Category: Lifestyle

Briton to walk length of the Nile on 6840km trek from Rwanda to Egypt

Victorian explorers such as Speke, Burton, Livingstone and Stanley famously tramped around central Africa in search of the fabled source of the Nile. But no one has been known to walk the river’s 4 250-mile (6 840km) length, an omission Levison Wood intends to rectify and hopes he can do it in a year.

Setting off from dense forest in the highlands of Rwanda on December 1, Wood (31), a former parachute regiment captain from Putney, south London, will work his way through up to seven countries – depending which side of the river he takes – some of which have been riven by civil unrest and war.

Wood will face natural hazards, from raging torrents to wildlife; he will traverse forests, the vast Sudd swamp, and desert while taking in, possibly, Burundi, but definitely Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan, Sudan and Egypt.

Boats float on the river Nile in Cairo on April 30 2013. (Pic: AFP)

“The old adage is there is nothing more dangerous than between a hippo and the water and that is where I am going to be,” said Wood, admitting it was also as well to ask local people when crocodiles liked to be in the water.”Before you had decent anti-microbials in the 20th century, for most of the Victorian explorers, Speke and Livingstone and all those chaps looking for the source of the Nile, it was much easier coming from the east – [what is now] Tanzania and the coast – than it was to get round the Sudd. Anyone who had ever tried that basically died of malaria,” said Wood.

The Sudanese civil war put much of the Nile off-limits until recently. “For the first time in history, [this journey] is medically, politically and bureacratically possible,” said Wood, who will be seeking to raise money for three charities, Tusk, Space for Giants and Ameca.

Unlike Joanna Lumley and the 2005-2006 Ascend the Nile team who employed mechanised transport, Wood will be heading downstream. He will however, have a Channel Four film crew joining him for up to fortnight.

Wood, who served in Afghanistan in 2008 and has more recently escorted film crews into hostile areas, is well aware of other dangers facing 21st-century explorers. The Ascend the Nile team, led by New Zealanders Garth MacIntyre and Cam McLeay and Briton Neil McGrigor, witnessed one member, Briton Steve Willis, killed in an ambush by an armed rebel group in Uganda. McGrigor also broke and burned his leg in an accident that wrecked a motorised raft and a support aircraft.

Wood will not be armed, though will be joined by armed rangers in national parks, not only to protect him from wild animals but from poachers. “Certainly it is not wise to carry arms yourself.”

Wood hopes to complete up to 100 miles a week but said: “No doubt the film crew will slow me down quite considerably and anything can happen. You only need to get a sprained ankle to delay you by a fortnight.”

He insisted that most of the time he would rely on local guides. “In more remote parts of South Sudan, especially swamp areas, and, of course, the desert, it is going to be tough and there are going to be weeks and weeks without a village. The idea is to explore Africa as much as possible. If there are huge stretches where I need to carry my own food, there might be times I need to get a camel or something … I don’t have the budget for a helicopter.”

Wood, who has received words of encouragement from modern-day adventurers including Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Colonel John Blashford-Snell, reckons the trip will cost about £150 000. He is still seeking sponsors and encouraging wellwishers to support his favourite sub-Saharan wildlife and healthcare charities.

“You have to be prepared as much as you can. The key really is having good, trustworthy local guides who have a good understanding of places you are going into. I have done my research as best I can but a lot of it you have to leave to, I won’t say blind faith, but leave to human kindness.”

11 years ago

‘We just want to skate’

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.

11 years ago

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)

“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.”

Aymeric Vincenot for AFP

11 years ago

Auction signals the continuing rise of Kenya’s sizzling art scene

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.

11 years ago

Libya aims to become tourist hotspot of the future

Ikram Bash Imam freely admits it is not an easy task to persuade a sceptical world that the “new” Libya, still awash with weapons and rival militias, is a holiday destination worth considering.

There is no question about the pull of attractions: more than 1 000 miles of pristine Mediterranean beaches, magnificent Roman and Greek ruins, palm-fringed oases and Saharan troglodyte caves. And while Libyan cuisine may lack the sophistication of its Maghreb neighbours, the country is remarkably unspoilt.

