Africa

wild shopping in Kenya

In Africa shopping is often an adventure. Well, who needs the thrill of the mall when you can strike a deal in a hippo-infested papyrus swamp? And for carnations too. I was most impressed by this young man’s opportunism, though puzzled too. Flower-buying customers seemed in short supply in this particular location. I was in the wilderness grounds attached to the Safariland Hotel on the shores of Lake Naivasha when he popped out of the papyrus. I had been wandering alone there (as I did over several days), not on the look out for retail therapy, but for Cape Buffalo (as indeed the sign warned me), and also for hippo whose very loud grunting was resounding off the lake. Both creatures can be deadly if you catch them, or they you, in circumstances not to their liking.

In short then, I was engaged in my own form of adventure bird-watching, while the Team Leader, aka Graham, was back at the hotel, involved in workshop brain-storming with fellow scientists from across Africa. The other surprising factor is that I had some money on me so was able to buy a bunch. The flower seller kept his stock hidden from view in a swamp puddle. It seemed he was recycling the discarded side-shoots from one of the local flower factories. There are several of these huge horticulture enterprises along Lake Naivasha’s shore, all abstracting and polluting the only freshwater lake within Kenya’s Rift in order to export perfect metre-long stems of roses and carnations to Europe. The seller was thus making an opportunity out of stock control squeamishness over European “standards”. But as you can see, his little posy is very pretty. The flowers lasted ages, even surviving a hot drive back to Nairobi. A good buy all round.

You can read more of this story at CARNATIONS, CROOKS AND COLOBUS AT LAKE NAIVASHA For now, here are more views of this unique wildlife outlet store:

DP weekly photo challenge: adventure

Ailsa’s Travel Challenge: merchandise

Floating not flooding: Adeyemi’s ‘Ark-ademy’

And what is this extraordinary structure?

Why, a floating school of course. It is also a prototype building created by Nigerian-born architect, Kunle Adeyemi and his Amsterdam-based company NLÉ. Adeyemi has more plans too, ones that will relieve the dire conditions for the 100,000 people who currently live in this, Nigeria’s Makoko slum. The fishing settlement in Lagos Lagoon has been there since the 18th century. To cope with changing tidal levels, the shanties are built on stilts, rising from the lagoon mud; the main way to get around is by boat. There is zero sanitation, and consequently much disease. Life expectancy is reckoned to be less than 40 years.

For the past two centuries Makoko slum dwellers have adapted to tidal changes, but now climate change, with rising sea levels and increasingly extreme weather events, is putting them at grave risk.

Recently the Nigerian authorities have addressed their plight by demolishing many of the stilt-built dwellings, making the inhabitants homeless. There will be re-development naturally – not for the poor who have long lived there, but to replace their community with flashy lagoon-view high rises. Makoko as it stands is deemed a blot that must be erased. It is an interesting approach to social deprivation: to make it worse.

See instead Adeyemi’s vision:

Now doesn’t this make your heart sing? Homes to live for.

And here is where it begins:

Diagram courtesy of NLÉ.

Makoko floating school, then, is literally the flagship of NLÉ’s proposed waterborne city. The structure was designed and built in collaboration with the Makoko Waterfront Community and with input from Dutch naval architect, Erik Wassen. It is movable, and capable of dealing with storm surges and flooding. The triangular frame which is mounted on 256 floating plastic barrels makes it very stable and with a capacity to keep 100 people safe in storm conditions. PV cells on the apex generate solar power, and there are facilities to recycle organic waste and harvest rainwater. Most importantly of all, it was built using the techniques and skills of local craftspeople. It is a building that fits with people’s view of themselves. And it is beautiful.

The school has three levels with a capacity for 60 -100 pupils. The 1st level is an open play area for breaks and assembly. Out of school hours this space may be used by the community. Level 2 is an enclosed space for 2-4 classrooms, and Level 3 has a partially enclosed workshop space.

The only fly in the ointment of NLÉ’s scheme for Makoko’s regeneration is the fact that Nigerian authorities say the floating school is an illegal structure, and should not be there. NLÉ are currently in negotiation with Lagos state government and are said to be optimistic that no immediate action will be taken.

