June 25, 2009

Hiatus

This blog is on a short break while I travel to the United States. I'll resume posting in a couple of weeks when I'm back in Africa.

June 23, 2009

Somali journalists flee. Again

Yet more journalists are fleeing deadly, targeted attacks against them by the militias of Somalia. Among the latest to reach the safety of Nairobi was Radio Shabelle journalist Ahmednor Mohamed, who also worked for the past several months as McClatchy's stringer in Mogadishu. Armed men came to Ahmednor's house following the assassination earlier this month of his former boss, Mukhtar Mohamed Hirabe, the onetime head of Shabelle and now the fifth Somali journalist to be killed this year. Ahmednor, a 29-year-old father of two, feared for his life.

He was McClatchy's fourth stringer in the capital in the past three years, and now we'll be needing a fifth.

Our first stringer, Mahad Elmi, was among two journalists assassinated within hours of one another on a terrible day in August 2007. A second stringer fled to Tanzania. A third, Ahmed Ali, escaped an asssassination attempt in a busy marketplace in December 2007. I'm pleased to say that the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi granted Ahmed a visa this year to reunite with his wife, who is an American citizen, and young baby. They are living happily in the Midwest.

There is no doubt that Somalia is the most dangerous place in the world right now to be a journalist. So it's both tragic and unsurprising that, as government officials describe a state of emergency in the country, reporters are fleeing in huge numbers. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 15 journalists from various news outlets are suspending their work out of fear for their safety.

Ahmednor tells me that only one English-speaking journalist is left among the major media outlets in Mogadishu, making it that much harder for on-the-ground news to reach reporters based in Nairobi. Many of my colleagues and I have come to rely on Somali journalists in Nairobi to work the phones to report on what's happening in Mogadishu.

Ahmednor, who's worked as a reporter for nearly a decade, told me that Islamist extremists with designs on toppling the government had ordered Somali journalists to refer to them as "mujahedeen," a term that means "holy warrior." (Some of these same people now plan to punish four suspected thieves by cutting off an arm and a leg from each one, a grotesque perversion of Islamic law.) To maintain their objectivity, the journalists refused. It's the right thing to do, but it cost Hirabe his life -- and may cost the lives of other brave Somalis who are just trying to their job in the midst of chaos.

By the way, Ahmednor's flight from Somalia to Kenya might not have been comfortable -- he had to sit in the back of a truck with dozens of other refugees for several hours -- but it was entirely predictable. Three days after he phoned to tell me he was fleeing, he was in Nairobi. Technically, this is illegal, because Kenya has closed the border with Somalia. Kenya says this is to keep Islamist extremists from coming in, but what it's really done is made it harder and more dangerous for legitimate refugees like Ahmednor to flee safely.

No matter. Their truck driver avoided the main road through eastern Kenya and drove through trees and thickets, bribing a few police officers along the way. The passage cost about $140. It's as regular as Kenya Airways.

June 22, 2009

Congo mining town

A taxi delivers raw minerals to a Chinese-run smelter in Lubumbashi, Congo

Our minibus taxi stopped the other day a few miles outside of Lubumbashi, the capital of Congo's mining country. We pulled off the road, parked next to a collection of huts and sat there for a few minutes. I couldn't understand the delay, so I turned to ask J-P, the local human rights activist I'd been traveling with, what was up.

"Oh, the driver is just loading up some sacks of minerals to sell at one of the foundries in town."

Oh, of course. Only in Lubumbashi, capital of one of the richest mining areas in the world, where precious metals seem to bust through the earth, would taxi drivers supplement their rush-hour fares with a couple hundred pounds of copper or cobalt.

I then started to notice it everywhere. Along the roads, dozens of taxis seemed to be weighed down with metals, their rears nearly dragging across the asphalt, headed to make a sale at one of the many small factories in and around Lubumbashi. This is how a substantial portion of Congo's metals are produced -- mined by hand by "artisanal miners," individuals who break rocks by hand and sell them in small quantities to middlemen like my taxi driver, who in turn sell them to foundries and smelters to be processed.

Everyone in Lubumbashi, it seems, has at one point had a hand in the mining business. J-P and his colleague Joe are human-rights workers now, but years ago J-P hauled huge, 150-lb. sacks of raw metals to put himself through college and Joe had worked as a middleman, selling small-scale minerals to smelters around town.

