Last week, the Caucasian Spring revolution roiling the West intensified as riots broke out across Holland, the world’s sixth largest banana exporter, and a notorious narco-state located in the nether regions of sub-Scandinavian Europe.

The violent demonstrations which started in the capital, Amsterdam on Sunday, have rapidly spread to other major cities, such as Eindhoven in the south of the country. Angry anti-science protesters are demanding fundamental freedoms and defying a curfew that the caretaker administration claims is necessary to contain the rampaging covid-19 pandemic that has claimed nearly 14,000 Dutch lives.

The country, a traditional hub for marijuana trade, has been overrun by violent organized criminal gangs dealing in hard drugs, with minors as young as 12 distributing narcotics and a spate of gruesome murders. The country is politically fragile following the resignation of its repressive coalition government two weeks ago, following anger over a child-benefit scandal which impoverished thousands of Dutch families.

Many analysts consider the toppling of Prime Minister  Mark Rutte, who is still in office pending fresh elections in March, as the trigger for the Caucasian Spring which has already claimed Donald “Papa Don” Trump, the far-white ruler of food-insecure, oil-rich United States; Julie Payette, the colonial governor of Canada; and Giuseppe Conte, Prime Minister of chronically unstable, crime-ridden Italy.

Meanwhile, in the ethnically divided, kingdom of Britain, where the nonagenarian Queen Elizabeth II has clung to power for nearly 70 years, corrupt strongman, Boris Johnson, apologized and took responsibility for his regime’s handling of the pandemic which has now claimed over 100,000 British lives on the wet and inhospitable island.

The beleaguered nation has had its pain compounded by the Brexit peace deal it signed with 27 countries in Off-white Europe which has increased hardship and food shortages in the restive, separatist, tribal enclaves of North Ireland and Scotland. Even worse, the harsh terms of the peace deal have grounded a major fishing boat, the Kirkella, which supplies up to 12 percent of the fish sold in the kingdom’s fish and chips shops, threatening one of the few local delicacies in the island’s otherwise unpalatable boiled diet. Analysts fear the resulting flavour shortage could spark even more unrest and bring the Caucasian Spring to the reclusive nation’s shores.

In an effort to calm rising ethnic tensions, and distract from the outrage over the covid deaths, Prime Minister Johnson also visited the northern tribal district of Scotland, ignoring warnings from the embattled separatist leader, Nicola Sturgeon, that it would not be safe and he was “not welcome”.

Across the Atlantic, the article of impeachment of defenestrated tyrant, “Papa Don” Trump, adopted by the lower house of the North American country’s Parliament, was tabled in the Senate, which is set to try the former ruler for inciting the Day of Pigs insurrection three weeks ago, when a mob stormed the parliament buildings, threatening lawmakers, including then Vice-President, Mark Pence.

Chances are slim that he will be convicted given the fanatical support he still enjoys from far-white, anti-math, Shite Christianist extremists, including in the Senate. Shite Christianists believe Papa Don is the divinely ordained Covfefe (Leader) who will defeat the mythical Al-Jibra network that they believe is using Islamist mathematics to introduce Sharia Law to the US and to interfere with elections.

Extremists in the Senate have already challenged the constitutionality of the trial and in what some consider a demonstration of the Covfefe’s powers, 45 of them voted in support of the motion to throw it out on the grounds that Papa Don was no longer in office. One of them, Marco Rubio, who represents the south eastern peninsula state of Florida, a Papa Don stronghold which hosts his headquarters, says the US is not yet ready to begin holding former rulers accountable as did mature third world democracies.

Although the motion ultimately failed, given that 67 out of 100 Senators are required to convict, it is unlikely that the trial, the second for Papa Don, will end in anything other than acquittal. However, a bulletin from the country’s Homeland Security has warned of increased threats of terror attacks Shite Christianist militants in the interior of the country amid intelligence warnings of dangers of travel outside the coastal capital of Washington DC.