I for one hope that this African solution to an African problem will be seen for what it is – an amazingly wonderful, life-giving, life-enhancing scheme of which Nigeria should be heartily proud. The floating school addresses both present need and future uncertainty, and in ways that its community can reproduce and embrace. It has inherent sustainability. It is a pattern to build on, adapt, develop, replicate, but on an individual human scale that everyone can understand. And as time goes on, we may all have need to tap into some of NLÉ’s ingenuity if we wish to continue living well and safely on our home planet. Town Planning that gladdens my heart and gives me hope, and believe me, that does not often happen.

Further info:

Kunlé Adeyemi Founder NLÉ

The Architectural Review Jan 2014

http://www.nleworks.com/case/makoko-floating-school/

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A Long Time Ago in Africa

Well this is what happens when you fiddle about in Windows Live Picture Gallery. I rather like the effect – posterized for posterity, an arty rendition of UK expatriate in 1990s Kenya. The original shot is thus pretty old, just like me. I was standing in the back garden of our house in Mbabane Road, in Nairobi’s leafy Lavington district, under the loquat trees. The house is gone now, and I can see from Google Earth that Madison Insurance who owned the compound, have given it over to some development of upscale townhouses. Across the road was the run-down state primary school. I imagine it is still run down. My days back then had a daily soundtrack of children’s voices – chanting times tables mostly.

In the photo I’m wearing a self-made suit (tunic and pants) of batik cloth created at a workshop by street boys trying to get their lives together. And I’m wearing a string of Kazuri Beads, glazed ceramic beads, made by women trying build themselves and their kids a future. Kazuri means small and beautiful. The little factory in Karen, Nairobi was a joy to visit. The workshop shelves were lined with glass jars of bright beads, rather like a picture book sweet shop, while at benches in the the airy room, women created beads and threaded necklaces in colour schemes of their choosing. I’m only sorry that I seem to have no photos, but if you go to the link you can see the factory today – much expanded and employing men too.

I still have the beads and the suit, and still wear them too, although the batik cloth is a little thin, while I, sadly, am not.

And now here’s a picture of our house – home for seven years.

It came with the usual services that accompany the living quarters of TCOs (Technical Cooperation Officers) working for Her Majesty’s Department for International Development. These included a well secured compound perimeter with lights, a 24/7 security guard, house alarms (checked monthly), internal security gate, barred windows, guard dog, and regular applications of pesticide by Rentokil. Phew. We did not like any of this much, although we did like Patrick, our day guard, such a tall and gentle man. It was hard to imagine him fending off intruders. He had a farm back home in Western Kenya where his wife stayed in the good stone house he had built for her, along with their three children. He used to go home twice a year to plant or harvest his maize crop.

To make up for all the oppressive security, during the day I used to walk around the district on foot, roaming along the avenues. I wasn’t sure what it was I supposed to afraid of, although I did know that people did have their homes broken into, and that expats who insisted on driving large new Land Cruisers were often relieved of them (on their own compounds) by guys with AK47s, and strangely enough, soon after said expats (usually diplomats) had arrived in country and taken possession of the new vehicles via customs and imports at Mombasa port. The word on the street was that these robbers were highly connected. Very highly connected. This situation frequently reminded me of one of my father’s favourite sayings: the fish goes rotten from the head, although one would have been foolish to say this too loudly, or even at all back then.

Farrell Team Leader, Graham, had a works Land Rover for work, but otherwise we drove a battered Suzuki jeep. It had some interesting features. A previous owner had cut a hatch over the back seats, and made a fibre glass lid to go over the top. For game viewing you could simply unclip it. I didn’t drive it much, because that was the really scary thing – Nairobi driving. I often used to ponder if I could get to places by driving on the very wide pavements. Once when I forgot I was in Kenya and slowed at a zebra crossing on a city highway to let a pedestrian cross, the poor woman looked as if she would faint. I was lucky that the Suzuki and I didn’t get flattened by a Tusker beer truck, while I and the woman stared at one other in a state of frozen confusion, neither of us able to move.

The other thing that used to scare me about driving was that parts used to fall off the Suzuki. G’s nonchalant response to my concern was, ‘Well if you were still going, you obviously did not need it, whatever it was.’

