A Catholic Citizen in America

I take commercial puffery with a grain of salt, but that 2,492 carat diamond from the Karowe mine does seem “epic”.

It’s also what I’ll be talking about this week: along with the Karowe mine, Botswana, what diamonds are and where they come from, and why I see Botswana’s recent history as a success story. Of sorts.

• One-Pound Diamond: and a Quick Look at Botswana
  • Comparing and Contrasting: Botswana and the United States
  • Wealth, Fertility Rates, Statistics —
  • — “Democracy”, and Dan Backslide
• Diamonds
  • Graphite and Diamond: Same Element, Different Crystal Form
  • Formed in the Depths, Rushed to the Surface
    • On the Shores of Arkansas
• To Be Continued
  • Congo Chaos and Lebensraum for Mountain Gorillas
  • Blood Diamonds, Mountain Gorillas: and Working With What We’ve Got

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One-Pound Diamond: and a Quick Look at Botswana

Putting this rough diamond’s 2,492 carets through Inch Calculator’s Carats to Pounds & Ounces Converter, I got a weight of one pound, 1.58 and a hair ounces. That’s sizable.

“Largest Diamond Since 1905 Unearthed by Miners in Botswana”
Rudy Molinek, Mass Media Fellow, AAAS;
Smithsonian Magazine (August 23, 2024)
“Volcanic eruptions long ago brought the 2,492-carat diamond—the latest in a string of stunning discoveries over the last decade—to the surface”

“Miners in Botswana made a dazzling discovery this week, when they uncovered a 2,492-carat diamond, weighing about one pound. The last time miners unearthed a diamond this big, the Model T Ford was still three years away from rolling off the assembly line.

“‘This is history in the making,’ Naseem Lahri, Botswana managing director for Lucara Diamond Corp., the Canadian mining company that found the gem, tells Sello Motseta of the Associated Press (AP). ‘I am very proud. It is a product of Botswana.’

“The new diamond was excavated at the Karowe mine, about 300 miles north of Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone. The same mine has produced four other large rough diamonds in the last decade, including the 813-carat Constellation diamond that sold for a record $63 million in 2016….”

As a nation, Botswana is a top producer of diamonds. BBC News says about 20% of all diamonds come from that south African nation. When I started looking into who’s doing what with diamonds in Botswana, things got complicated.

A Canadian company, Lucara Diamond, run by two Canadians and a very rich Swede, owns and operates the Karowe mine. About 14 years back, Lucara Diamond bought another company: African Diamonds. And that led me down a lot of rabbit holes.

Along the way, I ran across another company, Botswana Diamonds: an outfit that says they “developed West African Diamonds which later merged into Stellar Diamonds”. Botswana Diamonds’ website has a .uk top-level domain and a mailing address in the Republic of Ireland.¹

Given time, maybe I’d work out who owned African Diamonds, who operated the company, and how they spent their money.

Then again, maybe not.

I found a great deal of enthusiastic marketing content, and ample confirmation that folks find diamonds fascinating. But in-depth descriptions, not so much.

Comparing and Contrasting: Botswana and the United States

Something I did notice — make that confirm — while digging into Botswana’s history is that Botswana is not America. On the other hand, we’ve got more in common than many other countries.

We’ve both got presidents, and we’re both former English colonies. But Botswana’s government is a parliamentary republic with an executive president, while my country is a presidential republic.

My country cut ties with England in 1776. Two wars later, in 1815, colonists made the claim stick, and that’s another topic. Botswana negotiated a smooth transition to independence from 1964 to 1966.

We’ve had one internal war as a free nation. Botswana hasn’t had any. But then, they’ve only been independent for about six decades, compared to our two and a half centuries.²

That brings me to what Botswana’s president, and the Lucara mining company chief executive, said.

“Largest Diamond Since 1905 Unearthed by Miners in Botswana”
Rudy Molinek, Smithsonian Magazine (August 23, 2024)

“…On Thursday [August 22, 2024], President Mokgweetsi Masisi of Botswana became one of the first people to look at the newly discovered diamond up-close. It was large enough to fill up the palm of his hand.

“‘It is overwhelming,’ he said, per the AP. ‘I am lucky to have seen it in my time.’…

“…Lucara aims to leverage these developments [new tech, including X-ray devices] with a lofty goal in mind: finding the largest diamond ever.

“William Lamb, the company’s chief executive, tells the New York Times, ‘We believe that we can eclipse the Cullinan.’”
[emphasis mine]

How President Masisi’s remarks figure into this year’s election, I don’t know. It was, however, nice to see a national leader expressing admiration for a natural wonder.