The middlemen don't get rich, but in a country with a long history of foreign exploitation it's a rare example of Congolese reaping some small benefit from the ground beneath their feet. Our taxi stopped in one Chinese-run foundry in town, where my taxi man had a brief, animated negotiation with a Congolese foreman before getting back into the driver's seat and gunning the engine in a huff. He seemed to get a better deal at a second foundry, also Chinese-run, and when he dropped us off he was all smiles. I asked him how much he made, knowing that people can be cagey about this kind of stuff.

"Pas mal," he said. Not bad.

June 17, 2009

'Obamarama': Somaliland cafe

Today's unusual Obama sighting -- complete with a Somali translation of "Yes, we can" -- comes from my recent trip to Hargeisa, the capital of the autonomous region of Somaliland.

Send me your unusual, head-scratching examples of the African Obama obsession by e-mail.

Previous Obamarama images:
Bubble gum in Kisumu, Kenya
Kanga bag in Nairobi, Kenya
Hope Gift Shop in Kisumu, Kenya
Mini Market in Kigali, Rwanda
Video shop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Bar-cafe in Cotonou, Benin
Snacks Point in Ntulele, Kenya

June 15, 2009

Kenyans get their turn to read

I'm back in Nairobi after a brief holiday with some good news for lovers of free speech. It's Our Turn To Eat, an excellent new book on corruption and tribalism in Kenya, is busting through an unofficial government boycott and making it into the hands of ordinary Kenyans.

You might remember that this was the book that was "too hot" to sell in Nairobi bookshops, an unsparing glimpse at one man's doomed fight against Kenyan sleaze. I bought my copy in South Africa and my colleague Eric beamed when his copy, couriered by a friend returning from the UK, arrived last week.

Now several thousand copies are being made available for free or at reduced prices thanks to an innovative -- and surprising -- collaboration by Kenyan church groups, media houses, the international PEN writers' association, George Soros's Open Society Institute and the U.S. Agency for International Development. (The USAID part is what surprises me. A mid-level aid administrator taking a principled stand? Or more of the new administration's tough-love approach to the Obama paternal homeland?)

Author Michela Wrong writes that 5,100 copies will eventually be sold and distributed in Kenya, but shakes her head at the shenanigans required to get the year's most important book about Kenya into the country:

Yesterday, at a packed reading and discussion called "It's Our Turn to Read," a theater packed with writers, activists and ordinary Kenyans heard excerpts of the book. The discussion went on for more than four hours, and there are hopes of holding similar events in other Kenyan cities.

I was traveling and couldn't make it, but my friend Bec Hamilton has audio of the event on her blog  (including an index by subject!). The guerrilla-style marketing tactics are impressive -- especially as they target low- and middle-income folks -- but ought to be unneccessary. Most Kenyans are clear about the kind of government they want. Too bad the people who can give it to them won't bother reading this book.

June 03, 2009

Nairobi's airport insecurities

The first U.S.-Kenya nonstop flight in 20 years has been delayed a little longer, apparently over security concerns at East Africa's biggest airport.

The inaugural Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to Nairobi was due to arrive at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport this afternoon for a ceremony, but the airline announced yesterday that it was postponing the direct service indefinitely "following a decision by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that the agency required more time to review these flights."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Delta's hometown paper, reports that "it's the first time the Homeland Security Department’s Transportation Security Administration has denied international service by a U.S. carrier."

(Another new Delta service, nonstop from Atlanta to Monrovia, Liberia, was also put off for security reasons, the airline said.)

The Government of Kenya, which has been extremely eager to get this flight off the ground (ahem), could barely hide its annoyance. It issued a terse statement saying: "The reasons for the postponement by Delta are still not very clear.

"The Government of Kenya has complied with all the additional security measures requested by Delta and Nairobi airports' security is excellent (emphasis added)."

Well, let's not get carried away.

Anyone who has flown through JKIA knows it can be, on its best days, an experience I will charitably describe as pleasantly chaotic. ("Pleasant," I suppose, only if you've planned ahead, checked in online, confirmed the inevitable flight delay, still reached at least 90 minutes before the scheduled departure -- and learned over the years which security directives you must follow and which are, shall we say, open to interpretation.)

It starts at the entrance off the highway, where cops stand outside the boom gate and wave drivers to the side based on a rough guess of how likely the driver's license is to be expired (thereby requiring a minimum 200-shilling [$2.50] bribe...I mean fine). It's a blatantly racist and utterly predictable system: if a Kenyan is driving and I'm in the passenger seat, inspection; if I'm driving, no inspection.