On the whole, then, it was better walking. I could peep through the cracks in the big steel gates that protected ambassadorial and diplomatic residences, and count the excessive number of garbage bags put out for BINS, the private refuse removal company. I’d see street kids and Maasai, greet the security guards who sat out on the neatly trimmed verges and chatted house to house. I was intrigued by the barber who had turned a fallen flame tree into a salon, and I liked the smells of all the garden trees – cypress, frangipani, the warm musky smell of fever trees. When the rains came the streets would be filled with silvery clouds of termites on their nuptial flight. At dusk, the frogs in the Nairobi River way below our house would strike up frog songs that resounded across the valley. The crescent that adjoined Mbabane Road was called Applecross – a bizarrely English name that evoked pastoral perfection of the sort that had never existed outside colonial settlers’ minds.

When we took over the house from G’s predecessor we also took on the resident house steward, Sam, whose homeland was in Maragoli in Western Kenya. He had long worked for expatriates, but back home and also on the borders of Nandi he had small farms – three in all. His first wife lived on his ancestral land in what had been the Maragoli tribal reserve in colonial times. He still called it ‘the reserve’. He said he had poor relations on the other smallholdings, but they were not looking after the land properly and this caused him much concern. Apart from home leave, he stayed in Nairobi with his second wife, living in the servants’ quarters at the bottom of the garden. One reason for staying in Nairobi was so his three youngest children and a grandchild who had come to live with him could go to school across the road.

Now meet Sam, with guard dog Kim. We eventually had to hand Kim over to a vet, this after he started attacking children who came to play with Sam’s children on our compound. The vet told us that some German Shepherds were prone to this behaviour, and once begun, this was not a habit that could be broken. She told us she would try to send him to a rescue centre that kept such dogs, but otherwise he must be destroyed.

We did not ask which of these had been the outcome, but after having one sweet little girl’s face stitched up at the hospital we could not risk it happening again. Luckily the dog missed the child’s eye and the wound healed well. Here she is then, Sera, fully recovered with only a hint of a scar under the right eye.

And next comes Silas, Sam’s youngest son.

And Sam’s grand daughter, Zaina playing badminton with Silas on the back lawn.

Then Sam off-duty out on Mbabane Road. He only worked half days as we didn’t have enough house work.

And this is Francis, who stood every day on the corner of Mbabane and James Gichuru and sold us The Standard and Nation newspapers. He turned the newspaper round deliberately because it was featuring the British envoy, a man somewhat outspoken on Moi regime corruption.

And finally me again, not looking quite so postered (but oh, so much younger) with poor old Kim, and those Kazuri beads again. Interesting days.

Looking for Smut: Work on Kenya’s Highland Farms

Valentine’s Day Runaway

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On watch at Elmenteita–the lake that blows away

The light changes every second across the lake. From dawn till dusk there is always something to watch at Elmenteita in Kenya’s Great Rift. There are over 400 species of birds to spot for one thing – among them the endangered white pelican that breeds there. The main stars, though, are the surely the huge flocks of flamingos, both lesser and greater varieties, that turn swathes of the lake to rose-petal pink. Even a passing glimpse from the nearby Rift highway is enough to catch the breath. A pink lake – how can that be?

We came here often while we lived in Nairobi, staying at Delamere tented camp on the lake shore – a quirky, step-back-in-time establishment within its own nature reserve. The camp, itself was wholly unobtrusive -16 large tents, each sheltered by a thatched canopy and set out beneath fever trees that, here and there, hosted a sturdy canvas hammock.

The tents were functional – two wood-framed beds, simple cupboards, rattan chairs all locally made. They came, too, with a plain little bathroom attached out back – running water, flush loo and shower – all facilities that would still be an unobtain-able luxury to millions of Kenyans. Inevitably, knowing this added to the discomforting ‘them and us’ awareness that accompanied us pretty much everywhere.

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For us wazungu, then, Delamere Camp was an idyllic spot. I once spent a week here by myself while G was at a conference. There were no other guests for most of that time, external and internal tourism having been hit both by El Nino rains that had caused weeks of havoc, and by widely reported bouts of pre-election violence. Manager, Godfrey Mwirigi, treated me as if I were his personal house guest.

