Category: Perspective

Walking from Ethiopia to Chile: 1 year down, 6 to go

In Paul Salopek’s first year of his trek across the globe, the reporter walked alongside his camels for days in Ethiopia without seeing glass or bricks or any other signs of modern humanity, ate a hamburger on a US military base and was shadowed by minders in the Saudi desert. He has only 32 000 kilometres to go.

Salopek is walking from Ethiopia to Chile, a seven-year journey that aims to reproduce man’s global migration. Beauty and difficulty filled his first year, which is now nearly complete. In his second he will skirt the violence of Syria but will cross Iraq and Afghanistan.

After about 2 100km on foot, Salopek has walked through five languages (Afar, Amharic, Arabic, French, Somali), filled 40 notebooks full of words, said goodbye to four camel companions and has logged one 55-kilometre day.

Paul Salopek walks across the Afar desert of Ethiopia on January 28 2013. (Pic: AP / National Geographic Society)
Paul Salopek walks across the Afar desert of Ethiopia on January 28 2013. (Pic: AP / National Geographic Society)

Beginning in Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, where early man lived, Salopek walked east into Djibouti, where he ate a hamburger on a US military base, then waited nearly six weeks – because of insurance requirements over piracy attack fears – for a boat to take him over the Red Sea and into Saudi Arabia.

Much of Africa, the 51-year-old noted, is still dominated by humans who travel on foot.

“The Africa segment was remarkable for its kind of historical reverberations, and getting to go through historical pastoral cultures like the Afar, and walking through a landscape still shaped by the human foot,” Salopek said by telephone. “It really has struck me that walking out of Africa, a place that still walks, how fantastically bound to our cars the rest of the world is.”

Salopek’s journey will take him from Africa, through the Middle East, across Asia, over to Alaska, down the western United States, then Central and South America, ending in Chile. That’s about 34 000 kilometres.

This image shows the route of Salopek's planned seven-year global trek from Ethiopia to Tierra del Fuego. (Pic: AP / National Geographic Society)
This image shows the route of Paul Salopek’s planned seven-year global trek from Ethiopia to Tierra del Fuego. (Pic: AP / National Geographic Society)

The walk is called Out of Eden and is sponsored by National Geographic, the Knight Foundation and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. A two-time journalism Pulitzer Prize winner, the American plans to write one major article a year, the first of which appears in December’s National Geographic.

Salopek’s highlight from his first year was his access to Saudi Arabia, a country that maintains tight controls on what outside journalists can see. He noted that the oil-producing nation is 83% urban, a higher percentage than the US.

“I have been moving slowly through Saudi culture, from walking along highways with camels, to the surreal reality of it in some cases is walking with camels by a Pizza Hut with Saudis inside eating pepperoni, who look outside and see a skinny American with camels,” said Salopek, interrupting himself with the observation.

Saudi Arabia made global headlines in October over protests against its effective cultural ban on women drivers. But Salopek encountered many women drivers in the country. “They just happen to be in places where there are no reporters,” he said.

In some places in the country Salopek knew he was being watched by government officials, who explained their presence by saying they were concerned for the American’s safety. But most times he has had unfettered access, he said. He thinks he’s the first outside journalist to walk through Saudi Arabia since 1918.

Salopek doesn’t miss much from the Western world except information because of his limited access to the internet. He also misses his family, but his wife is joining him in Jordan, where he currently is. He says he’s on schedule to complete his seven-year journey, though because of his six-week wait in Djibouti and his boat ride up the Red Sea, he didn’t walk as many steps as he thought he would. He has suffered few physical pains or ailments, save for two blisters.

“This has been very fun and very interesting and I have no indication as I sit that I’m getting bored with it. On the contrary, walking into a new country on foot with your clothes on your back and a shoulder bag stuffed with notebooks was really fascinating.”

Jason Straziuso for Sapa-AP.

Our trans-African honeymoon from Pretoria to the pyramids

The joke in our house goes that my husband drove over 14 500km on a scooter through Africa while I spent that 14 500km telling him how to drive. Not quite true, but not quite false either. There were days when I just sat on the back of our 150cc motorbike, lost somewhere in Zambia or Sudan, without saying a word.

