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No Sable, No Sweat: On Safari in Tanzania II

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Find Part I, Another Day, Another Lion: On Safari in Tanzania, here.

Having pretty much lioned out, I suggested that we spend our last morning in Ruaha National Park searching for sable.  No other antelope has an all black coat (sable females don't either) and I’d never seen one.  My grandson was game, so to speak, and our companionable driver/guide was  willing, although he had a warning.   He’d encountered sable two weeks before, in the vicinity of a natural spring some  distance from the camp.  But sable are elusive.  Did we want to spend a morning on a highly possible wild goose chase? “Egyptian geese?” I quipped, glancing at my grandson, who rolled his eyes. We’d seen them, vast flocks of them,  in the Selous.

And so we drove and drove, in hopes of glimpsing the fabled sable, on bush roads largely  indistinguishable from the dust-raisers we’d haunted for the past week.  The impala count, as usual, was stratospheric. Although acacia trees continued to push out new green leaves, the savanna wears mostly brown during the rainless months. New Mexicans know that brown is beautiful, but what mattered that morning is this: bare branches don’t frustrate viewing as much as luxuriant foliage does.  I had high hopes for that sable.

Meanwhile, there were many good encounters.  Dikdiks and duikers, the midgets of the antelope family, froze long enough to be seen clearly, then skittered away from roadside where they’d been grazing.  My grandson was entranced.  “They’re  cute,” he said   “I want one.”    "You don’t,” I said.  “I do,” he said.  We left it there.

Proms, Protesters and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra – Where Culture Meets Politics

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Last week 30-some, well- organized pro-Palestinian protesters effectively disrupted the Israel Philharmonic’s popular summer Proms concert at Royal Albert Hall in London four times in two hours prompting the BBC to cut off its live broadcast.  Whether one agrees or disagrees with the protesters’ motives or behavior, their actions are just the most recent example of people using culture to send political messages that are otherwise being ignored by the government in question.

Yet it wasn’t just the protesters – some of whom were themselves professional musicians -who were in the hall that night to send a political message:  their actions were in direct response to the Israeli government’s decision to send its premier orchestra to London to perform as a cultural ambassador in the first place.  Here’s what Zubin Mehta, the orchestra’s Indian born and raised conductor, told the media in anticipation of the concert and possible protest according to John Burns of the The New York Times:

 “The IPO is a cultural ambassador for Israel, and it is not “whitewashing Israel’s crimes,” Mehta said quoting a pro-Israel boycott campaign. “People who make music have to be politically aware; we have to know what’s going on.  We have to bring people together.  In Israel, Arab and Jewish audiences, and on quite a few occasions every year, at least for two-and-one-half hours, there is some sort of peace in the hall.”

I think that’s about the best explanation Mehta could have given in the orchestra’s and the Israeli government’s defense. Music should and often does bring people together and, as Mehta pointed out, the Israel Philharmonic does just that for a few hours several times a year in Israel.

Music and the Beast

Remember the old saying: “music soothes the savage beast.” It may well but it also depends upon the kind of music and the beast’s mood. The wrong music at the wrong time can enrage the beast as well.   

Throughout the eons, music is, and has been used as a terrific unifier – but it has equally been a horrific divider that brings out the worst.

The use and misuse of the emotions that music engenders are legion.  Just think of Hitler's use of Richard Wagner’s operas in inciting the Holocaust against Europe’s Jews – powerful music, that I believe is still not performed in Israel. 

Or consider the proud nationalism encapsulated in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture which depicted Russia’s defeat of Napoleon’s Army or Jean Sibelius’ soaring Finlandia composed and performed in the years leading up to Finnish Independence in 1917.  Or the singing of equally nationalistic choral music by the Estonian independence movement prior to 1991 poignantly depicted in the film “The Singing Revolution.”  These are but a few examples of music as politics.

Another Day, Another Lion: On Safari in Tanzania

By Patricia Lee Sharpe



The morning I rebelled against the daily game drive routine, I sat on our tent’s verandah and watched a small troupe of elephants filing through the scrubby vegetation on the opposite bank of an arroyo.  (That's an impala out front.) My grandson tallied some 49 lions that day.  He played it cool, but I could tell.  He was thrilled.  And proud.  In fact, much of his cat count came from the afternoon drive, which I gladly shared with him, but my need for a furlough developed from something that travel brochures can't very well mention: game safaris involve long hours of pure tedium as well as wondrous encounters with wildlife. 

After the first day or so, when novelty produces spasms of ecstasy over every elegant but omnipresent impala or   weirdly-formed baobab trees, you begin to notice the draggy side of trolling the bush for bragging rights.  The sun’s a killer all day long near the equator. You block UVA and B with goop; you hunch under the Landrover’s canopy; you fall into daydreams that involve chasing polar bears.  Meanwhile, every acacia tree, thanks to its unforgettable umbrella shape, looks like every other  acacia tree (check out the zebra, by the way),   and the sprinkling of palms, marulas, sausage trees, etc., is statistically constant in very direction. 

