Dedicated to supporting youth in Ethiopia through the promotion of skateboarding and other educational initiatives, Ethiopia Skate was started in 2012 by 16-year-old Abenezer Temesgen and his partner Sean Stromsoe in Addis Ababa. Temesgen fell in love with skateboarding two years ago and has since taught 25 kids how to skateboard.
Ethiopia Skate plans to launch the country’s first public skatepark and needs as much support as it can get to successfully make this dream come true.
The video below introduces the project and the guys behind this great initiative. Check it out.
Dynamic Africa is a multimedia curated blog focused on all facets of African cultures, African history, and the lives and experiences of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora – past and present. Visitthe blog and connect with the curator, Funke Makinwa, on Twitter.
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)
“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)
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.”
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)
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 Countryand Central Angola 7311. Connect with him on Twitter.
Last Tuesday night, Nairobi held its first major, international commercial auction of East African art. The auction, organised by the Circle Art Agency, featured 47 works from 43 artists from six countries spanning the last four decades. In terms of sales, it was a huge success, with 90% of the works going for a combined Ksh18.5-million ($216 000).
But in a region long ignored by serious art collectors, and in a city that has mainly catered to foreign art buyers, the auction’s biggest achievement was that over half the works sold to Kenyans. Though that fact is partly a symptom of the ‘Africa Rising’ story of growing middle classes, it also marks an arrival for an unlikely city that has forged a unique modern art history.
“Kenyans like a party”
On the surface, Nairobi is perhaps a surprising art centre as it has little or no art infrastructure. The city has no renowned university art programmes and only two professional galleries, both of which operate in private homes to stay afloat and take tiny percentages so they can keep on board artists who would otherwise sell from their own studios. Kenya more broadly has no art education in government schools or significant public art installations. And beyond a few graffiti artists and political cartoonists, visual art is not on most Kenyans’ radar. The government is so out of touch with local art that it sent Chinese artists to this year’s Venice Biennial to fill the Kenya pavilion.
Yet behind the scenes, Nairobi’s art scene hums with improvised vibrancy. In slums, self-taught artists work in collectives where artists sleep, eat, and create together, pooling profits under the tutelage of an established name. More successful artists share shipping containers as studios. There are showings every week in galleries, private homes, restaurants, and cultural centres, and studios are gathering places for artists, buyers, and hangers-on.
But without a base of buyers who grew up learning about and viewing fine art, groups such as Circle Art have had to be creative in educating and building a market of locals willing to invest in Kenyan art.
“The traditional gallery sort of situation of going to a gallery and running for two or three weeks is not necessarily the best way to bring in a new audience,” says Danda Jaroljmek, director at Circle Art, explaining why they opted for an auction. “Kenyans like a party. By having a big noise, some glamour, a sort of party atmosphere, that’s perhaps a better way of doing it.”
Circle Art gives city art tours to galleries and collectives, and hosts collectors clubs to teach interested Kenyans about the history of local artists. There are ‘M/eat The Artist’ dinner parties in private homes where artists show and sell their work, and most studios are available for walk-ins whereby people can watch the artists in action and buy directly from the source. In Nairobi, art is interactive.
“It’s the story of Kenya,” says artist Gor Soudan (31) from his cramped apartment studio in the city’s Kibera slum. “The government, the banks were not working properly so M-Pesa [a mobile money service] came up to bank the poor people. So that’s the way the art scene is growing. By need and vision.”
Ugandan artist Geoffrey Mukasa’s ‘Lady in Green’ sold for Ksh 563 520. (Pic: Circle Art Agency)
Soudan, who was featured in the London’s 1:54 fair of contemporary African art last month, weaves human figures using metal wires from tyres burnt in riots. His home is a mini hub for local artists, and within walking distance are two other slum collectives. At one, artists weld scrap metal into sculptures and paint dreamscapes on Chinese-made plastic Muslim prayer mats.
Artist Paul Onditi, whose painting Half Life sold at Tuesday’s auction for Ksh704 400 ($8 200) says the fact that these many artists have little training means they make better art. “Here is a place you get self-taughts and they gamble around,” he says. Onditi is actually one of the few here who has received some formal training, but like his fellow local artists loves to experiment, making paintings by a long process of printing digital pictures and transferring them, through a four step chemical procedure he developed, to antiquated plastic printing press boards that he covers with oil paints.
Paul Onditi’s ‘Half Life’. (Pic: Circle Art Agency)
Painting politics
Kenya has long been known for its untrained but exciting artists. The ‘naïve’ movement, so called because the untutored artists never studied things like perspective or art history, dominated Nairobi’s scene for decades. Artists such as Sane Wadu, Wanyu Brush, and Jak Katarikawe painted surreal scenes of animals and rural life with expressive colours, and were marketed to foreign buyers as ‘untouched’ modern African artists.
