Zambia

KAYANJE FARM, Zambia - When a truckload of government-sponsored thugs chased Chris Thorne and his family from their wheat and soybean farm in Zimbabwe three years ago, ransacking his home and decrying him as a racist, Thorne was left to wonder whether a white farmer like him could have a future in Africa. Thorne is finding his answer in Zambia. Just north of Lusaka, Zambia's sleepy capital, Thorne is busy felling trees, leveling termite hills and laying irrigation lines to expand his new 7,000-acre tobacco and maize farm.

- American diplomats abroad confront a rapidly changing world brimming with both promise and peril. This reality is perhaps no more daunting than in the countries and regions - including parts of Africa, southeast Asia and key corners of the Middle East - where populations are young and the 21st century global power struggle will unfold. More than half of the world's 7 billion people are age 25 or younger. According to World Bank data, more than a dozen African nations also feature under-15 population shares near or above 40 percent.

KABWE, Zambia -- Depending on how you look at it, Thys Eloff is either continuing an old Afrikaner tradition or pioneering a new one.Mr. Eloff, 26, left the dry soil of South Africa three years ago to try his luck in more fertile lands. The country he left was on the verge of revolutionary change, about to get its first black government. The land he came to had been ruled by blacks for almost 30 years.In a sense, Mr. Eloff and a handful of other South African farmers now living in Zambia have done as their ancestors did 150 years ago: moved on, in search of land and peace.

GO ON A SAFARI IN KENYA OR SOUTH Africa and you'll likely encounter rows of buses filled with tourists armed with shiny zoom lenses all aiming at the same sleeping lion. It's a different world in Zambia, and not only because its game reserves are unspoiled by mass tourism. This is the home of Africa's best walking safaris, and instead of driving for hours in search of the big five (cape buffalo, elephant, leopard, lion and rhino), you explore the bush on foot. CITY WALKS: AMSTERDAM; CITY WALKS: BOSTON Chronicle Books / $14.95 each These are not books but boxed sets of 50 cards.

LUSAKA, Zambia -- Opposition leaders cried foul, and anti-government protesters rioted for a second day yesterday, as Zambia's president won five more years in power. After a hard-fought campaign among five candidates, President Levy Mwanawasa, head of the long-ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy, was re-elected with 43 percent of the vote. His main rival, Michael Sata of the Patriotic Front, received 29.3 percent. Under Zambia's system, the top vote-getter wins outright, even without polling more than half the ballots.

One of the last remaining leaders of Africa's independence era has been removed from power -- not killed at the hands of mutinous soldiers, flying into exile just ahead of riotous mobs or even dying peacefully in bed from natural causes -- but becoming the first to be voted out of office in democratic elections.The ruling United National Independence Party (UNIP) of President Kenneth D. Kaunda, who has led Zambia since its independence in 1964, was handily defeated Thursday in multi-party elections that would have been unthinkable a year ago. A fighter for independence and majority rule in other African states, Mr. Kaunda long maintained a one-party government at home.

Sarah DeLauder Reinecke, who had been a missionary in Zaire and Zambia, died Saturday of pulmonary failure at the Wesley Home in Mount Washington. She was 90. In a career that took her from the corporate world of Manhattan to the plains of Africa, Miss Reinecke began working in 1954 as a home economist and missionary in what was then Lodja, Belgian Congo, later Zaire. The country is now called Congo. Given the name of "Mama Ambatshe," which means "she has done everything," by her African students, Miss Reinecke taught hygiene, child care, nutrition, agriculture, cooking and women's development.

LONDON - Zambia will deport to Britain an accused al-Qaida operative suspected of having links to the bombers who struck London last month and attempting to start a militant training camp in the United States, officials said yesterday. Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa said at a news conference in the capital, Lusaka, that after discussions with British and U.S. officials, his nation had agreed to hand over to British authorities Haroon Rashid Aswat. Zambian authorities said that Aswat, 30, a British citizen of Indian descent, is believed to have entered the African country July 6, one day before bombs exploded on three London subways and one bus killed 56, including the four bombers.

LIVINGSTONE, Zambia -- P. R. Patel, looking at his ransacked dressmaking shop, sees clothing scraps and paperwork lying scattered across the floor. Work tables that once held sewing machines are barren."

A sunset cruise on the Zambezi? Who with $25 to spare could resist? And for the first hour it delivers all the magic the name implies -- a languid ride along a seemingly pristine African river.There is nothing too dreamy about the boat -- bare wood-plank floors set on two pontoons, plastic chairs, drinks stored in rusting coolers and offered in well-scratched plastic tumblers. But the water is calm, and the banks are lush. On one side, we pass a crocodile catching the last bit of warmth, lazing on some rocks.