Packing up your life and cutting all the strings that tie you to society is much easier said than done. It is only when you attempt it that you realise just how many things are pinning you down. Banks, cellphones, rent, vehicles, jobs, debit orders, credit cards, medical aid, pensions, doctors and insurance. Everyday things that most of Africa spent their days without. Something we would learn along the way from Pretoria to the pyramids is how little you need to be happy if you just learn to be content. And how, when situations are really bad, the smallest things, can create immense joy. Like an old, dirty bed after sleeping on the floor for weeks on end or a piece of dodgy-looking goat’s meat, served in a dirty plate, after you’ve spent the last 36 hours lost in the desert without food.  But I’m jumping the gun here.

Strapped for cash and desperate to explore the rest of our continent, we devised a plan towards the end of 2011. Cash everything in, including our pension funds, savings and most of the money we would have used on our wedding, quit our jobs – I’m a social media manager, Guillaume is an engineer – and travel through Africa. It sounds super romantic, which is probably why we chose to do it for our honeymoon, but let me tell you, there was very little honey during the 153 moons we spent on the road. We could not afford a 4×4 or even just a semi-decent vehicle, which is why we opted for the little motorbike standing in our front yard. It was cheap, it was there and it was absolutely ridiculous – that includes the bright orange coat of paint it was given. But it could average a speed of 75km/h and my husband knew how to drive it so it seemed like a plausible idea. Having finally gotten rid of all those things tying us down, we tied the knot on January 21 2012 during a very small, informal ceremony in the Kruger National Park, packed a single backpack and drove off into the sunset nine days later … aiming “north in general”.

Botswana1
Outriding elephants in Botswana was one of many nerve-wracking experiences.

A trans-African journey can be done in one of two ways: with a lot of planning and preparation, or the way we did it – the “fake it till you make it” way. We suggest you opt for the first. We aren’t total fools though and did do some planning. We read a few travel guides, scanned a map, got the necessary visas and learned how to do first aid but apart from that we had only the bare necessities and decided to just “let the journey guide us” –  from South Africa through Botswana, the Caprivi strip (now called the Zambezi Region) in Namibia, parts of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Sudan and eventually Egypt.

The picturesque, wet and Ethiopian highlands on the way to the city of Bahir Dar.
The picturesque, wet and cold Ethiopian highlands on the way to the city of Bahir Dar.

In the end, it turned out, it was the locals and not so much the journey that guided us. Without a map we got lost often so we’d find our way from place to place and country to country by asking locals for directions. Things get strange when you stand in front of a Masai warrior next to the ‘highway’ in Tanzania, point in a direction and ask, “Kenya?”. Often we would get to the next town after having “turned left at the big tree on the right before following the long, winding road and after spotting the little house, turned right and drove until we saw town” It was fun, at times.

Most days were tedious. We’d be on a bike from early morning to late afternoon. A bike that broke down a lot, sometimes up to four times a day. There were lots of obstacles like potholes, thunderstorms, running out of petrol, and going without food for 10 hours and a mere 200km after our departure point. But it was worth it.

Down and out at the border between Tanzania and Kenya after 10 hours of driving, a crash, three breakdowns and no food.
Down and out at the border between Tanzania and Kenya after 10 hours of driving, a crash, three breakdowns and no food.

We just had look around us to fall in love with Africa all over again. Greeting shepherds walking with their cattle in Ethiopia’s highlands, almost hidden in the thick mist left by the passing rains. Stopping to watch a road race between competing schools on what is considered the main ‘highway’ between Rwanda and Tanzania, cheering with the crowd as the children finish their race, some barefoot, some wearing mismatched shoes, but all smiling the biggest smiles you’ve ever seen. Spending an hour with the magnificent mountain gorillas in Uganda. And if you drive for long enough, Africa rewards you with her unimaginable natural beauty too. Like when the clouds open for just long enough to reveal Mount Kilimanjaro watching over the landscape below her, or when the sun sets over the Meroe Pyramids in Sudan and all you hear is the silence of the desert echoing through the dunes.

Camping in the Nubian desert between Khartoum and Atbara in Sudan.
Camping in the Nubian desert between Khartoum and Atbara in Sudan.

We cried at the mass graves in Rwanda, and spent time in villages where the possessions of all the residents put together was worth just a little more than our bike. Yes, we were robbed once, lied to at times and were witnesses to some of the cruel realities of life in much of Africa. But most people we met were much more eager to share their stories of triumph and happiness while boasting about how beautiful their continent is, than focus on their suffering.

A local shows off one of his crafts in Bagamoyo, Tanzania.
A local shows off one of his crafts in Bagamoyo, Tanzania.