Then you get to the security before check-in, which can be haphazard. The metal detectors seem to work, but the luggage belt is one of those interpretive exercises. They've put up signs, for example, asking people to remove their laptops and place them into bins, but I've never done this -- figuring it wastes valuable seconds better spent in the departure lounge. More importantly, no one has ever stopped me.

Inside the terminal is where you really start to raise your eyebrows. For a start, as others have pointed out, there's no separate departure and arrival lounge. Everyone comes through the same narrow, dingy, often stinking corridor. This has to be one of the things that TSA is worried about.

Then, at the gate for the final security check, things get fuzzy again. The airport recently barred unsealed liquids on flights, which most airports did years ago but JKIA is ill-equipped to enforce. Before a recent 9-hour plane journey to Somaliland, I bought a bottle of water in the terminal and brought it to the gate, where I was informed that I couldn't bring the water on the flight because it wasn't sealed. "New policy," they said.

Rather than leaving the water behind (risking dehydration) or chugging a liter right there (risking having to enter the lavatory on an African Express flight) I waited for the security guard to avert her eyes and then walked purposefully toward the gate, water in hand. Another guard watched this all happen, and she smiled as I passed.

When boarding flights, most gates at JKIA don't use jetways. I'll confess I don't know exactly why this is. (The Europe-bound flights on Emirates, BA, KLM and other major carriers use jetways, as Delta probably would have.) Instead, on seemingly all Africa-bound flights, you walk down a long ramp onto the tarmac, where you might see 10-15 planes with their engines running and doors open. For a few seconds, you're not sure where to go.

In those brief moments I've often dreamed of skipping my flight to Khartoum or Addis and finding the flight to the Seychelles instead. Eventually, however, an airport agent appears and directs people to their plane, so you see these lines of dazed-looking passengers trooping along the tarmac toward what they hope is their flight.

Finally, we can't forget the ridiculous incident in June 2006, when two "Armenian brothers" with shadowy links to President Mwai Kibaki's government barged into the baggage claim area and prevented customs from inspecting nine suitcases owned by a female friend who'd flown in from Dubai. (It was later determined that the men weren't brothers, and might actually have been Russian, but I digress.) As Corriere Della Sera reported, "One of the two brothers produced a pistol and then the pair took the woman by the arm, seized the suitcases and marched off with a shout of 'You don’t know who we are.'"

Security has been ramped up since then, but all of this can't make the folks at TSA very comfortable. While it's not clear what exactly they're concerned about, there are obviously some issues to choose from.

It's bad news for Delta, which is desperately looking for new markets to stave off financial troubles. Most of the passengers booked on Atlanta-Nairobi were rebooked on KLM through Amsterdam, while others were rerouted on Air France and Kenya Airways flights. Some folks, though, will apparently have to spend tonight in Johannesburg. Now that's a really nice airport.

June 02, 2009

The war zone pen pal

The longtime Chicago Tribune correspondent, Paul Salopek, has written a poignant piece in the Atlantic about a character that journalists in the developing world will instantly recognize -- the war zone pen pal.

It's someone you met once, in a bad place like Somalia or Congo, with whom you shared a moment in a refugee camp or behind the blast walls of your hotel. This person keeps your business card in his wallet, a wrinkled link to the outside world. Every so often, when you're on some other assignment or having a drink in a Nairobi bar, his name pops up in your email or as a missed call on your cell phone, often with a grim update on life in his faraway hellhole (like these from Djibouti and Somalia).

Paul's war zone pen pal is Abdi, a 24-year-old schoolteacher in Somalia, who writes him often with news about the latest fighting in Mogadishu or frustration at the Western media's fixation on pirates. He describes how they became friends:

I met him two years ago in Mogadishu, when it was still remotely possible for Western reporters to visit that shell-blasted corpse of a city without being kidnapped by radical Al Shabab insurgents or assorted clan mafias. (Things have gone downhill since.) Back then, he appeared at my safe house uninvited, startling my rent-a-guards, who supposed that my presence was a secret.

He wanted to complain about the indignities of survival in a country that hasn’t had a functional government since 1991—virtually his entire young life. He proceeded to do so in slangy English, learned, in part, from black-market DVDs of Hollywood action films. “It sucks to be here, man,” he told me with great feeling. I liked him immensely.