At the same time, Joe Biden, the aging, newly-oathed ruler has been ruling by decree, signing nearly two dozen Executive Orders along with many more proclamations and memoranda in his first week alone. This has dashed hopes that the millionaire former opposition leader, the oldest man to ever become ruler of the volatile, ethnically polarized, covid-ravaged nation, will lead efforts to reform the imperial presidency.

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Editors Note: Welcome to First World News, The Elephant’s weekly round-up of news from the neglected, crisis-prone, global North. 

If we covered coronavirus like we covered Ebola

In 2014, I spent more than six months covering Ebola in West Africa, two of them in the “hot zone” of Liberia. Global press coverage spurred clichéd response back home in the USA, from negative stereotypes about culture and hygiene to irrational panic. This is a piece of satire that imagines covering America’s global health emergency in the same way the US looked at one “over there”—revealing both the absurdity of imperial exceptionalism and the unwelcome fact that the weaknesses of the American “superpower” are not so different from those in so-called “s**hole countries.” But of course they are. Yet most of us are schooled to see the familiar as better than the foreign, and it’s easy to forget that we share the same weaknesses—and the same risks—as those we are taught, implicitly and explicitly, to see as less capable, less valuable, less worthy.

A new, deadly disease is exploding virtually unchecked in the United States of America, threatening the global economy and public health worldwide.

The US, as it is known, is the largest economy in the world, a position secured unfairly by its imposition of the US dollar as the global trading currency. The country regularly styles itself as “the leader of the free world”.

That leadership has failed miserably in recent weeks, as a pathogen known as SARS-CoV-2, or “coronavirus” for short, has spread, with very little detection, across the country of more than 300 million people.

“It’s spreading like wildfire from person to person,” said Papi Kabongo, a bus driver in Kinshasa whose uncle, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, discovered Ebola in 1976.

“There are clear, simple, easy things we know can help, but people there don’t listen. They don’t even wash their hands!”

The spread has largely overrun the country’s crumbling healthcare system and outmanoeuvred its byzantine insurance infrastructure. Doctors now fear there will not be enough beds or ventilators for the critically ill, nor enough supplies to protect healthcare workers.

“We’ve been telling them for years, ‘Your system is fragile. You need to be ready for this’”, said Albert Williams, Liberia’s minister of health during that country’s unprecedented Ebola outbreak. “But they’re deeply uninterested in international cooperation or advice”.

A frightened population has begun hoarding chloroquine pills following the recommendation of the American president, Donald Trump, who has acted as a kind of “witch doctor”, or traditional healer, during the outbreak. Trump has said he believes the pills may treat the disease. A supposed preventive dose has already killed one man, in the hot, dusty region of Arizona.

Some US government officials have made efforts to encourage or require people to distance themselves from each other—measures which are known to have helped contain or end outbreaks in China, South Korea and Hong Kong—but the US president, Donald Trump, is prioritising the economy over public health, and Americans themselves have largely refused official advice.

Meanwhile, traditional American social practices, as well as entrenched cultural values like individualism, have greatly contributed to the spread of coronavirus, whose carriers can be highly contagious even without showing any symptoms.

“If I get corona, I get corona. At the end of the day, I’m not going to let it stop me from partying”, said Brady Sluder, a student on spring break in the infamous party town of Miami, Florida. “I’ve been waiting, we’ve been waiting for Miami spring break for a while”.

Experts say that even young, healthy individuals can contract the disease without their knowledge, putting anyone they come into contact with at risk.

“Before you know you have it, maybe you’ve given it to five people. And who did they give it to? And if they are elderly, you maybe have signed their death warrant”, said Muhammed Abubakar, dean of humanities at National University in Abuja. “This is a sad example of American exceptionalism in its purest form”.

In addition to Americans’ almost magical belief in their immunity to rules of all kinds, the country has faced a serious erosion of trust in official institutions in recent decades.

“These people don’t trust their government,”, said Emmanuel Mawema, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Zimbabwe-Harare. “They still manage to hold what we would technically call elections, but the wider society has been broken for a long time.”

This breakdown in trust has a deep history. Though the country has not experienced violent conflict recently, the United States is wrought with long-standing political divisions between its urban and rural tribes, which have repeatedly renounced efforts to find common ground.