These artists are still revered in Kenya and internationally – a six-panel painting by Wadu sold for Ksh1.5-million ($17 000) on Tuesday – but in the last decade, a new group of contemporary artists have become the big names in Nairobi. This second generation – of Onditi, Soudan, and others – is often just as untrained, but is connected through the internet to global conceptual trends. Notably, these younger artists are more eager to take on political issues now that Kenya’s public space is freer under multi-party democracy.
Peterson Kamwathi’s ‘Nchi 1 Barcode’. (Pic: Circle Art Agency)
Nchi 1 Barcode, for example, a woodblock by Peterson Kamwathi that auctioned for Ksh375 680 ($4,400), shows the Kenyan flag next to a barcode, questioning the country’s nationhood. Joseph Bertiers, a former painter of homemade signs, makes Bruegel-esque paintings of partying politicians, one of which, The World’s Craziest Bar, sold for Ksh821 800 ($9 600) on Tuesday. Onditi’s paintings show Nairobi’s congested slums superimposed on slave ships, while Soudan’s sculptures are made literally from the ashes of political violence.
‘The World’s Craziest Bar’ by Joseph Bertiers. (Pic: Circle Art Agency)
Even Wanyu Brush, an old master known for delicate paintings of safari animals and village folk, has moved to tougher subjects and styles in the last few years, with dark lines, jagged brushstrokes, and starker colours seen in his epic Never, Never, Never Again, painted in the wake of Kenya’s 2007/8 post-election violence.
“What you are your seeing right now is Nairobi being activated,” says Soudan.
Still, many Kenyan buyers avoid such cutting edge, confrontational works, preferring decorative pieces instead. Artist Beatrice Wanjiku, for example, who paints distorted human forms and anguished mouths, was not featured in the auction, while a piece by Richard Kimathi, who paints unsettling blue portraits of child soldiers and gaunt animals, was one of the few under the hammer that did not sell on Tuesday.
It will be fascinating to watch where the new attention pushes Nairobi next. Is there momentum to develop more traditional galleries, or will the city continue with self-taught artists and an informal flair? However things progress, what’s clear is that Nairobi has some very high calibre art, and Nairobians are noticing.
Jason Patinkin for Think Africa Press, where this piece was first published.
It is normally the catwalks of Lagos and Johannesburg grabbing the limelight, as African fashion industry grows in stature around the world. But the Rwandan capital put in a bid for style glory at the weekend with the launch of the second annual Kigali fashion week.
Designer Sonia Mugabo, who lost grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles and friends in the genocide nearly 20 years ago, was one of 10 local designers whose work was showcased at Friday night’s show with help from the organisers of the New York fashion week.
Although Rwanda does not have a fashion school, Mugabo says the tragic history of her family has made her more determined to follow her desire to be a designer.
“When I was doing graphic design in college, my parents asked what is she doing?” says the 23-year-old, who studied in the US and interned at Teen Vogue. “Fashion is a luxury here, not everyone can afford to be fashionable and our culture is very conservative so people think it’s too showy. But I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life.
“I think people here don’t understand art as a whole concept. They don’t know what art can do for a country.”
Mugabo and her friend Candy Basomingera (30) launched their women’s range Afrikana Exquisiteness in August.
LDJ Productions, the company that runs New York fashion week, believes Rwanda it has the potential for a strong fashion industry, after the country was recently ranked as the third easiest place to do business in sub-Saharan Africa.
It has provided technical support and training for Kigali fashion week. “It’s not about giving money for us, it’s about giving our time and expertise,” says LDJ chief Laurie DeJong, who’s also worked on fashion weeks in Miami, Toronto, Los Angeles and Mumbai.
“The talent here, no one’s tapped into it. But the designers are so serious and dedicated and so enthusiastic. They really want to learn more than anything.”
A model in one of the creations from Sonia Mugabo’s Afrikana Exqusiteness range. (Pic: G.R. Vande weghe, Illume Creative Studio)
For the past two years DeJong has mentored self-taught designer Colombe Ituze Ndutiye, who launched her INCO icyusa label in 2011. Ndutiye’s pieces, which include denim and cotton dresses and skirts teamed with traditional accessories, are made with the help of genocide widows through Canadian initiative Centre César.
“When I started the fashion industry was not there, people were confused,” says the 25-year-old. “Now there’s a lot of awareness.”
Friday night’s show featured Mugabo and Basomingera’s creations, which the former described as “vintage and Victorian-inspired”.
“My pieces are fully covered because I don’t feel like a woman should have to reveal too much to be beautiful,” says Mugabo, who is hoping to find local shops to stock her designs but also plans to sell online.
A model in one of the creations from Sonia Mugabo’s Afrikana Exqusiteness range. (Pic: G.R. Vande weghe, Illume Creative Studio)
LDJ is also helping to build an arts school in Rwanda with local firm House of Fashion, which was set up to develop the Rwandan industry. But its chief executive, John Bunyeshuli, also has his sights on Rwanda’s neighbours. He hopes to stage Burundi’s first fashion week next year in the capital Bujumbura.