Cutting those strings and driving from South Africa to Cairo turned out to be so much more than what we bargained for, but the best thing we did was to rely on others to make it there. Every direction given by someone we met, whether right or wrong, was a friend made, a new adventure and a discovery of an African road less travelled. When we returned home in August 2012, we knew we’d had one of the biggest privileges in life – to discover Africa.

And our beloved but temperamental bike? At the end of our journey, we gave it to a friend we made on the border between Sudan and Egypt.

Egypt1
Admiring the Great Sphinx of Giza. Tired, dirty but so happy to be at our final destination!

 Dorette de Swardt lives in Port Elizabeth with her husband Guilllaume in a home that’s a recent upgrade from a two-man tent and self-inflatable mattresses that don’t inflate. 

Peepoo bag offers solution to Kenyan slum’s ‘flying toilets’

The usually straightforward act of going to the toilet is is far from simple in Kibera, the sprawling slum on the edge of Kenya’s capital.

Hundreds of thousands of people, whose homes are little more than makeshift shacks, are crammed into an area that lacks the most basic water and sanitation facilities, and where just one public toilet is available to every 300 people.

The result is two-fold: First, people become adept at holding it in, often spending hours in discomfort. And second, they eventually find relief by doing the necessary in a plastic bag, and then tossing it out onto the street or path outside.

Hence “flying toilets”, one of the many scourges of life in Kibera.

“Sanitation is one of the world’s biggest problems. Forty percent of the world’s population don’t have toilets. They say about 70 percent of the diseases come from the lack of sanitation, where water is polluted,” said Camilla Wirseen, director of a project that proposes an innovative solution to the problem.

Wirseen, who works for the Swedish firm Peepoople, is using Kibera as a testing ground for the Peepoo, a biodegradable, self-sanitising, single-use toilet that could one day provide a cheap, smart fix for the world’s billion slum dwellers.

The Peepoo is a slim bag with a larger liner tucked inside, both made of biodegradable plastic and designed to fit over a small pot. Inside the bag are a couple of spoonfuls of granulated urea, an ammonia that eliminates dangerous pathogens contained in faeces and urine within two to three weeks.

After use, the bag is knotted and taken to a drop-off point – where the family gets a small refund on the bag’s small purchase price because the contents are sold on for fertiliser.

Peepoo Bag. (Pic: peepoople.com)
Peepoo Bag. (Pic: peepoople.com)

“Before the project started, flying toilets were everywhere,” Wirseen told AFP, explaining that Kibera residents dare not go out at night to relieve themselves because of security fears.

“It’s also a social problem: women hold all day.”

‘A question of dignity’
Lydia Kwamboka, a 29-year-old Kibera resident and happy Peepoo user, said the freedom to answer the call of nature whenever necessary had had a profound impact on her life.

“Where I stay there are no toilets. When my kids had diarrhoea at night, I just gave them a plastic bag and dumped it in the drainage in the morning. You had to be careful what you stepped on,” she said.

“When Peepoo was brought in, it changed almost everything,” added Ann Wambui, a schoolteacher and another user of the bag.

“You can use it alone. Once used you dispose of it and Peepoo is carried away the same day, while you need money to get the latrines cleaned,” she said.

Peepoo salesperson Patricia Okello, aged 51 and also a Kibera resident, said she believed the part of the slum where Peepoople has been testing the bags since 2010 – currently to the tune of 5 000 a day – was becoming a cleaner, healthier place.

“Before Peepoo, this place was very dirty, the water we drank was not clean. Now we don’t have sicknesses like cholera and typhoid anymore,” she said. “It has brought a big change in my life.”

An illustration of the usage of Peepoo bags and toilets in Kibera. (Pic: AFP)
An illustration of the usage of Peepoo bags and toilets in Kibera. (Pic: AFP)

Wirseen said the aim was for the Kibera project to expand ten-fold over the next year, and twenty-fold by the end of 2015.

While Peepoo’s business model is still unproven as a long-term, sustainable solution – after all, it depends on the world’s poorest people seeing a benefit in paying 200-Kenyan shillings (around USD $2) for something they used to do for free – the Kibera testing ground has at least proved that the product works.

In addition, the firm is hoping the bags can be stockpiled for humanitarian emergencies in order to help refugees from conflict or victims of natural disasters like earthquakes, floods or typhoons before proper sanitation structures can be put in place.

Above all, the project helps highlight how going to the toilet cannot be taken for granted.

“Sanitation,” Wirseen said, “is a problem of dignity.”