“It’s almost as if they are opposed to the common good on principle”, said Tesfaye Haile, who spent eight years as Ethiopia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. “This kind of division and the institutional inertia it creates is simply the way of life there”.

Experts say the US is poised to soon look like neighbouring Europe, where cases of the virus have soared in recent weeks, and doctors in some countries are disconnecting life-support services from patients over 65.

“In countries like the US, where life is cheap, it can create painful choices”, said Simon Odhiambo, who directs the Global Human Rights Network, headquartered in Nairobi. “We’ve been saying for years that health is a human right all states must respect, or it can put everyone at risk. This is what we meant”.

Other countries, too, fear the failures of the United States will put their own populations at risk.

“We don’t have any cases right now”, said South Sudanese President Salva Kiir. “We’ve closed the airport and our land borders. This may create real economic hardship for our people, but we won’t allow anyone coming from or through the United States to put our people at risk. It’s a matter of national security”.

CORRECTION: Europe is not a neighbour of the United States. We regret the error.

Ends

All the names here are fictitious, unless otherwise indicated (with a link to verifiable, accurate information).

Always use the word ‘Rustler’ or ‘War’ or ‘Wilderness’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Somali’, ‘Bandit’, ‘Shifta’, ‘Survival’, ‘Ahmed the Elephant’, ‘Drought’, ‘Resilience’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Spear’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Rudimentary’. Also useful are words such as ‘Warlord’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘Bandit’ and ‘Shifta’ are both words that can be used to mean person from Northern Kenya.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted person on the cover of your article or in it, unless that person has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, two AK-47s, a child holding three AK-47s: use these. If you must include a person from the area, make sure you get one holding four, or better still, five AK-47s.

Everyone is a bandit. The carjacker is a bandit. The fast-talking man who cons you out of your money is a bandit. The mathe at the market who refuses to bargain is a bandit. The people chilling in the barbershops are bandits. The old man lounging in the sun in his shuka is a bandit. The child playing football at the corner and glancing at you warily is a bandit. Even the newly-born baby is a bandit, given a gun as soon as it can hold its neck up.

In your text, treat Northern Kenya as if it is one unified whole. Wajir, Laisamis, Loiyangalani, Garissa, none of these places exist in themselves; it’s all Northern Kenya. It is hot and dusty with kilometre after kilometre of desert and huge herds of camels and tall, thin people who are starving, but for the sticks of khat they chew. Or it is hot and dry with people who are war-torn. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Northern Kenya is big: too many counties, and too many people who are too busy starving and dying and being bandits to read your article. The region is full of deserts, mountains, lakes, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions wild and evocative and violent and unparticular.

Be vague about where Northern Kenya is. Northern Kenya might be Marsabit or Wajir or Sudan or Somalia. It might be Turkana or Baringo or Meru or Tana River. We are beyond boundaries. A better guide of where Northern Kenya is to follow where the bandits are. A bandit is in Northern Kenya, automatically. In your report, list the places in Northern Kenya where bandits have raided in 2019. Northern Kenya is Baringo North, and West Pokot and Samburu. Bandit area. Northern Kenya is South Gem in Siaya, and Bahati in Nakuru and Meru, where bandits have been banditing. Sometimes, make these suspected bandits, because the only way one is not a bandit is if one is a suspected bandit. Good synonyms here are ‘rustler’ and ‘Al-Shabaab’ and ‘secessionist group.’ But bandit works best. List them all, the bandits. In Lodwar and in Pokot Central and in Nyandarua. Northern Kenya. To bandit is to Northern Kenya. For ease of vividity, the bandits, have them spray bullets.