LUSAKA, Zambia -- Opposition leaders cried foul, and anti-government protesters rioted for a second day yesterday, as Zambia's president won five more years in power. After a hard-fought campaign among five candidates, President Levy Mwanawasa, head of the long-ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy, was re-elected with 43 percent of the vote. His main rival, Michael Sata of the Patriotic Front, received 29.3 percent. Under Zambia's system, the top vote-getter wins outright, even without polling more than half the ballots.

LONDON - Zambia will deport to Britain an accused al-Qaida operative suspected of having links to the bombers who struck London last month and attempting to start a militant training camp in the United States, officials said yesterday. Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa said at a news conference in the capital, Lusaka, that after discussions with British and U.S. officials, his nation had agreed to hand over to British authorities Haroon Rashid Aswat. Zambian authorities said that Aswat, 30, a British citizen of Indian descent, is believed to have entered the African country July 6, one day before bombs exploded on three London subways and one bus killed 56, including the four bombers.

In 2002, the farmers of Zambia were starving, eating leaves, sticks and poisonous berries in an attempt to survive the worst famine to rake southern Africa in years. President Levy Mwanawasa declared an emergency. But when the United States offered a shipment of corn, he rejected it, insisting his people would rather starve than eat genetically-modified American grain. The American agriculture industry was flummoxed. They had been tinkering with the DNA of crops to make it resistant to pests and herbicides, and regarded the results as healthier and better than the food produced "naturally."

KAYANJE FARM, Zambia - When a truckload of government-sponsored thugs chased Chris Thorne and his family from their wheat and soybean farm in Zimbabwe three years ago, ransacking his home and decrying him as a racist, Thorne was left to wonder whether a white farmer like him could have a future in Africa. Thorne is finding his answer in Zambia. Just north of Lusaka, Zambia's sleepy capital, Thorne is busy felling trees, leveling termite hills and laying irrigation lines to expand his new 7,000-acre tobacco and maize farm.

Around 1996, the phrase "neo-soul" got folks all excited. With the emergence of the Fugees and Lauryn Hill, D'Angelo, Erykah Badu and Maxwell, those keeping up with urban music were relieved to find an alternative to the cartoonish gangsta-isms of Snoop Dogg and Tupac, and the steely eyed, 'hood-rat sass of Mary J. Blige and Faith Evans. Finally, artists were returning to more organic-sounding material: a Fender Rhodes cascading over looping grooves. Lyrics extolling "brown sugar" skin and butterflies in the "next lifetime."

IT SOUNDS preposterous, even outrageous. Zambia recently rejected international emergency aid, even though food had already been shipped to that African country, where 3 million people are faced with starvation. The reason: The president described genetically modified corn as "poison." The United States, which donated most of the food, has voiced its displeasure. Inside Zambia, controversy rages. Foreign aid organizations say they don't have enough unmodified corn at their disposal. The situation is explosive: Some famished people have looted warehouses containing genetically modified corn.

IT SOUNDS preposterous, even outrageous. Zambia recently rejected international emergency aid, even though food had already been shipped to that African country, where 3 million people are faced with starvation. The reason: The president described genetically modified corn as "poison." The United States, which donated most of the food, has voiced its displeasure. Inside Zambia, controversy rages. Foreign aid organizations say they don't have enough unmodified corn at their disposal. The situation is explosive: Some famished people have looted warehouses containing genetically modified corn.

His electoral defeat and speedy departure from power was the second great service Kenneth Kaunda rendered to Africa. The first was leading Zambia peacefully to independence from Britain in 1964. Now Mr. Kaunda has bowed out with good grace befitting a democratic politician, which he had not lately been, and has shown the way to other African leaders.Of free Africa's founding giants, Mr. Kaunda was the one with the surest grasp of humanitarian issues outside his own country. At great harm to Zambia's economy, he championed majority rule for neighboring Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

To most in America, the Africa that exists beyond the game parks and tourist attractions is a continent mired in poverty and famine, rife with disease and despair, resistant to persistent efforts to raise it out of its terrible state. Even many who take pride in tracing their heritage to its soil can do little but blame those who have oppressed and exploited Africa for its seemingly never-ending travails. There is no doubt that these problems exist. In some parts of Africa, merely surviving is a daily challenge.

FEW AFRICAN nations can escape occasional droughts. But six countries from Malawi to Zimbabwe have been hit by something far more insidious - killer floods that first wiped out crops, followed by a merciless aridity that has baked the soil hard as rock. Some 5 million people are threatened with starvation. Nature's vagaries are only a partial reason for this unfolding disaster. Zimbabwe, long regarded as the region's bread basket, is a case in point. Drought, combined with President Robert Mugabe's disastrous expulsion of white farmers, has produced a man-made calamity in which the area planted with corn fell by 54 percent in a single year.