Speaking of which, I don’t know how much of this whacking great lump of carbon crystal’s sale price will go through Botswana’s economy.

“World’s second-largest diamond found in Botswana”
Farouk Chothia, BBC News (August 22, 2024)

“…Lucara has 100% ownership of the mine in Karowe.

“Botswana’s government has proposed a law that will ask companies, once granted a licence to mine, to sell a 24% stake to local firms if the government does not exercise its option of becoming a shareholder, Reuters news agency reported last month.”
[emphasis mine]

What that proposed law’s status is, and how it would actually work: that, I don’t know.

Wealth, Fertility Rates, Statistics —

I gather that Botswana went from being among the world’s poorest nations in 1966 to what a Wikipedia page called an “upper middle-income country”.

I see that as good news.

Botswana’s drop in fertility rate, from over five children per woman in the 1980s to about 2.4 (a tad above the 2.1 replacement rate) in 2013 is another matter.³

I grew up in a culture where that would have been applauded as a great step forward.

I see fewer folks dying young as a good thing. But I’m also aware that each of us will eventually die. If folks don’t get around to having and raising kids, we’ll run out of the current crop in about a century. Less, actually, and that’s almost another topic.

The good news for Botswana is that they’re not depending on immigration for their country’s future. I see it as good news, at any rate.

I’m not sure what I think about this assessment of Botswana’s politics:

“…Botswana was ranked as a ‘flawed democracy’ and 33rd out of 167 states in the 2023 Democracy Index (The Economist), which was the second highest rating in Africa, and highest ranking in continental Africa (only the offshore island nation of Mauritius bested its ranking). However, according to the 2024 V-Dem Democracy Indices, Botswana has been experiencing an episode of democratic backsliding over the past ten years, recording its lowest ever score on the indices. The indices classify Botswana as an electoral democracy in a ‘grey zone’ between electoral democracy and electoral autocracy….”
(Botswana > Government and politics, Wikipedia)

— “Democracy”, and Dan Backslide

I’ll admit to a bias. I remember when ardent defenders of “democracy” warned Americans against the dread dangers of communism, rock music, and the Catholic Church: not necessarily in that order.

Since then, I’ve gotten the impression that — for many zealous do-gooders — “democracy” can mean “support for ideas I like”, while a “threat to democracy” is anyone who’s not sufficiently supportive of those ideas.

The word “backsliding” in that Wikipedia page didn’t help.

I associate it with well-meaning folks I rubbed shoulders with in my youth, and the infamous Dan Backslide of “The Dover Boys at Pimento University; or, The Rivals of Roquefort Hall” (1942).

The point I’m groping for is that I don’t know how the folks behind the Democracy Index and V-Dem Democracy Indices define “democracy”, and what they consider a “flawed” democracy.

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Diamonds

Depending on context, I could say that diamonds come from a bank vault, a jewelry store, diamond mines — you get the picture.

This month’s one-pound diamond came from the Karowe open-pit mine, south of Lake Makgadikgadi: a place that became salt flats around the time Earth’s most recent glacial period ended.

I gather that Karowe’s owners plan on digging tunnels “to access the highest value portion of the Karowe orebody”. That project’s over budget and behind schedule. Seems that keeping water out of the tunnels is a bigger job than expected.⁴

Instead of looking at why folks pay so much for sparkly rocks, I’ll talk about how diamonds wind up being close enough to the surface for us to find.

Graphite and Diamond: Same Element, Different Crystal Form

Starting with the basics, diamonds are carbon in a particular crystal form.

Carbon is the fourth most abundant element by mass in the universe, and the second most abundant in the human body. It’s got chemical properties that make it dandy for building the complex molecules I’m made of. And that’s yet another topic.

Carbon is also good at allotropy. Carbon atoms will stick to each other in several ways, making different shapes. I’ve put ‘for more information’ links in the footnotes.

The two carbon allotropes I’m most familiar with are graphite and diamond. They’re both crystalline, with atoms sticking together in repeating geometric patterns.

The crystalline pattern of graphite is two-dimensional, with very light bonding between layers.

Diamond crystals are three-dimensional.

Diamonds will burn, but it takes a fair amount of heat to ignite them.

Although they’re chemically stable at room temperature and pressure, diamonds don’t last forever: not at “NTP” (Normal Pressure and Temperature). Diamond is metastable, so a diamond will, given lots of time, turn into graphite.