I thus spent my days and nights being driven around Soysambu nature reserve in a safari truck with zoologist, Michael Kahiga as my expert guide, or taken on early morning bird walks through the bush, or on late afternoon hikes up through the sage-scented leleshwa brush to Sogonoi cliff-top to watch the sun set over the lake with a glass of wine in my hand. This, the daily late afternoon pilgrimage to the sun-downer cliff, was a pleasing piece of hospitality thought up by Paul Kabochi, the camp’s ethno-botanist. I have written about him in an earlier post, but here he is again on the lake shore at dawn.

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On this solitary sojourn I was sorry to find that he was away setting up another camp. He is a man whose great fund of knowledge is sadly missed, and I would have been glad to have had another chance to speak with him. Instead, I talked to Godfrey about tourism. He kindly ate his meals with me so that I did not have to sit in the dining room alone.

Between times, hot water bottles and extra blankets appeared like magic in my bed, or indeed in the truck for the evening game drives. (Nights in the Rift can feel frosty). And all the time I watched and watched until my brain ached with sensory overload.

The camp overlooked the lake and the remnant volcanic cone that has long been known by the Maasai as the Elngiragata Olmorani, the Sleeping Warrior. During colonial times it acquired a further name – Lord Delamere’s Nose, this apparently in tribute to the impressive dynastic proboscis of the third baron Delamere who, in the early 1900s, and as one of the first pioneer colonists, acquired 19 hectares (46,000 acres) of shore-land around the the east, north and west of the lake.

His brother-in-law, Galbraith Cole, son of the Earl of Enniskillen, farmed the southerly shores at Kekopey. He was a man who was later exiled from British East Africa because he shot dead one of his labourers for stealing a favourite sheep. He later sneaked back to Kekopey disguised as a Somali, and his mother, Countess of Enniskillen successfully pleaded his cause. At the age of 48, and looking out over the lake, he shot himself, unable to bear the constant pain of his rheumatoid arthritis.

The descendants of these early settlers still live and retain most of their lands (including estates at nearby Lake Naivasha). In fact the only way to gain access to Elmenteita is to book into one of the exclusive safari lodges that now stand on the land that belongs to these old colonial families. This sense of British aristocratic exclusivity inevitably strikes a sour note. Doubtless these landowners will say they are custodians and that, without their dutiful care, the place would be wrecked by ramshackle trading operations and squatters, and the wildlife decimated.

Even in my home town in Shropshire we are still ruled by such feudal argument. ‘Keep Out’ signs exclude the people of Much Wenlock from the ancient Priory parkland that is now owned by one family. In Great Britain we take for granted (or are even unaware of) the power of the self-appointed, self-aggrandizing elite who own most of our countries’ lands. I imagine, though, that many people would be surprised to know that super-squiredom is also alive and well in East Africa.

Before the British annexed East Africa in the 1890s, and all the (deemed) unoccupied territory became the property of the British Crown, and the locals obliged to stay forever on the land where the British happened to find them, land usage and territorial ownership was a much more fluid affair. For instance, up in the Rift highlands, and going back hundreds of years, the Kikuyu farmers had negotiated the legal acquisition of new land with the indigenous Okiek hunters, whom the Kikuyu judged to be the land’s original owners. Over the centuries this process of colonisation caused an occupational creep: as land became exhausted or overcrowded, so clan scions left their fathers’ homesteads and sought out fresh territories for their own families to cultivate. It is a similar story over much of the continent as the Bantu agriculturalists sought fresh ground.

As the boundaries of allotted farm and pastureland nudged further into the Rift, so there was competition and conflict with the pastoral Maasai. The herders anyway believed themselves masters of the Rift, shifting up and down it as need for fresh grazing and water dictated. The farming communities with whom they traded and inter-married also at times presented an alluring target. This was inspired by the cattle herders’ belief that Enkai, the creator, had bequeathed all the cattle on earth to the Maasai. For young warriors intent on proving their courage and amassing cattle to augment family honour, armed cattle raids on their farming neighbours were a matter of necessity.

