mitterand is also to blame, indirectly, for the 1994 massacre by sending paras to repel the 1990 invasion in the name of Francophonie. A conflict going back to Fashoda. Apparently.

The IMF is more to blame.

It began before the IMF existed. Dammit, why this knee-jerk rejection of analysis? Allocate blame to the usual suspects, then look for evidence. 

No kneejerk.  This is the result of a great deal of research.  Yes, there were conflicts there, and a divide.  But the difference between Rwanda & Burundi, which meant one descended into brutal civil war, and, despite violence, the other did not, was very much the use of Structural Adjustment Programmes as an act of war.

Fwiw, I am usually the one calling the cause earlier - for example, the cause of the First World War has nothing to do with defending British freedom, or student revolutionaries in Sarajevo.  It most clearly dates back to the Scramble for Africa, and the Berlin Conference of 1884-5.

Of course it doesn't have anything to do with defending freedom or Sarajevo - that was just an excuse to start it.  It was entirely about control of trade, with the British still based on a seagoing empire and seeing Germany partly as a threat to that power and to our trade with Europe, much the same as today.

[Cudzoziemiec]

The first massacre mentioned by Kapuściński is 1959. As for Banyarwanda meaning 'people of Rwanda', that's pretty evident from the word. Whether it derives from the name of the state or the state from it is a bit like asking whether France came from French or vice versa.

How reliable Kapuściński is, I don't know, but he's interesting. You can read it on this slightly dodgy site (ignore the Russian adverts!), starting near the bottom of p34.
http://mreadz.com/read-265722/p34

[Bledlow]

Belgian stirring of the conflict pot goes back to the 50s according to what I've read, when they switched from using the Tutsis as their channels of power to the Hutus, because the better educated Tutsis were getting too uppity and demanding independence. Mitterand is also to blame, indirectly, for the 1994 massacre by sending paras to repel the 1990 invasion in the name of Francophonie. A conflict going back to Fashoda. Apparently.

The IMF is more to blame.

It began before the IMF existed. Dammit, why this knee-jerk rejection of analysis? Allocate blame to the usual suspects, then look for evidence. 

No kneejerk.  This is the result of a great deal of research.  Yes, there were conflicts there, and a divide.  But the difference between Rwanda & Burundi, which meant one descended into brutal civil war, and, despite violence, the other did not, was very much the use of Structural Adjustment Programmes as an act of war.

Burundi didn't descend into brutal civil war? In which universe? A few hundred thousand dead (again) is just 'violence'.

Of course, the attempt to exterminate the Tutsi population of Rwanda had nothing to do with a small Hutu clique exploiting tensions to try to destroy the internal power base of the mostly expatriate Tutsi army which invaded from Uganda, but was everything to do with an IMF 'act of war'. And the structural adjustment explains why Rwanda descended further into horror even than Burundi. Never heard of the IMF structural adjustment programmes in Burundi, have you, or you'd know that both Rwanda & Burundi had more or less simultaneous programmes in the early 1990s?

Now do you see what I mean? In the selected sources you rely on, the fact that Rwanda had a structural adjustment programme just before the genocide is obviously the cause of the genocide. Since Burundi didn't have an equally* ghastly episode, then clearly it didn't have a structural adjustment programme.  Rwandan politics, such as the existence of a large & organised (with the co-operation of a neighbouring state) expatriate population dating back to inter-ethnic conflict over 30 years earlier, don't count. Nor do the ambitions of the leaders of neighbouring states. The poor natives are helpless puppets dancing on the strings pulled by white people, & incapable of having their own motivations, or acting on their own initiative.

*Unutterably horrible, but much less intense.

[David Martin]

The person who is the most cited author on Google Scholar with an H-Index of 333..

https://scholar.google.nl/citations?user=qGuYgMsAAAAJ&hl=en

[Basil]

 

[lou boutin]

 

[barakta]

 

[ElyDave]

 

[Wombat]

That there is logic to my casual referring to our no2 cat as "coarsefur cat".  I measured one of his hairs from the middle of his back, and it was 0.1mm diameter.  I later grabbed one from Baggins' (AKA silkyfur cat) back and it was 0.06mm diameter.  So it wasn't just my imagination, and the fact that Alfie is a scruffy git.  In contrast one of Mrs W's hairs was 0.04mm.

Really changes my life, that 

[Tim Hall]

That there is logic to my casual referring to our no2 cat as "coarsefur cat".  I measured one of his hairs from the middle of his back, and it was 0.1mm diameter.  I later grabbed one from Baggins' (AKA silkyfur cat) back and it was 0.06mm diameter.  So it wasn't just my imagination, and the fact that Alfie is a scruffy git.  In contrast one of Mrs W's hairs was 0.04mm.

Really changes my life, that 

I needed to read that twice. At first I thought "my casual" was a fancy modern way of referring to your paramour.  What Mrs W might say about that I really don't know.