That’s because at NTP, graphite has a lower energy state than diamond. “Energy state” is an aspect of quantum mechanics, and that’s something I’d rather sidestep: this week, at any rate. Again, I’ve put links in the footnotes.

Given time, and a quantum nudge, carbon atoms in a diamond rearrange themselves into the lower-energy-state pattern of graphite.

That’s here on the surface.

Deep inside Earth, with much higher temperatures and pressures, diamond has the lower energy state; and that brings me to where diamonds are formed.⁵

Formed in the Depths, Rushed to the Surface

By the time I was in high school, I’d heard that diamonds are formed when coal gets squeezed and heated, deep inside Earth.

That’s not the way it works. Not usually, at any rate.

Coal starts out as dead plant matter from forests and marshes accumulating in peat bogs. Eventually some of those peat bogs get covered by more stuff, geology happens, and what had been peat becomes coal.

A coal bed could get pulled down in a subduction zone — that’s yet again another topic for another day — with diamonds forming when the coal’s carbon gets sufficiently concentrated. Diamonds are rare, but they’re not that rare.

Scientists have been learning that carbon’s lurking deep beneath our feet,

Carbon is the 15th or 17th most abundant element in Earth’s crust, depending on how “abundance” gets measured.

There’s even more carbon in Earth’s mantle, coming at least partly from carbon-rich ocean sediments that were pulled down in subduction zones.

When carbon in Earth’s mantle gets concentrated, under the right conditions, diamond crystals start growing.

Then a particular sort of volcanic eruption shoots those diamonds and the material around them to the surface.

“…Kimberlite pipes are the result of explosive diatreme volcanism from very deep mantle derived sources. The theory is that they are formed deep within the mantle, between 93 and 280 miles in depth, from anomalously enriched exotic mantle compositions, and are erupted rapidly and violently, often with considerable CO2 and volatile components. It is this depth of melting and generation which makes kimberlites prone to hosting diamond xenocrysts….”
(“Geology of the Crater of Diamonds State Park and Vicinity, Pike County, Arkansas“; J. M. Howard, W. D. Hanson; State Park Series 03 (2008)) [emphasis mine]

Lamproite pipes form the same way

That Arkansas State Park Service article says kimberlite pipes are “carrot-shaped”, an apt and simple description in otherwise rather academic-sounding text.⁶

On the Shores of Arkansas

About 100,000,000 years ago, clams and oysters shared a warm ocean shore with things that looked like crocodiles, long-tailed ostriches, and 11-foot roadrunners with hands and nightmare-inducing talons.

Then part of the landscape exploded.

“…a mass of material moved out of the earth’s mantle at a high rate of speed—30 to 50 miles per hour, driven by carbon dioxide gas. During its journey, it gathered rocks from all the zones of rock it passed through. As it reached the upper crust, the speed increased to as much as 150 miles per hour. When it came near the earth’s surface, about 850 feet below the ground, the pressure of the gas overcame the weight of the overlying sedimentary rock and an explosion occurred. The expanding gas rapidly cooled the mass so we see little heating effects in the surrounding sediments. The resulting explosive volcano is classified as a diatreme by geologists..”
(“Geology of the Crater of Diamonds State Park and Vicinity, Pike County, Arkansas“; J. M. Howard, W. D. Hanson; State Park Series 03 (2008)) [emphasis mine]

Time passed. Plants, animals, and the land, changed. Glaciers approached but did not reach the old volcanic pipe. The glaciers melted, and now folks can look for diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas.

They’ll occasionally find one, but the rock-to-diamond ratio is so low that the place has been strictly a tourist attraction for decades.

I think of diamonds as coming from exotic places like the shores of the rivers Godavar, Penner, and Krishna. And so they did, a few millennia back.⁷ That’s a part of diamond lore I’ll save for another time.

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To Be Continued

I’ll be talking about diamonds, history, folklore, and a Wilkie Collins novel next Saturday. Unless something else pops up.

I’m wrapping up this week’s post with a look at why I see Botswana’s recent history as a success story. Remember: no internal wars since independence: which shouldn’t be remarkable, but is.

Don’t worry: I’m not going to start an in-depth review of a continent’s history. I’ll mostly look at what used to be the Kingdom of Kongo.⁸

Congo Chaos and Lebensraum for Mountain Gorillas

The Kingdom of Kongo was in one of Earth’s major river basins, and apparently doing okay; at least until folks from Europe showed up and started making arrangements for trade.