It is interesting, then, that colonial aristocrats such as Delamere, who established large stock ranches in the Rift, were inordinately admiring of the Maasai, seeing them as nature’s aristocrats. It is also tempting to put this down to a congruence of world vision: recognition of a mutual case of droit du seigneur? In fact in those early days, Delamere was the only white man for whom the Maasai would deign to work, although this did not stop them from making off with large numbers of his sheep and cattle.

That the Rift was once Maasai territory is indicated by the many place names – Naivasha, Nakuru included – that are European renderings of Maa originals. Elmenteita derives from ol muteita, meaning “place of dust” and, from time to time, this shallow soda lake does turn to dust. At the best of times it is only around 1 metre deep. It shrinks and expands depending on the rains. But when not blowing away to dust, it extends over some 19-22 square kilometres.

The alkaline waters are rich in the crustacea and larvae that the greater flamingos feed on, and in the blue-green algae that the lesser flamingos syphon up through the top of their bills. The former have white plumage with a pink wash; the latter are more the colour of strawberry ice cream. Both honk, and grunt and mutter in a continuously shifting mass. All night you can hear them as you lie awake in your tent.

A view to dine for: Losogonoi Escarpment and the lake shore

But it is not only the bird life that make this place so special. The traditional ‘big five’ may be lacking in this part of the Rift, but it is still home to Rothschild giraffe, eland, buffalo, zebra, ostrich, impala, gazelle and a host of smaller game – aardvark, zorilla, porcupine, African wildcat. Since our time in Kenya much has changed at Soysambu. In 2007 the private Delamere Estate began operating as a not-for-profit conservation organi-zation called Soysambu Conservancy.

Delamere Camp has long gone. In its place is a new enterprise, the very expensive Serena Elmenteita Luxury Camp, a sort of out-of-Africa manifestation with bells on, the kind of set-up that intrudes a different kind of exclusivity on this piece of Kenya. But then of course there’s always the usual argument: that the provision of luxury on this scale does at least provide many, many jobs for Kenyans. Across the lake, however, something of the original Delamere Camp ethos has been re-created at the Sleeping Warrior Eco Lodge and Tented Camp – all within the Soysambu Conservancy.

In fact things have not been going well with the Delamere family. The sheer mention of the name has been enough to evoke great fury among many Kenyans. In 2005 and again in 2006, Thomas Cholmondeley, sole heir of the 5th Baron and Soysambu’s manager, admitted to shooting dead an African. The first case involved a plain clothes officer working for the Kenya Wildlife Service, apparently on the Soysambu farm to investigate a poaching incident. Cholmondeley says he thought the man was robbing his staff. Action against him was dropped.

In the second case, he caught a group of poachers with a dead impala, and said he was shooting at their dog when he fatally wounded one of the men. Later he claimed it was his friend, Carl Tundo, who had shot the poacher, and that he was covering for him. The whole sorry story was featured in the BBC Storyville film Last White Man Standing. Later the charge of murder was changed to manslaughter, and in any event Cholmondeley spent 3 years in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, Kenya’s toughest jail. To many, though, it was thought to be far too lenient a sentence. The high profile media coverage also reminded millions of landless Kenyans that certain individuals had in their sole possession unimaginably vast estates. The old skeletons of racism and colonial oppression came rattling out of the cupboard to fuel the general furore, as the poacher’s widow asked for justice.

And so what in the end are we left with – a beautiful place enmeshed in tales of human intrigue, slaughter and misadventure.

I know I was lucky to spend so much time there when I did, and to see it through the eyes of the Kenyan naturalists who were my guides. I hope that many of them still work there – for Serena or Soysambu. They taught me how to watch out in that landscape: to recognize tracks of genet cat and mongoose, to poke through the little piles of dik dik droppings that marked this tiny antelope’s territory, to identify a black-breasted apalis or shy tchagra, to listen for the calls of the red-fronted tinkerbird, to know that an infusion of bark from the muthiga or Kenya Greenheart tree is good for toothache and stomach upsets, and most especially not to fall into aardvark holes as I was walking through the thornscrub.

Finally then, a few glimpses of Soysambu’s beautiful creatures.