Aymeric Vincenot for AFP

Hurdles and hope: Doing business in Luanda

Angola usually appears near the bottom of rankings that quantify the ease of doing business in a particular country. The most recent Doing Business report ranks Angola in 179th place out of 189 countries. Corruption is rampant and institutionalised – Angola is ranked 157 out of 176 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. The costs of opening a business are very high, the entrepreneurial climate is fraught with obstacles, and the bureaucracy is gloriously inefficient.

Despite all this, I left my corporate job in New York City earlier this year and moved back to Luanda to start a business.

Angola is constantly in the news because of its economic boom – ever since the war ended in 2002 and the price of oil, the country main export, has soared, the government has become awash in cash. It even has the apparent luxury of ‘bailing out’ Portugal from its current economic crisis – one just has to look at the amount of Angolan money in Lisbon’s stock exchange. However, the entrepreneurial climate in Angola has struggled to keep up and doing business here is a challenging proposition, to put it mildly.

This summer I started an online micro-enterprise in Luanda with two friends. The start-up operates in the hospitality sector, does not have any paid employees, and so far does not yet pay rent in an office. Still, it cost more than $4 000 and took six weeks to open. Even so, this is a great improvement from just two years ago.

Officially, it’s possible to open a business in Angola in just one day at the Guiché Único da Empresa (GUE), a government institution that greatly simplifies the process. The reality, however, is that it takes much longer. But two years ago GUE was not what it is today, and I’ve been able to witness just how much more professional and efficient the institution has become.

Once we had our start-up legalised and our business model prepared, we were ready to start operations and set about finding and contacting potential clients. As any visitor to Luanda will quickly realise, traffic in the capital is an absolute nightmare. If there is ever a study done on just how much Luanda’s traffic negatively impacts the country’s economic output, I’d be first in line to read it. With this in mind, we had to be very creative with how to get the most out of the day, how to meet with different clients in different areas of the city, and how to squeeze in time for a quick lunch. With a bit of finesse, a willingness to experiment, and a very open mind, we learned to adapt our schedules and temper our expectations.

A view of Luanda's Central Business District taken on August 30 2012. (Pic: AFP)
A view of Luanda’s Central Business District taken on August 30 2012. (Pic: AFP)

Each country has its own business culture and its fair share of rather quirky norms. When it comes to communication in Luanda, introductory emails are overly formal and people love to give themselves important titles. Their e-mail signatures are coveted, elaborate markers of glory.

Most people have two phones – one SIM from the country’s two mobile phone networks in each. Nothing gets done on Friday and if Monday is a holiday you can expect people to take Friday and perhaps even Tuesday off.

Pray that your workplace is adequately equipped with a proper generator and water supply, because the city’s infrastructure is very weak. If it rains, chaos will ensue. The city’s roads and sewage system are badly built and not equipped for rain, as the water has nowhere to go. The already dreadful traffic worsens and some areas of the city resemble Venice with its canals.

Luandans have learned not to be overly specific with time and know to give generous leeway when it comes to people arriving late to meetings. Sometimes, the situation is simply outside of their control – in our city, anything can happen on the way from point A to point B.

People love to feel important. Often, in order to speak with the head of a company or a member of government you’ll need to write a letter and coax the secretary into letting your unimportant self speak to her almighty boss. On the other hand, a phone call is always better than an email and a lot of importance is given to interpersonal interactions.

Despite the setbacks and the long list of things that need improvement, the atmosphere in the city is incredibly electric. Money flows and liquidity is high. It seems everyone is hustling, everyone has a side business, everyone has cash money. I get very excited when I see people my age opening their own businesses, acting on their ideas, helping each other out, and generally making a difference, however small.

The most important thing about hustling in Luanda is surrounding yourself with doers and believers – friends and associates who believe in themselves, their ideas and their capacity to help develop this country of ours.

Claudio Silva is Angolan. He has spent time in New York, Washington DC, Lisbon, Reading (UK) and attended university in Boston. In 2009, he started Caipirinha Lounge, a music blog dedicated to Lusophone music. Claudio contributes to several other blogs including Africa is a Country and Central Angola 7311. Connect with him on Twitter.

Art: The ‘Man of a Thousand Faces’ returns to Nigeria

Photographer Samuel Fosso, whose renowned self-portraits have made him one of Africa’s most popular artists, is exhibiting for the first time in Nigeria, where he grew up in the grip of the brutal Biafran war.

Fosso, a Cameroonian national, is known for taking chameleon-like photos of himself dressed as a range of figures from black African and American life – from musicians to pop-culture icons to political leaders.