I’m over-simplifying centuries of geopolitics something fierce here, by the way.

What used to be the Kingdom of Kongo arguably hit bottom when it was repackaged as the “Congo Free State”: an ironic name for Leopold II of Belgium’s private property.

Next it was called the Belgian Congo, run along perhaps less-rapacious lines by the Belgian government. Then, around 1960, when arranging independence for former holdings was all the rage, folks in the Congo River Basin were free to set up their own government.

The last I heard, there’s less death and destruction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo / Free Republic of the Congo / Republic of the Congo / Republic of the Congo (Léopoldville) / Republic of Zaire / South Kasai / State of Katanga, than there was in the Sixties.

The country’s kept the same name for several decades now, but I get the impression that folks living in what should be a prosperous nation — well, ‘nuf said.

That’s definitely true for folks who had been living in what’s currently on the Democratic Republic of the Congo/Uganda border, the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Depending on who’s talking they’re the Twa, or Batwa.

The Batwa had working agreements with their neighbors, and were getting along. Until the powers that be decided that mountain gorillas had prior claim on their land.

Last I heard, they’d been dropped into territory they couldn’t use.

Bad as their situation is, it could have been worse.

For one thing, the higher-ups apparently regard the Batwa as people, which I see as a step in the right direction.

A ‘down’ side is that they’re not the only folks whose lack of legal and economic clout left them on the short end of some high-minded enterprise.

“Conservation refugee” isn’t in the news much, its my language’s term for people in that predicament.⁹

Blood Diamonds, Mountain Gorillas: and Working With What We’ve Got

Finally, I haven’t seen “blood diamond” in the news lately. More good news. Of a sort.

What I hope are well-intentioned efforts like the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme may be putting a crimp in shady and/or illegal diamond mining and sales.

It’s run by a multi-national outfit that’s at least partly connected with the United Nations. That’s probably a good idea. The United Nations is the closest thing we’ve got to an international authority with membership that’s in principle available to all nations.

Working with what we’ve got, rather than sitting on our hands and wishing that we had something better, strikes me as a good idea.

Another United Nations outfit was involved in booting folks out of their homeland, making room for mountain gorillas.

I don’t doubt that the World Heritage folks meant well.

But it would have been nice if they’d shown as much concern for the well-being of humans living in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, as they did for mountain gorillas.

Still, things could have been worse for the folks who, in effect, lost a property rights case to mountain gorillas. Instead of being killed, they were relocated.

It wasn’t all that long ago that folks in charge had, by long-established custom and law, the right to kill unwanted people or inconvenient groups of people.¹⁰

“…When Lemkin asked about a way to punish the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, a law professor told him: ‘Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing.’ As late as 1959, many world leaders still ‘believed states had a right to commit genocide against people within their borders’, according to political scientist Douglas Irvin-Erickson….”
(Genocide > Pre-criminalization view, Wikipedia) [emphasis mine]

I’m not, putting it mildly, content with today’s status quo.

But I know history, and I’ve lived through some distinctly mercurial decades.

We do not live in an ideal world. But we can learn: and some of us have, now and again, made changes that improved peoples’ lives.

I see the occasional injustice that’s corrected, and reform that achieves at least some of its goals, as — again — good news.

Next week, barring the unexpected, I’ll be back with tales of cursed gems, glow-in-the-dark diamonds, diamonds from outer space, whatever else comes to mind, and why I’m not worried that the Hope Diamond’s current owner is the Smithsonian.

Vaguely-related posts:

• “Liberal? Conservative? Republican? Democrat? No: Catholic”
  (July 27, 2024)
• “Freedom of Speech: On the Whole, I Like It”
  (July 6, 2024)
• “Half-Million-Year-Old Structure: Rethinking Cavemen, Origins”
  (March 9, 2024)
• “Where Have All the People Gone?”
  (November 23, 2018)
• “Gems, Metal, and Earth’s Core”
  (January 27, 2017)

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¹ Diamonds, diamond production, and a really big diamond from Botswana:

• Wikipedia
  • Diamond
  • Karowe diamond mine
  • List of countries by diamond production
  • List of largest rough diamonds
  • Lucara Diamond
• Botswana Diamonds PLC (botswanadiamonds.co.uk)
  • About Us
    • History
• “Largest Diamond Since 1905 Unearthed by Miners in Botswana”
  Rudy Molinek, Mass Media Fellow, AAAS; Smithsonian Magazine (August 23, 2024)
• “World’s second-largest diamond found in Botswana”
  Farouk Chothia, BBC News (August 22, 2024)
• “Lucara agrees to buy African Diamonds for C$82 mln”
  Reuters (October 4, 2010)