The piece is one of the last things to come out of the Chicago Tribune's bureau in Johannesburg, which the paper has closed due to massive budget cuts at the Tribune Co. The number of journalists who cover Africa is shrinking rapidly, which means voices like Abdi's will be heard less and less. Paul is off to write a book about Mexico and Abdi, I am sure, will continue to write about Somalia for his audience of one.

June 01, 2009

Kenyan trucker comes home. Country panics

The Washington Post recently profiled James Odhiambo, a Kenyan who emigrated to the United States and was working as a truck driver until the recession forced him to return to Kenya. The reporter, my friend Stephanie McCrummen, illustrated a trend that many experts have been predicting: some of the African disapora returning to the continent due to the economic troubles in the U.S. and Europe.

It's too early to say whether this reverse migration is happening in large numbers. The Kenyan property market, which is enoying a long, gravity-defying boom, is due less to Somali pirates than to Kenyans living abroad who are investing back home. Property prices are still rising, which suggests that the diaspora still has purchasing power. And unlike in Western countries, informal economies are huge in countries like Kenya, so a crisis in the banking sector doesn't necessarily mean that people have less money to spend.

Naturally, the Daily Nation read the Post story, considered the facts, did its own reporting and wrote a measured story on the alleged trend. Their headline:

Billions to be lost as Kenyans return home from diaspora

There's almost no hard evidence to support this fear, despite one assistant minister remarking that "five of my own relatives" had left the U.S. in recent weeks. The Nation's own reporting doesn't bear it out, either:

According to the latest Central Bank of Kenya statistics, Kenyans in the diaspora channelled back home close to Sh47 billion [$588 million] in remittances last year alone, while between January and March this year, they sent close to Sh12 billion [$150 million].

Some quick math here: Sh12 billion x 4 = Sh48 billion. So basically, remittances this year, through what was an extremely difficult first quarter in the world economy, are on pace to match those of last year. An effective headline though; the story was one of the Nation's most-read last week.

May 26, 2009

Overheard in Nairobi

Some observations from a weekend of sun, beer and barbecue in Nairobi, where, despite it not being Memorial Day, a break in the autumn rains made it feel like a holiday.

* You know you've been in Kenya too long when someone at a party begins a story with, "So I flew down to Bunia [Congo] one time to buy some rough diamonds..." and no one bats an eye.

* A colleague from a very prestigious Western newspaper is planning a trip to eastern Congo. He pitched his editors and the reply came back instantly: You didn't include a cost estimate. These days it seems that even the best papers can't decide whether a story is worth doing without first knowing how much it's going to cost to do it.

* I'm all for pirate humor but this joke is just dumb. A mock website is hawking cruises between Kenya and Djibouti where passengers are encouraged to fire on pirates. "Most cruises offer a mini-bar," goes the website for "Somali Cruises." "We offer a mounted mini-gun." Ho ho ho.

* When a public official under scrutiny refuses to return a reporter's phone calls or says he or she won't answer questions, we often write that he or she "couldn't be reached for comment" or "declined to comment" and leave it at that. Kenyan newspapers, fortunately, are a lot more interesting.

From today's Standard on the latest this-would-be-shocking-if-it-weren't-Kenya scandal involving Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta's inability to explain a $140 million budget discrepancy:

Finance PS [permanent secretary] Joseph Kinyua would not be drawn to speak about it.

"Oh no, I’m not talking to you...No! No! No" Kinyua said when The Standard reached him on the telephone.

May 20, 2009

'Obamarama': Bubble gum

More Obama fun from -- where else? -- Kisumu, Kenya. Blogger Bankelele was in the Luoland capital  last month and saw banners advertising a new Obama bubble gum. The slogan? It's a clever one: "Yes we want!!"

The gum comes in at least two flavors, orange and strawberry (below) and is priced to sell at 1 shilling, or a little more than a penny, apiece. However, Bankelele, with the same alertness he uses to take Kenya's business elite to task on his terrific blog, pointed out that the gum wasn't on the shelves at the local Nakumatt superstore.

Remember, folks -- send your unusual Obama images to us via e-mail.

Previous installments in Obamarama:
Kanga bag in Nairobi, Kenya
Hope Gift Shop in Kisumu, Kenya
Mini Market in Kigali, Rwanda
Video shop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Bar-cafe in Cotonou, Benin
Snacks Point in Ntulele, Kenya