Nicknamed the “Man of a Thousand Faces”, his pictures have been shown in major museums across Europe, in a career that has taken him far from Nigeria, his mother’s homeland.

“It’s very emotional for me to be here,” the 51-year-old told AFP as he premiered his latest work at the fourth edition of Lagos Photo, an international photography festival.

Fosso’s appearance is a major coup for organisers of the annual festival, which began last week and this year brings together some of the greatest names in contemporary photography, including Britain’s Martin Parr and Spain’s Cristina de Middel.

“When I suggested bringing Samuel Fosso, everyone told me, ‘You’re too late’, or ‘He’s too well-known’,” said the founder of the exhibition, Azu Nwagbogu.

“Then I contacted him via Facebook and he spoke to me in Igbo. I was shocked! I didn’t know about this part of his life with Nigeria.”

Fosso needed nearly a year of preparation to produce “The Emperor of Africa”, his piece for the exhibit – a collection of five self-portraits in which he dresses as former Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong and through which he explores the relationship between China and Africa.

Samuel Fosso poses next to a series of self-portraits in which he is dressed as the former Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong. (Pic: AFP)
Samuel Fosso poses next to a series of self-portraits in which he is dressed as the former Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong. (Pic: AFP)

He also needed a production director and about 10 other people, including make-up artists, technicians and a costume designer for a day’s shoot in the French capital, Paris.

This is a far cry from Fosso’s first studio, in the Central African Republic, where at the age of just 13 he began photographing himself using the unused ends of the rolls of film brought in by his clients.

“But it was already a major production at the time,” said gallery owner Jean-Marc Patras, who has represented him exclusively since 2001.

“Even in the 1970s, Samuel left nothing to chance, be it make-up, costumes or lighting.”

Uprooted by Biafran war
Fosso has no photos from his own childhood but says he has never forgotten the traumatic images of the Biafran war, which claimed nearly one million lives between 1967 and 1970 after the southeastern region broke away and declared itself a republic.

Aged barely five, Fosso lost his mother and found refuge in the forest with his grandparents, both of them from the Igbo ethnic group at the centre of the conflict.

“Thank God I had a robust constitution,” he said.

Fosso was the only child of his age to survive from his entire family. The images of burnt and disfigured bodies, the bloated stomachs and twisted limbs of malnourished children and hunger have remained with him, he says.

Aged 10, Fosso left his village in Nigeria, Ebunwana Edda, to work in his uncle’s shoe-making shop in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.

Three years later, in 1975, he opened his first photographic studio with the motto: “With Studio National, you will be beautiful, stylish, dainty and hard to forget.”

Once the shop shut in the evening, he made himself up and got in front of the camera.

Inspired by magazine cuttings, Fosso imitated his idols – black African and American musicians.

He bought himself a pair of two-tone platform leather boots to dress up as Cameroonian-Nigerian singer Prince Nico Mbarga, whose Highlife-style song Sweet Mother was then a radio hit.

Fosso took the photos for himself and as a lasting memory for his as-yet unborn children and his maternal grandmother still in Nigeria, who repeatedly told him when he was a child that he was “the best-looking in the village”.

Until 1993, that is, when French photographer Bernard Descamps, on the hunt for talent to show at a new African photography festival, arrived in Fosso’s studio.

Impressed by his self-portraits, Descamps asked Fosso if he could take the negatives with him back to Paris. A year later, Fosso received an Air Afrique ticket for Mali, where he would win his first award at the Bamako Encounters, a photo show that has become a major biennial exhibition.

Six-figure price tags
Today, Fosso’s self-portraits have been included in collections at London’s Tate Modern and the Pompidou Centre and Quai Branly museums in Paris.

Samuel Fosso poses next to a self-portrait, which sees him dressed as former Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah. (Pic: AFP)
Samuel Fosso poses next to a self-portrait, which sees him dressed as former Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah. (Pic: AFP)

The wealthy Congolese entrepreneur Sindika Dokolo, a major collector of contemporary African art, bought three series of self-portraits from Fosso, including “African Spirits”, a homage to major figures of the pan-Africanism movement and the fight for civil rights in the United States, which carry a price tag of at least $135 000.

But Fosso has not altogether left his studio in the Miskine district of Bangui.

Despite his success and daily hardships in the Central African Republic, which is riven by instability after rebels overthrew the previous government in March, he said simply: “I’ve got my own way of doing things there.”

And if he ever leaves, he says, it will not be for Europe but for his village in Nigeria, where his wife Nenna, mother of their four sons, was born.

Cecile De Comarmond for AFP