Word: africas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unfortunately, the Japanese ivory traders delayed too long. Unrelenting poaching has cut Africa's wild elephant population by more than half in the past decade, to an estimated 625,000. In October the 102 nations that subscribe to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species are expected to declare the African elephant endangered, which would make the ivory trade illegal in those countries. Not waiting for a worldwide ban, the U.S. and the E.C. decided last month to stop ivory imports immediately. Japan followed suit with a partial ban that would reduce its ivory imports to a trickle...
...conveyed in nonfiction such as An Area of Darkness and The Loss of El Dorado and in his novels Guerrillas and A Bend in the River changed Western perceptions of the underdeveloped world. Free of their colonial keepers, new nations had to confront their own hearts of darkness. In Africa the author found tribalism overgrowing hopes of progress; in India he observed that poverty was more dehumanizing than any modern machine. Eight years before Salman Rushdie outraged the Imam, Naipaul had pinpointed the problem of true believers: "In the fundamentalist scheme the world constantly decays and has constantly...
...plan, said President-elect Frederik W. de Klerk, opens nothing less than "a new chapter" in South Africa's history. Passed last week by the ruling National Party, the outline calls for constitutional reforms to be introduced over the next five years that would provide limited voting rights to the country's disenfranchised black majority. The accord envisions a federal system composed of Swiss-style cantons, where suffrage in local elections would be universal...
...most of the new chapter sounded decidedly familiar. There was no talk of changing the body of law that lies at the heart of South Africa's apartheid. There was repeated mention of "group rights," a code phrase for continuing white control. The black Congress of South African Trade Unions dismissed the proposal as "old formulas." And despite the announced five-year deadline for reform, De Klerk, who is scheduled to take office in September, admitted, "I would not like to tie myself down to a timetable...
...question now is whether Tutu will actually make the long journey from South Africa to attend Overseers meetings...