“Libya is a beautiful place and we are a hospitable people and we have much to show to visitors,” says Imam, tourism minister in a government whose prime minister, Ali Zeidan, was briefly, but embarrassingly, abducted by gunmen in Tripoli last month. (“It’s true that this is a very challenging issue,” she says.)

Young Libyans enjoy a dip in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Tripoli. (Pic: AFP)

Muammar Gaddafi’s violent demise at the hands of Nato-backed rebels two years ago has left the north African country open to the world for the first time in more than four decades. But the barriers to tourism are daunting: dozens of heavily armed militias, a desperately weak central government, jihadi terrorism and, to some, the threat of state collapse.

The scale of violence is exaggerated by the media, says Imam, receiving visitors and well-wishers at the Libyan stand at this week’s World Travel Market in London’s Docklands, a pulsating mass of laminated-badged industry insiders struggling under the weight of brochures, DVDs and posters.

“Everyone focuses on the violence but most armed clashes are between [Libyan] individuals and groups. It is not a war. When young people can get back to work and the economy is more normal and we have our elections and constitution they will hand in their weapons.”

Sensibly, Imam is taking the long view and moving cautiously. The short-term plan is first to build up domestic tourism and raise revenues to 4% of GDP over the next two years. International tourism comes after that. Diversifying employment away from the dominant energy sector is an important element of the government’s overall economic strategy.

Urgent work needs to be done. The Unesco-recognised world heritage sites at Leptis Magna and Sabratha are still badly neglected, though plans are under way to develop the lush hills of Jebel Akhdar, south of Benghazi, and Jebel Nafusa in the western mountains.

The ancient Roman city of Sabratha used to attract more than 20 000 foreign visitors annually before the 2011 conflict that ousted Muammar Gaddafi. Now the temples and mosaics overlooking the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean are usually deserted. (Pic: Reuters)

“We have to be realistic and we have to be honest about what we say and promote what we have,” says Imam. “The new Libya will not be closed to the world. We were cut off for too long. We don’t want to have hundreds of thousands of tourists coming without the infrastructure and services to receive them with high standards and in an honourable way. We need to lay the foundations for our industry.”

Libya is not entirely a blank slate. Modest growth began in Gaddafi’s final years, with some niche adventure travel and several spectacular hotels built in Tripoil – including the lavish Turkish-owned Rixos, where foreign journalists were virtually imprisoned during the revolution, and the supposedly secure Corinthia, the scene of Zeidan’s kidnapping. Later this year an international marathon is being held at Ghat deep in the Sahara.

Other practical problems include the difficulty of getting tourist visas from Libyan embassies: in one change, group visas can be obtained by travel companies on arrival. And friendly governments, including the UK, advise against all travel to parts of the country – including Benghazi and Derna – and all but essential travel elsewhere in Libya. The Foreign Office cites “a high threat from terrorism including kidnapping”. It adds: “Violent clashes between armed groups are possible across the country, particularly at night. You should remain vigilant at all times.”

Imam also agrees that Libya’s identity as a conservative Muslim country poses problems for mass tourism from the west. But it should, not, she suggests, be an insuperable one. “When I am in London and it’s raining, I need an umbrella. Yes we are Muslim society and we don’t want to offer alcohol. If people want alcohol they can go elsewhere.

“Our plan is that when you come to Libya you will enjoy the Libyan experience. Libyans are not closed-minded. But visitors must respect the country and its values.”

Libya’s problems are not unique. Nearby stands in the Middle East and North Africa section at the World Travel Market include a large but very quiet Iraqi one – where gaily coloured Beduin carpets and brass coffee pots have no obvious effect on countering the negative impact of Baghdad’s repeated suicide bombings. Tunisia, one of the few relatively bright spots of the Arab spring, is moderately busy. On the Egyptian stand – complete with plaster sphinxes – the emphasis is on Red Sea resorts far from the tensions of Cairo. Palestinians are trying to promote Jerusalem and Bethlehem in competition with Israel.

Lebanon’s stand displays fine wines but is also quieter than usual – tourist revenues affected by the war next door. Syria has not even been represented for the past two years. “There’s no point,” said a glum Arab tour operator. “It’s suicidal to even go there.”