Make sure you mention that, despite it all, people are showing resilience in the face of it all. Wake up, survive bandit attack, be resilient, sleep. Mention Lake Paradise, and Ewaso Ng’iro and all the other oases in this den of banditry. Mention Ahmed. Ahmed the elephant with his mighty tusks. Ahmed who was protected only by the good graces of our dear founding father, God bless him, the first president. Don’t forget Koobi Fora. The cradle of mankind. And the oil underneath the ground that will bring development to this godforsaken region.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between the people (unless a death from banditry is involved), references to writers or musicians or intellectuals from the area, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from banditry or famine or having to be bandits or forced early marriages or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the article, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Northern Kenya, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Northern Kenya is the only part of Kenya you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her beautiful sun duned landscapes forests. If you are a woman, treat Northern Kenya as a man with huge tusks and disappears off into the sunset. Northern Kenya is to be pitied, worshipped or gifted with development. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important article, Northern Kenya is doomed.

In your memoir, write about the Somali man, the waria. Describe them, these waria, with their “…strange scripts in Arabic, or wrong bottles in the wrong box, or a slightly off-kilter brand name. Porchi. Poisone. Sold by thin thin men from Somalia. Dominos of nations tumble around Kenya and Somali work about, overstimulated, and thrust their faces into yours, dribbling chewed khat, eyes bleary, jacket open and say…Kssss, Kssss…Rolexxx…Xss…xxxsss…Seyko.” Don’t forget to mention that they walk around with their shirts untucked, these waria. After all, you wrote the satirical guide ‘How To Write About Africa’ and so you must be as accurate as possible.

Names are interchangeable, remember that. When you have to name a local politician, don’t be bothered by accuracy and such mundane concerns as truth. Bonaya Godana is Bonaya Godana, but he can also be Boyana Godana or Boyana Gonada or Bonaya Gonada or Bonada Goyana or Bonana Godaya or Boyada Gonana or Bodaye Gonaria or Bodana Gonaya or Bodana Goyana or Bonada Gonaya or Bonaiia Goyada. Bonavecture Godana is acceptable too, as is Abdi Godana. Everybody in Northern Kenya is called Abdi, after all.

Don’t forget to talk about the wild animals too. Ahmed the Elephant, first, but also the lions and the giraffes and the lions and hippopotami. The animals are complex characters. They whisper (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, dreams and flights of intellectualism. Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. Hippos are dignified proud gentlemen. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a Hippo. Big cats drink wine with their caviar. Hyenas are fair game and talk like warias. Give a shout out to the people doing the labour of saving the animals from all the banditry around them. Mention them, these conservancies. The conservancies are great because they are remote and away from civilisation. Mention them, these heroes who fell in love with the terrains of Africa and are now there to save them. Mention them, the heroes with the OBEs given to them by Her Majesty the Queen of the Colony for “services to conservation and security to communities in Kenya.” Decry the bandits who dare to enact violence upon the private landowners fighting to save the animals. Remember, conservation is good, and pastoralist, which is just another word for uncivilised bandit, is bad.

Don’t forget the camel. The camel is noble and patient, decking it out with all the banditry around it. Each of the bandits in this bandit-infested area owns a camel, or several, and they probably chew khat with their camels too. Make the camel a metaphor. Maybe a metaphor for the resistance of the soul. Maybe a metaphor for persistence in the face of hardship. It doesn’t matter, as long as it is a metaphor.

In your article, talk about the vastness of the landscapes. Say that it looks like a forgotten country, but don’t ask why that is so. Talk about the empty terrain you have to cover, the harshness of the abandoned lands. Mention that the land has been abandoned because of banditry. Don’t forget to add that here, even stray dogs look out of place. Announce to your readers the good news, that development is underway. The oil rigs, the mines, the wind power projects, the development that is coming to Northern Kenya. All the years of the residents failing to utilise their high-potential lands because their attentions are occupied by banditry is at an end: Development is here to save them.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the bandits laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about survival in the badlands of Northern Kenya. Mention that the land is chaotic and fractured, and that the bandits walk proudly with their guns, as one would with a pen in civilised Kenya. Make powerful statements with vague generalized statistics to the effect of everyone having guns, good numbers of livestock being carried away by the bandits, and most of the children being bandits on the sly. The guns, of course, are nothing more than rudimentary firearms. The bandits should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause. Remember, at the heart of it all, these people are bandits. Six or seven AK-47s on the cover of your article is an excellent choice.