² Botswana and the United States, government and a little history:

• Wikipedia
  • 2024 Botswana general election
  • Botswana
  • Government of Botswana
  • Parliamentary republic
  • Politics of Botswana
  • Presidential system
  • Republic
  • United States
  • 1812 (1812-1815)

³ Land, people, and a cartoon character:

• Wikipedia
  • Botswana
  • Kalahari Desert
  • Okavango Delta
  • Sub-replacement fertility
• Botswana
  CIA World Factbook (last updated August 13, 2024)
• Dan Backslide
  Villains Wiki, Fandom

⁴ Current events and a little background:

• Wikipedia
  • Karowe diamond mine
  • Lake Makgadikgadi (it’s now salt pans in northeastern Botswana)
  • Last Glacial Period (most recent, at any rate)
• “Lucara Provides Karowe Underground Expansion Project Update”
  Press Release, Lucara Diamond (July 17, 2023)
• “Lucara Secures $220M in Financing to Take Mine Underground”
  Michelle Graff, National Jeweler (May 11, 2021)
• “Karowe Mine Groundwater Flow Model and Predictive Dewatering Simulations”
  Itasca International Consulting Services (January 31, 2019)

⁵ More than you need, or maybe want, to know about:

• Wikipedia
  • Allotropy (the way some elements bond with each other in different shapes)
  • Carbon
  • Crystal
  • Crystal structure
  • Composition of the human body
  • Diamond
  • Diamond cubic (a repeating crystal pattern of 8 atoms)
  • Energy level (discusses energy states, an aspect of quantum mechanics, among other things)
  • Graphite
  • Quantum mechanics
• “Why do diamonds last forever?” (discusses metasability)
  Christopher S. Baird, West Texas A & M University (December 17, 2013)

⁶ Still more about diamonds and geology:

• Wikipedia
  • Abundance of elements in Earth’s crust
  • Archean (second of Earth’s four geologic eons, about 4 to 2.5 billion years back)
  • Bog
  • Carbon
  • Coal
  • Craton (very old parts of Earth’s crust, the cores of continents)
  • Crust (geology) (a planet’s outer, well, crust)
  • Deep carbon cycle (AKA slow carbon cycle)
  • Deposition (geology)
  • Diamond
  • Diatreme (AKA maar-diatreme volcano, a volcanic pipe)
  • Dike (geology) (a vertical sheet of rock)
  • Earth’s mantle
  • Peat
  • Kimberlite (a rare igneous rock: a variant of peridotite, found in Earth’s cratons)
  • Lamproite (a rare igneous rock: a variant of peridotite)
  • Lava (magma that’s on the surface)
  • Magma (molten material, mostly rock, that’s under the surface)
  • Mantle (geology) (the part of a planet that’s between its core and crust)
  • Peridot (AKA chrysolite, a yellow-green transparent gemstone)
  • Peridotite (an igneous rock, common in Earth’s upper mantle)
  • Sedimentary rock
  • Sill (geology) (a horizontal sheet of rock)
  • Subduction
  • Types of volcanic eruptions
    • Magmatic eruptions (mostly magma)
    • Phreatic eruption (mostly steam)
    • Phreatomagmatic eruption (magma and steam)
  • Upper mantle
  • Volcanic pipe (“carrot-shaped” cones of volcanic rock, formed by the violent, supersonic eruptions of deep-origin volcanoes)
    • Kimberlite pipes
    • Lamproite pipes
  • Xenolith (a rock fragment enveloped in a larger rock during the larger rock’s development and solidification — a xenocryst is an individual foreign crystal within an igneous body of rock)
• “What are Kimberlites?”
  Public Information Circular (PIC) 16, Kansas Geological Survey, The University of Kansas
• “What is coal?”
  Frequently Asked Questions, USGS (United States Geological Survey)

⁷ Even more about diamonds and all that, but I’m almost done:

• Wikipedia
  • Arkansaurus (theropod dinosaur, looked sort of like an ostrich with a long tail)
  • Cenomanian (part of the Cretaceous, 100.5 to 93.9 million years ago)
  • Crater of Diamonds State Park (Arkansas)
  • Cretaceous (geological period from 145 to 66 million years ago)
  • Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event
  • Deinonychus (theropod dinosaur: sort like an 11-foot-long roadrunner with hands and an overgrown talon on each foot)
  • Deltasuchus (looked like a crocodile; but wasn’t, quite)
  • Diamond
  • Laurentide ice sheet
  • Ostrich
  • Paleontology in Arkansas
  • Quaternary glaciation
  • Roadrunner
• “Study: Effects of Past Ice Ages More Widespread Than Previously Thought”
  News, University of Arkansas (February 22, 2021)
• “Geology of the Crater of Diamonds State Park and Vicinity, Pike County, Arkansas”
  J. M. Howard, W. D. Hanson; State Park Series 03 (2008)
• “Middle Park Fossils from the USGS-Denver Collections: Cretaceous Ammonites”
  “A Story of Sea Level Changes in the Western Interior Seaway”
  Paleontological Resources of the USGS in Denver (2004)
• “Contributions to Economic Geology”, Diamond-Bearing Peridotite in Pike County, Arkansas, pp. 279-322
  Hugh D. Misek, Clarence S. Ross; Contributions to Economic Geology, 1922, Part 1 (1922) via USGS (United States Geological Survey)

⁸ A river basin, a kingdom, and stories:

• Wikipedia
  • Congo Basin
  • Kingdom of Kongo (in name, 1390(?)-1914; independent 1390(?)-1862)
  • The Moonstone: A Romance (novel by Wilkie Collins (1868))
  • The Moonstone (1934 film)

⁹ Places, people, and problems; focusing on central Africa:

• Wikipedia
  • Bwindi Impenetrable Forest (on the Democratic Republic of Congo/Uganda border, currently Gorillaland; “Batwa pygmy people” mentioned)
  • Belgian Congo (territory controlled by Belgium, 1908-1960)
  • Congo Crisis (lethal SNAFU following independence from Belgium, 1960-1965)
  • Congo Free State (“free” only in the sense that King Leopold II of Belgium was free to do what he wanted with his personal property: which included this territory, 1885-1908)
  • Conservation refugee (folks who get booted off their land when the powers that be decide they’re in the way of more important critters)
  • Democratic Republic of the Congo (1964-1971, 2006-present (2024))
  • Free Republic of the Congo
  • Indigenous peoples
  • Leopold II of Belgium (lived 1835-1909, king of Belgium 1865-1909)
  • Kingdom of Kongo (in name, 1390(?)-1914; independent 1390(?)-1862)
  • Lebensraum
  • Mgahinga Gorilla National Park (“This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards….”) (“…Popular tourist activities include … bird watching and meeting the Batwa community….”)
  • Mountain gorilla
  • Republic of the Congo (Léopoldville) (Republic of the Congo 1960-1964, AKA Congo-Léopoldville 1960-1966, Democratic Republic of the Congo 1964-1971
  • Republic of the Congo (Not to be confused with Republic of the Congo: this one was started in 1958, independent 1960-present (2024))
  • Rhodesia (region) (territory held by the British Empire ca. 1890 to 1920s-1960s — it’s complicated)
  • South Kasai (an “unrecognised secessionist state” in what’s now part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1960-1962))
  • State of Katanga (“This article needs additional citations for verification….”) (a “breakaway state” in what’s now part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1960-1963))
  • Twa (AKA Cwa, OvaTwa Batwa)
    • Uganda (“Batwa of Uganda” mentioned here)
  • Uganda
  • UNESCO
  • World Heritage Site (made room for mountain gorillas, run by UNESCO)
  • Zaire (official name for what’s currently called Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1971-1997)
  • Zambia (none of the above, a country south of Democratic Republic of the Congo, used to be part of “Rhodesia”: independent since 1964, current constitution since 2016)
• My take on long-overdue attitude adjustments
  • “Half-Million-Year-Old Structure: Rethinking Cavemen, Origins” (March 9, 2024)
    • Good News, Bad News, and (Slowly) Changing Attitudes (includes discussion of how genocide was perceived)
    • We’re Learning

¹⁰ Good intentions, working in an imperfect world:

• Wikipedia
  • Bwindi Impenetrable Forest (on the Democratic Republic of Congo/Uganda border, currently Gorillaland; “Batwa pygmy people” mentioned here)
  • Blood diamond (AKA brown diamonds, conflict diamonds, hot diamonds, red diamonds; diamonds mined in a war zone, sold to bankroll an insurgency/terrorists/invaders/warlord: the bad guys, in short)
  • Kimberley Process Certification Scheme
  • UNESCO
  • United Nations
  • World Heritage Site (run by UNESCO)