You drive and drive and what you see is—oh no!  You see more impala, in predictable groupings distinguished by the presence  of no horns, all horns or impressive rack presiding over hornless females, distinctions without much difference, except to zoologists or trophy hunters. So you’re thinking you never ever want to see another impala—until suddenly these prime prey animals become aware of something worrisome.  A lion, perhaps.  They freeze, except for their heads, which swivel like big-eared periscopes.  And then they’re off—and you fall in love with their way of bounding over every obstacle in high graceful arcs (which this photo doesn't begin to capture). 

This safari with my grandson was my second experience in Tanzania’s Selous Game Preserve. The first time around, the logistics were cheap and simple.  We—my Tanzanian friends and I—would load a flat of eggs, a few pounds of rice and some back-up cans of baked beans, plus a de rigeur bottle of commissary Scotch—my contribution, into a barely functional Landrover of WWII vintage, along with personal sleeping bags and some faded old tents. A hunting license allowed my friends to shoot for the pot.  Although it might be dusk before the duly licensed animal was secured, we never had to subsist on the tinned stuff. 

Alone in my tent back then, I shrank from the powerfully resonant roaring of lions, and yet I never saw a lion.  Nor did I see any big cats during my visits to a baboon research camp, three hours from Dar es Salaam, in Mikumi National Park.  So I still remember the one smallish  pride we managed to approach, when a Tanzananian friend and I made a quick tour of the famous  northern parks—Serengeti, Ngorongoro, et. al. 

This month, when my grandson and I spent several days in the Northern portion of the Selous Game preserve, where hunting is tabu, the lions—and the elephants—were richly in evidence. The same was true when we shifted, for a few more days, to Ruaha National Park.  I hope this allows me to conclude that conservation efforts are working reasonably well.

With lions so abundant, we had to be careful.  We were never to stray from established paths as we made our way from secluded tents to the communal dining areas—and we needed an armed guard to do so after dark.  This was upscale travel, so I didn’t have to pee outside the tent, juggling flashlight, pistol and tp, wondering what was lurking in the darkness.  Still,  canvas is canvas.  Elephants might wander through these camps, and nothing’s proof against elephants on a rampage.  Thoughts of being stomped, skewered by tusks or turned into steak tartare for lions can keep you awake, even after a solar-powered hot shower.  

Education for a New Age: Why Finns Succeed and Americans, Brits and Norwegians Don’t

By Patricia H. Kushlis

If you haven’t watched Sir Ken Robinson’s “Changing Education Paradigms” yet, take the next few minutes to do so.   It’s well worth the investment.

The video is entertaining. It’s shorter than a coffee break or recess - that is if American schools still have recesses.  And whether intentional or not, Robinson’s video of how education should be perceived in the US and the UK reinforces the Finnish approach to public education as described in Lynnell Hancock’s article “A+ For Finland” in the Smithsonian Magazine’s September 2011 issue.

No, please

Don’t think that just because Finland is a small, wealthy country with a homogeneous, largely middle class, blond, blue-eyed and majority Lutheran population all marching to the same beat that therefore, Finnish kids should, ipso facto, consistently excel on the internationally recognized PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) exams. That myth of the stereotypical Finn is simply not true - although they speak an incredibly difficult language for non-Finno-Ugric speakers to learn and Finland’s immigrant population numbers only 4% of the total.

In comparison, Finland’s northernmost Nordic neighbor, Norway, has PISA results similar to America’s own. Norway also follows the US educational, corporatist, super-competitive model too so, let’s see: This might suggest that there’s something fundamentally wrong with this approach – as Robinson and Hancock both suggest – and that a new educational paradigm is desperately needed.   

Why is it that year after year Finnish students perform far better than American, British and Norwegian students on those pesky exams -all three groups of whom remain stuck somewhere in the PISA middle? It's not just money.  Finland spends “about 30 percent less per student than in the US.” 

One of the most interesting aspects in Hancock’s article about the Finnish system is that the Finnish approach to K-12 education works in some of the poorest and ethnically diverse immigrant neighborhoods as well as with the children of the country’s middle and wealthy classes.  Not only do all the kids perform extremely well in a comparative sense, but 93% of Finnish high school students graduate as compared with 75.5% in the US and 66% go on to higher education – the highest in the EU.   

As Hancock tells us, Finnish kids are not subjected to the current American mania of “No Child Left Behind” teach-to-the-test competitive education which – among other things - seems to have produced wholesale cheating by certain teachers in certain school districts who surreptitiously changed answers to raise their students’ test scores. This, of course has neither improved the quality nor image of US public education. 

The Obama administration’s reforms that basically make teachers accountable for their kids test scores doesn’t seem to have helped much either but since they've hardly had time to take effect it may be too soon to say.

Regardless, “teaching to the test” seems, in my view, to have primarily benefitted the standardized testing companies whose markets suddenly expanded exponentially under “No Child Left Behind.”

Why do Finnish schools leave others in the dust?

Here are a few things that Hancock discovered (supplemented by some recollections of my own):

Most Finnish K-12 teachers are professionals who have been “selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s (university) graduates to earn a required degree in education.” 

The current system was begun forty years ago at a time when the country decided that to become globally economically competitive all Finnish children needed strong basic education from the very beginning.   

Most Finnish schools are small and the teachers know every student.  “If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else” and as many as 30% of Finnish children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school.